A compelling big picture view. You mentioned the German encouragement to suicide in the elderly not yet occurring in the US. I am not so sure. Robert Kennedy's ascension to the head of HHS could be seen as an acceptance of the idea that the weak will and should die as the elderly will be most affected by any future epidemics and unvaccinated children will help to separate the weak from the strong.
Still we remain in a period where much of this upheaval is under human control. The oil age is not yet over. So the view from the US is not to succumb completely to propaganda and the lure of what perhaps 40 percent of voters see as a return to past "greatness" in the form of undisputed empire. The long wave of history notwithstanding, I think the US is currently in a race between Republican propaganda. voter suppression, and oligarchy on the one hand, and the application of constitutional structures intended to maintain the rule of law on the other. The outcome remains uncertain, and may depend on just a few seats in the House of Representatives, even if this uncertainty is only a perturbation in the long wave of history. Regardless of the outcome. the status quo appears to be over for the surplus elite that the West has generated in such large numbers. Is that us?
I suspect that the world on-deck now promises a future that will be its own encouragement for suicide, and not just amongst the elderly. The elderly may be amongt the lucky ones. I mean, they've almost made it to the buzzer anyway. Imagine the lives of those who are toddlers right now.
There does seem the semblance of a plan, and people hark back to the 50s and that phase of American 'can-do', which was a phase in the application of the 'carbon pulse' creating a 'modern life'. It is more of a path-dependent society/economy now, however.
And this is some complex machine we, I'm European, live with globally now, and these guys probably aren't that bright, and poking holes even in the American structure could cross tipping points which will only be seen in hindsight.
It will be interesting to see how the Enlightenment thinking, the Constitution, and the case-history based legal system, stand up to it. America became a command economy instantly in WWII, but is much more vulnerable now.
Your closing comment is exactly what I have been telling people. Decentralization will happen. The question is 'how'. Had Kamala been elected, it would have been a psychopathic collapse. With Trump, crazily enough, there is some hope to order.
People do not like to hear this at all. You can imagine my popularity as of late.
Yet that huge tariff tax flows directly into Federal centrist coffers, Chuck. Are you sure you are witnessing decentralization under a despotic president?
I doubt DJT thought of this big picture himself, and he surely doesn't get it completely. Those who have knowledge of history and science (physical limits) could be running him by feeding him pointed ideas. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative, free market think tank, announced yesterday that the math used to formulate the tariffs was in error. I posted that to my lists yesterday. Relocalization is likely coming, but few realize that tariffs and DJT aren’t the primary drivers. Overshoot and a finite planet are.
My favorite composite rumor is that Trump is inducing a recession to knock down the cost of Treasury borrowing below 3%, so he can borrow long all the treasury debt that Yellen borrowed short and is coming due this year on his watch.
He is inducing recession by kneecapping all of his adversaries, especially European financiers and other "globalists", who will enter the recession>> RESET kneecapped.
These things tend to take 12 years or more to sort out, like the Great Depression did.
Yes, he is going to take the other side of Triffin's Paradox now, and drop the global reserve currency mantle, though he denies it. That's what happens when a country produces more and develops a positive balance of payments.
There won't be any sorting out of what Trump brings. Whatever Trump engineers in the way of chaos will be just another chapter of many outlining the details of the collapse of modernity. At the tail end of the Great Depression the USA and the rest of the world were still sitting on oceans of oil. The means to recover, like a young vital body emerging from some virulent pathology. The body is now old and moribund and there is only one way the condition is going. The Trump presidency is putting a little more hustle on the set trajectory is all.
We shall see. We humans work constructively in groups. We have created a peak industrial economy, and our elites are poisoning us to death and planning more pandemics rather than nuclear war to reduce our herds this time (for practical reasons).
I doubt we will go extinct, we may. The whole engineered elimination of the people is just more tinfoil static to my ears. No intelligent parasite works to exterminate the host. I'm well versed meanwhile on the limits to growth stuff, yes, and the state of oil.
What work would you have "us" do by the way? With what outcome the goal?
Owners thin herds that overgraze. Our elites, and in the Americas, unknown to us, have found ways to kill lots of people by use of wars, sacrificing to the Sun God, whatever could be effectively sold to a society.
I have reduced my burn rate, grow vegetable gardens, ride for exercise, and have bike luggage I have toured with in the past. I meditate, and am comfortable with my own death, not driven by fear, but a desire to help work things out.
I stood with "the unvaccinated" and accepted firing in October 2021, after being the only COVID early-treating physician at my clinic.
I "stood naked with the Jews" openly to resist the dehumanization that I saw. I know what that means in history. Some took offense that I was "trivializing the holocaust". I looked them in the eye when they would let me and explained that it was exactly the same thing again.
None of them "got it". They may be having the side effects from the shots that we were only beginning to see then. I will not, which is one of the silver linings.
The other silver lining is that I followed what I knew to be right.
Utterly wrong about vaccines. None are “safe and effective”. All are part of the depopulation agenda. Read “A Midwestern Doctor’s” The Forgotten Side of Medicine” and many other Substacks.
Yes, I agree with you. What most pundits on TV and politicians outside of the US are calling madness and sheer economic incompetence for challenging the free trade dogma might well be part of a much bigger plan.
It could be that Trump is actually simplifying a system that largely benefited the US since WW2. But whose complexity is not sustainable anymore. This is very much Tainter's logic at work.
That means that in the end, Trump will never fix the US economy and make it "great again". That might be indeed just propaganda to get the public support he needs. But he may actually be playing the next move. That is trying to cushion the unavoidable fall as much as he can. At least for the US.
But we might actually never know. Those who profit the most of the actual system will always pretend that Trump ruined it and that it would never have collapsed in the first place.
.
And so, according to this plan, the US must retreat from most of the world. Starting with the Ukraine quagmire of course and the whole of Europe which will appear more and more as a waste of useful ressources once stripped of its remaining industries.
And still, there are indeed two very dangerous situations in problematic and far away places : Israel and Taiwan. How long it will be possible to support these last outposts of the Empire? And to what lengths this support will go? With what consequences?
And Trump might be denying the $ loosing its global reserve currency status. But it's quite possible he knows or understands that's already on the way. So the advantages it is supposed to give the US won't pay for the inconveniences much longer.
We are a collection of globalised nations facing contraction with our ingrained 20th Century mindset of abundance. We think our problems are at their root political, rather than physical - the end of abundance. It's not going to pan-out, but then, in the decline and fall stage, nothing will on the level of nations.
Trump seems to be about the only one who grasps that it's time to pull in the horns and circle the wagons, notwithstanding all paths lead downwards now. If you assume for the sake of argument that the rationale is sound - that the short to mid term pain would indeed bring the long term gain - this is still a gross political miscalculation on Trump's part. The democratic political systems don't allow for long or even mid-term thinking. You live or die based on year to year or even quarter-to-quarter assessments. Right now it is seeming more week to week. The only room for change in the minds of the people is a change into a state of "more" - for less - essentially overnight. Only on the upslope of your trajectory is it possible to produce such results. The electorate of modernity don't have the patience, the vision, the understanding of what is actually happening to modernity, nor the resilience for anything less than this. Trump's policies - assuming they would indeed work in the long run, which is doubtful, politics aside i doubt the USA can rebuild anywhere close to what he envisions at this stage of entropy - but assuming they would for sake of argument, are policies for a monarchy or a dictatorship only, where the impatience of the electorate carries no weight. Clearly Trump most desires to be this - monarch or dictator and maybe this is even what a world at our stage of the game needs, and Trump the man is likely not up to role anyway. But we're not going to get what we need, in any form. What we need is going away.
Chaos is the strategy imho. It benefits the USD as reserve currency, Europe is dumb enough to clamour for war with Russia and give up relatively cheap Russian nat gas for expensive LNG from the US. Probably still gunning for Iranian resources though. Possibly let the Israelis do something insane then mop up after? Not exactly a terrible strategy, set the world on fire then come to the rescue? 🥲 As you say method to the madness and historically worked well. Less people less drain on natural resources... Exteminatus indeed.
Rebuilding industries might be a good idea in theory, executing it takes about 5 years or more and by that time, Trump's session is over. Any industry requires skilled workers who in China, for a large part are robots. Once these robots are equipped with (open source) AI, there's no way a US or EU worker could compete.
In the US and EU, AI would have to be rented, increasing the cost for consumers while continuing to enrich owners / oligarchs. Jimmy Carter already mentioned that the US is an oligarchy which implies there's an owner for everything who has to be paid rent. That can be interpreted as "tax on everything" but not for improvement of education, infrastructure, environment, R&D.
Where this didn't significantly affect small scale industries, the overall effect doesn't motivate "to do the best for your country" (paraphrasing JFK).
What Trump achieved is "end of trust" in US and to set up trade- and peace treaties between countries, not long ago "adversaries". Japanese govt will realize the Chinese leadership is much more reliable partner than US etc.
By the time the wallet of Trump voters will be "hit" because of the consequences of the tariffs, their mood might change.
I have a feeling that Trump might repurpose Musk to building a new shipbuilding industry for the US. Musk is already remaking the South Texas coast around Brownsville, where he launches Space-X rockets, and catches them gently on the way down.
We shall see.
The global economy will crash. Trump wants to crash it on his terms and timeline.
the Trump admin doesn't even understand the problem.
It's just this: for quite a while the US no longer is able to sell enough products to foreign countries, to balance what is being bought from them. When able to balance "sold" and "bought" it doesn't matter one iota if one country exports more to the US than it buys: only balance matters
Hence the real issue is "why has the US been unable to balance the "sold" and bought" bookkeeping? The popular myth is that "US labor is too expensive". In China it became expensive too, so where possible, AI and robots are used and products stayed competitive in price and performance. Remember that in China, vital industries (energy, health, infrastructure) are govt run so do neither burden producers (by "paying oligarchs for the use of it" nor present a risk for start-ups. This policy greatly motivates "setting up a new business" (like DeepSeek).
In the US that's different, profit directly turns to the oligarchs who won't invest it preemptively to stay in front of the pack.
Inhabited, no infrastructure, costly to travel to, isn't the recipe for a loophole. If it was, the moon, Mars and its moons would have been included too.
The tariffs will only make everything more expensive for Americans and there's no money to build the required factories - or increase debt to 100 trillion? Surely the rentiers are moving their money away (to Russia for instance).
Foreigners will find ways to do trade without any US involvement and stay at that as reliability is more important than a few cents lower in price.
The US has an ominous track record of violating treaties, and violating WTO rules is the recent one. Not something for "wait and see". Trump (as Chabad extremist?) is running what could be called a Khazarian extortion racket on the rest of the world that could be a bridge too far even for moderate Chabad members.
I don't know how you could have gotten it so wrong. This is tantamount to painting a bullseye around the arrow after it has landed. Saying that he has a bigger picture in mind which will be revealed explicitly or implicitly is the intellectual equivalent of gaslighting. The policies that his administration is implementing have been outline in Project 2025. P2025 itself is the freakish child of Curtis Yarvin and his ideology of a Network State.
The network state, as envisioned by Yarvin and others, involves breaking up nation-states into smaller territories run by corporate dictatorships. Both the network state and Project 2025 aim to replace democratic governance with technocratic control. This involves consolidating privatized power over key public systems and reducing the influence of democratic institutions. They envision a future where government is replaced by oligarchs who are easy to bend to the administration's will - you are with us or against us.
This is already apparent with them sum total firing or 280 000 federal employees, the gutting of several agencies to be replaced by private contractors (Starlink/SpaceX is set to take over the Federal Aviation Administration in charge of flight safety, others are set to replace NOAA which is in charge of weather modelling/prediction and monitoring of bodies of water, including to determine drinking water safety).
Those plans might just overlap with the plans that one might implement to ensure US survival given the resource crisis, in a Gann chart fashion, to an extent. Portraying the administration as some sort of secret geniuses just betrays a lack of knowledge regarding Project 2025 and assumes the administration that is filled with former Fox news hosts, conspiracy theorists and others with a limited cranium and very little academic credential a heavenly enlightenment of knowledge beyond any logic.
Kristjan, excuse me, but I beg to disagree. I didn't mention P2025 because in my opinion it is mostly an ideological screed, not especially interesting or influential. The points you mention are common memes being exchanged in the current administration and in the general political memesphere that's emerging as the dominating view. Whether there is a "plan," I don't know; I never said that there was one in my post. I did say that there is a certain logic in what the administration is doing. How consistently it will be followed, and for how long, it is all to be seen.
I think you're being too generous when you attribute his policies to a coherent plan to provide America with the factories, commodities and brains to ensure future survival capacity in a world where growth is limited. He is a simple man who has loved tariffs since the 1980s (video link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAS5oTVeNTE), he hates it when foreign companies succeed as if trade was a zero sum game.
You're saying there's a method to the madness, as if he was playing chess while others were playing checkers. If he truly was implementing a plan to just re-shore production and ensure access to natural resources, why would he deport random people? Why would he ask Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which adds a poll tax to millions of married female voters who now have to get a passport to vote? Why would he dismantle federal agencies and give contracts to private companies as was done with the FDA just this week? These only start to make sense once you start comparing the admin's policies to the plans set out in P2025. Dismissing these as simple memes is short-sighted.
The slogan is "Make America Great Again" is Trump campaign rhetoric, but many who understand this can decode it for what it actually is. The real life version, if we start things heading back in the right direction, might more aptly be called "Make America Function Again" (if we are lucky, that is).
Both ends of the oligarchic spectrum have all their "gee whiz" ideas, but we really aren't going to return to a better-functioning nation until a critical mass of the public wakes up and realizes that it's not just "the other side" that is pumping out propaganda, violating the constitution, and challenging the rule of law. Anyone who thinks so is part of the problem. The sudden change of direction following the last election has truly been whiplash-inducing in many respects, and not all of it is good. But I think what angers me the most is being forced to choose between this and a replay of the sh*t-show we just went through over the previous four years.
Except the world is pivoting away from America and not bowing down to its attempted extortion of the rest of the world. Is there a paradigm shift - absolutely. But the civilisation which is ending appears to be the American one. I would also argue that Europe is capable of rearming itself - it already has a robust defence industry. Your article seems to operate under the premise that America has been doing all the heavy lifting on its own and ignores your allies also lending a hand - funny how that narrative never seems to reach the American people. There are lots of holes in your arguments the biggest is that America is the be all and all. And no other Country can survive without it I think China and Canada are showing the opposite. America is a dying superpower and has no one to blame for what’s happening there except itself. No other country carries the amount of debt you do and now that other countries are moving away from trading in USD you are about to pay the piper for that debt.
A compelling big picture view. You mentioned the German encouragement to suicide in the elderly not yet occurring in the US. I am not so sure. Robert Kennedy's ascension to the head of HHS could be seen as an acceptance of the idea that the weak will and should die as the elderly will be most affected by any future epidemics and unvaccinated children will help to separate the weak from the strong.
Still we remain in a period where much of this upheaval is under human control. The oil age is not yet over. So the view from the US is not to succumb completely to propaganda and the lure of what perhaps 40 percent of voters see as a return to past "greatness" in the form of undisputed empire. The long wave of history notwithstanding, I think the US is currently in a race between Republican propaganda. voter suppression, and oligarchy on the one hand, and the application of constitutional structures intended to maintain the rule of law on the other. The outcome remains uncertain, and may depend on just a few seats in the House of Representatives, even if this uncertainty is only a perturbation in the long wave of history. Regardless of the outcome. the status quo appears to be over for the surplus elite that the West has generated in such large numbers. Is that us?
I suspect that the world on-deck now promises a future that will be its own encouragement for suicide, and not just amongst the elderly. The elderly may be amongt the lucky ones. I mean, they've almost made it to the buzzer anyway. Imagine the lives of those who are toddlers right now.
There does seem the semblance of a plan, and people hark back to the 50s and that phase of American 'can-do', which was a phase in the application of the 'carbon pulse' creating a 'modern life'. It is more of a path-dependent society/economy now, however.
And this is some complex machine we, I'm European, live with globally now, and these guys probably aren't that bright, and poking holes even in the American structure could cross tipping points which will only be seen in hindsight.
It will be interesting to see how the Enlightenment thinking, the Constitution, and the case-history based legal system, stand up to it. America became a command economy instantly in WWII, but is much more vulnerable now.
Your closing comment is exactly what I have been telling people. Decentralization will happen. The question is 'how'. Had Kamala been elected, it would have been a psychopathic collapse. With Trump, crazily enough, there is some hope to order.
People do not like to hear this at all. You can imagine my popularity as of late.
Yet that huge tariff tax flows directly into Federal centrist coffers, Chuck. Are you sure you are witnessing decentralization under a despotic president?
I doubt DJT thought of this big picture himself, and he surely doesn't get it completely. Those who have knowledge of history and science (physical limits) could be running him by feeding him pointed ideas. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative, free market think tank, announced yesterday that the math used to formulate the tariffs was in error. I posted that to my lists yesterday. Relocalization is likely coming, but few realize that tariffs and DJT aren’t the primary drivers. Overshoot and a finite planet are.
My favorite composite rumor is that Trump is inducing a recession to knock down the cost of Treasury borrowing below 3%, so he can borrow long all the treasury debt that Yellen borrowed short and is coming due this year on his watch.
He is inducing recession by kneecapping all of his adversaries, especially European financiers and other "globalists", who will enter the recession>> RESET kneecapped.
These things tend to take 12 years or more to sort out, like the Great Depression did.
Yes, he is going to take the other side of Triffin's Paradox now, and drop the global reserve currency mantle, though he denies it. That's what happens when a country produces more and develops a positive balance of payments.
Imperialism has to reverse, too.
There won't be any sorting out of what Trump brings. Whatever Trump engineers in the way of chaos will be just another chapter of many outlining the details of the collapse of modernity. At the tail end of the Great Depression the USA and the rest of the world were still sitting on oceans of oil. The means to recover, like a young vital body emerging from some virulent pathology. The body is now old and moribund and there is only one way the condition is going. The Trump presidency is putting a little more hustle on the set trajectory is all.
We shall see. We humans work constructively in groups. We have created a peak industrial economy, and our elites are poisoning us to death and planning more pandemics rather than nuclear war to reduce our herds this time (for practical reasons).
You might scroll down to the graph from The Limits To Growth here https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/from-unexpected-quarters
and the graphs on US and global crude-oil + condensates production here: https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/triffin-dilemma-switcheroo
You and I have work to do. Things are neither "fine" , nor "hopeless", but require the work of those who see the problems.
I doubt we will go extinct, we may. The whole engineered elimination of the people is just more tinfoil static to my ears. No intelligent parasite works to exterminate the host. I'm well versed meanwhile on the limits to growth stuff, yes, and the state of oil.
What work would you have "us" do by the way? With what outcome the goal?
Owners thin herds that overgraze. Our elites, and in the Americas, unknown to us, have found ways to kill lots of people by use of wars, sacrificing to the Sun God, whatever could be effectively sold to a society.
I have reduced my burn rate, grow vegetable gardens, ride for exercise, and have bike luggage I have toured with in the past. I meditate, and am comfortable with my own death, not driven by fear, but a desire to help work things out.
I stood with "the unvaccinated" and accepted firing in October 2021, after being the only COVID early-treating physician at my clinic.
I "stood naked with the Jews" openly to resist the dehumanization that I saw. I know what that means in history. Some took offense that I was "trivializing the holocaust". I looked them in the eye when they would let me and explained that it was exactly the same thing again.
None of them "got it". They may be having the side effects from the shots that we were only beginning to see then. I will not, which is one of the silver linings.
The other silver lining is that I followed what I knew to be right.
It was a fork in the road.
There are others on this path.
Sorry I can't give more specific advice.
Oh, don’t worry - it’s not advice i seek. I’m merely curious.
I understand now.
Understanding is good.
Doing the right thing seems like the expensive way to reduce cognitive-dissonance, but in the longer term it is the bargain.
Utterly wrong about vaccines. None are “safe and effective”. All are part of the depopulation agenda. Read “A Midwestern Doctor’s” The Forgotten Side of Medicine” and many other Substacks.
Yes, I agree with you. What most pundits on TV and politicians outside of the US are calling madness and sheer economic incompetence for challenging the free trade dogma might well be part of a much bigger plan.
It could be that Trump is actually simplifying a system that largely benefited the US since WW2. But whose complexity is not sustainable anymore. This is very much Tainter's logic at work.
That means that in the end, Trump will never fix the US economy and make it "great again". That might be indeed just propaganda to get the public support he needs. But he may actually be playing the next move. That is trying to cushion the unavoidable fall as much as he can. At least for the US.
But we might actually never know. Those who profit the most of the actual system will always pretend that Trump ruined it and that it would never have collapsed in the first place.
.
And so, according to this plan, the US must retreat from most of the world. Starting with the Ukraine quagmire of course and the whole of Europe which will appear more and more as a waste of useful ressources once stripped of its remaining industries.
And still, there are indeed two very dangerous situations in problematic and far away places : Israel and Taiwan. How long it will be possible to support these last outposts of the Empire? And to what lengths this support will go? With what consequences?
He is going from imports feeding an imperial military and financial regime to producing exports, as in pre-WW-2 USA.
That forces the $US out of global reserve currency status, though he is denying that right now.
He takes the other side of Triffin's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Interesting.
And Trump might be denying the $ loosing its global reserve currency status. But it's quite possible he knows or understands that's already on the way. So the advantages it is supposed to give the US won't pay for the inconveniences much longer.
Can you explain Triffins Paradox in a few sentences? Thanks
See the first 3 sentences here, please. https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/triffin-dilemma-switcheroo
We are a collection of globalised nations facing contraction with our ingrained 20th Century mindset of abundance. We think our problems are at their root political, rather than physical - the end of abundance. It's not going to pan-out, but then, in the decline and fall stage, nothing will on the level of nations.
Trump seems to be about the only one who grasps that it's time to pull in the horns and circle the wagons, notwithstanding all paths lead downwards now. If you assume for the sake of argument that the rationale is sound - that the short to mid term pain would indeed bring the long term gain - this is still a gross political miscalculation on Trump's part. The democratic political systems don't allow for long or even mid-term thinking. You live or die based on year to year or even quarter-to-quarter assessments. Right now it is seeming more week to week. The only room for change in the minds of the people is a change into a state of "more" - for less - essentially overnight. Only on the upslope of your trajectory is it possible to produce such results. The electorate of modernity don't have the patience, the vision, the understanding of what is actually happening to modernity, nor the resilience for anything less than this. Trump's policies - assuming they would indeed work in the long run, which is doubtful, politics aside i doubt the USA can rebuild anywhere close to what he envisions at this stage of entropy - but assuming they would for sake of argument, are policies for a monarchy or a dictatorship only, where the impatience of the electorate carries no weight. Clearly Trump most desires to be this - monarch or dictator and maybe this is even what a world at our stage of the game needs, and Trump the man is likely not up to role anyway. But we're not going to get what we need, in any form. What we need is going away.
Chaos is the strategy imho. It benefits the USD as reserve currency, Europe is dumb enough to clamour for war with Russia and give up relatively cheap Russian nat gas for expensive LNG from the US. Probably still gunning for Iranian resources though. Possibly let the Israelis do something insane then mop up after? Not exactly a terrible strategy, set the world on fire then come to the rescue? 🥲 As you say method to the madness and historically worked well. Less people less drain on natural resources... Exteminatus indeed.
Rebuilding industries might be a good idea in theory, executing it takes about 5 years or more and by that time, Trump's session is over. Any industry requires skilled workers who in China, for a large part are robots. Once these robots are equipped with (open source) AI, there's no way a US or EU worker could compete.
In the US and EU, AI would have to be rented, increasing the cost for consumers while continuing to enrich owners / oligarchs. Jimmy Carter already mentioned that the US is an oligarchy which implies there's an owner for everything who has to be paid rent. That can be interpreted as "tax on everything" but not for improvement of education, infrastructure, environment, R&D.
Where this didn't significantly affect small scale industries, the overall effect doesn't motivate "to do the best for your country" (paraphrasing JFK).
What Trump achieved is "end of trust" in US and to set up trade- and peace treaties between countries, not long ago "adversaries". Japanese govt will realize the Chinese leadership is much more reliable partner than US etc.
By the time the wallet of Trump voters will be "hit" because of the consequences of the tariffs, their mood might change.
I have a feeling that Trump might repurpose Musk to building a new shipbuilding industry for the US. Musk is already remaking the South Texas coast around Brownsville, where he launches Space-X rockets, and catches them gently on the way down.
We shall see.
The global economy will crash. Trump wants to crash it on his terms and timeline.
It looks to me that, considering how the tariffs have been calculated,
---
Trump's Tariffs Extend to Islands Where Penguins Are the Only Residents
https://www.distractify.com/p/penguin-island-tariffs
FAFO, Donald
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/04/06/fafo-donald/
---
the Trump admin doesn't even understand the problem.
It's just this: for quite a while the US no longer is able to sell enough products to foreign countries, to balance what is being bought from them. When able to balance "sold" and "bought" it doesn't matter one iota if one country exports more to the US than it buys: only balance matters
Hence the real issue is "why has the US been unable to balance the "sold" and bought" bookkeeping? The popular myth is that "US labor is too expensive". In China it became expensive too, so where possible, AI and robots are used and products stayed competitive in price and performance. Remember that in China, vital industries (energy, health, infrastructure) are govt run so do neither burden producers (by "paying oligarchs for the use of it" nor present a risk for start-ups. This policy greatly motivates "setting up a new business" (like DeepSeek).
In the US that's different, profit directly turns to the oligarchs who won't invest it preemptively to stay in front of the pack.
Putting tariffs on uninhabited territories blocks potential export-loopholes, I have read.
Yes, China uses the "American Plan" from the early 1800s, which always seems to work. The Americans seem poised to use it again, now.
"Mixed Economy" is not so bad.
Losses must be taken by rentiers. Let's see how THAT part goes.
Inhabited, no infrastructure, costly to travel to, isn't the recipe for a loophole. If it was, the moon, Mars and its moons would have been included too.
The tariffs will only make everything more expensive for Americans and there's no money to build the required factories - or increase debt to 100 trillion? Surely the rentiers are moving their money away (to Russia for instance).
Foreigners will find ways to do trade without any US involvement and stay at that as reliability is more important than a few cents lower in price.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-can-replace-us-exports-to-china-amid-trade-war-finds-study/articleshow/65568130.cms
We will see how this plays out this month and before October.
I think directions should be clear by October.
As I said, "Closing loopholes" was the explanation I read about including tariffs on uninhabited islands.
The US has an ominous track record of violating treaties, and violating WTO rules is the recent one. Not something for "wait and see". Trump (as Chabad extremist?) is running what could be called a Khazarian extortion racket on the rest of the world that could be a bridge too far even for moderate Chabad members.
Just a small collection:
American Violations of the INF and START Treaties
https://en.topwar.ru/31053-amerikanskie-narusheniya-dogovorov-o-rsmd-i-snv.html
https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2023/03/30/International-Court-of-Justice-to-rule-on-Iran-US-frozen-assets-claim
https://stacker.com/stories/history/broken-us-indigenous-treaties-timeline
https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-u-s-makes-a-mockery-of-treaties-and-international-law/
Any govt making a deal with outlaws violates the law - this should be clear enough for a 12 year old.
I don't know how you could have gotten it so wrong. This is tantamount to painting a bullseye around the arrow after it has landed. Saying that he has a bigger picture in mind which will be revealed explicitly or implicitly is the intellectual equivalent of gaslighting. The policies that his administration is implementing have been outline in Project 2025. P2025 itself is the freakish child of Curtis Yarvin and his ideology of a Network State.
The network state, as envisioned by Yarvin and others, involves breaking up nation-states into smaller territories run by corporate dictatorships. Both the network state and Project 2025 aim to replace democratic governance with technocratic control. This involves consolidating privatized power over key public systems and reducing the influence of democratic institutions. They envision a future where government is replaced by oligarchs who are easy to bend to the administration's will - you are with us or against us.
This is already apparent with them sum total firing or 280 000 federal employees, the gutting of several agencies to be replaced by private contractors (Starlink/SpaceX is set to take over the Federal Aviation Administration in charge of flight safety, others are set to replace NOAA which is in charge of weather modelling/prediction and monitoring of bodies of water, including to determine drinking water safety).
Those plans might just overlap with the plans that one might implement to ensure US survival given the resource crisis, in a Gann chart fashion, to an extent. Portraying the administration as some sort of secret geniuses just betrays a lack of knowledge regarding Project 2025 and assumes the administration that is filled with former Fox news hosts, conspiracy theorists and others with a limited cranium and very little academic credential a heavenly enlightenment of knowledge beyond any logic.
Kristjan, excuse me, but I beg to disagree. I didn't mention P2025 because in my opinion it is mostly an ideological screed, not especially interesting or influential. The points you mention are common memes being exchanged in the current administration and in the general political memesphere that's emerging as the dominating view. Whether there is a "plan," I don't know; I never said that there was one in my post. I did say that there is a certain logic in what the administration is doing. How consistently it will be followed, and for how long, it is all to be seen.
I think you're being too generous when you attribute his policies to a coherent plan to provide America with the factories, commodities and brains to ensure future survival capacity in a world where growth is limited. He is a simple man who has loved tariffs since the 1980s (video link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAS5oTVeNTE), he hates it when foreign companies succeed as if trade was a zero sum game.
You're saying there's a method to the madness, as if he was playing chess while others were playing checkers. If he truly was implementing a plan to just re-shore production and ensure access to natural resources, why would he deport random people? Why would he ask Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which adds a poll tax to millions of married female voters who now have to get a passport to vote? Why would he dismantle federal agencies and give contracts to private companies as was done with the FDA just this week? These only start to make sense once you start comparing the admin's policies to the plans set out in P2025. Dismissing these as simple memes is short-sighted.
The slogan is "Make America Great Again" is Trump campaign rhetoric, but many who understand this can decode it for what it actually is. The real life version, if we start things heading back in the right direction, might more aptly be called "Make America Function Again" (if we are lucky, that is).
Both ends of the oligarchic spectrum have all their "gee whiz" ideas, but we really aren't going to return to a better-functioning nation until a critical mass of the public wakes up and realizes that it's not just "the other side" that is pumping out propaganda, violating the constitution, and challenging the rule of law. Anyone who thinks so is part of the problem. The sudden change of direction following the last election has truly been whiplash-inducing in many respects, and not all of it is good. But I think what angers me the most is being forced to choose between this and a replay of the sh*t-show we just went through over the previous four years.
You lost me at global warming …
USAID has not been ended, but brought within the State Department for administrative efficiency.
Except the world is pivoting away from America and not bowing down to its attempted extortion of the rest of the world. Is there a paradigm shift - absolutely. But the civilisation which is ending appears to be the American one. I would also argue that Europe is capable of rearming itself - it already has a robust defence industry. Your article seems to operate under the premise that America has been doing all the heavy lifting on its own and ignores your allies also lending a hand - funny how that narrative never seems to reach the American people. There are lots of holes in your arguments the biggest is that America is the be all and all. And no other Country can survive without it I think China and Canada are showing the opposite. America is a dying superpower and has no one to blame for what’s happening there except itself. No other country carries the amount of debt you do and now that other countries are moving away from trading in USD you are about to pay the piper for that debt.
Thanks, Ugo, for some relief from insipid tribalist thinking and some planetary geo-political perspective on the process of accelerating collapse.