"successful managed decline..." Bingo! There it is!
The plan for America is a gradual Brazilification, with a small mostly lighter-skinned elite living high away in hillside mansions, guarded by private security flying in private jets and funded by private equity, with a mass of mostly darker-skinned subliterate peasants living in squalor, but who get enough welfare money to keep their lights and Wifi on and bellies filled, with a small middle class fighting every day to keep their heads above water.
I've been to Brazil many times and have seen the future...Just imagine Gavin Newsom dressed like Manuel Noriega inside his Napa Versailles saying: Let them eat Diversity!
All of the left's/globalist narratives are designed to energize them. All of the Right's are meant to make them passive.
The left gets warnings such as:
We have to help Mother Gaia defeat the Sun God or we will all die!!!
The right is waging war and is killing trans people! We must protect them!!!
Republicans are building/want to build concentration camps at the border!! We must stop them because only Nazis the most deadly people in history) want immigration restrictions!!!
The rift wants women to be just barefoot and pregnant!! We won't let them.
Now contrast that with the Right's beloved narratives.
Buy guns. That makes you free.
Trust the plan.
Push us too far and we will secede.
Don't worry. gun owners, the police and military will take back our country.
Lol. The whole thing is going to collapse.
The left's narratives all stress collective actionvto accomplish something ASAP while the Right's stress individual action to avoid the mess.
Home school, buy guns, become a tradesman instead of an MBA or lawyer to avoid corporations, move out of the city.
What has been interesting about all of these mothers' groups fighting against abortion, the anal revolution and critical race theory in schools and the workplace is they, unlike men, are actually pushing back and gaining some victories
Don’t overlook the fact (specifically looking at housing) that in the last 3 corrections, peak to trough took 4, 7, and 6+ years respectively.
1979-1983. 1989-1996 (even though the recession ended after 18 months, housing fell for another 5.5 years) 2005-2012 (again the recession did not begin until housing had already been in decline for 3 years and housing continued to decline for 2.5 years after the recession ended.
I find housing more interesting to analyze than the overall economy because there are so many components and many of them are totally misunderstood.
We are on a slow grind down to a bottom in housing that is still years away. 2026. 2027. Maybe even 2028. Historical average for peak to trough is 4.6 years. And we are now one year in to the correction. And there are still many Covid loss mitigation rules still in place that will further delay the inevitable.
You’ll know it’s finally real when jingle mail becomes a thing again.
Adam Smith said there was much ruin a country can absorb. Gibbon, who wrote "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", pointed out that it is not surprising the empire fell, but that it took so long to do so. I don't think we'll have a sudden collapse unless we get into a nuclear exchange with Russia, or China, or both. I think it is as is described above: slow decline, with the poor getting poorer, the middle class getting poorer, the rich getting richer, and everyone having less freedom.
Good article. Speaking of Rome, I'd like to reiterate your points but through a spiritual lens. America is, I believe, in the midst of a Romans 1 judgment. It's a judgment not of intense, immediate calamity like a great flood or fire raining down from heaven, but rather, a steep descent that get's worse, and worse, and worse. I rarely ever read The Message translation, but that version has some thought provoking language in this particular passage. Should you feel inclined to take a gander, what I'm referring to picks up in verse 18.
This is a cogent and rational analysis, but your analysis is not a solution to anything. Even if later proved to be somewhat accurate, it doesn't solve anything and therefore has little-to-no value to the future. At some point, you have to use your brainpower for the purpose of prevailing over hardship or evolution has no use for you. And it's a cope for you to presume that all people will just acquiesce to being impoverished and docile slaves to a totalitarian elite. The coming collapse is not about the strawman of a Mad Max scenario, but rather the correction necessary to clear out the deadfall. You can only keep the plates for so long before bottom drops out. And it was only a few decades ago that the Soviet Union collapsed overnight, so yes, that can happen here too.
But some people are focused on solutions rather than endless erudite analysis. The collapse (in whatever form) is very likely to engender chaos and social unrest (particularly in urban areas). In the realm of solution, its best to think of this chaos as a fog of opportunity. If LEOs and National Guard are fully engaged quelling wanton urban violence and mayhem, then many unique and creative avenues of opportunity will abound. The problem at the root of our distress is actually quite small in number and not at all robust. That is where the focus should be placed. When a body is infected with a pathogen or virus, the cure must focus on removing these detriments or the species will soon cease to exist. Evolution requires that we become smarter and stronger over time, not degenerate into passive insect-like drones.
Interesting and well written piece! But RE: the dissidents/doomers being far too optimistic in their expectations of what would happen for them after a "collapse", I'm not so sure their completely off: I took a look at the field of Anthropology's views on "collapse", well, some of them at least, and I read some really fascinating stuff on the collapse of states and empires that may back up what the dissidents/doomers expect/hope will happen. The stuff I read, mostly old stuff (late 1970s was the newest, at least I think, its been a wwhile), described many historical examples and what happened most of the time wasn't a sort of doomsday collapse that brought the while System down in its entirety but rather a collapse of a strong and super extractive center that had a stranglehold on the Systems broader political economy. This led to a signifcant, often not super large amount or even a big amount but none the less siginificant, degree of political and eocnomic decenralization which created a much larger amount of opportunities for a much wider array of people and geographies. Also, in some of these cases it turned out in in ways that were only apparent to most after the fact, that those centers were very highly extractive and were also mal-investing and misallocating resources to a very large extent. And so alot of those new opportunities that opened up also had adequate resources available to them. It would take far too long to describe here, but there are alternative arguments for the idea that there may be a significant amount of dedollarization and, perhaps more importantly, and very large degree of decline in (possibly all of the way) in the developing world being net capital exporters to the West (yes, they actually are net capital exporters to the West!!!), this would stand a chance of trigger the collapse of our (or at least America's) very strong center.
I'm sorry Robert but it sure feels like Britan between the wars despite the inertia.
The BRICS certainly are pretty open about devising some way to disabuse American Government in DC from Uniparty deficit spending. Just look at what Obama's third term in every facet of spending - be it the Executive under the puppet Dotard - or the magic mushroom munching Yellin at Treasury or the Milk toast lawyer in charge at the Fed - & they all took to heart the drumbeat conventional mantra after the Porkulous in 2009 - namely that the only problem was that they only printed BILLIONS RATHER THAN TRILLIONS.... and have saddled us with nearly un-imaginable debt.
And this blind ambition did not end with financial folly alone - it's the same insane quadruple down with immigration. There the logic extends beyond cheap labor mentality; namely that the same cheap labor will 'hopefully' bring along their 3rd world tendency to still have 4+ kids to plug the dike that is Social Security - a payer system already past solvency - but because we can still bully the world via our military (that keeps trade lanes open when not bogged down in places like Iraq or Ukraine) and currency - we still sluggishly plug along like bricks in Pink Floyds Wall.
Granted there are still enough Americans who want to believe in a federal republic still existing - and - that the definition of a currency - despite Milton Friedmans legacy - IS DEFINED AS A COVENANT BETWEEN THE GOVERNED AND THOSE THEY CHOOSE TO GOVERN THEM - that revolt is a foot - regardless the parents or their children who enjoy spending the vast sums required to see T. Swift live rather than via CD or pay per view streaming.
I'd say a better measure of discontent is Gun Show purchases. No matter whether Chase or Mastercard is socking away who is buying what and for how much, in the hopes of vetoing future purchases.
In closing I recommend listening to what Peter Thiel has had to say about the moribund 'innovation' coming out of supposed institutions of higher learning - and once listening closely - one gets a better understanding why the modest common sense of Americans has such low regard for our many institutions. Or why, at the least, they know firsthand that Anthony Fauci is every bit the murderous little poisoned dwarf RFK says he is.
I think you're right about a gradual decline. Gibbons, in his seminal work "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", pointed out that it was not that their empire fell, but that it took so long to do so. As bad as things were, it was much worse everywhere else. We might be able to stumble along for some time, as long as the elites are protected in their sinecures and neighborhoods from the riff raff. The only thing that will cause a sudden collapse is a large kinetic exchange with one or more enemies, or and EMP from one of them that closes down all or much of the economy.
Can't help think that is correct. There doom industry keeps feeding us dawn of the dead images while money (credit, really) keeps being created like dressing on a wound to pacify a population now addicted to Hollywood endings and "news" from the information trough. Meanwhile people are planning for zombies, blind to saner possibilities and (apparently) unaware of the systematic rollback to their rights and freedoms, their now auto-tuned to frequencies that cater to their carefully cultivated ideological proclivities.
That post details well the reality of what is being done. People have been played and used against each other and against themselves.
The "Taylor Swift tickets" stuff reminds me of something Alexander Mercouris noted: Last fall 20-somethings were partying in Kiev, which was taken by some foreign reporters as a sign that the economy was fine. But it is typical for the privileged elite to party while the country is going down. In Ukraine there was a ton of foreign money floating around with no oversight, ending up in the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats and commanders who gave the money to their kids. In the West we have our own privileged leftist class whose money tap is never shut off, the flow going to their endless government departments and enviro-racial organizations and HR jobs and so on.
One thing you may be missing is the loss of reserve currency status for the USD. This will precipitate changes beyond any native-born American can easily imagine (unless they've been in a country undergoing a currency collapse).
Under that circumstance, managing a decline without the ability to print money ex nihilo could prove... Unmanageable.
This is already underway (note the recent abandonment of the USD for trade between many countries), and I expect it to get underway in earnest once the NATO proxy is shown to be incapable of projecting sufficient force to "persuade" your country to continue to use the USD as a settlement currency.
An excellent article, Robert - thank you but I don't think a 'collapse' is in the cards - after all the Globalists would lose everything in this scenario. I prefer a gradual decline, avoiding a catastrophic disaster, as the serfs are gradually squeezed into slavery without even knowing it. I guess that 80% will succumb to the tantalising free shit through UBI and CBDCs.
Our awakened 20% will be ignored because we are not relevant - which is why I am returning to South Africa this autumn and invoking my Plan 'B' :
"successful managed decline..." Bingo! There it is!
The plan for America is a gradual Brazilification, with a small mostly lighter-skinned elite living high away in hillside mansions, guarded by private security flying in private jets and funded by private equity, with a mass of mostly darker-skinned subliterate peasants living in squalor, but who get enough welfare money to keep their lights and Wifi on and bellies filled, with a small middle class fighting every day to keep their heads above water.
I've been to Brazil many times and have seen the future...Just imagine Gavin Newsom dressed like Manuel Noriega inside his Napa Versailles saying: Let them eat Diversity!
Good post.
All of the left's/globalist narratives are designed to energize them. All of the Right's are meant to make them passive.
The left gets warnings such as:
We have to help Mother Gaia defeat the Sun God or we will all die!!!
The right is waging war and is killing trans people! We must protect them!!!
Republicans are building/want to build concentration camps at the border!! We must stop them because only Nazis the most deadly people in history) want immigration restrictions!!!
The rift wants women to be just barefoot and pregnant!! We won't let them.
Now contrast that with the Right's beloved narratives.
Buy guns. That makes you free.
Trust the plan.
Push us too far and we will secede.
Don't worry. gun owners, the police and military will take back our country.
Lol. The whole thing is going to collapse.
The left's narratives all stress collective actionvto accomplish something ASAP while the Right's stress individual action to avoid the mess.
Home school, buy guns, become a tradesman instead of an MBA or lawyer to avoid corporations, move out of the city.
What has been interesting about all of these mothers' groups fighting against abortion, the anal revolution and critical race theory in schools and the workplace is they, unlike men, are actually pushing back and gaining some victories
Don’t overlook the fact (specifically looking at housing) that in the last 3 corrections, peak to trough took 4, 7, and 6+ years respectively.
1979-1983. 1989-1996 (even though the recession ended after 18 months, housing fell for another 5.5 years) 2005-2012 (again the recession did not begin until housing had already been in decline for 3 years and housing continued to decline for 2.5 years after the recession ended.
I find housing more interesting to analyze than the overall economy because there are so many components and many of them are totally misunderstood.
We are on a slow grind down to a bottom in housing that is still years away. 2026. 2027. Maybe even 2028. Historical average for peak to trough is 4.6 years. And we are now one year in to the correction. And there are still many Covid loss mitigation rules still in place that will further delay the inevitable.
You’ll know it’s finally real when jingle mail becomes a thing again.
Adam Smith said there was much ruin a country can absorb. Gibbon, who wrote "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", pointed out that it is not surprising the empire fell, but that it took so long to do so. I don't think we'll have a sudden collapse unless we get into a nuclear exchange with Russia, or China, or both. I think it is as is described above: slow decline, with the poor getting poorer, the middle class getting poorer, the rich getting richer, and everyone having less freedom.
Danny Huckabee
Good article. Speaking of Rome, I'd like to reiterate your points but through a spiritual lens. America is, I believe, in the midst of a Romans 1 judgment. It's a judgment not of intense, immediate calamity like a great flood or fire raining down from heaven, but rather, a steep descent that get's worse, and worse, and worse. I rarely ever read The Message translation, but that version has some thought provoking language in this particular passage. Should you feel inclined to take a gander, what I'm referring to picks up in verse 18.
This is a cogent and rational analysis, but your analysis is not a solution to anything. Even if later proved to be somewhat accurate, it doesn't solve anything and therefore has little-to-no value to the future. At some point, you have to use your brainpower for the purpose of prevailing over hardship or evolution has no use for you. And it's a cope for you to presume that all people will just acquiesce to being impoverished and docile slaves to a totalitarian elite. The coming collapse is not about the strawman of a Mad Max scenario, but rather the correction necessary to clear out the deadfall. You can only keep the plates for so long before bottom drops out. And it was only a few decades ago that the Soviet Union collapsed overnight, so yes, that can happen here too.
But some people are focused on solutions rather than endless erudite analysis. The collapse (in whatever form) is very likely to engender chaos and social unrest (particularly in urban areas). In the realm of solution, its best to think of this chaos as a fog of opportunity. If LEOs and National Guard are fully engaged quelling wanton urban violence and mayhem, then many unique and creative avenues of opportunity will abound. The problem at the root of our distress is actually quite small in number and not at all robust. That is where the focus should be placed. When a body is infected with a pathogen or virus, the cure must focus on removing these detriments or the species will soon cease to exist. Evolution requires that we become smarter and stronger over time, not degenerate into passive insect-like drones.
Interesting and well written piece! But RE: the dissidents/doomers being far too optimistic in their expectations of what would happen for them after a "collapse", I'm not so sure their completely off: I took a look at the field of Anthropology's views on "collapse", well, some of them at least, and I read some really fascinating stuff on the collapse of states and empires that may back up what the dissidents/doomers expect/hope will happen. The stuff I read, mostly old stuff (late 1970s was the newest, at least I think, its been a wwhile), described many historical examples and what happened most of the time wasn't a sort of doomsday collapse that brought the while System down in its entirety but rather a collapse of a strong and super extractive center that had a stranglehold on the Systems broader political economy. This led to a signifcant, often not super large amount or even a big amount but none the less siginificant, degree of political and eocnomic decenralization which created a much larger amount of opportunities for a much wider array of people and geographies. Also, in some of these cases it turned out in in ways that were only apparent to most after the fact, that those centers were very highly extractive and were also mal-investing and misallocating resources to a very large extent. And so alot of those new opportunities that opened up also had adequate resources available to them. It would take far too long to describe here, but there are alternative arguments for the idea that there may be a significant amount of dedollarization and, perhaps more importantly, and very large degree of decline in (possibly all of the way) in the developing world being net capital exporters to the West (yes, they actually are net capital exporters to the West!!!), this would stand a chance of trigger the collapse of our (or at least America's) very strong center.
Thanks for writing this, I enjoyed it.
---Mike
I'm sorry Robert but it sure feels like Britan between the wars despite the inertia.
The BRICS certainly are pretty open about devising some way to disabuse American Government in DC from Uniparty deficit spending. Just look at what Obama's third term in every facet of spending - be it the Executive under the puppet Dotard - or the magic mushroom munching Yellin at Treasury or the Milk toast lawyer in charge at the Fed - & they all took to heart the drumbeat conventional mantra after the Porkulous in 2009 - namely that the only problem was that they only printed BILLIONS RATHER THAN TRILLIONS.... and have saddled us with nearly un-imaginable debt.
And this blind ambition did not end with financial folly alone - it's the same insane quadruple down with immigration. There the logic extends beyond cheap labor mentality; namely that the same cheap labor will 'hopefully' bring along their 3rd world tendency to still have 4+ kids to plug the dike that is Social Security - a payer system already past solvency - but because we can still bully the world via our military (that keeps trade lanes open when not bogged down in places like Iraq or Ukraine) and currency - we still sluggishly plug along like bricks in Pink Floyds Wall.
Granted there are still enough Americans who want to believe in a federal republic still existing - and - that the definition of a currency - despite Milton Friedmans legacy - IS DEFINED AS A COVENANT BETWEEN THE GOVERNED AND THOSE THEY CHOOSE TO GOVERN THEM - that revolt is a foot - regardless the parents or their children who enjoy spending the vast sums required to see T. Swift live rather than via CD or pay per view streaming.
I'd say a better measure of discontent is Gun Show purchases. No matter whether Chase or Mastercard is socking away who is buying what and for how much, in the hopes of vetoing future purchases.
In closing I recommend listening to what Peter Thiel has had to say about the moribund 'innovation' coming out of supposed institutions of higher learning - and once listening closely - one gets a better understanding why the modest common sense of Americans has such low regard for our many institutions. Or why, at the least, they know firsthand that Anthony Fauci is every bit the murderous little poisoned dwarf RFK says he is.
I think you're right about a gradual decline. Gibbons, in his seminal work "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", pointed out that it was not that their empire fell, but that it took so long to do so. As bad as things were, it was much worse everywhere else. We might be able to stumble along for some time, as long as the elites are protected in their sinecures and neighborhoods from the riff raff. The only thing that will cause a sudden collapse is a large kinetic exchange with one or more enemies, or and EMP from one of them that closes down all or much of the economy.
Danny Huckabee
>>> Anonymous 4chan post from 2013
Can't help think that is correct. There doom industry keeps feeding us dawn of the dead images while money (credit, really) keeps being created like dressing on a wound to pacify a population now addicted to Hollywood endings and "news" from the information trough. Meanwhile people are planning for zombies, blind to saner possibilities and (apparently) unaware of the systematic rollback to their rights and freedoms, their now auto-tuned to frequencies that cater to their carefully cultivated ideological proclivities.
That post details well the reality of what is being done. People have been played and used against each other and against themselves.
The "Taylor Swift tickets" stuff reminds me of something Alexander Mercouris noted: Last fall 20-somethings were partying in Kiev, which was taken by some foreign reporters as a sign that the economy was fine. But it is typical for the privileged elite to party while the country is going down. In Ukraine there was a ton of foreign money floating around with no oversight, ending up in the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats and commanders who gave the money to their kids. In the West we have our own privileged leftist class whose money tap is never shut off, the flow going to their endless government departments and enviro-racial organizations and HR jobs and so on.
One thing you may be missing is the loss of reserve currency status for the USD. This will precipitate changes beyond any native-born American can easily imagine (unless they've been in a country undergoing a currency collapse).
Under that circumstance, managing a decline without the ability to print money ex nihilo could prove... Unmanageable.
This is already underway (note the recent abandonment of the USD for trade between many countries), and I expect it to get underway in earnest once the NATO proxy is shown to be incapable of projecting sufficient force to "persuade" your country to continue to use the USD as a settlement currency.
An excellent article, Robert - thank you but I don't think a 'collapse' is in the cards - after all the Globalists would lose everything in this scenario. I prefer a gradual decline, avoiding a catastrophic disaster, as the serfs are gradually squeezed into slavery without even knowing it. I guess that 80% will succumb to the tantalising free shit through UBI and CBDCs.
Our awakened 20% will be ignored because we are not relevant - which is why I am returning to South Africa this autumn and invoking my Plan 'B' :
https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/progressing-plan-b-a-quarterly-review?s=w