"And what do the oligarchs want? Like all feudal lords, they want untrammeled power and insecure, obedient serfs—and for this, the vast social services operation that is the US federal government must be cut back, along with the professional classes who form the modern core of the Democratic Party. The words of Andrew Mellon (as recalled by Herbert Hoover) come to mind: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system.… enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The problem the oligarchs face, and possibly do not understand, is that they cannot do this, any more now than then, without bringing the economy to ruin—from which recovery will be possible only with the competent government they are now working to destroy.
Over the longer term, it is hard for an old progressive, who fought against the forces of deindustrialization and financialization when they took control under Reagan in the early 1980s, not to sympathize with the stated vision of the old man now in charge. But it is one thing to yearn for a vanished past of superior American engineering, industrial strength and technological prowess—and quite another to create the conditions for revival. Handing the economy over to libertarians, monopolists, speculators, and rich reactionaries with big egos will not make America great again."
James K. Galbraith @ The Nation
From an economist who has been around the block a few times; and of illustrious academic lineage. Good stuff. But I'm a bit thrown off about his lamentation about the sorry outdated condition of the US military because 1) I thought cutting edge US military tech (Starlink, for instance) has been a big difference maker in Ukraine and Gaza, and 2) talk like this, when so much money is already being lavished on the military, will only intensify an arm's race collision course with China, which he fears could be "world ending." But then buried in this same section of his excoriating list is perhaps his most trenchant question: "Is this, perchance, the agenda of formerly free-trading oligarchs in the tech sector, suddenly faced with superior competition in their niche?" No doubt. But rather than learning some lessons from the Chinese experience and building up the developmental capacities of the US government and its relationships with trading allies they, Grump, Leon, Project 2025, are tearing the government down because they fear it threatens their own, Big Tech et al, private empires. Anyway, as Galbraith says, this is not likely to turn out a winning strategy in global geo-politics. And most likely, I'd add, will end up part of a historical epitaph explaining the transition from the American Century to Chinese Century. And maybe it has to go this way, and is mostly a matter of scale and inevitable technological global leveling, but instead of doing this collaboratively and peacefully, working towards a new public-private sustainable growth model, America is bound and determined, in this administration at any rate, to do this the hard way; which is to say the most destructive and violent way. Have mercy on us all.
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