Diatribes of Jay: A National Nightmare (A So-Far Fictional Future History)

For reasons why we should task Los Alamos with making nuclear energy safe, click here. For a review of Pete Buttigieg’s good qualities and his prospects for vice-president, click here. For a brief review of the second and anticlimactic Detroit debate, click here. For a morning-after view of the first Dem Detroit Debate, click here. For initial reaction to the first Detroit debate, including criticism of CNN, click here. For a discussion of how the US can arrest its decline by rebuilding its labor unions online, click here. For suggestions how to fix, not trash, America by adjusting corporate law, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For an analysis of reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

It’s January 2025. Under extraordinary security, President-Elect Pete Buttigieg is preparing for his inaugural day.

His landslide win was so overwhelming that outgoing President Donald Trump had no realistic chance to extend his own presidency unconstitutionally. Just for good measure, the Joint Chiefs told Trump personally that, if he tried to stay, elite troops would lead him away in handcuffs. So for the first time in his colorful career, Trump left the field quietly.

The nation was anything but quiet. In a little over four years, its mood and politics had changed radically. The main reason was the Crash of 2021.

The Crash had several causes, all intertwined in a perfect economic storm. Perhaps the most important was investment uncertainty.

Trump had begun laying serious tariffs on every trading partner, from China to our closest allies, as early as 2017. But it took a while for the tariffs to bite. At first, consumer prices barely rose as China dropped its currency and producers tried to absorb as much of the loss as possible.

Business people held their breath. Some thought that China would cave, others that Trump would declare “victory” and revoke the tariffs regardless. Some hoped that an unprecedented outbreak of competence would strike the Executive Branch.

But you can hold your breath only for so long. By the time Trump won a second narrow Electoral College victory in 2020, decisions had to be made. Supply chains were collapsing from Singapore to Sonora. At the same time, the technology sectors of the US and China were undergoing a messy divorce for reasons of national security on both sides.

By then China’s global strategy, if not the American president’s, was clear. In Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, China was pitching itself, with 25% of the world’s population. as the new leader of world trade.

China took great pains to be practical and flexible in negotiating. It slammed the US, with less than 5% of the world’s population, as an overbearing, erratic, and cantankerous relic and an unreasonable control freak to boot.

Business people around the globe were listening, and trade deals were being made. Often they excluded the US entirely.

It didn’t hurt that China’s Huawei and other high-tech producers were offering attractive terms, and that China was offering low-interest loans, to build out a new 6G telecomm network of China’s own design. It also didn’t hurt that China’s scientists, in the fall 2020, had come up with the world’s first marketable quantum computer. Meanwhile, Trump had continued appointing clueless, unqualified apparatchiks and sycophants to key positions in our federal research establishment.

American oligarchs did little politically but help Trump win a second term. They didn’t like him personally, but they liked his tax cuts, his rollback of regulations, and his bossism. If the truth be told, he was the “leader” that many of them secretly would have liked to have been themselves. Few to none of them even flinched when told that Vladimir Putin and his “special services” had been about as much an influence in Trump’s second election as in his first.

Yet Trump took his second election as a mandate for doubling down on his trade wars. China’s caving, Trump’s caving and other miracles began to look increasingly unlikely. Something had to be done. But what?

The international picture looked increasingly chaotic. The new trade deals with China changed longstanding trade patterns. International supply chains had been shifting and dissolving like lines of salt in hot water. New laws and tariffs around the world disadvantaged American business. American car makers couldn’t decide whether to go electric or, relying on Trump’s relaxation of mileage standards, to produce more fossil-fueled muscle cars for Trumpets.

The chief result of all the uncertainty was the steepest plunge in business investment in America since the Great Depression. American business people became a herd of deer collectively caught in the headlights of rapid international change. If they invested in plants at all, they did so abroad, often through shell corporations. Foreigner investors saw greener pastures elsewhere.

The first big US corporation to fail was the “new” AT&T, saddled with over $200 billion of debt. Many had expected its bankruptcy, but the bankers not so much.

As William Cohan had warned in May 2019, hedge funds and others playing the casino of credit-default swaps had built up a pyramid of $600 trillion in their face value, which began to collapse. At the same time, a similar debt crisis began unfolding in China. Its central and regional governments had incurred massive state debt propping up businesses against losses from the trade war and backing attractive trade terms for foreigners regardless of profit.

The oligarchs wanted to be bailed out, as before, and they had the political clout. But there wasn’t nearly enough money in the combined treasuries of China and the US to do the job. So the result was neither fish nor fowl—a partial bailout that made no one happy, infuriated the public, and only accelerated the collapse.

Global stock markets crashed almost simultaneously on October 23, 2021, marking the start of the worst depression since the Great Depression of 1929. Some academic economists argued that it was even worse, or soon would be.

As always, it took some time for the pain to bleed from the traders and securities markets to the general public. But by 2023, it got there. General unemployment in the United States ran between 15% and 20%, depending on who was doing the counting. The federal deficit soared to $6 trillion per year, with no end in sight. After China had sold all its Treasury bills, interest rates on the shortest Treasury notes began running 4.5%, without any rate increase by the Fed. For the first time in US history, experts began talking about the possibility of a US default not occasioned by partisan disputes over spending and debt ceilings.

In this atmosphere, support for the Republican Party cratered. From year-end 2018 to year-end 2023, a total of 57 Republican House members had retired or declined to run again, all but insuring Democrats a veto-proof majority in the House. Four senators had done the same, and two had been dis-elected in by-elections. A Democratic sweep of all three branches seemed increasingly likely.

Along with the Republican Party, political resistance to structural change began to collapse. Tired of incessant death threats and in ill health, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had announced early on that they would not run for president. Filling the vacuum, and touting his youth and energy, Pete Buttigieg capitalized on his momentum from 2019 and rode it all the way to the general election.

But Buttigieg’s landslide victory was bittersweet. He would preside over a nation with massive unemployment, debt unprecedented even in wartime, financial markets still in collapse, and trading partners and allies abandoning America like rats leaving a sinking ship. During the campaign, three respected economists—one Brit, one German and one American—had declared China the world’s leading economy, not just in purchasing power parity, but in raw GDP and any other measure that mattered.

By the 2020 election, over 3,700 people had died in post-Trump white-supremacist terror inside the US, more than on 9/11. Many Americans heaved a huge sigh of relief upon Buttigieg’s election, hoping that a white man’s election would forestall the incessant conflict over race and religion. For their part, white supremacists had begun a vicious open argument, punctuated by several public murders, over whether a white male gay, even if Christian, qualifies for supremacy.

Everyone in the world seemed to be angry at America at once. Rivals China and Russia resented an apparently chastened foe that wouldn’t compromise in any way. Its erstwhile allies and partners hated the America that had abandoned them and, in so doing, had made their lot far worse. And most non-white, non-Christian people around the globe, of whom there turned out to be quite a few, hated Americans for so visibly forsaking their credo that “all men are created equal.”

We Americans, along with our outgoing president, began to be seen by the whole world as the vilest hypocrites in recent history.

The Baby Boomers, in their numbers, selfishness and moral vacuity, had made all this possible. As outgoing President Trump had taught them, they watched Fox* for guidance. They prayed that their Social Security and health insurance would last out their increasingly insecure lives.

* * *

P.S. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it easily could. It all depends on whether voters return to believing that their leaders ought to be better, smarter, and better educated—and also know more—than they themselves. If they continue to bet their and their children’s futures on leaders who are worse, and equally selfish (or more so), the nightmare laid out above is entirely possible.

* I don’t call Fox “news” because it isn’t. It’s a bunch of mostly ignorant, overpaid nobodies sitting around blathering as if at a neighborhood bar. Its drivel can pass for “news” only in a nation that no longer teaches its kids the differences between news and entertainment, policy and gossip, reality and blather, or fact and opinion.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For reasons to task Los Alamos with making nuclear energy safe, click here.
For a review of Pete Buttigieg’s qualities and prospects for vice-president, click here.
For a critique of the Dems’ anticlimactic second debate in Detroit, click here.
For a morning-after view of the Dems’ first Detroit debate, click here.
For an analysis CNN’s role in privatizing the news and history of the first Detroit Dem debate, click here.
For an intital reaction to the first Dem Detroit debate, click here.
For a discussion of the importance of labor unions and how to rebuild them online, click here.
For a recipe for fixing America by adjustment, without revolution or extremism, click here.
For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here.
For brief analysis of the House’s resolution censuring the President, click here.
For good reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here.
For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves and how to make the reparations work, click here.
For three things the Dems must do to win the White House, click here.
For an assessment of how the second debate propels the Dems toward losing, click here.
For suggestions on how to improve multi-candidate debates, click here.
For a more general discussion of how to improve debates, click here.
For a review of the first Democratic Debate, click here.
For a third, simpler look at why Trump won in 2016, click here.
For seven reasons not to make war on Iran, click here.
For discussion of Warren’s ability to defend science, and why it matters, click here.
For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
For analysis of the disastrous effect of our leaders’ failure to take personal responsibility, click here.
For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

09 August 2019

A National Nightmare (A So-Far Fictional Future History)

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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