Fifth Annual Neoliberal Darwin Awards
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
- James Madison, Fourth POTUS
By Gregg Wall (11-25-2023)
Greedy boomer pigs.
It’s something I’ve never quite forgiven my parents for. If I had been born a year or two later, I could have been Gen X, instead the dreaded B-word. Mom more than made up for it, however, by being Canadian. Dual citizenship is something I find myself increasingly thanking the Goddess above for.
It wasn’t bad enough that boomers - & the silent generation - gave us Reagan, the Clintons, forty years of trickle-down, supply-side fraud, and $37 trillion in national debt… but it turns out, the entire economy has been rigged in their favor: Bank of America reports boomer balance sheets have ballooned a massive $129 trillion. This transfer of wealth came by looting the federal, and in some instances, state governments: the aforementioned $37 trillion in federal debt, the explosive growth in money supply, leverage, compounding tax cuts for the uber rich and the merely rich, a regressive tax structure, monetary policy & interest rate suppression policies that juiced real estate & asset classes of the wealthy, endless Wall St bailouts, and the FED put. The boomer trash couldn’t lose. A U.S. economy, at least in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, that still functioned for Americans… where M&A, private equity, and Wall St. had not yet destroyed competition, markets, pensions, company after company, and price discovery.
It's all gone now. A functioning economy, that is actual competition, markets, a living wage, and price discovery… vanished, disappeared by greed, M&A, the formation of a monopoly economy, the elimination of rules & regs, and globalization. U.S. labor reduced to a mere commodity… the middle class also disappeared. No wonder Millennials & Gen Z are upset. Price gouging, shareholder value, ongoing dollar depreciation, and offshored labor have crushed North American labor’s earnings. And federal government debt is catastrophic. (Which doesn’t mean our highly corrupt congress won’t bailout Wall St again and again, or finance another for-profit war, but it does mean: opportunity & job killing austerity for the American people, as far as the eye can see. Unless the younger generations demand that the national debt be written down, as they should.) The latest deficit is two trillion dollars and the national debt is $37 trillion, including Trump’s 2020 Wall St. bailout. Our great, libertarian, capitalist utopia is addicted to government spending, government welfare, privatization schemes, zombies & debt, and endless war. Federal government spending is 25% of U.S. GDP, and a sizeable chunk of that is defense and security state spending.
And nobody wants to address the elephant in the room: failed Reaganomics, Clintonista neoliberalism, oligarchy, trickle-down, and supply-side fraud.
With wage & wealth concentration - firmly entrenched into the hands of few oligarchs - growing more burdensome, with consolidation, technology, and the monopoly economy requiring fewer well-paid workers … government spending & debt to keep the American economy upright can only be expected to grow & undoubtedly will grow. Which brings us to the American defense industry, this year’s Neoliberal Darwin Award winner.
It's no accident that America finds itself constantly at war, that defense & security state spending grows ever higher. It’s also no accident that GDP growth tracks with deficit spending (with deficit spending as a percentage of GDP coming in higher than actual GDP growth). The fallout from wage & wealth inequality, globalization, and a monopoly economy is a permanent under-class, catastrophic credit card debt, and a regressed & stagnating private sector economy… this means that in order for America to have growth or maintain GDP, federal government spending must pick up private sector slack.
And, in Washington, what better way to grow the economy and create jobs than our repugnant arms industry. Defense spending is a never-ending source of campaign contributions, kickbacks, stock appreciation, and stock buybacks for our day traders in congress. As the defense industry grows and as the military is increasingly privatized… and as the private sector consolidates and shrinks the number of well paying jobs… the moral hazard and temptation to embrace conflict & war as the one-size-fits-all solution to all American & Western economic & foreign policy needs will only increase and grow. And our morally bankrupt congress has shown zero appetite to rein it in.
This likely means Americans can expect to be treated to the spectacle of more genocides, more war, more U.S. troops placed into harm’s way, as well as more proxy wars. To defray out-of-control defense spending and the monopolization & corruption of the defense industry, the U.S. pushes its allies to buy armaments that sometimes, to put it nicely, don’t even function.
And the quid pro quo for the American people? More debt, more austerity, more culture war politics, more divide & conquer politics to distract from gross fiscal & monetary mismanagement in Washington. The post-boomer generations enslaved & indentured to catastrophic national debt. Exorbitant privilege slipping from our grasp? And an ever-growing police & surveillance state to maintain law & order as the American people come to discover they’ve been lied to & ripped off (by vicious boomer & the silent generations). We can also expect the corporate MSM to do its part: by blasting the latest War & Washington narrative from our television sets, instead of doing a deep dive into gross, abject political fraud in Washington.
Alas, it's complex they tell us. But not really. At the center of all this, who does the U.S. economy serve: a handful of oligarchs (in which case, everything is perfect), or the American people (in which case, the economy is a disaster)?
And there you have it America… an economic, fiscal, foreign policy update… and this year’s Neoliberal Darwin Award winner:
The Military Industrial Complex.
All for want of honesty & integrity in our leadership.
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2023
