Warning Signs of US Recession: A Potential Setback for Kamala Harris

[Social Media]

 

Donald Trump has consistently argued that the economy under Joe Biden has been disastrous, and until recently, the data did not support his claim. The United States has been the fastest-growing G7 nation since the Covid pandemic, with historically low unemployment and less severe inflation compared to Europe after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. However, recent developments provide Trump with some evidence to back his argument.

 

The latest US jobs figures indicate a significant cooling of the labor market. In July, payroll growth slowed to 114,000, about half the average of 215,000 from the previous 12 months and well below economists' expectations. The unemployment rate also rose from 4.1% to 4.3%, causing alarm. Financial markets, which had bet heavily on the US economy's resilience to higher interest rates, are now worried about a potential hard landing. Concerns about the US economy cooling rapidly contributed to a 12% drop in Japan's Nikkei index.

 

The Federal Reserve's Sahm rule, a measure named after economist Claudia Sahm, gauges whether the US economy is in recession. According to this rule, if the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate is 0.5 percentage points or more above its low over the previous 12 months, the economy is in the early months of recession.

 

The recent jobless report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that the Sahm rule is close to being triggered. Unless the unemployment rate falls, the rule will be met next month. Historically, the Sahm rule has been a reliable predictor of impending US recessions, prompting some to argue that the Federal Reserve has delayed cutting interest rates for too long. Speculation has arisen that the Fed might announce an emergency rate cut before its next scheduled meeting.

 

However, some economists caution against relying too heavily on the Sahm rule. Dhaval Joshi, an analyst at BCA Research, notes an unprecedented decoupling between robust economic growth and rising unemployment. Unlike in the past 60 years, when an increase in the unemployment rate by 0.5% in a year signaled a recession, current GDP growth remains strong. Joshi attributes the rising unemployment not to widespread layoffs but to an increase in labor supply outpacing labor demand. He suggests that the stock market, particularly tech stocks exposed to the artificial intelligence boom, is more vulnerable to a recession than the real economy.

 

In addition to rising unemployment, other economic indicators pose challenges for Kamala Harris as she counters Trump's critiques of the administration's economic performance. For example, the performance of UPS, often seen as a barometer of the US economy, fell short of analysts' estimates last month, leading the company to lower its growth forecasts for 2024.

 

With the presidential election only three months away, the US economy is not on the brink of an immediate recession. However, signs of households cutting back on spending spell trouble for Harris, the Democratic presidential hopeful. The cooling labor market and other economic indicators provide Trump with ammunition to argue that Biden's economic policies have failed, potentially swaying voters as the election approaches.

 

Credit: The Guardian  2024-08-06

 

 

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[Cryingdick]

We did it Joe!

[JonnyF]

Good old Bidenomics coming home to roost just in time.

 

Thanks Joe. 

[stoner]

hold on. for quite some time i have been reading over and over on here. 

 

the stock market

the stock market

the stock market

 

something doesn't add up.

[novacova]

The dems are fiscal derelicts that have no interest whatsoever in reducing the debt, they want to crush the economy and destroy the middle class in order to have a government take over of the economy and impose a socialist economic system. The only way out of this mess is to drill oil on federal land sell on open market globally and pay down the debt with the profits. That would not only reduce the national debt, it would also reduce global inflation and the green wokenuts will also have more money to spend on battery powered vehicles. But for whatever reason, the left is hell bent on transferring all the wealth to the super rich and bring further disparity to everyone else. 

[Tug]

I think they are clamoring for an interest rate reduction.

[jaywalker2]

10 minutes ago, novacova said:

The dems are fiscal derelicts that have no interest whatsoever in reducing the debt, they want to crush the economy and destroy the middle class in order to have a government take over of the economy and impose a socialist economic system. The only way out of this mess is to drill oil on federal land sell on open market globally and pay down the debt with the profits. That would not only reduce the national debt, it would also reduce global inflation and the green wokenuts will also have more money to spend on battery powered vehicles. But for whatever reason, the left is hell bent on transferring all the wealth to the super rich and bring further disparity to everyone else. 

Donald Trump increased the debt by 7 trillion, George W Bush by 4 trillion. But the grandaddy of them all was Ronald Reagan, who increased the national debt by 160 percent. Now, I wonder what those 3 have in common.

[Chomper Higgot]

22 minutes ago, Tug said:

I think they are clamoring for an interest rate reduction.

No doubt about it:

“

Private equity firms are sitting on more than $2tn of dry powder — capital that has been committed, but not yet deployed in investments, according to data provider Preqin. “

 

 

 

https://www.ft.com/content/a2c22d6d-aa52-47d5-8415-542027ee33e5?accessToken=zwAGHvsXBvdIkdOiwi1tqlJH1dOEFVQgJ-4z5Q.MEUCIGVjQbYBU-aEs7B9SJo6lmV71ncNZ-dhyxlQH8x_WzGgAiEA2T1ioSVijRDDb4x_3Ut8_n65-OjhXVgTCTCMEtBpoMU&sharetype=gift&token=ce45edfa-8dce-4799-b711-f9aa7db79952

[Tug]

14 minutes ago, jaywalker2 said:

Donald Trump increased the debt by 7 trillion, George W Bush by 4 trillion. But the grandaddy of them all was Ronald Reagan, who increased the national debt by 160 percent. Now, I wonder what those 3 have in common.

Carefull jaywalker the truth to a trump supporter is like ray orbison music to the martins in that cult classic movie mars attacks!lol all being said I hope the market resolves itself and everything works out for everyone!

[impulse]

9 minutes ago, Tug said:

Carefull jaywalker the truth to a trump supporter is like ray orbison music to the martins in that cult classic movie mars attacks!lol all being said I hope the market resolves itself and everything works out for everyone!

Assuming you know how to read a graph, what does it mean when the slope of the curve increases like it has post-Covid.  You know...  On Biden's watch...

 

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN/

 

It's not difficult to explain Trump's numbers, since the slope of the curve only matched Obama's line, until Covid.

[Tug]

19 minutes ago, impulse said:

Assuming you know how to read a graph, what does it mean when the slope of the curve increases like it has post-Covid.  You know...  On Biden's watch...

 

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN/

 

It's not difficult to explain Trump's numbers, since the slope of the curve only matched Obama's line, until Covid.

Why the insult?your boy trump added 23% to our national debt with absolutely nothing to show for it but some stock buy backs for his cronies.I don’t have to be an office worker or school teacher to understand that and yes I can read a graph

[jaywalker2]

28 minutes ago, impulse said:

Assuming you know how to read a graph, what does it mean when the slope of the curve increases like it has post-Covid.  You know...  On Biden's watch...

 

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN/

 

It's not difficult to explain Trump's numbers, since the slope of the curve only matched Obama's line, until Covid.

It means obviously that both Republicans and Democrats are to blame.  Total borrowing under the Trump administration was 8.1 trillion. Under Biden, it's been 4.3 trillion. Minus the Covid spending, Trump still increased the debt by 4.8 trillion, 2 trillion of that was for tax cuts that he didn't pay for (and which he's promising more of). (All figures from Fox news)

 

More importantly, it was Reagan who started the paradigm of ignoring the debt problem as he increased spending while cutting taxes. The debt was only 780 billion when he took office. It rose to 1.6 trillion by the time he left.

 

If you're counting on Trump to the cut the deficit, you're delusional. If you're expecting fiscal responsibility from either party or the FED, you're also delusional.

[Tug]

I distinctly remember when Reagan was questioned about increasing spending and cutting taxes his reply was voodoo economics…..thats not panning out so well it seems.I was watching the news they were saying what started this downturn was the Nikkei market apparently the interest free money is drying up and investors that were heavily leveraged had to sell …..or something like that ,well over my pay grade hopefully it gets resolved without further damage the Nikkei dumped 20% of its value!yeiks!!

[nauseus]

6 hours ago, jaywalker2 said:

Donald Trump increased the debt by 7 trillion, George W Bush by 4 trillion. But the grandaddy of them all was Ronald Reagan, who increased the national debt by 160 percent. Now, I wonder what those 3 have in common.

 

Common to these is that they are all going to be less that what Bidenomics will cost.

[nauseus]

4 hours ago, Tug said:

I distinctly remember when Reagan was questioned about increasing spending and cutting taxes his reply was voodoo economics…..thats not panning out so well it seems.I was watching the news they were saying what started this downturn was the Nikkei market apparently the interest free money is drying up and investors that were heavily leveraged had to sell …..or something like that ,well over my pay grade hopefully it gets resolved without further damage the Nikkei dumped 20% of its value!yeiks!!

 

The Japanese did not start this. The US 2008 GFC causes were never fixed.

[nauseus]

6 hours ago, Tug said:

Carefull jaywalker the truth to a trump supporter is like ray orbison music to the martins in that cult classic movie mars attacks!lol all being said I hope the market resolves itself and everything works out for everyone!

 

Slim Whitman was the man..

 

 

[placeholder]

11 hours ago, novacova said:

The dems are fiscal derelicts that have no interest whatsoever in reducing the debt, they want to crush the economy and destroy the middle class in order to have a government take over of the economy and impose a socialist economic system. The only way out of this mess is to drill oil on federal land sell on open market globally and pay down the debt with the profits. That would not only reduce the national debt, it would also reduce global inflation and the green wokenuts will also have more money to spend on battery powered vehicles. But for whatever reason, the left is hell bent on transferring all the wealth to the super rich and bring further disparity to everyone else. 

Where don't you get your news from?

U.S. Oil And Gas Production Are Ahead Of Last Year’s Record Pace

Last year marked a record for U.S. oil production with an average daily production of 12.93 million barrels per day (BPD). That record was 5% greater than the previous record of 12.31 million bpd set in 2019.

However, current data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that average daily production thus far in 2024 is 13.12 million bpd — 7.1% ahead of the production level of a year ago and 1.4% higher than last year’s record pace.

U.S. natural gas production tells a similar tale. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2024/04/26/us-oil-and-gas-production-are-ahead-of-last-years-record-pace/

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO

 

What do you think would  be the effect on oil and gas prices if the US greatly accelerated production of oil and gas? Not exactly an effective way to pay down the debt. 

As for Democrats' war on the middle class...it's not Democrats who have massively slashed taxes on the wealthy. Or who consistently try to undermine Social Security. The latest attack goes to the Trump administrationh which changed the way inflation was computed with the result that benefits to the elderly are lower. The Republicans also opposing measure to impose the Social Security Tax on higher levels of income. And have no problem with leaving millions of Americans with no affordable access to health insurance.

 

[Yellowtail]

1 minute ago, placeholder said:

Where don't you get your news from?

U.S. Oil And Gas Production Are Ahead Of Last Year’s Record Pace

Last year marked a record for U.S. oil production with an average daily production of 12.93 million barrels per day (BPD). That record was 5% greater than the previous record of 12.31 million bpd set in 2019.

However, current data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that average daily production thus far in 2024 is 13.12 million bpd — 7.1% ahead of the production level of a year ago and 1.4% higher than last year’s record pace.

U.S. natural gas production tells a similar tale. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2024/04/26/us-oil-and-gas-production-are-ahead-of-last-years-record-pace/

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO

 

What do you think would  be the effect on oil and gas prices if the US greatly accelerated production of oil and gas? Not exactly an effective way to pay down the debt. 

As for Democrats' war on the middle class...it's not Democrats who have massively slashed taxes on the wealthy. Or who consistently try to undermine Social Security. The latest attack goes to the Trump administrationh which changed the way inflation was computed with the result that benefits to the elderly are lower. The Republicans also opposing measure to impose the Social Security Tax on higher levels of income. And have no problem with leaving millions of Americans with no affordable access to health insurance.

 

So much for Biden's promises to cut fossil fuels, what a liar. 

[Dan747]

Voting Kamala? This is the Marxist you're voting for: Decriminalize illegals (citizenship & voting); Abolish ICE; Defund police; Voting from jail; Free transgender surgery for prisoners; End cash bail; Mandate gun buyback; Palestinian statehood; Universal Basic Income; Reparations; Single Payer Healthcare; Abolish private insurance; 70-80% income tax; Abortion to birth federal law; Opposes voter ID; Elimination of the filibuster; Ban fracking; Endorses Green New Deal; Ban plastic straws; Abolish gas cars by 2035; Outlaw gas appliances.

[Roo Island]

1 hour ago, Dan747 said:

Voting Kamala? This is the Marxist you're voting for: Decriminalize illegals (citizenship & voting); Abolish ICE; Defund police; Voting from jail; Free transgender surgery for prisoners; End cash bail; Mandate gun buyback; Palestinian statehood; Universal Basic Income; Reparations; Single Payer Healthcare; Abolish private insurance; 70-80% income tax; Abortion to birth federal law; Opposes voter ID; Elimination of the filibuster; Ban fracking; Endorses Green New Deal; Ban plastic straws; Abolish gas cars by 2035; Outlaw gas appliances.

Cross posting the same lies. Sad

[Roo Island]

1 hour ago, Yellowtail said:

So much for Biden's promises to cut fossil fuels, what a liar. 

This might help educate you. Probably not. But best to read behind the headlines. Especially when coming from dodgy media outlets

 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bidens-complex-relationship-with-oil-and-gas-despite-campaign-promises

[Yellowtail]

1 minute ago, Roo Island said:

This might help educate you. Probably not. But best to read behind the headlines. Especially when coming from dodgy media outlets

 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bidens-complex-relationship-with-oil-and-gas-despite-campaign-promises

 

 

Biden promised to cut fossil fuel production.

 

Fossil fuel production in the US just hit an all-time high.

 

You can link to whatever you like, but Biden is a liar. 

 

 

[placeholder]

13 hours ago, JonnyF said:

Good old Bidenomics coming home to roost just in time.

 

Thanks Joe. 

As the Noble Memorial Economics prize winner Paul Samuelson once remarked, "The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/01/predict-nine/?amp=1

 

So this sharp drop is hardly conclusive.

 

[Roo Island]

27 minutes ago, Yellowtail said:

 

 

Biden promised to cut fossil fuel production.

 

Fossil fuel production in the US just hit an all-time high.

 

You can link to whatever you like, but Biden is a liar. 

 

 

Ya didn't even read the article. Hard to have intelligent conversations with people who don't want to educate themselves

[riclag]

13 hours ago, JonnyF said:

Good old Bidenomics coming home to roost just in time.

 

Thanks Joe. 

More concerned about everybody stayin Woke! An eleven year old would run a lemonade stand better than her!
 

Her # 1 experience , activist & Social justice warrior!

 

bidens vision of a new generation of leader.

 

 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/harris-says-everybody-needs-woke-unearthed-clip-spreading-like-wildfire-social-media

 

[riclag]

6 hours ago, nauseus said:

 

Slim Whitman was the man..

 

 

I gave it a laughing emoji mate! Second time in 11 years i used it for it’s intended purpose!

[riclag]

2 hours ago, Dan747 said:

Voting Kamala? This is the Marxist you're voting for: Decriminalize illegals (citizenship & voting); Abolish ICE; Defund police; Voting from jail; Free transgender surgery for prisoners; End cash bail; Mandate gun buyback; Palestinian statehood; Universal Basic Income; Reparations; Single Payer Healthcare; Abolish private insurance; 70-80% income tax; Abortion to birth federal law; Opposes voter ID; Elimination of the filibuster; Ban fracking; Endorses Green New Deal; Ban plastic straws; Abolish gas cars by 2035; Outlaw gas appliances.

You’ll fit in right nice Dan!

 

Welcome !

nice comment too 

 

You’ll get my support with emoji’s and a occasional agreeing comment!

 

[riclag]

13 hours ago, novacova said:

The dems are fiscal derelicts that have no interest whatsoever in reducing the debt, they want to crush the economy and destroy the middle class in order to have a government take over of the economy and impose a socialist economic system. The only way out of this mess is to drill oil on federal land sell on open market globally and pay down the debt with the profits. That would not only reduce the national debt, it would also reduce global inflation and the green wokenuts will also have more money to spend on battery powered vehicles. But for whatever reason, the left is hell bent on transferring all the wealth to the super rich and bring further disparity to everyone else. 

It would also help Social Security’s destruction, by paying down the debts 

 

[Dan747]

I hope my Facebook friends will read the following. It's Victor Davis Hanson explaining radical changes in America. Yes, it is long, but it's worth reading and keeping for reference...

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without knowing how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

Americans of the 20th century had never quite seen anything like the mega-global celebrities from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, or a Bezos fortune of $170 billion, or the sorts who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley, and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward muscular classes and to plot their noblesse oblige salvation for them.

Indeed, for those reliant on muscular jobs and the production of the material essentials of life—agriculture, fuels, construction, assembly, timber, mining, and services—their livelihoods were often xeroxed abroad. Millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor, abundant natural resources, and less overhead, making investment “wiser” and more profitable.

Anointed Americans in the “soft” or informational economy achieved levels of wealth never seen before in history. Meanwhile, Americans in the “hard” or concrete sectors saw stagnation in wages, job losses, and the erosion of middle-class life itself.

That the universities, the media, the administrative state, entertainment, high tech, and the federal government were mostly on the coasts became a geographical force multiplier of the growing economic and cultural divide—perhaps in the manner that the Civil War became not just an ideological conflict but one of definable geography as well.

Red-state and blue-state cultures followed these radical displacements in the global economy. Urban bicoastal America created an ethos and an accompanying narrative that it was blessed, rich, and all-knowing because it had been rightfully rewarded for supposedly being innately smarter, better credentialed, more worldly, and—given its wealth—more moral than the losers who fell behind. The new multibillionaires reinvented the Democrat Party into a concord of the hyper-rich and subsidized poor, abandoning the now caricatured working and losing middle classes.

Indeed, a sort of atheistic, reverse Calvinism arose. The elite left-wing, monied classes were left-wing and monied precisely because of some sort of fated reward for their obvious innate superior virtue and wisdom—even as millions fled from failing blue states to their freer and more prosperous red counterparts.

An entire moral vocabulary of condemnation followed to stigmatize those who supposedly lacked the know-how or morality to appreciate their elite benefactors—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, hobbits, chumps, dregs, and “crazies,” to use the parlance of Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Their targets were the relics of a vanishing America who did quirky things like salute the flag, go to church, believe there were still only two sexes, honor America as always far better than the alternative, and believe they were the muscles that kept the nation fed, fueled, and housed for one more day.

The chief characteristic of the 21st-century American Revolution’s vast recalibrations in wealth was not just the transition from the muscular to the supposedly cerebral but from right to left. Look at the Fortune 400. There is a pattern in the rankings—mostly progressives and rich—and the winners’ wealth is usually not created from old sources like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, or construction.

The real multibillion-dollar fortunes in America are now in tech and investment. The hierarchies that own and manage Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Chase, Microsoft, or Morgan Stanley are now decidedly left-wing Democrats. That 21st-century reality marked a radical change from the past. Democrats now typically vastly outraise Republicans in most national campaigns. Their philanthropic foundations dwarf those of their right-wing rivals.

Elite hard-left universities are flush with multibillion-dollar endowments in a manner unimaginable just 40 years ago. And they are no longer merely liberal but overwhelmingly woke and uncompromisingly hard left—with millions of dollars to waste on their unicorn chases of mandated equality and racist “anti-racism.” Hollywood, the media, new and old, and Wall Street are not just far wealthier than ever but far more intolerant and sanctimonious as well.

It was not just money that gave the new left-wing oligarchy such clout in the administrative state, Wall Street, tech, the media, the corporate world, and the university. It was the accompanying assurance that, unlike other Americans, the lab rats of the mostly rural or interior parts of the country were exempt. They were to be free to apply their bankrupt agendas—open borders, DEI, globalism, climate change gospels, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory, critical race theory—to distant others. They assumed correctly that they were never really to be subject to the concrete and real-life disasters arising from the implementation of their ideology.

Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our 21st century secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain this overweening left-wing new zealotry to change the world, but largely at others’ expense. They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same superstitions and fanaticism to punish all who doubt their purity and wisdom.

So arose the idea among elites of a borderless America, where yearly 2-3 million poor and downtrodden of Latin America, and soon the world at large, could surge into a humane and progressive America—without the ossified and illiberal idea of background checks, or legal “technicalities.”

The arrivals’ abject poverty would remind the bigoted American middle classes of the need to expand their welfare state—as if a lifelong victim of the institutional oppression of Oaxaca, Mexico, became a legitimate victim of white capitalist America the very moment he set foot across a now mythical border. Importing massive poverty would remind the middle classes that racism and inequality were still on the rise.

The locus classicus of this self-righteousness and contrition was emblemized when a few dozen illegal aliens were redirected toward tony Martha’s Vineyard. The locals immediately rushed to reveal to us two realities: 1) shower the illegals with food, upscale clothing, and other essentials to virtue signal their universal concern for the downtrodden; and 2) bus them out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible to where they “belonged”—either among the inner-city poor or struggling rural Hispanic communities of the American southwest.

In the abstract, open borders were what any progressive nation should aspire to; in the concrete among the architects of such idealism—not in their backyard.

Following the death of George Floyd, corporations, universities, and administrative state agencies rushed to compete to “level the playing field” by eroding meritocratic criteria such as calcified SAT tests, background checks, resumes, etc., and began hiring by race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Tens of thousands of DEI commissars and their henchmen have now spread far beyond their birthplaces in the university (where elite schools routinely restrict so-called whites [ca. 65–70 percent of the population] to 20–40 percent of incoming classes). At some Ivy League schools and their kindred elite campuses, grades are “adjusted” to ensure 60-80 percent are A’s.

Almost everything in revolutionary America has “evolved” beyond silly notions like “meritocracy” and “standards” and has instead become DEI hot-wired—from the hiring and promotion of airline pilots, selection of actors, management of the Secret Service, and the rank and file of FBI and CIA operatives to admissions to medical school, corporate boardrooms, and advertising.

In response, a dangerous underground cynicism grows commensurately. As in the old Soviet Union, so too here arises our official “truth” besides the subterranean truth that most rely on when an incompetent Secret Service hierarchy allows a shooter to take potshots at a president’s head or there is a sharp rise in passenger jet near misses and go-arounds or students in mass demand exemptions from final schedules or expect amnesties when they storm campus buildings, or major corporations—like Disney, Target, Anheuser Busch, and John Deere—ostentatiously virtue signal.

In sum, we are knee-deep in an authoritarian commissariat that we do not even dare formally acknowledge. DEI, like open borders, was predicated on the idea that the good one percent who ran the country was too good to experience the trickle-down from the commissar system it imposed on others.

Ditto the top-down green revolution. We are to assume that sweaty truckers should have no problem juicing up their battery engines every 300 miles. Hispanics in Bakersfield should appreciate turning down their air conditioning when it hits 115. Lower-middle-class moms should learn the advantages of high-cost electric stoves and ovens once they are forcibly weaned off their cheap but too-hot natural gas appliances.

Meanwhile, the sales of designer Italian cooking platforms, 10,000-square-foot air-conditioned second homes (the Obamas own three), private jets, yachts, and huge limo SUVs have reached record levels. The model is John Kerryism—or the rationale that to help the uneducated, dumber, and less moral people survive global warming, the enlightened need the tools to do it. So, they must avoid messy airports, 9-hour delays due to missed connections, and the stuffy, cramped middle seat on modern commercial jets.

The idea of 100,000-200,000 legal immigrants admitted annually and meritocratically, charter schools in the inner city, beefed-up policing in our major urban areas, nationwide civic education, emphasis on assimilation, integration, and intermarriage of the melting pot, wide use of nuclear power—all the things that might make the life of the middle class more secure, more prosperous, and more confident—are deemed corny and passé.

Again, what we got in the last quarter century was a shrill elite that subjects their Jacobin theories upon a distant other but has absolutely no intention of ever getting near the very disasters they wrought, much less suffering the collateral damage that was inevitable from their social engineering.

Or, to put it another way, they were to be our few genius white-coated researchers while we were their many expendable lab rats.

[riclag]

29 minutes ago, Dan747 said:

I hope my Facebook friends will read the following. It's Victor Davis Hanson explaining radical changes in America. Yes, it is long, but it's worth reading and keeping for reference...

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without knowing how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

Americans of the 20th century had never quite seen anything like the mega-global celebrities from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, or a Bezos fortune of $170 billion, or the sorts who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley, and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward muscular classes and to plot their noblesse oblige salvation for them.

Indeed, for those reliant on muscular jobs and the production of the material essentials of life—agriculture, fuels, construction, assembly, timber, mining, and services—their livelihoods were often xeroxed abroad. Millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor, abundant natural resources, and less overhead, making investment “wiser” and more profitable.

Anointed Americans in the “soft” or informational economy achieved levels of wealth never seen before in history. Meanwhile, Americans in the “hard” or concrete sectors saw stagnation in wages, job losses, and the erosion of middle-class life itself.

That the universities, the media, the administrative state, entertainment, high tech, and the federal government were mostly on the coasts became a geographical force multiplier of the growing economic and cultural divide—perhaps in the manner that the Civil War became not just an ideological conflict but one of definable geography as well.

Red-state and blue-state cultures followed these radical displacements in the global economy. Urban bicoastal America created an ethos and an accompanying narrative that it was blessed, rich, and all-knowing because it had been rightfully rewarded for supposedly being innately smarter, better credentialed, more worldly, and—given its wealth—more moral than the losers who fell behind. The new multibillionaires reinvented the Democrat Party into a concord of the hyper-rich and subsidized poor, abandoning the now caricatured working and losing middle classes.

Indeed, a sort of atheistic, reverse Calvinism arose. The elite left-wing, monied classes were left-wing and monied precisely because of some sort of fated reward for their obvious innate superior virtue and wisdom—even as millions fled from failing blue states to their freer and more prosperous red counterparts.

An entire moral vocabulary of condemnation followed to stigmatize those who supposedly lacked the know-how or morality to appreciate their elite benefactors—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, hobbits, chumps, dregs, and “crazies,” to use the parlance of Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Their targets were the relics of a vanishing America who did quirky things like salute the flag, go to church, believe there were still only two sexes, honor America as always far better than the alternative, and believe they were the muscles that kept the nation fed, fueled, and housed for one more day.

The chief characteristic of the 21st-century American Revolution’s vast recalibrations in wealth was not just the transition from the muscular to the supposedly cerebral but from right to left. Look at the Fortune 400. There is a pattern in the rankings—mostly progressives and rich—and the winners’ wealth is usually not created from old sources like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, or construction.

The real multibillion-dollar fortunes in America are now in tech and investment. The hierarchies that own and manage Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Chase, Microsoft, or Morgan Stanley are now decidedly left-wing Democrats. That 21st-century reality marked a radical change from the past. Democrats now typically vastly outraise Republicans in most national campaigns. Their philanthropic foundations dwarf those of their right-wing rivals.

Elite hard-left universities are flush with multibillion-dollar endowments in a manner unimaginable just 40 years ago. And they are no longer merely liberal but overwhelmingly woke and uncompromisingly hard left—with millions of dollars to waste on their unicorn chases of mandated equality and racist “anti-racism.” Hollywood, the media, new and old, and Wall Street are not just far wealthier than ever but far more intolerant and sanctimonious as well.

It was not just money that gave the new left-wing oligarchy such clout in the administrative state, Wall Street, tech, the media, the corporate world, and the university. It was the accompanying assurance that, unlike other Americans, the lab rats of the mostly rural or interior parts of the country were exempt. They were to be free to apply their bankrupt agendas—open borders, DEI, globalism, climate change gospels, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory, critical race theory—to distant others. They assumed correctly that they were never really to be subject to the concrete and real-life disasters arising from the implementation of their ideology.

Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our 21st century secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain this overweening left-wing new zealotry to change the world, but largely at others’ expense. They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same superstitions and fanaticism to punish all who doubt their purity and wisdom.

So arose the idea among elites of a borderless America, where yearly 2-3 million poor and downtrodden of Latin America, and soon the world at large, could surge into a humane and progressive America—without the ossified and illiberal idea of background checks, or legal “technicalities.”

The arrivals’ abject poverty would remind the bigoted American middle classes of the need to expand their welfare state—as if a lifelong victim of the institutional oppression of Oaxaca, Mexico, became a legitimate victim of white capitalist America the very moment he set foot across a now mythical border. Importing massive poverty would remind the middle classes that racism and inequality were still on the rise.

The locus classicus of this self-righteousness and contrition was emblemized when a few dozen illegal aliens were redirected toward tony Martha’s Vineyard. The locals immediately rushed to reveal to us two realities: 1) shower the illegals with food, upscale clothing, and other essentials to virtue signal their universal concern for the downtrodden; and 2) bus them out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible to where they “belonged”—either among the inner-city poor or struggling rural Hispanic communities of the American southwest.

In the abstract, open borders were what any progressive nation should aspire to; in the concrete among the architects of such idealism—not in their backyard.

Following the death of George Floyd, corporations, universities, and administrative state agencies rushed to compete to “level the playing field” by eroding meritocratic criteria such as calcified SAT tests, background checks, resumes, etc., and began hiring by race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Tens of thousands of DEI commissars and their henchmen have now spread far beyond their birthplaces in the university (where elite schools routinely restrict so-called whites [ca. 65–70 percent of the population] to 20–40 percent of incoming classes). At some Ivy League schools and their kindred elite campuses, grades are “adjusted” to ensure 60-80 percent are A’s.

Almost everything in revolutionary America has “evolved” beyond silly notions like “meritocracy” and “standards” and has instead become DEI hot-wired—from the hiring and promotion of airline pilots, selection of actors, management of the Secret Service, and the rank and file of FBI and CIA operatives to admissions to medical school, corporate boardrooms, and advertising.

In response, a dangerous underground cynicism grows commensurately. As in the old Soviet Union, so too here arises our official “truth” besides the subterranean truth that most rely on when an incompetent Secret Service hierarchy allows a shooter to take potshots at a president’s head or there is a sharp rise in passenger jet near misses and go-arounds or students in mass demand exemptions from final schedules or expect amnesties when they storm campus buildings, or major corporations—like Disney, Target, Anheuser Busch, and John Deere—ostentatiously virtue signal.

In sum, we are knee-deep in an authoritarian commissariat that we do not even dare formally acknowledge. DEI, like open borders, was predicated on the idea that the good one percent who ran the country was too good to experience the trickle-down from the commissar system it imposed on others.

Ditto the top-down green revolution. We are to assume that sweaty truckers should have no problem juicing up their battery engines every 300 miles. Hispanics in Bakersfield should appreciate turning down their air conditioning when it hits 115. Lower-middle-class moms should learn the advantages of high-cost electric stoves and ovens once they are forcibly weaned off their cheap but too-hot natural gas appliances.

Meanwhile, the sales of designer Italian cooking platforms, 10,000-square-foot air-conditioned second homes (the Obamas own three), private jets, yachts, and huge limo SUVs have reached record levels. The model is John Kerryism—or the rationale that to help the uneducated, dumber, and less moral people survive global warming, the enlightened need the tools to do it. So, they must avoid messy airports, 9-hour delays due to missed connections, and the stuffy, cramped middle seat on modern commercial jets.

The idea of 100,000-200,000 legal immigrants admitted annually and meritocratically, charter schools in the inner city, beefed-up policing in our major urban areas, nationwide civic education, emphasis on assimilation, integration, and intermarriage of the melting pot, wide use of nuclear power—all the things that might make the life of the middle class more secure, more prosperous, and more confident—are deemed corny and passé.

Again, what we got in the last quarter century was a shrill elite that subjects their Jacobin theories upon a distant other but has absolutely no intention of ever getting near the very disasters they wrought, much less suffering the collateral damage that was inevitable from their social engineering.

Or, to put it another way, they were to be our few genius white-coated researchers while we were their many expendable lab rats.

 Thanks for your comment!

VDH is a historian scholar ! I often  watch & read his writings in journals , in videos and seminars!

He is a expert on neo cultural Marxist philosophy and Jacobian tactics!

The plan is to create a socialist state through divestment of capitalism!

We see the Marxist attack financial institutions because its a iconic institution!We are witnessing it on & off campus all around the world !

 

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/01/cultural-marxism-is-real/