Sunday Cutdown LII (24 November 2024)

Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document

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1) The “day without” is coming

CNN: Here’s how mass deportations could change the housing market

NEWSWEEK: Donald Trump's Deportation Plan Causes 'Panic' Among Farmers

The DVD case image recalls a 2004 film comedy about what life would be like in California if, all of a sudden, all the Mexican migrants magically disappeared.

We are going to run that experiment, it would seem, although the gamut of talk on this subject ranges from “complete theater” to “absolutely going to happen big-time.” It does remind me of those early portions in Holocaust movies where the previously comfortable/safe Jews in Country X of the Third Reich are all telling each other that it’s just a big bluff to scare them and that it will blow over. You, of course, in the audience, just want to scream out Take it seriously!

We’re at a moment where fooling ourselves is natural. Whenever we get a new president, there’s that hope that a new broom will do all manner of great sweepings. And, when you think about it, Trump, given all his uncertainty and threats and bluster, could instantly morph into the Nixon who goes to X (whatever X is). His pull on his base is such that, if he told them the sky was pink and that that was good, much of America would embrace that idea fervently.

That is serious power for a man who wields power un-seriously.

I mean, that’s the genius of our system: no matter how or why we get stuck in any one administration, the next one can come along and rejigger the board, making everything that much better or easier or clearer.

Trump has that moment right now. He can use it to teach or to learn — the hard way.

Understand: Trump is not an expert on anything other than those skills that got him elected. Win-the-deal he knows, but operate-the-business he does not, having consistently and almost comically failed time and again in the latter portion.

He’s also surrounded by experts at being anti-expert — another scary parallel to You Know Who.

So, betting on difficult lessons? Seems like good odds for now.

Meaning, Trump 2.0 is the system perturbation and soon we’ll see the ripple effects expanding outward across the economy in construction, farming, hospitality, and so on. It won’t be pretty and it may well negate the positive outflows of other of his economic policies, dooming us to plenty of tumult with zero gain.

But that would seem fitting, frankly.

He shook things up, but none for the better.

You can chisel that on marble now, I am guessing, and it’ll age just fine in the years and decades ahead..

2) Our “civil war” SECDEF-select

GUARDIAN: Trump’s Pentagon pick Hegseth wrote of US military taking sides in ‘civil war’

The tattoos are just the surface expression.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics …

In one of his five published books he wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies”.

And this guy is supposed to de-politicize the military? Un-woken it?

You have to wonder how much of the MAGA Right wants to see the US military patrolling our streets.

But again, we can file this all under “just talk,” right? Just theater.

I sense a great deal of wasted effort looming on the horizon.

3) Iatrogenesis in climate change responses

WAPO: How a change in rice farming unexpectedly made India’s air so much worse

You start out trying to make things better and they only get worse (iatrogenesis). This is the average man’s experience working plumbing in his own house (I used to do a lot of repair-after-repair plumbing as a super at a Boston apartment complex back in the late 1980s).

An Indian initiative to preserve vanishing groundwater by delaying the annual sowing of rice has led to a dramatic worsening of air pollution in New Delhi and the surrounding region, already infamous for its suffocating smog, according to farmers and researchers. And no one saw it coming.

For decades, farmers have burned the field stubble that remains after harvesting rice to prepare for the next crop.

But when government officials ordered a delay in the summer sowing of rice by a few weeks in part of India to take advantage of the coming monsoon rain, they did not consider that winds would have shifted by harvest time. Now, the harvest coincides with winter weather, and the winds blow the smoke across the plains of northern India.

New Delhi today reminds me of many cities in China twenty years ago.

I would get a sinus infection every trip to China back then.

Believe it or not, but this black soot is making its way all the way to the Himalayan mountain ranges, where its accumulating deposits only facilitate unusual melting there.

India’s got a tough and tricky road ahead, but the world needs them to succeed. It really does.

4) That emergent global majority middle-class (or better)

VISUAL CAPITALIST: How the Global Distribution of Wealth Has Changed (2000-2023)

This is the “damage” wrought by Peak Globalization: 75% of the world’s population getting by on less than $10k in wealth in 2000, dropping to 40% (almost cut in half!) by 2023.

Meanwhile, the above-$10k-wealth band has expanded from 25% to 60%.

No wonder everybody’s so mad.

Actually, I’m being serious here.

Remember my dictum: the poor want protection from their circumstances and the rich (e.g., Musk) want protection from the poor. But the middle class? They want protection from the future — from uncertainty. They’ve achieved something and they don’t want to lose it.

So yeah, a majority global middle class feeling nervous about the future is going to be unreasonable alright, and it’s going to want serious change from serious leaders.

5) Globalization changing? The deuce you say!

Somebody’s flying the coop!

FT: Globalisation is not dead — it’s just changed

The comforting notion (very ANM in character) … uh maybe: Globalization has grown beyond America’s ownership/veto. The multipolarity we claimed we always sought is now truly here, disturbing the hell out of us because now we can’t really expect the world to bail us out forever (buying our sovereign debt) if we refuse to reform at home (the Progressive Era we so desperately need to regrade our economic landscape and re-middle-class our political landscape).

In this ultimate shit-hitting-fan moment, we’ve elected a total ostrich of a leader who’s convinced that our market power alone will force the entire world to backtrack into our Golden Age at their cost.

Brilliant diagnosis, just seven decades too late. Trump in a nutshell.

Optimistic to some, delusional to me.

Last month, Sergio Ermotti, head of UBS, issued a stark warning on these pages. “For most of my nearly 50 years in finance, markets operated on the assumption that global capital would flow with increasing ease . . . fostering growth, innovation and improved standards of living.”

However, “that dynamic is now being upended”, he lamented. “Trade tensions between the US and China have led to declines in the flows of goods, services, investments, and labour.”

Must we say goodbye to both bathwater AND baby?

It seems we are slated to run that experiment — again. Time to get our Smoot-Hawley on. That gem of a legislation is analyzed as accounting for a two-thirds drop in global trade in a mere half-decade.

But I’m sure we can do better this time.

The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard!

The key point is this: what happens next to globalisation does not depend on Trump alone. Other countries are stepping into the breach — including, but not limited to, China. Latin America is a case in point.

The next US Treasury secretary should pay attention — particularly given the $9tn of dollar debt that they need to sell to investors all around the world.

Pish posh!

Our re-new leader is a genius at selling debilitating, catastrophic debt.

6) DHL delivers some perspective

THE LOAD STAR: 'Retreating from globalisation can put your competitive position at risk'

Report from the DHL-funded research center at NYU.

The gist:

Claims of a fracturing global economy brought about by deteriorating China-US relations continue to be overstated, but Russia’s international ties have been battered by its war on Ukraine, according to the latest Global Connectedness update from DHL.

Steve Altman, director of the DHL Initiative on Globalisation at NYU Stern’s Center for the Future of Management noted that the tracker indicated countries were “finding creative ways to preserve benefits they derive from globalisation”.

“In turbulent times, it is essential to look beyond the political crossfire about globalisation to make informed decisions based on how international flows are actually developing,” Mr Altman continued.

“While there is no guarantee the recent resilience of global flows will continue, it highlights how creative ways can preserve benefits of globalisation. As long as markets stay connected, a company unilaterally retreating from globalisation can put its competitive position at risk.”

Well, if you’re going to insist on being reasonable about this, then we’re not going to have any fun!

7) The ICC. What can you do?

NYT: ‘This Helps Netanyahu’: Israelis Rally Around Leader Over Warrant, for Now

By all rights, both Netanyahu and Gallant are getting what they earned: in response to a terrific attack, they’ve set in motion a comprehensively lethal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. So, yeah, I get why the ICC acted. How could it not?

But two realities dent this effort:

First, the ICC is set up to punish leaders in countries unable to police their own, which is not the case in Israel.

Has Israel the state taken too long on this score, passively inviting the ICC’s “aggression” here? Yes, it has.

But the second-to-be-named reality renders that failure moot — for now: the ICC was not set up to adjudicate or judge conflicts involving great powers — just smaller ones that are, in effect, orphaned by the world security system. The ICC was designed to step-in when the system’s larger powers would otherwise not do so.

That’s an intensely realist perspective on the ICC, but there it is.

Israel does not fall into that either category. It is a democracy, a truly great power, and a nuclear one at that.

So no, the ICC warrants won’t have any appreciable effect on what Bibi does next. But, history is most definitely coming for him. It’s just going to take a lot longer than these legal proceedings.

8) Remove Musk, insert Chinese

SCMP: China tech firm gains altitude as Brazil embraces alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink

The details:

A Chinese tech company has signed a deal in Brazil that positions it as a potential challenger to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet constellation in the region.

Shanghai-based SpaceSail on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding with Brazil’s state-owned telecoms firm Telecomunicacoes Brasileiras (Telebras) coinciding with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the Latin American country. The agreement will provide broadband internet services in Brazil in 2026.

SpaceSail plans to bring satellite-based internet access to areas with limited connectivity by deploying its Qianfan, or “Thousand Sails”, constellation, a low-Earth orbit satellite network currently under construction that would support Brazil’s national digital inclusion policies, according to its official WeChat account.

The initiative is intended to provide broadband services to schools, hospitals and rural communities, streamlining the delivery of essential public services in previously underserved regions while driving the country’s digital economic transformation.

Brazil wants to reduce reliance on Starlink, which dominates 46 per cent of the country’s satellite internet market, by seeking to diversify its satellite internet providers.

How did this all start? Brazil wanted X to crack down on disinformation and Musk told them to go fish, with his usual charmlessness.

What can I say? The man knows how to burn bridges.

9) The posturing is well underway for Ukraine’s endgame

REUTERS: Russia fires intercontinental ballistic missile in attack on Ukraine, Kyiv says

Strictly a show of force by Moscow, with ample warning to the US to prevent any accidental triggering of WWIII, so fear not.

But Russia is reminding us and the world that it can only be pushed so far in this conflict, and its timing of that message is clear enough: push Trump to force a deal upon Kyiv, winning him his much-sought-after (Obama got one for doing nothing!) Nobel Peace Prize.

Entirely possible because of the relief it would spread throughout the system (however misleading).

Are we on the verge of WWIII? Not really.

But salesmanship is salesmanship. Even if Trump going to Moscow ain’t exactly Nixon going to Beijing, the opportunity is there, along with a host of expectations.

The hardball approach here is to tell Vlad he can keep his bits but Ukraine is going into both NATO and the EU — pronto!

Trump sells that and he deserves the Nobel.

But I suspect he won’t aim that high, meaning a near-complete sellout of an ally in order to keep the strategic peace.

Yes, there is inherent value in that, just as there would be in any Taiwan scenario not worth its weight in system-destroying blood and treasure.

Stunning, I know, to be fighting over the kids this long after our Cold War divorce from the USSR, but there you have it: no winners, just a variety of losers who’ve all paid too much for “sacred” lands.

10) Being there, finally realized!

CNN: Trump's picks don't look like America. They look like Fox News

Trump hears something he likes on Fox News and hits his clicker, instantly transporting that talking head into a Senate confirmation hearing — or, better yet, right into office as a recess appointment.

America apparently wanted their celebrity president back and this is how that works.

Who cares about reality? The key question is, How does this play on Fox?

Murdoch has to be laughing himself to bed every night.

11) India ain’t nobody’s stooge

SCMP: America, not China, stands in the way of India becoming a great power

The subtitle says it all:

Washington makes no room for New Delhi’s geopolitical ambitions but considers the Asian giant as just another asset in its Beijing containment strategy.

The vast majority of the time I find Alex Lo insufferable: always the taunting, mocking, goading type — another voice we do not need in our American feed, stuffed as it is already with those, within our own ranks, who declare everything and everyone to be an idiot, stooge, fool, liar, etc. With these types, it’s always a pox on every house, with no real answers or a way ahead provided — entirely unhelpful venting without purpose except to gain more eyeballs.

In short, our non-mainstream media is woefully underperforming with no signs of improvement. It stuns me what absolute nonsense sells so well right now.

But this piece by Lo … it rings true — painfully so:

The expansion of Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific as a military-political-economic regional entity under Washington has not expanded, but actually shrunk, Modi’s influence.

True dat.

The problem for Modi is that there is a fundamental but unbridgeable gap between India’s grand ambitions for itself and Washington’s design for it, which is no more than a bulwark against China’s alleged expansionism.

“Alleged expansionism” is fair enough, because, it truth, China has no stomach or desire for true expansionism — just the virtual kind through the extension of information ecosystems under Beijing’s firm control, along with other nibbling-like-a-silkworm forms of physical-if-largely-symbolic encroachment.

But India is too smart for that, as well as being too smart to play Washington’s junior partner in a China containment strategy.

For now, India is the most sensible member of this three-way relationship.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

12) Signs of the apocalypse

NYT: Putin Sees America Hurtling to Disaster, With Trump at the Wheel

NYT: Trump’s Way Could Win the Contest With China Once and for All

FOX NEWS: Ukrainian troops train for trench warfare near France's WWI battlefields

Per my rock-paper-scissors analysis on Friday:

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Putin sees an America on its last legs with Trump’s inherent self-destructiveness, while China hawks in the US dream of a Reagan-like magical takedown of the Chinese Communist Party — confusing coincidence with causality in both instances.

People in power believing in crazy stories they keep telling themselves: it’s a serious problem alright, one that should keep us all on our toes.

Meanwhile, the pointlessness of the Russia-Ukraine fight is made glaringly apparent by Ukrainian troops training for trench warfare in the old WWI battlefields of France.

While evidence of the Military Singularity abounds, we still dream of resurrecting old forms of warfare, to include toying with nukes.

It is insane, this fixation on hard, kinetic solutions for a world being overrun by digitalization and the emergence of AI. This goes way beyond fighting the last battle or preparing for the last war.

We have entered a period of strategic cluelessness, and that is dangerous.

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