The Defeated - America's path forward after losing the economic war with China
The US is a defeated country, whether it realizes it or not. It no longer has the resources to dominate its adversaries, and its losing its grip on its vassals. In implicit confirmation of this, the diehards in the elite are moving to guerrilla war. That is why the US, in partnership with equally defeated Israel, is kicking over the card table in country after country - Iran, Syria, Pakistan,... That's why its forcing the EU into war mode to prolong the agony of Ukraine. The Ukrainians themselves have nothing left but guerrilla war: continuing to hit civilian targets, and popping up drones (courtesy of Israel) all over Russia.
The US has been defeated by China. China has won the economic war. Their share of world production is huge. In some critical areas, such as rare earths, it is 90%. That is far beyond the 50% of world production that the US had at the end of WW2. Chinese production is devouring the US from the inside out. Their hyper-efficient, highly differentiated, and highly responsive supply chains are well inside the US's OODA loop.
They are drawing ahead in the technology wars despite US embargoes, because they produce vast numbers of STEM graduates from their world class universities to staff their enterprises. (The Chinese joke that Harvard is their "party school".) They have a fairly honest government that actually executes rich profiteers and stops big money from taking over the government.
The US has been stalemated by Russia. Russia has survived everything the US has thrown at it. Not merely survived - their economy is growing. They have acquired North Korea as an ally providing actual troops and useful weapons. Militarily, the Russians have at least a decade lead on the US. We have no hypersonic missiles. All our military kit is exposed as gold-plated hangar queens designed to maximize corporate profits, not to win wars. The Chinese are also ahead of the US militarily. The Pakistanis just did a demo of Chinese integrated aerial combat on India's French Rafael fighters.
Internally, the US is a dump
It is like some third world place that still has a few tourist attractions. The nature oriented attractions are being ruined by cuts to the National Park Service, in preparation for their privatization. The urban attractions are located in overpriced city centers with massive fees for parking, lousy public transport, and sketchy public safety due to Biden's policy of subsidizing illegal aliens - many of them criminals. Foreign tourism has dropped 10-20% due to tariffs on plane fares and general disgust with US support for Zionist genocide. It is dropping even more as ICE criminality discourages any tourist of color from showing up.
As for the public, only the rich can afford to live in city centers. House prices and rents are out of control everywhere. Practically no one can afford a 7% mortgage on a house that has doubled in price over the last five years. And that's without considering the overhanging, un-dischargeable student loan debt that Trump has started demanding repayment on.
The coming generation has given up on finding a decent job, owning a decent house, raising a traditional family. You can see the rot in the way people dress (slovenly for guys, provocatively for girls - a gypsy vibe to it), in their pathetic attempts to define themselves by tattoos, piercing, outlandish hair styles, and tattered clothes.
And yet we continue down the road to ruin
Why? Because the elites are no longer loyal to the US. They are loyal to transnational capital and transnational corporations. (See APPENDIX.) Voting is meaningless because all the candidates of both parties have been vetted beforehand, bought and paid for. The elite program will be carried out no matter which wing of the Uniparty wins. They are building out the silicon Panopticon. SCOTUS will continue to shred the Constitution, enhancing the already dangerous authority of the President to interfere with the Legislature and the lesser judiciary by means of emergency decrees - the royal road to dictatorship.
I already wrote about the woke "bustout" on the Democratic Party. The completely manufactured wedge issue of so-called trans people was disgusting to most sensible adults. Illegal aliens were another losing proposition. That made the Dems so toxic that even an asshole like Trump could defeat the word-salad spouter, Harris, even though a billion dollars was spent on her.
But Trump is more of the same. His BBB will cause the US to go bankrupt even sooner than expected. The big money is salivating at the bargains to be had in the coming fire sale of US government assets. If the elite failed to loot Russia, it will simply loot the US instead.
Clearly Trump is nothing more than a chaos agent, a wrecker. He doesn't even care about the base who elected him. (That's either because he knows he is a lame duck or because he plans to be dictator by 2028.) He just alienated half the MAGA base in one sentence by saying that the whole Epstein thing was a nothing burger, a Democratic psyop. He also has not ended the Ukraine war he promised to end. Then he committed a new war crime by attacking Iran. Tulsi Gabbard, another dubious hope for sanity, caved to Trump on the Iran intelligence front. And RFK jr just greenlighted the poison shot for children - et tu, Bobby?
Politics as usual will have no effect on elite plans
In short, politics is of no use to the average citizen who is bombarded with misinformation and agitprop from both sides. Both parties are complicit in the ongoing warmongering and domestic looting. Almost all office holders are covered in mud. You know how far gone we are when MTG sounds rational. This is textbook propaganda technique.
It is sometimes said that two competing propagandas cancel each other out...(but) far from cancelling each other out because they are contradictory, (they) have a cumulative effect. A boxer, groggy from a left hook, does not return to normal when he is hit with a right hook; he becomes groggier.
- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda - The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 181.
Things are just too broken in too many places for reform to succeed before the financial roof caves in. Getting one's hopes up for Zhoran Mamdani is just cargo cult behavior. He will either sell out or be hamstrung.
The problem is that the only one with an alternative plan ready to go are the rightwing radicals: the tech bros, the new Social Darwinists, the "scientific" racists like Charles Murray, and the White Nationalists who have been let out of jail. Their program is the same program that the hard right has used since the 1870s: destroy the government, let business reign supreme, restore racial and gender inequality, lock the debt onto the populace in perpetuity.
This plan is known to be bad news for everyone but the super rich.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
However, the radicals' plans are already on the elite conveyor belt discussed in the Appendix. If you hear about these plans at all, it will be one day before they are voted into law by the bought and paid for legislators. The old political process has long been circumvented. Politics now happens off-line. Let me quote from the Appendix:
The idea first emerges in an off-the-record hotel ballroom, reappears as a panel theme in Bratislava, and finally solidifies into an operational directive in Brussels. These networks no longer merely discuss grand strategy; they prototype it and then sell it back to defense ministries as the next unavoidable step.
Proliferation, hypersonics, AI target-selection: each cycle begins with “informal” diplomacy, migrates to a glossy policy brief, and finishes as a line item in someone’s procurement budget.
The politics created by networks is crystalline in its uniformity because the process behind it has been engineered to produce conformity, much as ultra-strong turbine blades are grown from a single crystal of metal. (FOOTNOTE) In the picture, you see that the material below the "constrictor" is disorgnaized, but the constrictor allows only the desired orientation to pass into the blade where it becomes a single crystal
Our legislative system has long since been re-engineered to be in the hands of lobbyists and think tanks funded by anti-union, anti-democracy, anti-environmental billionaires and corporations. They are now rolling out the new single crystal structure of government, designed by the funders of the think tank network.
The future
If they succeed, we will live in a silicon panaopicon with 90+% of us reduced to peons and the elites immune from laws and taxes. If this new structure provokes rebellion, they will still succeed because chaos is their ally. It allows the dictator at the top to call out the military and destroy what few freedoms we still have.
Again, not much hope for the future.
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FOOTNOTE
A precisely oriented rod-mounted seed crystal is dipped into the molten silicon. The seed crystal's rod is slowly pulled upwards and rotated simultaneously. By precisely controlling the temperature gradients, rate of pulling and speed of rotation, it is possible to extract a large, single-crystal, cylindrical ingot from the melt.
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APPENDIX
Excerpts from Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony
It is institutionalized hegemony, operating through what Gramsci called the "cultural leadership" of a ruling class. But where Gramsci analyzed national elites vis-a-vis their fellow citizens, we now confront a transnational caste: ...hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.
the maintenance of hegemony relies less on coercion than on soft incorporation. Elite knowledge networks, embedded in university programs, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks, act as vectors for this soft power. They socialize, recruit, and certify rising leaders...these networks define what counts as “thinkable thought” and “askable questions.”
The map of institutions we have traced so far would be inert without a circulating cadre of professionals who glide between foundation cubicles, cable-news studios, and government offices
Nourished by corporate endowments and philanthropic grants, U.S.–European think tanks act as both idea refineries and talent pipelines: they pre-agree the paradigm, then second their own staff to ministries that put it into practice.
Dissent isn’t debated. It is rendered invisible and only actively excluded if it becomes too visible and loud. Such a hegemonic system, operating on a smaller scale among political elites, functions like a theological seminary, where deviation marks heresy and compliance brings canonization.
they internalize a hierarchy of legitimacy: Washington’s priorities are neutral, universal, and common sense. Alternative modes of thinking about foreign policy, such as non-alignment, détente, and Eurasian trade, are filtered out as extremist or naïve.
This is ideological imprinting and the psychological construction of hegemony at the individual level. The result is a generation of political elites whose biographies read like U.S. State Department training manuals. The tragedy is that by the time these groomed elites reach positions of power in politics, media, or corporations, their compliance feels natural. They do not serve (elite) interests because they are coerced; they do so because they cannot conceive of another way…
This is ultraimperialism (Kautsky’s term) in action: national elites collude across borders to protect shared class interests, even as their publics suffer the costs…
The idea first emerges in an off-the-record hotel ballroom, reappears as a panel theme in Bratislava, and finally solidifies into an operational directive in Brussels. These networks no longer merely discuss grand strategy; they prototype it and then sell it back to defense ministries as the next unavoidable step.
Proliferation, hypersonics, AI target-selection: each cycle begins with “informal” diplomacy, migrates to a glossy policy brief, and finishes as a line item in someone’s procurement budget.