Forecast 2016
There’s really one supreme element of this story that you must keep in
view at all times: a society (i.e. an economy + a polity = a political
economy) based on debt that will never be paid back is certain to crack up.
Its institutions will stop functioning. Its business activities will seize
up. Its leaders will be demoralized. Its denizens will act up and act out.
Its wealth will evaporate.
Given where we are in human history — the moment of techno-industrial
over-reach — this crackup will not be easy to recover from; not like, say,
the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany after the brutal fiasco of World
War Two. Things have gone too far in too many ways. The coming crackup will
re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial.
How far backward remains to be seen.
Those terms might be somewhat negotiable if we could accept the reality of
this re-set and prepare for it. But, alas, most of the people capable of
thought these days prefer wishful techno-narcissistic woolgathering to a
reality-based assessment of where things stand — passively awaiting
technological rescue remedies (“they” will “come up with something”) that
will enable all the current rackets to continue. Thus, electric cars will
allow suburban sprawl to function as the preferred everyday environment;
molecular medicine will eliminate the role of death in human affairs;
as-yet-undiscovered energy modalities will keep all the familiar comforts and
conveniences running; and financial legerdemain will marshal the capital to
make it all happen.
Oh, by the way, here’s a second element of the story to stay alert to:
that most of the activities on-going in the USA today have taken on the
qualities of rackets, that is, dishonest schemes for money-grubbing. This is
most vividly and nauseatingly on display lately in the fields of medicine and
education — two realms of action that formerly embodied in their basic
operating systems the most sacred virtues developed in the fairly short
history of civilized human endeavor: duty, diligence, etc.
I’ve offered predictions for many a year that this consortium of rackets
would enter failure mode, and so far that has seemed to not have happened, at
least not to the catastrophic degree, yet. I’ve also maintained that of all
the complex systems we depend on for contemporary life, finance is the most
abstracted from reality and therefore the one most likely to show the
earliest strains of crackup. The outstanding feature of recent times has been
the ability of the banking hierarchies to employ accounting fraud to
forestall any reckoning over the majestic sums of unpayable debt. The lesson
for those who cheerlead the triumph of fraud is that lying works and that it
can continue indefinitely — or at least until they are clear of culpability
for it, either retired, dead, or safe beyond the statute of limitations for
their particular crime.
Of course it says something about the kind of society we’ve become that
such racketeering has become so normative and pervasive, and that evading
responsibility for its consequences has been elevated to a sort of enviable
skill-set. In fact, the art of evasion has taken the place of what used to be
called honor. We live in a low time that honors only low men. Ironically, we
affect to admire only “superheroes” because it has become impossible to
imagine mere humans showing courage, fortitude, and respect for truth. All
conduct is provisional and equivocal. Every law can be parsed to serve what
it was created to oppose. Anything goes and nothing matters.
In this year’s go-round, I’ll try to describe what happened so far, where
we stand, and where I think things are going. My method is emergent and
heuristic. I’m allergic to charts and graphs, which are among the prime tools
of the racketeers and the wishful thinking impresarios for bending the truth.
Sadly, also, statistical analysis plays into the fantasy that if you can
measure enough things you can control them. (And if you mis-measure things on
purpose, you can pretend to be in control.) This illusion of control is the
weakest ingredient in the financial system. When it does finally reach
failure mode, it tends to produce calamity.
I’m more interested in the longer view than the moment-at-hand. The swirl
of events generally includes more vectors and factors than any calculus can
manage. Outcomes easily slip away from the linear. Ultimately this is a
exercise that might be called a history of the future — that is, just a
story.
Banking and Markets
The big event of the year past was the Federal Reserve’s Waiting for
Godot act concerning the fed funds rate. When Godot finally showed up
two weeks before year’s end, it was in the expected-but-pitiful form of a
25-50 basis point hike — which gives the impression of a possible 50 point
rise, but with the way more likely probability of actually sticking to the
lowest end of the gradient (and actual overnight lending rates were already a
few basis points above zero, so the net was really less than 25 basis
points.)
The background of this charade was pretty clear to anyone not brain damaged
from the rigors of playing Candy Crush on their phone: the Fed was hiking
rates into a wobbling global economy; they were forced to act at year’s end
or surrender the last shreds of their credibility (i.e. being taken to mean
what they say); and they left the door open to retreat in 2016 if necessary.
But the damage to the Fed had already been done. They were unmasked as a
propaganda machine powerless against the real tides of economy, creating only
mischief and misunderstanding, and ultimately undermining all soundness in
the relationship between money and real human activity. Anything they do in
the election year ahead will be viewed with suspicion, specifically of
pimping for Hillary Clinton’s coronation. And her relationship with the
biggest banks is well-understood. So they had to make their grand gesture in
December.
The stock markets skidded a little below sideways this year (except for
the Nasdaq) which glided up more than 5 percent (techno-grandiosity rules!) —
with one upchuck at the end of the summer that was remedied by China bailing
out its own janky stock markets and playing games with its currency.
Gold and silver continued their four-year swoon thanks to repeated massive
wee hour dumps of futures contracts before the traders in New York even got
out of bed. The charts conclusively show this shady activity, raising the
question: why would any seller want to hugely undercut the price of what he
seeks to sell by selling into a market where no buyers are present… or even
awake? The answer seems to be: to make the dollar appear more firm than it
really is.
The many years of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), combined with the
previous accumulation of debt unlikely to be paid back has made it ever more
difficult to issue new debt with any likelihood of being paid back. But ZIRP
has also nullified the relationship between interest rates and risk. In a
system unencumbered by central bank interventions, interest rates would have
to go a whole lot higher on instruments with such poor prospects. Of course,
higher interest rates would only make new bonds that much less likely to be
serviced by their issuers, especially governments laboring under
Himalayan-scale debt loads. The tension in this equation has been
provisionally papered over by the use of interest rate swaps, reverse repos,
and other abstruse machinations and derivatives aimed at suppressing true
price discovery.
The corporate stock buyback fiesta of 2015 was the perfect example of an
anything goes and nothing matters ethos. It happened in full view of
everyone, and it happened solely to assure corporate executives that they
would enjoy their bonuses and fringe benefits and nobody complained about it.
Even so, it barely accomplished anything index-wise. The markets went
sideways even with all that insider action because the fundamentals suck and
the global economy was obviously sinking into a deflationary contraction.
My auditors derive no end of mirth from my attempts to predict the stock
markets each year. So, to add to their enjoyment, I’ll be even more precise
this time around. I predict that the S & P will top on January 15, 2016,
at 2142, and then crumple below 1000 by June. Carnage at the margins of the
bond market — high yield paper — will spread to the center and we’ll finally
see the re-pricing of risk back in the European sovereign market. French,
Spanish, UK, and Italian 10-year paper below 2.0 percent? What a colossal
joke that’s been! Fasten your seat belts and check your pension funds.
Oil and Deflation
The oil picture has bamboozled both the broad public and the smaller
cohort of supposedly sentient observers. I maintain that the deflationary
contraction underway worldwide is largely due to the fact that the world has
run out of a particular form of oil: affordable oil. Turns out the peak
oil story is still true, just playing out differently than a lot folks
predicted. We’re at the mercy of a pretty basic equation: oil over
$75-a-barrel destroys industrial economies; oil under $75-a-barrel destroys
oil companies. There is no “just right” Goldilocks place on the gradient.
The public got bamboozled by the Ponzi scheme of shale oil. It seemed like
a fabulous techno-rescue: the “fracking miracle!” It operated by converting
mountains of cheap leveraged capital into a very rapid bump-up in US oil
production. It got full traction after a couple of years of $100 oil squashed
economic activity — and then squashed demand for oil. Whoops. The problem was
that shale oil was very expensive to produce even if reduced demand drove the
market price very low. Back at $100-plus a barrel, hardly anyone made any
profit on shale. At $40 a barrel shale was a laughable loser. So, in 2015,
the shale oil companies laid off thousands of workers, idled the drilling
rigs, and kicked back to pray that the price would go back up. Which it
didn’t. Incidentally, all kinds of associated ventures went bust with that.
The landscape of North Dakota is littered with unfinished garden apartment
complexes that may never be completed, and the discharged construction
carpenters and roofers drove back to Minnesota ahead of the re-po men coming
for their Ford F-110s. Sad, I know….
The rapid ramp-up in shale oil production from 2010 to 2014 was intended
as a demonstration project to convince Wall Street to stuff ever more
investment capital into oil companies. It was also part of an enormous PR
campaign to allow the people running things in business and government to
pretend that America’s oil problems were behind us. The “shale miracle” was
going to make us “Saudi America,” It was going to boost us into “energy
independence.” It played into the Master Wish beneath all the wishful
thinking in America: Please, God, let us be able to drive to WalMart
forever. It wasn’t so much an evil conspiracy as a feckless collective
effort in denial and self-delusion
It happened that a lot of that Wall Street finance came in the form of
high-yield (junk) bonds issued by the oil companies — with fat commissions
for the big banks to cream off in creating the bonds. So when the price of
oil crashed below $50, a lot of oil companies — especially the smaller ones
with no cash flow — couldn’t service the interest payments. What lies ahead
in 2016 is a debacle of bond defaults and corporate bankruptcies in the US
oil patches. What’s more, because of the peculiar geology of shale oil and
the rapid depletion of the fracked wells, it is necessary to incessantly
drill and frack new wells to keep production even level, let alone rising.
That calls for evermore rounds of new financing. But since the current
financial obligations can’t be serviced, new financing will not be not
forthcoming. And so neither will additional production. All of which means
that shale oil production is going to crash in 2016 when the backlog of
previously-drilled but untapped wells runs out. I’ll predict that US oil
production will go down a million barrels a day before 2017. That includes
the roughly 5 percent annual decline of conventional oil.
Some might suppose that such a crash would drive prices back up again as
the supply necks down. There are a couple of problems with that supposition.
One is that the previous round of $100-plus oil did a lot of permanent damage
to the economy, in particular to small businesses and households (i.e.
middle-class workers). That damage looks more and more permanent, meaning a
smaller aggregate economy and still-shrinking demand base as businesses and
citizens go broke and stay broke. If oil prices do return to a level that
would justify exploration and production of expensive, hard-to-get oil,
(probably north of $110) it will only crash industrial economies again — and
there are only so many times this can happen before the system is so damaged
recovery is no longer possible. Another problem is that the oil price crash
has done significant damage to the oil industry itself, including its
credibility as a viable target for investment. Contrary to hopes and
expectations, current low oil prices are doing nothing to re-stimulate
economic activity. It all has the look of a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a
downward spiral in a global complex networked system getting clobbered by the
diminishing returns of its principal activities.
Hence I would predict that the price of oil will fall further in 2016,
below the $30 mark, and that it will lead to more carnage in the oil
industry, in banking and debt defaults, and to new manifestations of
geopolitical trouble that could lead to profound oil scarcities and
rationing. We can’t seem to face the fact that our techno-industrial paradigm
was designed to run on cheap oil, which is just no longer available.
Geopolitics
People are getting very nervous. They can’t help harking back a hundred
years to the mysterious lead-up of the First World War, which brought an end
to the first iteration of globalism with a bang. The great nations of 1914
just seemed to get haplessly drawn into a debacle that no one had bargained
for — the slaughter of the trenches, bankrupted national treasuries, the fall
of three dynasties, the rise of the fascists and Bolsheviks… ugh!
Many people with more than half a brain are seeing similar motifs today —
a general movement toward major war by way of sheer fecklessness. For
instance, the ongoing effort led by the USA to antagonize Russia for no
apparent good reason, dragging the dupes of NATO along with it. I won’t
rehash our stupid operation to destabilize Ukraine. David Stockman covered
that so nicely last
week in his blog. Anyway, that Ukraine action was all back in 2013-14.
Ukraine is now a failed state. I predict that in 2016 Ukraine will beg Russia
to take it back into the Russian sovereign fold, to become once again a
province of greater Russia. However, Russia will demur. Russia actually can’t
afford such a woebegone, unreliable, and expensive ward. So Ukraine will then
go begging back to the US and NATO to dole out financial life-support. By
that time, the US and western Europe will be so economically distressed that
they will only pretend to bail out Ukraine, just as they pretend to bolster
their own economies via smoke-and-mirrors central bank shenanigans. Ukraine
will sink into a World Made By Hand level of neo-medievalism,
blazing the trail for everybody else in the world. Think: lawlessness, banditry,
gangster autarky, neo-serfdom. Sounds harsh, I know, but it is what it is.
In 2015 the action between the US and Russia shifted to Syria. Our
monumental blunderings in the Middle East, which included enabling the
creation of ISIS, left us bereft of any coherent way to counter the barbarism
and animus of radical Islam. So, our “adversary” Mr. Putin stepped in, on the
premise that destabilizing what remains of the Syrian government under Mr.
Assad was not such a good idea — as he explained very clearly to the UN
General Assembly. It remains to be seen whether Russia will be able to pacify
Syria, much of which lies in ruins now. But unlike the USA, Russia doesn’t
have ambivalent intentions where ISIS is concerned. We’ve pretended that any
old freelance gang opposing Assad is our friend. Russia’s aims are pretty
straightforward: prop up Assad, rescue whatever governing institutions remain
in Syria, and smash ISIS. In exchange they get a warm-water naval base on the
Mediterranean. That’s supposed to be an existential threat to the USA.
The basic regional beef there, anyway, is between the Sunni and the
Shi’ite, which is to say Arabian-sponsored Islamic maniacs versus
Persian-sponsored Islamic maniacs. Unfortunately, that translates into the
Saudi Arabia / USA and Iran / Russia contest of wills. Throw in some league
wild-card players like Hezbollah and Israel and you have a pretty yeasty mix
for rising animosities. Sadly, the US can’t seem to formulate a strategy that
doesn’t make things worse for people in the region or for the US homeland (or
for our allies in Europe, plagued by refugees they cannot comfortably absorb
and the awful threat of terror events).
I expect in 2016 that Obama’s policy will be to just get out of the way of
Putin and see what happens. He doesn’t have much left in the kit-bag for now.
The worst thing to come out of this for Obama, really, is if Putin can
succeed in pacifying Syria, America’s leaders will look bad — incompetent and
foolish — which is the actual case, of course. Maybe
sometimes you just have suck up your mistakes. Much as Obama dislikes
Hillary, I doubt he wants to upend the whole groaning Democratic Party
Washington DC patronage pyramid, so he might be careful to not start World
War Three during the election year. He can leave that to Hillary, should her
coronation actually occur on Jan 20, 2017.
Anything might happen across the Islamic world in 2016. Every Islamic
nation is grossly overpopulated, given the poor quality of the terrain. Most
of them occupy territory that has been horribly degraded during the
population explosion of the past hundred years, and stand to suffer hugely
from climate and weather abnormalities ahead. Governments will fall and may
not be replaced by anything resembling a coherent polity. Algeria, Libya,
Egypt, Iraq (fuggeddabowdit), Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia are all only marginally
stable for now. Afghanistan is hopeless. We will never control the terrain or
the people who live there. But we will continue to maintain a garrison to
defend Kabul, pretending that control of the capital city is enough.
And then there is the Big Kahuna: Saudi Arabia, with its dwindling oil
income and growing multitude of dependant layabouts. King Salman’s
misadventure in Yemen’s civil war has birthed another failed state and dented
Saudi Arabia’s resources. If the other clans of Arabia, whoever they turn out
to be, overthrow Salman, they will also create an opening for ISIS-flavored
non-royals to incite a multi-dimensional civil war. An upheaval in KSA would
surely produce profound disorder in the oil markets. The USA would get
suckered into this tar-pit wrestling match. The attempt to stabilize our old
“ally” with troops on the ground would probably work out about as well as our
adventure next door in Iraq did. The further result will be more conflict in
this broad swathe of the world over remaining scarce resources, especially
water, along with hot war at various scales, and ever more massive movements
of populations fleeing the turmoil. If they journey to Europe, they will be
turned away. The Camp of the Saints becomes a reality show.
Turkey, with the second-largest military in NATO, could have been a force
for stability in the Middle East, but strongman President Recep Tayyip
Erdo?an can’t get out of his own way. He can’t decide whether he’s on the
side of the Islamists or the West and his attempts to play footsie with both,
while piling up private booty, have left him suspect among both camps. Lately
he has ventured into such misadventures as shooting down a Russian warplane
and receiving stolen goods in the form of ISIS oil shipments from Syrian and
Iraqi wells. He was unable to enlist NATO into joining the argument over
Turkish airspace and has fatally alienated his western auditors by his
actions. He’s lucky that Putin didn’t turn Ankara into an ashtray. The Kurds
on Turkey’s southern border threaten to start a civil war by asserting their
own nationhood, now just de facto. Meanwhile, the Turkish economy is
faltering again, reinforcing its longtime status as “the sick man of Europe.”
Europe’s decades as the West’s delightful tourist theme park are over. The
continent is back to being a dangerous free-for-all of nations, tribes, and
factions, with the overlay of alien Islamic intruders making things worse.
Who knows who or what will blow up next over there. When it becomes obvious
in 2016 that the 2015 refugee influx was not a one-off that the Eurozone
could comfortably absorb, the individual nations will commence the
deportations. Getting to that has been a difficult road, with the headwind of
the memory of the Holocaust. But then, unlike the Jews of the 1930s, the
Islamists are slaughtering concert-goers, booby-trapping subways, shooting
civilians in restaurants, beheading journalists, and explicitly threatening
the existence of European society. This business with Islam is different and
we are now four generations past Auschwitz. Europeans may just have to get
real about defending their respective and collective cultures.
2016 will be the lead-up to the French presidential election of 2017.
François Hollande has the whole of the coming year to demonstrate his
weakness. But can the French stomach Marine Le Pen’s demi-fascist National
Front. The French right wing is not for reduced government, just for pushing
people around differently. As 2016 goes on, look for good ole Sarko (Nicolas
Sarkozy) to flank them both. Sarko is a bit crooked, but as strong-willed as
Le Pen, and not as crazy. French voters will be fed up Hollande-style
squishiness, but unready for a female Hitler. Sarko is the Devil they know
and they will want him back.
The same election time-line goes for Germany. Voters there will
increasingly revolt against what Mutti Merkel represents: how she jammed a
million Islamic refugees down Europe’s craw. They’re not shopping for another
Hitler, either, but they will be looking for a strong-willed someone to
protect the volk against the foreign hordes, of whom they are
getting good and goddam sick. There is also the matter of Germany
baby-sitting all the bankrupt nations to the south.
As 2016 unfurls, the PIIGS will spin back into financial intensive care.
Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece will eventually have to face the absence of
buyers for their bonds and the falsity of their low interest rates. Spain,
for one, is not finished with the Catalonian secession problem. Portugal
needs to return to the 18th century. The clowns in Brussels have
no plan to repair the finances of Euroland beyond massive QE that cannot be
endless. Whoever replaces Merkel as chancellor may be the one who senses that
Germany ought to lead the way out of the Euro currency fantasy and all the
awful liabilities it entails.
Great Britain is a basketcase in search of a basket to land in. It has no
economy left besides the swindlers of “the City,” its version of Wall Street,
and that janky establishment is losing its grip as a desirable financial
capital after years of sharp practice, with much of its action moving to
Shanghai. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is a catamite for the big
banks. The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn is an old-school romantic
unionist Leftie in a nation with little remaining industrial workforce.
Unlike France or Germany, Britain’s parliamentary system can route a
government on short notice. The debt implosion of 2016 and rescheduled Great
Depression 2.0 will thrust UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage into the
spotlight to salvage what remains of Old Blighty.
The big question around Asia is whether China can navigate its way out of
the blind alley it’s trapped in: a banking system steeped in crony
corruption, bad debt everywhere, and malinvestment like unto nothing the
world has ever seen before. The country is choking on excess industrial
capacity just as the world enters its epic Peak Everything contraction. Can
they keep on pumping out salad shooters and Han Solo dolls to a world
drowning in plastic crap and too broke to buy more of it? They still have
$3.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to theoretically bail themselves
out. But that starts affecting the value of their pegged currency, and their
main trading partner (us) can play endless currency war games with them to
dissuade them from dumping the rest of their accumulated US treasury paper,
which, of course, only pisses them off more and makes them look for
surreptitious ways to fight back — which is what currency war is all about.
Which is also exactly why China (with Russia and others) has started up its
own Asian version of the IMF, the BRICs Development Bank, and an alternative
to the SWIFT international clearing system.
Chinese economic and financial statistics are even less reliable than the
overcooked sludge offered up by the US agencies, but the tanking of commodity
prices worldwide tells enough of a story: China is sure not expanding as much
as the good old days, if at all. It’s been a great ride, but it was
super-quick, and it happened just prior to the world reaching the bona fide
limits to growth. China’s contraction may be as quick as its rise, and if
that is the case, it will be rough ride into the same vortex of contraction
that everybody else is entering.
My one wild-hair prediction about China for 2016: after Kim Jong-Un pulls
some bonehead move against his neighbor to the south, China invades North
Korea and installs a more rational management regime there. Kim Jong-Un ends
up as a lounge singer in Macao. Lucky boy.
Homeland Frolics
Be very afraid. Donald Trump isn’t funny anymore. He’s Hitler without the
brains and the charm. But he’s gotten where he is for a reason. He expresses
perfectly the depravity of the culture he springs from: narcissistic, morally
rudderless, vulgar, shameless, lost in fantasy, and sadistic. Hillary (last
name unnecessary) is not much better, but she’s not nearly as dumb, only more
thoroughly corrupt. These are the avatars of our two major political parties.
Be very afraid and weep!
The good news is that political parties do occasionally blow up and vanish
from the scene, and that would be an interesting possible outcome of the 2016
national elections. Trump could accomplish this much more briskly with the
Republicans. He’s made it clear already that he feels zero loyalty to the Red
Team, and noises offstage can be heard that the party faithful would find
some way to either expel or end-run the Donald Creature. Given our litigious
society, one outcome of this would be an election held hostage by the courts.
Oy vey is mir. Another possibility is that a message would be transmitted to
the Trump Team from some combination of rogue elements in the NSA and the US
Military that he’d better drop out or else. It would be done in such a way
that Trump would not be able to use it for further narcissistic
grandstanding. Were that not to happen, and were Trump somehow able to get
elected, I predict there will be a coup d’état against him inside of April
2017. Hello constitutional crisis. Where it might go from there, no one can
say.
Of Trump’s opponents for the Republican nomination, the only one I can
grudge up any interest for is Rand Paul, who is a truly disruptive figure
without being a maniac. In fact, I think he would make a good president,
sober, thoughtful, unencumbered by obligation to the forces of racketeering.
But he appears to have a near-zero chance of winning the party’s nomination.
Hillary is the opposite of a disrupter; she is the racketeer Godmother. As
things proceed, however, she would merely preside over Great Depression 2.0.
Unlike FDR in GD 1.0, Hillary would inspire no trust among a fractious
population out for revenge against the very enablers of Hillary’s election,
namely the Wall Street bankers. The nation would fall into factional fighting
and possibly even regional breakup under Miz It’s-My-Turn. But I get ahead of
myself…. The question at hand for 2016 is: Can Hillary be stopped. At this
point, I don’t see how, given all the weight of the party machinery
calibrated in her favor by the equally odious National Party Chairperson,
Congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Bernie Sanders mounted a noble opposition campaign, and perhaps it is too
early to write him off here before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire
primary. Perhaps something can happen and he can at least slay the candidacy
of Rodan the Flying Reptile – my other nickname for the Hillary Creature.
Apart from that is my basic aversion to Bernie’s political philosophy as a
self-proclaimed “socialist.” I know it sounds like a glib dismissal of a
cartoonish political label, but Bernie’s self-applied label implies ever more
intrusion by ever bigger government into the life of this nation. History
wants to take us in another direction now, away from so much
hyper-centralized control, and we go against the flow at our peril. While I
admire Bernie’s presence as a vocal opposition to Hillary, I’m not keen on
what he’s actually selling.
I know that Martin O’Malley is still “out there,” but he appears to be a
blank cartridge, or a six-pack in search of worldview, and I don’t believe as
some observers have averred that this is the fault of the media. In the few
Democratic “debates” held last fall he offered next to nothing outside a
conventional punch-list of shopworn center-left ideology — that is, no
recognition of the extraordinary problems this country faces in the climax of
the techno-industrial idyll, and the long emergency that is following it.
And that’s all you get on the Democratic side for the moment: a powerful
sense that the fix is in. Yet there is the very real problem of Hillary’s
loathsomeness and how that would go down at the polls. There’s even a pretty
good chance that many women would vote against her. So my provisional
conclusion / prediction for the November contest is that Hillary runs and
loses against some as-yet-unknown un-Trump person. President Cruz? Ach!
Rubio? Back in the playpen! Christie? Leave the body, take the canoli…! Jeb?
El pendejo supremo! To be continued….
Race Relations and the Cowardice of the Thinking Classes
2015 was sure a bad year for different groups of Americans trying (or not)
to get along, especially black people and white people. American society is
feeling the full force of the identity ideologies cooked up on the college
campuses over the past several decades, now boiling over into an orgy of
victim-pleading, identity grandstanding, sexual hysteria, scapegoating,
intellectual despotism, juridical blackmail, and (let’s not forget) careerist
posturing. The more irrelevant higher education gets, the more strenuously
the social justice inquisitors mount their persecutions against those who
don’t buy the race-gender-privilege party line. In 2015 it has morphed into a
campaign against free speech and free inquiry. The “diversity” deans multiply
like fruit flies.
I made the “error” last year of suggesting that black Americans would
benefit if the teaching of spoken English were made a high priority of
primary and secondary schooling — and I was vilified for saying that. My
opponents have not offered any useful counter-ideas beyond name-calling. I
suspect that many people of good intentions are running out patience with
this racket — and it is a racket for extorting preferential treatment and
money from guilt-tripped white people.
In the arena of crime and policing, the situation is especially bad. Black
lives matter, but not so much for black people themselves, who are ardently
slaughtering each other in places like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit,
Milwaukee, and “Chi-raq” at a rate proportionately much greater than other
ethnic groups in the land. The martyrs of the movement act in ways likely to
get them in trouble, for instance the hapless 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot
brandishing a BB gun designed to look exactly like the US Army 1911 issue .45
caliber ACP, Michael Brown thugging out on officer Darren Wilson, Trayvon
Martin beating down George Zimmerman. The cops present at several notorious
incidents include black officers; a black female sergeant who was supervising
the action on the sidewalk in Staten Island when her colleagues choked Eric
Garner. (she did nothing to intervene); the several black policemen in
Baltimore who took Freddy Gray on his fatal ride in the paddy wagon. It’s a
scene fraught with ambiguity, to be generous.
Where are we going with race relations in this country? For now, not in a
favorable direction. The trend will be for police to regard certain
neighborhoods as “no-go” areas — if only to avoid the gigantic multi-million
dollar litigations that grow out of these ambiguous confrontations. Some may
view that as a good thing, but it will only play into the decadent ethos that
anything goes and nothing matters in this country. The larger question going
forward is whether Black America will continue to insist on being an
oppositional culture. That is what it has become, though the cowed thinking
classes will not acknowledge it. They also will not recognize the need for a
common culture in this nation, a set of truly shared values and standards of
conduct.
Climate Change
This is the underlayment of despair that reflective persons cannot avoid
thinking about when all the other petty issues of human relations and the
project of civilization are disposed of. Weird weather? Biblical Floods?
Melting icecaps? Sea level creep? It was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve here in
upstate New York, dandelions blooming in the yard, just a week or so ago.
Some people I know can’t stop thinking about climate change. Somehow I manage
to put it out of mind and ruminate on other things, or even feel good about
something that is happening in the present — a good meal, a gathering of
friends, an evening of live music…. but it’s always lurking there in the
background like some hooded reaper in a New Yorker cartoon.
Despite the hoopla of the Paris climate change talks, I’m not persuaded
that national governments will really do anything, or even that anything they
might do would avail to make things better. I’m not even so concerned about
whether climate change is man-made or not. I just accept that something is up
and that as things change, we will have to adjust. It seems to me that the
adjustment will not be easy and five hundred years from now there will be far
fewer human beings, if any, around. From the point of view of the planet’s
well-being, that is probably a good thing.
In the mean time, let’s do the best we can to carry on and be as kind as
possible to one another. Good luck in 2016!
