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As the ruling class papers over the rot, the country heads for an even greater breakdown

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Rainer Shea
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The liberal technocrats who are at the helm want us to think that the country is on its way towards a great economic recovery, that we're entering a new golden age, which will be enhanced by all the shiny technology that the "Great Reset" will bring. They're portraying the government's meager efforts to help the masses as a miraculous break from the neoliberal hell we've been subjected to during this last half century, with big bank-bailout architect Larry Summers having written in the Washington Post last week about Biden's stimulus proposal: "its ambition, its rejection of austerity orthodoxy, and its commitment to reducing economic inequality are all admirable."

Yet even this aspect of our conditions has an ominous and foreboding underbelly to it. The stimulus package, which won't even have the $2000 universal checks that we were being promised a couple months ago, comes at a time when U.S. markets are so unstable that the dollar will be endangered by it. Observing the warnings Summers made in that very same op-ed, commentator Nick Beams wrote this week that "Summers is warning that the very measures being adopted to try to create political stability will result in economic instability, particularly in the financial markets. Rising inflation will bring demands for higher wages and an intensification of the class struggle, which could bring about a collapse of the Wall Street bubble."

This risk of a new financial crisis stems from the rapid increase in debt across the economy that we've seen so far this year, which has gone along with market-hypersensitivity wherein only a small rise in interest rates could trigger a financial meltdown. As Sydney Morning Herald economics columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz has assessed, "Given the 'debt trap' the US finds itself in, with federal debt already over 100 percent of US GDP and rising rapidly... even a modest movement [in interest rates] could cause a recession and even another financial crisis." In other words, the current debt trap is of "such magnitude" that trying to escape it simply through printing vast amounts of money "could trigger something worse than the experience in 2008."

This is the truth that the Democratic policy-makers who've come to Biden's defense over the stimulus want to paper over: under our neoliberal, highly financialized paradigm, the Biden team is engaging in a zero-sum game. There's no way to avoid the collapse of the U.S. dollar, which has already reached its lowest purchasing power on record and is estimated by more honest economists to shrink in value by over 30% before the end of 2021.

What are we poor and working people going to do when the "double-dip recession" theory for the COVID-19 era comes true? We have no idea, because we're struggling to get through each month as it is. The hopes for a v-shaped economic recovery are in tatters, running up against the realities of deepening austerity due to ongoing costly militarism, weekly jobless claims that keep exceeding expectations, and loopholes in the eviction moratorium that keep allowing for people to be thrown out of their homes. A quarter of the population is now regularly going hungry, compared to ten percent a year ago. The U.S. COVID-19 death count is likely to surpass half a million by the end of this month. And in the background, the risk of a third world war continues to increase while climate-related natural disasters are certain to keep getting more severe.

The end of the Trump era was supposed to be when things went "back to normal," but things keep getting more uncertain. Simply due to the deteriorating conditions we're living in, many instinctively recognize this creeping danger, even as the political and media elites insist that it's all getting fixed.

To see what the state of our reality is really like, just look at the wars, liberty crackdowns, and genocidal policies that Biden is building upon. Biden and his war-loving Secretary of State Antony Blinken are continuing Washington's genocidal sanctions against Iran, expanding Washington's military presence within Syria with the purpose of stealing more oil from the country, and still enabling Saudi Arabia's genocidal war against the Yemenis. U.S. drone strikes against Somalia have been rapidly increasing under Biden, despite the administration's optically appealing choice to withdraw troops from the country. And as Washington props up the Honduran dictatorship that is perpetuating the refugee crisis, Biden is expanding the network of concentration camps by opening up an overflow facility for the ever-growing influx of victims of U.S. imperialism.

In this environment, the suppression of the truth is more important to the U.S. government than ever. And the coverup efforts go far beyond the bogus government unemployment numbers that try to paint the jobless population as several times smaller than it actually is. Biden is continuing Trump's rule of not publicly disclosing drone-strike casualties. The Justice Department has demanded Julian Assange be extradited to the U.S. despite evidence that Assange is at risk of suicide, showing just how determined Washington is to set an example for potential future whistleblowers. Social-media companies, in partnership with the U.S. intelligence agencies they serve, are continuing to tighten censorship against social-justice organizers and anti-imperialist media sources. In the coming years, this kind of repression will be expanded upon with the normalization of intensive AI-driven mass surveillance that the liberal technocrats have planned.

What's coming after then? 2024 seems far off, but it could very well be when the U.S. sees a fascist reaction many times more dangerous than the one we saw with Trump. It will be more dangerous because in all likelihood, the leader in charge of it will be a lot more competent than Trump was. Senator Tom Cotton, who's been emerging as the default heir to Trumpism during Trump's own political implosion, is in the lead in a recent poll for the 2024 GOP primary.

This is a figure who's so far made some sinister marks on U.S. political history by promoting the far-right conspiracy theory about COVID-19 being a Chinese bioweapon, by writing an open letter in 2006 that called for the prosecution of two New York Times reporters for breaking a story about a secret government program, and by writing an op-ed last year calling for the military to be sent in to attack the anti-police-brutality protesters. When the latter statement received condemnation, Cotton said on Fox News that only the "woke child mob" could oppose such an idea.

And in the near future that the current conditions are producing, ideas like it will become seen as sensible by the predominant factions of the political and media elite. Because in this future, the economic and social foundations of our society will have fallen out, leaving the country open for political freaks to come out who will make Trump look tame.

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Rainer Shea is writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution. Donate to me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

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