This could have been three different posts, but there is so much overlap between them I can’t really see how to present one without the others. And while once again events are hard to stay in front of (the first 3 drafts on twitter are ancient news already), my slower than expected recovery from surgery kept me from keeping any kind of pace with events—so its coming in blobform. I wasn’t quite sure how to group all these things together either but the desired intent is to present the existing broken contract and system to adapt to, the competing narratives, where we are in the cycle and how we can chart out a path of least resistance. There is enough in each topic for multiple books so I will try to keep it brief as possible and have broken it up into sections/chapters.
1. Midterms Postmortem; Enter Post Boredom
2. Macro Models and the Social Contract
3. The Brass Ring and the Bird
5. The Business Cycle is a Group Project
6. Equalizing Inflation and Modern Commerce
7. Building Bridges and Brass Tacks
8. Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any a Drop to Drink
Midterms Postmortem; Enter Post Boredom
The thing about interesting times is, as we live through them--we’re finding out that they’re really not that interesting. Everything is so predictable when a critical mass of the players have crossed the Rubicon and courses are locked in. Just a series of coin flips and results from there. It’s a chaotic paradox where nothing is boring but absolutely everything is boorish. Exciting for lovers of chance to be sure, but no more interesting than a stop run.
The midterms were one of those events that reshuffled positions and set the table for the next round of game-play and gave us a lot to chew on. From the election splits, Elon Musk’s debasement of twitter, battles shaping up around the debt ceiling, the future of crypto and the dollar and how all of those things will play out in the courts. I am going to attempt to demonstrate the intersection of macroeconomics, the dollar and politics and probable outcomes.
Will go over some quick take aways from the results and post-election shake outs and get right into the big picture directly after.
On the results:
We’re now into the open hostile takeover phase of the game, and the gop base voters are showing cracks in the coalition. Some are still voting republican because of the culture war, but even those gop voters do not want the policies that the gop has on offer. Wisconsin voters in Trump country voted for single payer health care but republicans also, while at the same time the gop is promising to leverage their newfound power in the house with cutting social security and Medicare. There is an untenable contradiction here that should not survive the 2022-24 congressional term.
For the GOP:
Turns out the school shooting generation and the women who were pissed off about having been stripped of agency’s opinions did not go up and down with the price of oil on a futures chart down the stretch and that threw the pollsters for a loop.
Polls are systemically weighted to republicans in nature, compounded with boomers dominating the pool of people who will answer the phone—which I might add is conservatives shooting themselves in the foot because it’s a secondary effect of deregulating your phone. They corrupted their own ability to generate a reliable dataset so they could inform you about your car’s extended warranty.
And as the results and the reaction to the results demonstrate, they have zero understanding of Gen Z nor any answer for them other than immediately floating strategies on how to disenfranchise them. An entire generation of kids whose lives republicans put up as a stake wager for political ends are now of voting age.
Oh, they also killed too many of their own voters with Trump & red state Covid policies as it turns out.
Because of all that they have a very narrow majority in the house only instead of their red wave, and like Putin in Ukraine now has to resort to alternate tactics to keep winning elections. The courts and the right-wing media universe which now includes Twitter are their only remaining avenues to put their thumbs on the scale if they want to play the keep it going game vs. the burn it all down game.
The power split is mostly between the TradCaths and Evangelicals with DeSantis and Trump camps engaged for party leadership. What puts the outcome in doubt is that the TradCaths have actual power on the Supreme court while Trump has his diehard 30% of the party vote no matter what. Because they’re not natural allies they will immediately transition to an internal power struggle if they succeed on that theocracy thing they are no longer shy about sharing their supportive opinions on.
Between the two camps the main difference in my opinion is the Trump base are apocalyptic and want all “the elites” to pay and will turn on the gop regardless of how everything plays out and the TradCath wing wants to take this American empire shit out for a test drive and give Jesus a real chance to copilot this bitch.
They have actual power; Trump has put it in jeopardy and their decision matrix on tactics will be driven by how important it is to them to have a chance behind the wheel of the death star for themselves so please try not to break everything you blathering idiots.
The debt ceiling and now Twitter along with crypto are the chaos/accelerationist vectors.
For the Democrats:
Democrats made blunders and still cannot be counted on to act with initiative but there is some hope in the results. The narrative push across cable media has been busy gushing over DeSantis and focusing on the direct confrontation with Trump, but it is missing the bigger story here: voters are in the mood for assertive representation and embraced women on the democratic side really en masse for the first time.
Whitmer and Michigan represent a shift and is a much bigger story than DeSantis’ win because now, along with the kids who are definitely alright is what the republican civil war is all about that. The conflict within the GOP is just how much further they are willing to expand the Jim Quant (corvid) voting era to get the results they want. At the same time each right wing escalation via the courts creates secondary obstacles like bad polling data and kids pissed off about having mortal danger systemically introduced into their lives.
There is also an opportunity here for Democrats to learn and harness the primal appeal of strength fascist employ: when the social contract is up for grabs, everybody is doing their own calculus on what they can live with vs who is going to win, and is trying to go with a winner; follow the trend. Its not just misogyny, people in the closet, or mindless followers—it’s a survival instinct. Authoritarians manipulate it in grotesque fashion, but people don’t want to back a guy who is gonna lose—and in transitional eras or conflicts when social contracts are broken and whole nations are in existential flux people prioritize strength for their side. Even just the appearance of it matters when life is on the ballot. There are a non-trivial amount of people waiting for take no shit liberals to show up before they can get on the bus, its coded into their OS.
That’s the appeal of guys like Fetterman. He’s a fighter, he takes no shit, ‘finally’ a democrat who can’t be dismissed as some ‘woke soy boy’. The bigger story however is that take no-shit women are also winning. The stakes go up and it all ain’t so shrill now is it?
How it Plays Short Term:
The American people will wake up in an active hostage situation in January when the GOP formally takes control of the house. Not really anything positive to hope for or say in regard to that. With the senate now lost outright from the Georgia runoff, they have one and only one card to play and that’s the threat of “defunding” critical items for culture war scalps. They will threaten to defund the FBI and DOJ over Trump and they are already issuing hollow threats to defund the military over required vaccinations.
Cannon did her job of stalling Trump’s legal problems past the poll but the GOP’s poor showing election night has exposed fault lines. Post-election rulings from the Supreme Court signal they’re done with him but they are also still stuck with him for the time being.
The house immediately switches from investigating GOP criminality to witch hunting. Hunter Biden’s laptop will be getting the Benghazi treatment until the budget ceiling main event.
The debt ceiling and social security showdown is in my opinion the only long thesis for crypto currency that carries water—that the combination of GOP politicians and would be money changers like Musk manage to kill the dollar and the American people’s sovereignty at the same time. Factor in Twitter and you’ve got the biggest game of chicken ever played. Stock up on popcorn, hold onto your seat and try to enjoy a mortal game of Poultry on the Potomac.
The elephant in the chamber: Moore v. Harper. There is a split on the right about this case, and amicus briefings were filed from the co-chair of the Federalist society of all places to reject the state legislature theory. However, its my opinion the midterm results show the GOP is at a dead end and even agreeing to hear the case gave them a call option on end running the 2024 election—and are now more likely they go through with it. The right flank is explicitly calling for dictatorship & dissolving the constitution, the window for the Theocrats to maximize their advantage in the courts and gerrymandering is closing without installing another layer of systemic bias. If they go through with it, it fundamentally changes the nature of the government, character of the country, shatters what little is left of the existing social contract and will destabilize the country. Like full on legitimacy crisis. Between this case and the debt ceiling the republican party has to choose between killing the hostage or watching their current foothold fade into nothing.
Macro Models and the Social Contract:
Have seen several takes describing the election results as a flashing warning sign, that republicans held base at home on the state level and just had some unpopular candidates for national office. I disagree, bigly.
A closer examination of the mid term splits show not just rural voters who are voting GOP for the culture war wedges while explicitely desiring different policy, we see split ticket voters who voted red at home blue for national races. To ever have any kind of chance with these people we need to understand why the gop brand is percieved “better on defense”, “better on the economy”, and source the media’s undying obsession with rando white dudes in diners.
Its key to making a viable new social contract. For that we need to take a look at the most successful socialist program in history that is the interstate highway system X the United States Armed Forces and how its been the backbone of the US economy and how the global trade works since its inception. Its not really a story about the perpetual war machine either. Its about facilitating commerce.
The combination of the two—demand nodes & arteries, bases stretched across the country connected by highways caused businesses to sprout up around servicing and capturing this significant, constant new revenue stream. Yes there was a ground floor of the carbon era effect boosting it but around these flows local economies and power structures sprouted up around local developers, auto dealerships, and retailers--and evolved into things like the Walmart supply chain and the enlistment to Dodge Challenger pipeline.
This network of commerce that grew from these programs has been the GOP power base since it’s inception, why they’re considered pro-business, and we’ve not even gotten to the arms manufacturers or contractors yet. Which shows quite the pickle for republicans where they’re so far gone they’ve been reduced to making threats to defund their very own gravy train with biscuit wheels.
But the thing is that the military is also not just about funneling money to the GOP base or wars (justified or not), its very good for liberal America too. There is the part of seeding communities with young men who have discipline imposed on them while putting a steady stream of revenue into local social services for their families. But there is also the part where they are a liberalizing force not just from racial integration; the culture in the armed forces cannot be too far removed from where the kids are or there’s no recruits. Service members having full card-carrying privileges of “real Americans” play a massive role in defining exactly what that ‘real’ is.
That’s not even the biggest part of it though. The whole US dollar system and world trade network is based on the US Navy securing free, neutral shipping lanes globally. Everybody can complain about fiat currency or the debt or inflation or any other part of the financial system—but for other countries its an easy payment system and hey, free shipping man.
The system of neutral sea routes, roads and dollars facilitated commerce and facilitating commerce is how you make it easy for people to make a living in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Established anchor tenants of entire regions while the highway system established an easy logistical shipping network. Investing in infrastructure that facilitates trade PAYS.
The problem is the whole system is anchored around the automobile, and outside of urban areas cannot function without them. To get those split ticket voters solid blue a new model and social contract is required, and the fact is a new working model will attract more people than the ones already eager to bail on republicans. These folks need a new branch to grab a hold of before they’ll let got of the old one and nebulous “green” policies while spending bills packed with “job training” are the equivelant of “here’s some money, go see a star war”.
Any grand bargain or new deal pitches that don’t account for this reality are DOA. Now lets take a look at what we’re up against narrative and organizing wise so we can come up with some sort of pitch that will at least be heard and not dismissed out of hand.
The Brass Ring and the Bird
There’s been endless speculation on Musk’s motives for buying Twitter, and a lot of smart people are certain that Elon has bought twitter to destroy it. No! Well, maybe—but not as a primary objective. You put a lot of thought into the last car or big ticket item you bought and probably made a checklist with pros and cons and thought about how those things might work out in the future; those same things happen in business. Elon might be reckless and impulsive but the banks and partners that backed him typically are not.
There is a bigger prize at the top of the list here, and Elon is not nearly the first to take a stab at it Either. Zuckerberg tried to do it and failed to do it and is trying again, Peter Thiel is trying to do it, the Chinese communist party kinda has done it. It’s the brass ring of social media and politics and is about creating supra national networks while superseding national sovereignty and it is unquestionably the primary objective.
Yeah he’s running the Fox news model for the red pilled shitpostphere having identified the MAGAverse as the easiest marks on the planet, yeah it’s an organizing tool to push authoritarian narrative, but as Musk has himself expressed a desire to replicate the Chinese everything app WeChat it can be oh such more.
This is directly tied to a critical concept liberal, democracies and anybody trying to attempt a counter narrative needs to internalize: the nature of commerce and trade has changed, and the technology is chasing it. There is a reason that crypto persists when it is a self-evident scam, full of scamming scammers running scams called things like pumpscamcoins—and that reason is there is a legitimate demand for an international payments system to facilitate commerce. People are betting one of them will catch on eventually.
When we think of social media we typically think people talking about their lives, shitposting, exchanging ideas and what not but the fact is that a critical mass of small business and individual trade has shifted to it. Reddit, Facebook marketplace and Instagram evolved into a place for small businesses and individuals to move product. Real, physical product—and lots of it.
Zuckerberg’s first attempt at the brass ring was when Facebook attempted to introduce its own cryptocurrency Libra as a means of payment on its platform. India rightfully didn’t play along. Here a platform becomes the exchange/market like the CME or NYSE where things are bought and sold, but also bought and sold with the platform’s own private currency. Remember, Zuckerberg actually believed at the time between big data targeting and the power of the platform he could actually be president of the United States. These are not trivial forces they’re harnessing.
The brass ring is the ultimate company store, and a platform that achieved network effects, where the in house currency is accepted for payments off platform effectively guts the nation state model. The dystopian science fiction villain they’re all aspiring to be is not some evil AI, Vader or Agent Smith—the holder of the one ring is Mom from Futurama, not Sauron. Dystopia is really that mundane.
So when Musk expresses desire for Twitter to be a platform for content creators, an $8chan X OnlyFans at the same time wanting it to be a bank, where he is the market exchange facilitating buying and selling of content paid for with store credit. An emerald mine of creator content if you will.
That is what the Twitter purchase is about, a catch and kill of such a weapon (which is what they view it as) would be third or fourth best option down the list at best and only considered an acceptable outcome if better objectives fail. Its also why his biggest partners are the Saudis and from the crypto space. However, where Musk deviates from Zuckerberg’s attempt is that he’s aligned with a political party and political movement attempting to install an authoritarian single party state that is currently threatening to default on the national debt and collapse the dollar if we don’t submit to their extortion. The danger here is real.
Grooming Blood Libel
We’re far enough along into the Musk Twitter era that any benefits of the doubt can be dismissed, innocent outcomes can be safely ruled out and the character of the site has been cemented. Whether its because Musk has always been a men’s rights style misogynist, or because one of his children came out as trans, or because Grimes dumped him for Chelsea Manning it does not matter—he has purposefully released a torrent of LGBTQ hate on the site and is actively and purposefully enabling it.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this is going either. Its impossible to wander into any topical thread where “groomers” isn’t every third or fourth reply, boosted to the top by Elon’s eight dollar army of bigots and bots that has effectively turned twitter into a hate site.
So let me break it down for you, how groomers is the blood libel du jour, and just exactly how it functions and what the intended outcome is. Like most things fash there is a sleight of hand covering up a contradiction where they think they’re real clever boys.
Repetition and normalization are frequently cited regarding the fascist tool kit, but there’s more to it than brand recognition and marketing. Its not designed to make you think its old hat and think that’s just the way things are. Its worse than that.
They are trying to turn you the same way the mafia does, corrupt your soul. When they no longer feign shock or sympathy to the latest mass murder or hate crime against LGBTQ people, when they are angry in the morning that it is being ‘politicized by the left’ and have moved onto ‘they had it coming’ by the afternoon they are trying to get you to sanction murder justified by sky wizard brand loyalty.
They are trying to generate significant enough disgust in people who would not accept violence based on religious arguments in the name of protecting ‘the children’. To re-anchor your moral compass, to make you an accomplice. To get you to enable it, tied to it, and unable to wash it off after it spreads.
Groomers is about sacrificing the marginalized to OWN YOU. The word normalized is wholly inadequate in communicating the magnitude of it.
And we haven’t even addressed the absurdity of it. This whole protect the children from gays and Trans at these drag brunches and readings? Just an excuse for violence because who’s kid has ever actually in danger of accidentally in danger of taking themselves out for some gay brunch? In this economy? These events have to be sought out by the child’s own parents. Literally none of your god damn business.
So holding out hope to stay and fight on twitter while it goes in this direction is a huge mistake in my opinion. Staying on to “fight” past a certain point in the transition to a hate platform just legitimizes the illegitimate because then Musk will have succeeded in altering the public perception of what is acceptable. The fight is also absurdly futile because a right-wing troll controls who and what gets amplified on the platform now—its another bad faith game you cannot win.
You will get just enough little victories to keep you on the platform while legitimizing the other voices at the table if you are not banned outright like many liberals and antifascist accounts have been already. The bottom line is that you become controlled opposition: you legitimize them and waste your time dancing to their tune instead of pursuing fruitful efforts elsewhere. The intention is to turn you into a spent force, the bots are the digital equivalent of flooding the enemy with drones to degrade their ammunition and defensive capability.
Now I am not leaving the platform entirely just this second, but our paths are wildly divergent, and I’ve got a serious case of short timer syndrome. I plan on keeping the account as a placeholder but its harder and harder to justify contributing to such a beast on a daily basis.
The Business Cycle is a Group Project
The last bit of groundwork to go over before getting into potential new social contract discussion is back to macroeconomics while revisiting some concepts from previous posts like “inequality is inflation”. Its impossible to get a realistic understanding of inflation or anything else economics right now unless you have at least a cursory idea of where we are in this cycle and why the right is willing to blow it all up.
There are multiple legs of inflation throughout the cycle, we just call some of them “growth” when they are not actually growth but a bottom up wealth transfer. Growth is already over at this point but inequality has reached a tipping point where a feedback loop is established within paper assets; and its not a linear relationship—it goes exponential as capital gains a decisive edge over labor and is able to parlay it into political power.
Cost cutting, innovation, productivity gains—these things give way to straight up exploitation. The gig economy is the perfect example of this, just take a business model and transfer all the operational costs you can to labor, which no longer has rights because you’ve made them “contractors”.
Nobody in the financial press complains about inflation during this phase. Everything is roses on TV when the $300K house is going to $850K with inflation contained under 2% (lmao, like really lmao) as top line paper assets scream higher. As line go up wealth begets more line go up on labor’s back. Those damn socialist kids are complaining they can’t afford housing or college or healthcare, but this is good business!
This is the leg of the cycle we’re transitioning away from. When the inequality reaches such an extreme, where there are no more costs that can be passed onto labor, where the exploitation is so high the economic base load cannot be maintained. There are two paths from here: an equalizing inflation phase where a new deal or equilibrium is reached, or a transition into outright authoritarianism/slavery.
So how is this a group project? Its one of those predictable bits of human behavior that scales up and down from tiny groups all the way up to nation sized groups and even generational sized groups across all countries. Random individuals are impossible to predict, however specific individuals or groups at scale typically are not.
The same dynamics repeating over and over within a nearly infinite number of overlapping groups of infinite variety in size, but we’re not trying to develop any kind of Hari Seldon Psychohistory here—we can round these edges. Academic group projects aside, how we typically get group projects from the business level and on up through generational is typically from a major crisis or a creative R&D development filling a technological need.
Group formation and behavior dynamics; the mechanism of the cycle are not really complicated either:
need/crisis
forced cooperation
business method/technological breakthrough
individuals in group gain advantages/hierarchy forms
group splinters, group winners exploit advantages
All of you reading this know the group winner isn’t always the best group contributors either, or have had coworkers steal your ideas and take credit for your work. The winners are frequently just the assholes with no regard for other people.
There is no optimal level of inequality either because there are too many variables from TC/TI (Technological Capability/Technological Inputs) outlined in earlier posts, there are only extremities to avoid—the cycles could conceivably run indefinitely with appropriate governors in the system.
But governors are necessary because it is undeniable that the people who come out the biggest winners are almost exclusively the people whose talents are best at manipulating group dynamics and not the ones making the group project successful, the system grow or run. This group skews heavily towards sociopaths and amoral assholes. They make dreadful overlords as we are finding out once again as they’ve driven us straight for another big forced cooperation group project to avoid the slavery and/or extinction thing.
Equalizing Inflation and Modern Commerce
The last time inequality broke society’s baseload those who broke it reacted in the same way they’re trying now: hard money private currency. Its just an attempt to lock the hierarchy in, with them on top, permanently. It killed the golden goose and triggerd the great depression, equalizing inflation happened anyways and capital has been trying to undo it ever since.
Everybody this go around keeps looking for the source of inflation, covid, energy, QE and zero bound rates but it’s really just the inequality. The 1970’s energy crisis gets floated regularly as a comp era, but it was at the height of labor’s power post New Deal and at the end of a roughly 40 year cycle. Rates are an accelerant, not the driver.
Hard money types call it monetizing the debt, but potato-potahto. The bottom can catch up or the top can be brought down. It really doesn’t matter—a new equilibrium comes regardless of what you want or want to call it. It was about gold then, crypto now and the way the tea leaves are drying with the FTX collapse, the ascendancy of Tom Emmer in the new GOP house, Musk’s take over of Twitter it really does feel like an endgame of sorts is in the cards over the near future on this front.
The ECB says bitcoin is on the road to irrelevance while Cathie Wood says its going to one million. I side with the ECB here in theory but treating crypto as some novelty rather than an attack on your sovereignty has left the Eurozone protected by something that is perhaps less than even the idea of a digital Maginot line.
Meanwhile the Michael Flynn wing of the nutty Christian right has been promoting a generational wealth transfer to true Christian believers via his ReAwaken group. Obviously crypto is the common vector here but it’s another example of how religion in politics is a tool for exercising or gaining power and not tied to morality even a little bit. Unless you believe Jesus’ primary concern was followers having fat stacks.
So what could central banks and governments do here besides outright banning crypto? The first thing is to recognize how the internet has changed modern commerce and how the technology is chasing those flows, the same way business followed the flows from the interstate highway & military spending flows. The internet facilitates commerce the same way the interstates did, in the way that it co-locates buyers and sellers of physical goods—difference being the goods are not present at time of transaction.
It turns out a great deal of those buyers and sellers are mom & pop operations in one country to individual buyers in another country.
There’s a been a lot of ink spent on de-globalization and reshoring of industry but it only is a part of the story and its really the geopolitical story. Big national security type strategic industries are reshoring, like semiconductors. But small consumer goods? These are more global than ever and consumers are more connected to the actual producers of said goods since we lived in villages and there was just that one guy down by the river to buy shoes from.
Facilitating this commerce is how you protect your currency vs crypto.
A brief(ish) example of how all this is interconnected and how the supply chain is not fixed nor is inflation fixed because Target bought to much stuff one quarter to skew the CPI print; using shoes (because that’s my thing y’all).
There is currently a long lead time to get a pair of good shoes or boots, doesn’t matter where you’re buying from—Europe, USA, Asia. Part of that is labor, part is supply chain, of which part is also labor but we’re far enough into climate change that things like animal feed and livestock lost to natural disasters is also factoring. Its become harder to get quality leathers; Horween is behind, Shinki is behind, the best tanneries cannot keep up. The lead time on a pair of Whites, made in Spokane WA has gone from maybe 4-6 weeks, to 6 months, to 8 months and counting. There is also a finite supply of manufacturers that can make that grade/quality of product and lets say Red Wing (Minnesota) is at the lower end of that and put Viberg (Victoria BC) or John Lofgren (Japan) at the high end. In between are a ton of independent makers who are mostly in SE Asia but can be anywhere including the US. There are higher price points to be sure but we’re looking for the median block of high quality.
If you want to purchase a pair from one of the guys in Asia doing it, you’re not outsourcing for a cheaper product either. Some of these guys charge $1200 and up and have a two year wait list. They buy premium leathers from Horween in Chicago and put it on a British made Danite sole, it really is a global affair. They can be found on social media, primarily Instagram, and typically have crappy websites if any website at all.
Where am I going with this? How to facilitate this trade? How to make it easy for Americans to make a living? Or maybe even fix the UK?
A small producer currency/customs union. Say if you are in X country with X currency and buying from somebody in country Y with their currency shipping to country X in the union—the price quoted in the transaction would have a zero fee FX conversion at the same time as including the customs fee (negotiated as part of union) up front. Easy commerce. Fair trade.
Details like where to cut off “small producer” would obviously need to be worked out, but a company like White’s would be about the cut off with a company like Nike obviously a big multinational operating under different importation rules for mass produced goods. Currencies would still have floating exchange rates, essentially unchanged from as is—but the conversion price would be fixed daily with central banks back stopping liquidity.
Call it the G8 coin or whatever. Doesn’t matter. And I don’t know if that idea is even a great one, but its an idea that is focused on solving the actual problem, addressing the actual demand for crypto and one that tries to make people’s lives better. The commerce is already there and will continue on—make it easy for them, open up markets to small American producers, make a TSA pre-check style bypass for customs. We’re in a narrative for the future battle, not having any ideas is forfeiting the game.
Building Bridges and Brass Tacks
Now that we’ve got a semi-comprehensive picture of where the votes are and where the economy is we can start in on coalition building. The GOP really is a coalition of single issues and bad ideas and once their lock on local economies is broken it all falls apart:
Theocrats: neither GOP nor Dem voters want this
Fascist capital/libertarian: neither GOP nor Dem voters want this
White supremacists: neither GOP nor Dem voters want this (explicitly)
Regular folks living in old carbon economy trying to get by
We just saw the last part of the coalition split their votes. This is at the same time an opportunity for democrats its also a warning to the GOP to escalate or falter. There have been several “reach across the aisle” attempts at coalition building from different folks on the left but they have for the most part ignored the reality of their own coalition nor understood the GOP’s coalition either. I’m sure some were certainly performative in bad faith.
Bernie Sanders has and continues to push a version that ignores social justice and focuses on economic message geared towards a white leftist base while contending that social justice will follow economic fairness. Its never caught on because he doesn’t really understand how commerce works, and the minority coalition that makes up the democrats knows better than that. Just a quick thought about the group project dynamics and human’s instincts for hierarchy betray the naivety of the idea.
And then there is the wanna-be “Mavericky independent” Kyrsten Sinema who campaigned as a progressive and immediately proceeded to give Arizona voters the Atlas Rugged treatment on critical votes in the senate. Switching her party affiliation to independent after the Democrats won the senate outright has a whiff of desperation to the political calculus—an attempt to avoid getting primaried by the very same voters she Rickrolled but also is flatly a bad bet.
There is no market for a democrat-capitalist fascist coalition candidate on the ballot. Is it bipartisan? Maybe, but the republican voters open for coalition revealed themselves and they’re abandoning the faction she’s sided with. Not challenging her would be a colossal mistake, nobody wants what she’s offering, and nobody is entertained by her childish self-absorbed act either. She’s either hopelessly corrupt or pants on head stupid and it truly does not matter, she’s just gotta go.
This does not yet account for the fact the GOP’s command economy turn will hurt the very same people we’re trying to attract. Ron DeSantis is previewing a Christian flavored version of Chinese command style economy and social controls. This does not make it easier to make a living, nor does it facilitate commerce. Culture wars are bad for business, the very opposite of freedom.
So what’s the pitch? What would a new social contract look like and where can we start it?
First we look at future forecasts regarding climate, available resources, where people live and where they’re going to and how we build a system that can create and move goods along with people as seamlessly as possible between urban, suburban and rural locations.
We need to acknowledge that combustion engines are not going away tomorrow and outside of areas directly adjacent to urban population centers and will not go away until viable replacements are fully operational. Batteries or fuel cells will be adopted when they work. Milk doesn’t come from the store and we can’t pretend it does.
Cities and cars are not long for each other. Even electric ones. They’ll probably never be phased out completely in our lifetimes, but city residents want e-bikes and e-bike infrastructure. If you’ve ever lived in a city like NY or SF you know first hand having a car is as much burden as an asset. You might think but they won’t work for my city because of weather or terrain, but the E-bike program demand from a test run in Denver of all places should dispell that notion. A substantial drop in car traffic also offers a chance to re-imagine how we live in cities, because not only do they become cleaner—an absolute boat load of real estate opens up where they can be phased out.
We also know from 1000’s of years of history what a city not designed around cars looks like. A lot like the cities we’re seeing bombed out in the war in Ukraine: a city center with a ring around it and then expanding layers of rings as cities grow. A future working version of a city has some kind of transition from interstate and rail network to internal logistics operation that moves goods at scale.
For example say what if instead of making urban worm holes for rich people with “hyperloop” tunnels, it was an electrified delivery network of bins/cars moving goods within cities like luggage at the airport? The era of mass production is entering a new era where only some things are mass produced at a handful of quality points, everything else is shifting to made to order and shipped directly to consumers. Optimizing our population centers for that lower waste reality is a priority.
That’s not even the big adaptation stuff required for us to prevent society from falling into some Mad Max Thunderdome dystopia.
Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any a Drop to Drink
Here we need to sidestep the arguments over global warming completely instead of getting tripped up by Frank Lutz style pedants. Its hot, everybody knows its hot and its gonna get hotter—attack that and leave the why for later. The one thing we all can agree on and understand is that a hotter planet means more water in the atmosphere and more violent and faster forming storms.
This is also at the same time we’ve depleted water tables all around the globe so there is not just more water in the air from regular evaporation, it’s the most water in the air for all of human history in working in concert with soil subsidence.
Did I mention drought? That too. Rivers running dry in the summer as surface temperatures make it plainly obvious that surface level water storage in open reservoirs just puts it right back in the atmosphere and not where we need it.
We need a national water infrastructure and irrigation network, strategy and policy. A lot of strategists predict whichever country gets a handle on AI will dominate the next era, and well maybe. But I think the country that can master water, from moving it to the molecular level at scale will. What good is AI without water anyways?
As far as geoengineering goes, the easiest thing to do within out current technological capability while also being the safest by far is getting as much as that water as possible back into the ground. That’s also a good place to store it so it doesn't evaporate.
And to do that we also need to capture mass precipitation flood event run off. We also need to adapt our housing to these events and this can be done the same time on the same project by building Tokyo style flood management systems in cities where its needed and/or feasible. How many times are we going to want to rebuild Houston? Are all those folks gonna move?
Instead we can direct it to wetlands (natural or engineered) and drip irrigate it if need be so the soil never hard pans over. And connect it to massive underground water network. That requires building concurrent rail lines for the project to excavate and supply materials with. Which could be also be electrified for both high speed travel and shipping. That could be powered by renewables built into the water network, geothermal or solar. That moves people and goods easily and facilitates commerce.
In a future without stable growing regions and rising seas, being able to move water and topsoil at scale is the ability to control your own destiny. A new interior rail network can get it done. It can all be part of the same project.
It can all be done with public private partnerships with local businesses throughout the country. Think people might go for that kind of Green New Deal? One that came with water? If we stocked engineered wetlands with fish and game for hunting? And made it easy for them to make a living? And ensured food security for the next generations? And the local business social structure small town USA doesn’t get turned all upside down? That was the idea behind the Green New Fields title.
We also have carbon capture as major factor in current climate mitigation plans and projections. A quick logic exercise here on developing strategies—if we look at the other major water problem of ocean acidification its quickly evident that the planet’s oceans are quite efficient at carbon capture and if we pulled all the excess carbon out of the air we will still need to pull the carbon from the oceans. The obvious conclusion here for a Manhattan style project is that if we can remove carbon removal from salt water at industrial scale we don’t need to remove it from the atmosphere at all.
Global tempuratures could conceivably be regulated just by controlling the ocean’s ph balance.
The third and final chapter of Green New Fields will cover realistic future climate forecasts and a more comprehensive outline of potential projects and absolutely neccesarry projects, reimagining cities and manufacturing.
Again these are all ideas, but for some reason ideas for a cooperative future are in short supply. “Some day, this war is gonna end.” so throw yours in the pot too, its time to build some cool shit.