"Angry Voters": What Are We Angry About?

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes.

Here's the mainstream summary of the midterm election results: Angry Voters Usher in Beginning of the End to the Trump Era.

And what are voters angry about? It's a fairly lengthy shopping list:

"Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, believing that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars. They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people living in the country for years. They rebelled against the tariffs that increased costs for consumers."

OK, fair enough. Those are all legitimate issues. But I submit voters are also angry about a reality larger than any of those issues: no matter which party they vote for, nothing changes. Scrape off the culture wars hot-button topics designed to inflame the loyalists and generate conveniently distracting rage and indignation, and we find that nothing actually changes in what matters to the hard-working bottom 90% who are being stripmined by the accelerating decline in the purchasing power of their earnings.

Look carefully at these three charts and point out the reversal of the primary trends delivered by either political party. You can't, because the policies and Imperial Project continue on the same trajectory regardless of which party or administration is in power.

Here is a chart of TCMDO, total debt. We can call it "living on money borrowed from the future." Note that way back in 1980, before the "borrow our way to prosperity" fantasy became the unofficial policy of the status quo, the ratio of GDP to total debt was 1.67: $3 trillion in GDP, $5 trillion in total debt.

Now the ratio is 3.7: $30.7 in GDP and $115 trillion in debt. So how is "borrowing our way to prosperity" working? This is a parody of a functional, sustainable economy. Both parties have relied on soaring debt to win the popularity contest of who promises more "free money" to the elites who fund their campaigns and the electorate.

Never mind it's not actually "free": we've perfected kicking the can down the road.



Next up: soaring wealth-income inequality: we now live in a highly stratified society of haves and have-Nots, in which the Haves have little or no contact with the Have-Nots other than Amazon deliveries and wait staff.

So show us where one party or the other reversed this geometric rise in inequality. You can't. Relying on inflating credit-asset bubbles for a politically useful illusion of "growth" has an unavoidable side-effect: credit-asset bubbles enrich the top 10% who already own assets and have the income to enjoy the ride, with the gains concentrated in the top 1%.



Wages' share of the economy has been in a stairstep decline for 50 years as capital has been favored by both parties and the Federal Reserve, the central bank. Both parties have maintained an illusion of 'growth" that rewards the least productive at the expense of the most productive.



Both parties have been equally pleased to oversee the gaming of statistics to support this illusion of "growth" and "low inflation" that funnels the gains to the top 0.1% who fund political campaigns. The political toadies in the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve have dutifully rigged the status quo to remain unchanged, so the revolving door of elections maintain the illusion of "choice" and "democracy."

Our two-party system is like being offered two "competing" brands of toilet paper, both owned by the same corporation. Consider the Imperial Project of Endless Wars (TM). the players in the war room change, but the game of Wars of Choice continues on regardless of who's at the table.



The same can be said of our Wall Street Casino Economy, filled with gamblers desperate to win big enough to escape penury, usury, student-debt servitude and Tax Donkey indenturement. The corrupt game doesn't change when one party wins or loses; nothing changes in the casino except a slight modification of who gets VIP status.

The only potential for real change is a third party that introduces the possibility of closing down the war room and the casino and cashiering all the toadies maintaining a status quo adept at illusion and artifice.

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes. Shopping for political change is like shopping for healthcare insurance: we have no real choice. Maintaining the illusion of choice benefits both parties at the expense of the citizenry.

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5,200 Miles: Impressions of the US Economy

What's the value proposition of immersing ourselves in the real world?

Longtime correspondent Buck V. recently reminded me of a timeless quote from Yogi Berra: "You can observe a lot just by watching." Buck added: With the corollary being "you can hear a lot just by listening.") Having completed a 5,200 mile camping trip around the American West, I had a chance to "observe a lot just by watching" and "hear a lot just by listening."

Everything I mention will sound so obvious that it doesn't seem worthy of comment, and that is why it's worthy of comment.

The real world is not at all like the abstract, symbolic "world" displayed on screens. Replacing looking at screens with looking at real life is a good example of "You can observe a lot just by watching."

The weather matters more than anything displayed on a screen. Drive a few thousand miles through the Western states and one observes large-scale agriculture. In drier climates, the primary crop is fodder to feed the animals we raise to milk, shear and eat. You will occasionally observe bright-green fields which are irrigated, generally by water from a river or extracted from an aquifer.

Most large-scale agriculture isn't irrigated. It depends on rain and cooperative weather.

Electrons in a data center and images on a screen cannot make it rain or refill an aquifer. The abstract, symbolic layer we pay so much attention to can't change the weather. This is too obvious to matter, until it does.

Convenience comes in one package: diesel. Grocery stores in small towns stock wonderfully fresh and affordable produce from distant lands, California or an even more distant foreign farm. The gas stations all have diesel and gasoline to fill our tanks. This abundance of convenience--too obvious to be worthy of comment--is remarkable. Equally obvious and therefore unworthy of comment is that all this convenience depends on diesel fuel.

The long trains--70, 80 or 100 cars in length, pulled by multiple Locomotives--are powered by diesel. So are the thousands of large trucks that distribute convenience to every corner of our remarkably large nation. All the rail and all the roads take a beating and must be constantly maintained. Roadwork is everywhere. This too is too obvious to be worthy of comment.

Those who own 90% of the financial wealth of the nation are drooling over the profits to be reaped by replacing 400,000 truck drivers with AI. Diesel doesn't seem to enter the picture. I know--too obvious to be worthy of comment. The screen is all about increasing profits by any means available, and nothing else matters. Until it does.

You don't see Tesla vehicles on the road or charging stations, because the distances exceed the limits of electric vehicle ranges. Not the theoretical range, the real-world range. There's a chicken and egg aspect: why invest in charging stations for so few customers, so nobody buys electric vehicles because there's so few charging stations.

What you do see are long 80-car trains of coal being pulled across the landscape. This is not a value judgment, it's an observation: "You can observe a lot just by watching."

If we tear our eyes from screens and look at the real world, all sorts of things become absolutely remarkable.

Those who own 90% of the financial wealth of the nation are drooling over the profits to be reaped by optimizing everything with AI. What's obvious--and therefore unworthy of comment--is virtually every aspect of the American economy is already optimized.

A relative handful of the workforce manages to grow hundreds of millions of tons of fodder and turn this into food for us and our pets. Every such enterprise is already optimized for efficiency. Every one requires special knowledge and deep experience.

What AI replaces is abstract, symbolic busy-work that takes place on screens, most of which is superfluous, an artifact of too much money seeking ways to make more money without producing anything real.

Most people are decent and hard-working. Maybe people don't want a robot to replace their neighbor the Walmart greeter just to make a Tech Bro billionaire and his pals even wealthier and more powerful. Maybe this is so obvious that it's unworthy of comment.

Yes, there is a place for screens and data and information and entertainment. The question isn't about that; the question is whether there's any space left in our lives to "observe a lot just by watching."

Ours is a big, beautiful land. It is still possible to escape the abstract, symbolic, intentionally synthetic, commoditized, addictive digital bubble, turn off the screens and the music and all the other distractions and just listen and observe. What's the value proposition of immersing ourselves in the real world? The only way to get an answer is to "observe a lot just by watching."



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Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World

This is Essay #9 in the series Truth Be Told.

The core dynamic of this era is the notion that controlling the narrative controls the world, as persuading the populace to believe something is true controls their convictions which then control their behaviors. Centralized powers discovered the potential for narrative control to control the world in the 20th century, as mass communications enabled centralized control of what is presented as true and important.

Propaganda has an ugly tone, so now we say narrative control, which is of course a comically obvious propaganda technique. We call propaganda designed to financially benefit a private entity marketing, a key component in what I call privatized totalitarianism: establish a monopoly that controls a key mass communication technology--a social media platform, search, smart phones, etc.--and voila, privatized totalitarianism controls the medium which controls the message.

Controlling what the populace believes to be true appears to control the world, but Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World. This is becoming increasingly clear as the status quo narratives--everything's going great, AI will deliver super-abundance to everyone, inflation is low, etc.--are now so detached from what we experience that they are inducing mass psychosis.

The incentive is obvious: persuade the populace to accept an arrangement that enriches and empowers those in control, and you no longer have to deliver authentic Progress or Prosperity, you only need to deliver artifice: fake statistics, fake claims presented as certainties, a ceaselessly promoted narrative in which everything is fake.

But narrative control doesn't actually control the world. A rancher told us the cost of fodder has doubled in the past year. That's the real world of weather and the cost of energy. Telling us that inflation is only 3.6% while healthcare premiums go up 13% a year, insurance costs triple and beef is now a luxury item is a parody of factual reporting.

The Pendulum of History has reached an extreme of artifice and narrative control that will break the status quo as the gulf between the fake and the real widens to the point the bridge connecting them collapses.

The social control of replacing authenticity with artifice will backfire and the pendulum will swing back to punishing self-serving artifice rather than rewarding it.

Yes, yes, I know this is "impossible." Those wielding the machinery of social control have god-like powers that will never diminish, they will only increase, etc. But everything is fake and mass psychosis are not stable arrangements. Artifice is self-liquidating.

The pendulum has reached an extreme of parody that cannot be pushed any further, and as the real world intrudes, all the narrative control in the world won't actually control the real world.



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The Pendulum of History

This is Essay #8 in the series Truth Be Told.

A great many phenomena in both Nature and human history follow cyclical patterns, while others form waves. Author David Hackett Fischer (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History) described the difference between cycles and waves:

"Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum. One great price wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than 180 years. The irregularities in individual price movements make them no more (or less) predictable than individual waves in the sea.

Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest rates; and the same dangerous volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world crises and was followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium."

As Fischer observed, waves of human history share characteristics with ocean waves, which can accrete energy and become giant rogue waves that cannot be predicted even as they can be foreseen as recurring phenomena.

Two cycles have attracted much commentary over the past decade: The Fourth Turning posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (subtitled What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny) which laid out an 80-year cycle of four generational turnings (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis) that culminate in a system-changing Fourth Turning.

This 80-year cycle aligns with the nation-changing crises of 1781 (the end of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States), 1861 (the start of the Civil War) and 1941 (America's entry into an existential global conflict, World War II). This cycle suggests a nation-changing crisis began around 2021.

Strauss and Howe took pains to note that the outcome of each crisis isn't pre-ordained to be positive. Complacency based on the idea that it will all turn out wonderfully due to the nation's destiny could be fatal.

Peter Turchin and his colleagues have mapped out a 50-year cycle based on data ranging from archeological to financial--or in the case of coin hoards buried in times of crisis, both archeological and financial. Turchin's prediction of a crisis beginning in 2020 drew skepticism which then flipped to recognition when the events of 2020 came to pass.

Cycles are generally depicted as some version of a sine wave:



Waves build up and break in irregular fashion. If we discern the forces at work--storms, etc.--we can predict the eventual arrival of waves but not their amplitude. In other words, the outcome of waves cannot be predicted. The complacency lent by cycles--everything will recover in time, etc.--is not possible in waves, as the wave might sweep away the entire status quo.


Moana Jones Wong at Pipeline, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

A pendulum offers a third model of history: asymmetries push the socio-political-economic order to an extreme that cannot be sustained, and the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, for example, from order to chaos and from surplus to depletion.

In my framework, the shared interests of society are always in competition with the private interests of markets. Ideally, these generate a dynamic equilibrium, as adaptive forces provide feedback that counteracts any overreach.

But as I have taken pains to explain, when one set of interests gains the power to override or ignore competing interests and the shared interests of society, their power becoming self-reinforcing, with fatal consequences. When a financial-market elite gains enough wealth to take control of the political machinery, they use this power to increase their share of the economy's output / gains at the expense of everyone else.

From their point of view, this is the natural order of things: we've gained supremacy because we're smarter and therefore deserving of power.

What they miss is that by gaining dominance, they eliminate the adaptive forces needed to maintain systemic stability. The system veers into moral decay as self-interest is deemed all that's necessary for "growth," and rampant corruption / unfairness reigns as the system is tilted to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The irony is rich: the status quo the dominant few believe is permanent cascades into disorder due to the destabilizing effects of their dominance.

Richard Bonugli and I discuss the resulting potential for nonlinear disruption in our latest podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

This pendulum swing eventually reaches an extreme that cannot be increased or even sustained. The asymmetries imposed by the dominant few reach the limits of the system, and the pendulum pauses for a brief moment before beginning its mechanically inevitable swing to the opposite extreme.

It's impossible not to note the pendulum of wealth and power swinging from the extreme of elites owning most of the wealth and accumulating most of the gains to the other end of the spectrum of a more widely shared distribution of wealth, power and gains. Here we see Peter Turchin's 50-year cycle depicted as pendulum swings.



We are currently poised in that brief moment in which the pendulum has reached an extreme that cannot be pushed any further as the asymmetries have reached their systemic limits. Wealth-power-income asymmetries have reached extremes of concentration that generate instability:



The broad-based distribution of the economy's gains to the workforce has been siphoned off and distributed to the owners of capital in a highly asymmetric power-law distribution: over time, this resulted in the transfer of $150 trillion from the workforce to those at the top:



Wealth, income and power now follow a power law distribution that favors the few over the many due to the self-reinforcing nature of an economy dominated by what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale:



Life is good for Billionaire Tech Bros and the financial Nobility:



Thanks to the status quo's mastery of The Big Con, the majority have been conned into believing the current moment of apparent stability is authentic stability. But this apparent stability is as fake as everything else in Ultra-Processed Life, as events will reveal.



I don't follow the predictive gambling table in the casino, but I did overhear a peculiarly garbed stranger murmuring, with some urgency, "I bet 100 million quatloos the economy will collapse into disorder and depression by 2032." I think he was given good odds from the gamblers who fell for The Big Con.

The delusion that technology and finance have given us god-like powers that moot the pendulum of history will be revealed as delusion in a most painful manner. A social-economic system in which what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale generates its own demise, as The Big Con doesn't work on the forces of history.

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The Status Quo Is a Comic-Book Parody

This is Essay #7 in the series Truth Be Told.

The sharpest critique of the status quo--and therefore the one most likely to spark spittle-flecked freakouts--is that stripped of self-important spin, it's a comic-book parody of a functional state of affairs. The key to a solid parody is the most absurd exaggerations are taken with the utmost seriousness, as if the participants are completely unaware of the laughable nature of the caricatures they're playing.

So let's conduct a thought experiment: boil off all the grandiose self-importance ("we're serious people discussing serious things," blah-blah-blah) and hyper-stylized spin ("AI will make everything free, or end the world as we know it!"), and then try to parody what's left.

You can't. Everything in the status quo is already a self-parody and therefore impervious to being parodied. Whatever we come up with as a parody is only a pale shadow of what's passed off as "serious people doing serious things."

Consider The Imperial Project (tm) War Room for playing their live-action game War of Choice (tm). This is the pinnacle of "serious people discussing serious things"--what's our next War of Choice (tm)?



It's not ideal, but it's the only war we got.



War generates inflation which creates an illusory "growth" that impoverishes the bottom 90% as life becomes unaffordable, a tragicomic parody of prosperity: as long as this parody of prosperity enriches Wall Street, the status quo cheers.



Our Billionaire Tech Bros have concentrated enough personal wealth to buy political power in unlimited quantities, generating delusions of grandeur and hubris that are now comic-book parodies:



When those we worship as Tech Gods go mad with power, the parody ceases to be amusing.



By turning the hype machinery to 11, our Billionaire Tech Bros have become parodies of themselves. Each AI Tech Bro is now a thinly cloaked parody of a James Bond villain, a fervent believer in their own private religion of PR and delusions that transmogrify the AI Ponzi Scheme credit bubble into the Savior or the Devil, either one works equally well.



An economy dominated by monopolies, cartels and Billionaire Financier - Tech Bro concentrations of wealth / power is a parody of "democracy" and "prosperity": cue the comic-book caricatures of Private Equity:



The core quasi-religious belief of the status quo--that the profit motive drives technological innovation which drives improvements in the quality of our lives--is now a parody, as the ceaseless mania to increase profits by any means available has led to speeding up product cycles with what correspondent Mike Fasano calls overfeaturing, adding complicated features which are parodies of utility and durability, all designed to improve profits, not the quality, utility, value or durability of products and services. Mike described the resulting parody of "innovation":

"Just like with your experience on getting AI customer support, the endless options are never trimmed or even updated. They are only expanded upon -- often described in names reflecting faddish, incomprehensible computer lingo which itself will become archaic in a month or two."

The other driver of the status quo--that novelty drives profits higher by enticing consumers to buy "what's new" on the much-hyped belief "new" is "better"--is also now a slap-stick parody of "innovation" and novelty. Here is the winning recipe from Trader Joe's recent contest promoting novel uses of hoisin sauce: Hoisin Sauce Recipe Contest WINNERS! (note the caps--every novelty is a WINNER!)

And the winner is: Hoisin Caramel Apple Sundae with Black Pepper & Pistachios:



Go ahead and try to parody this parody of "novelty"; you can't. It's already a hokey, trying-too-hard parody of novelty.

This hokey, campy, slap-stick caricature quality characterizes the entire status quo apparatus: 'education" is a parody of useful learning, "leadership" is a comic-book parody of authentic leadership, "innovation" is a Rube Goldberg parody of technological advances, and "novelty" has reached such absurd excesses that it's no longer amusing.

Here's a few of Trader Joe's Fall novelty products. Try to identify my attempts to parody these concoctions. Or try to concoct your own parody products. It's fun for all.

Duck with blueberry favoring (dog treats)
Caramel Creme Scented Body Butter
Candy Jar Flavored Lip Butter Balm Set
Crawdaddy-shaped macaroons with caramel and chocolate
Pumpkin Spice Coffee
Pumpkin and Spice Caramel Sauce
Glazed Pumpkin Pie Spice Donut Holes
Pumpkin Spice Espresso Martini
Pumpkin Spice IPA beer
Pumpkin Maple Bacon Flavored Stuffies (dog treats)
Pumpkin Spiced Teeny Tiny Pretzels
Pumpkin Cream Cheese Croissants

Personally, I found the dog treats the most appealing. I hope Fido won't mind sharing.

What's obvious and therefore verboten to state out loud is this status quo parody of a functional economy and society is not just hokey, campy, slap-stick caricature; it's demeaning, delusional and sad. Acting like it's not a demeaning parody only extends the artifice and delusion.

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