When the Oligarchs Don’t Need You Anymore

Kathleen Wallace

 February 11, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I’m not sure what else will be required as evidence that our government and society is being run by men who view the rest of us as poor quality commodities. They say as much in their “Dark Enlightenment” nonsense, in the Project 2025 Temu Ayn Rand papers, and of course, by their own actions. That is the best indicator of all. The use of children as pawns to abuse in order to compromise individuals of wealth and power is clear to anyone not firmly with scales on their eyes. There is no need at this point for a point of “disclosure”. It is grossly evident and to continue to ignore it will most certainly lead to more deaths and misery for the vast majority of people.

We have a group of men who are actively preparing themselves for a societal collapse. In fact, by their own writings, they invite it. They build bunkers to hurriedly protect themselves from the fallout of their own actions. They seem to only want enough humans around to serve them in ways that AI cannot and even that looks to be an infinitesimally small number. Perhaps they need enough to breed children to abuse? There are no plans coming forth to replace income with a UBI when jobs are lost to AI, and of course that is already occurring. In a nation flush with cash, but not for you, millions are cast off on Medicaid, in what can only be considered a premeditated murder of the masses.

But you see, they don’t care. It’s not an unfortunate side effect or a required austerity measure in a time of crisis. It is a class of individuals who do not see themselves as one of us. The concept of empathy, solidarity and working for a beautiful future is not a consideration for individuals wounded so profoundly at the core. If anything, this is why Empire comes down so hard on those who do show empathy, think of Alex Pretti helping the woman who was shoved to the ground by the enabler goon squad. They don’t have it in themselves to feel that profound warmth that comes from belonging and having others care for them in anything but a transactional manner. And for this, they want to eradicate others who show this concern for the well-being of their own neighbors.

The propaganda is relentless, but of course it must be. If these derangements of society came easily, then of course such a firm hold on the narrative would not be necessary. I once saw it mentioned that if women were truly to be subservient and this was indeed the natural order of things, it wouldn’t be so imperative to keep reminding them of it via religious dogmatism. These hierarchies are unnatural and to keep them from toppling, massive amounts of glue, tape and violence are needed. Every step of the way, whether it was taking away the commons or strong-arming labor into factories, it’s always been the same. It takes violence and unnatural coercion to plunge the vast majority of the populace into lives that don’t make sense, to lives less free than animals in nature.

There is no reason for technology to have been used to further subjugate us. In a just society, these advances would be used for things like mitigating natural disasters and allowing the lives of citizens to be meaningful and connected. Can you even imagine what would be possible if most of the populace weren’t scared of ruin via one misstep? What grand inventions have we missed? What works of art? They say the average medieval peasant had more days off than current workers. Think of the inherent cruelty in a society taking away the right to choose to be a mother and then not even giving said mother one single required paid day off before needing to return to work. That’s not allowing meaningful lives. It’s the factory farming of humans. In such a setting, there is little time for anything but base existence. Is it any wonder there might be a need for massive anti-depressants, stimulants and whatever else can numb the pain? None of this is necessary; it’s simply to prop up a class of individuals who got there via a profound ability to step on others in a manner most of us would find repellent and impossible.

These tech bro nightmare freaks also have sickening fantasies of AI immortality. They see a future without biological humans at all, save their own uploaded consciousness. They have aligned with simple, sick, malignant narcissists of the political class who serve as their accomplices on this dystopian road.

Until they can hack immortality, they seem to be holding something of a breeder fetish like we have seen with Elon Musk. Father to what……14 or so kids that he doesn’t see or care for? I wonder if he can even remember their names. And this is the ketamine riddled man given the DOGE keys? In what universe is this anything but an attempt to destroy?

We’ve gotten a taste from the disgusting Epstein files that that guy had a breeder fetish as well. So many DNA tests were ordered that the manufacturing company said WTF? These men are so profoundly disturbed and with the dangerous mix of certainty that they are a completely different species than the 99.99999%, it seems to be a bit dangerous to give them such power over us. Again, they view the populace as mere commodities and most of us have aged out of what they deem useful.

The pedophilia is so telling about not just their sick enjoyment of torturing the innocent, but also how they view our entire world. They voraciously take in the most destructive manner, and they leave the damage in their rear-view mirror. You don’t have to feel for the victims or for the earth if you see yourself as some kind of demi-god. The fact that so many don’t realize the endgame of the oligarchs is troubling. It’s quite terrifying to realize that you are surrounded by monsters, but keeping your eyes closed really won’t do anything but allow them to take you without a fight.

Many are placing their hopes on Democrats standing up and staunching the bleed. If you are looking to a tool like Chuck Schumer to do anything beyond his role of keeping Israel in the manner she is accustomed to, you will be sorely disappointed.

The Epstein files and their bizarre release/not release have opened up a bit of the tawdry world that the middle-level accomplices occupied. They were enamored to be in that world and open to any level of class traitorship in order to be near power and lack of accountability. Looking at you, Chomsky et al.

We have had dozens of women come forward to say what had been done to them as children by these men. Some even went to the FBI— it looks like as far back as what…the 90s? I’m sure nasty men like Michael Cohen have threatened many of them. I’m guessing some have even likely died, whether by their own hands or not.

It’s ridiculous that we seem to need a corrupt government to hand us the files in a package with a bow to take this seriously. We have goddamn Donald Trump saying pedophile/incest adjacent crap out loud over and over through the years. Red MAGA hat after Red MAGA hat (I’m replacing red flag with that). You know, maybe when people tell you who they are, believe it, as they say.

I believed the women who came forward then, and I believe them now. Instead of playing Bondi’s game with file drippings and wondering who is under the black lines, I think we should believe the critical mass of victims.

One important aspect of this is to realize that in the same manner as the Palestinians have been treated, you and yours will be treated likewise. This is the case with the “disposable” girls in the Epstein class. Our lives mean nothing to them. It is intersectional in all the terrible ways. An older man without a job any longer due to AI will not be treated with any more deference than the Palestinian woman, the trafficked child. This is our great difficulty, because most Americans certainly do not realize this, but they are getting a hint at it when they see white moms shot in the face after saying “I’m not mad at you”.

You don’t need to wait for a government that lives by lies to tell you your truth. Does it feel correct that a man like Epstein would fade away into that good night? On a night that the cameras weren’t working and the guards were sleeping? When a mortician of regard says…hmmm, those photos of “dead Epstein” don’t look all that dead? You don’t have to feel you are a Q-Anon Wayfair box nut to ask some questions about what the wealthy will do for each other and what they will do against you.

But the strongest takeaway is to know that none of this depravity is accidental, be it the Medicaid cancellations or the pedophilia. It’s an ethos these powerful men share and there is nothing for the rest of us but misery, subjugation and death if we allow it to continue.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

 

The book only gets 3 stars, but is considered great literature

A new study from the Center for Humanities Computing and the Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text at Aarhus University shows that star ratings of books are not always accurate.

Aarhus University

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You may have tried it yourself: to deselect a book because it "only" has about three stars on Goodreads. But according to a new study from the Center for Humanities Computing (CHC) and the Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text (TEXT), these books may well contain great literary value.

Goodreads is an international platform where millions of readers rate books between one and five stars. The average is often used as a quick indicator of quality – also by publishers, authors and researchers. But when a book ends up in the middle of the scale, the number says far less than you might think.

The researchers from CHC and TEXT have analyzed about 9,000 American novels published between 1880 and 2000. They have particularly focused on just over 2,000 books with average Goodreads ratings in the middle field. By comparing the readers' stars with other measures of literary quality, the researchers have investigated what is hidden behind the seemingly mediocre figures.

The results show that about 30 percent of these 2,000 "mediocre" books are rated as literary important or of high quality according to other criteria – for example, whether they are considered classics, are part of education or have had great cultural significance.

According to the researchers, the mediocre ratings are often not due to the fact that the books are boring. On the contrary. 

A key finding of the study
A key finding of the study is that disagreement among readers does not arise by chance:

"For books that are considered to be of literary significance, we see that the more readers who rate them, the greater the disagreement between readers. Some give top marks, others are critical – and it is precisely this spread that characterises books that engage," says PhD student Pascale Feldkamp, who is behind the study together with colleagues from the Center for Humanities Computing and TEXT.

For books that are generally assessed as less important, the same correlation is not seen. Here, several assessments do not lead to major disagreement. This indicates that split ratings are not just an expression of random noise, but are linked to books that actually mean something to readers.

When disagreement grows as more people read along, it is not a sign of indifference – but of importance." The study thus challenges the notion that a book's value can be read directly in its average star rating. An average rating can cover very different situations. Sometimes it is an expression of a broad but lukewarm agreement. Other times, it hides strong and opposing reading experiences that cancel each other out on average," says Pascale Feldkamp.

An average may look neutral, but can in reality be the sum of strong opinions that point in different directions.

The study's main conclusion is therefore that an average Goodreads rating does not automatically mean that a book is unimportant. On the contrary, it can point to works that are controversial, polarizing – or later recognized as literarily important.

According to the researchers, if reader data from platforms like Goodreads is to be used to say something meaningful about literary success or value, it requires a more nuanced approach. It is not enough to look at one number. You also have to look at how many people are assessing and how much they disagree.

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Behind the research results
Study type: Computational study
Authors: Pascale Feldkamp Moreira, Yuri Bizzoni, Mia Jacobsen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Kristoffer L. Nielbo
Link to the scientific publication "The Goodreads' ›Mediocre‹: Assessing a Grey Area of Literary Judgements"  in Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften
External funding: Velux Fonden

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fact box

 

Highly rated books with a polarizing character

Highly rated, acclaimed books can get a medium rating because they evoke strong, opposing reactions in readers – either because of style, theme or point of view. Some examples:

• James Joyce: Ulysses (stylistically experimental)
• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita(provocative theme)
• William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (fragmented narrator's voice)
• Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano(complex style)
• Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead(politically controversial)
• Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins: Left Behind (Ideologically Polarizing)

The average rating can thus hide both fascination and frustration.

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DOI

10.17175/sb006_002 

Article Title

The Goodreads’ ›Mediocre‹: Assessing a Grey Area of Literary Judgements

DYSTOPIA NOW!

What Mess Will Trump Have Made of the USA by 2029?

If he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.

LONG READ

Alfred W. Mccoy
Dec 26, 2025

TomDispatch

For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.

Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.

From the time that Henry George published his influential futuristic treatise Progress and Poverty in 1879, inspiring many of the Progressive Era’s key reforms, American writers across the political spectrum have used the future to frame an agenda for present-day political action, sometimes progressive, sometimes violently regressive. Published in 1938, Ayn Rand’s second novel, Anthem, was a futuristic saga whose hero, named “Equality 7-2521,” rejected the socialist society that raised him and struggled to rediscover his inherent individuality, articulating libertarian ideals that would inspire generations of American conservatives. And amid the social turmoil of the 1970s, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries imagined a future armed revolt against the US government that has provoked violence from generations of white nationalists.

So, with some trepidation, let me venture into the immediate future and imagine what the United States will be like when President Donald J. Trump finally leaves office (if, of course, he does) in January 2029. To keep such projections within the bounds of possibility, let’s clip the wings of our imaginations and hew closely to Trump’s policies and policy statements.

America’s Place in the World of 2029

In just 11 action-packed months since his January inauguration, President Trump has already demolished the fundamental geopolitics that have undergirded US global hegemony for the past 80 years. Even if he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.

To grasp something of the scope of his impact, it’s necessary to briefly outline the world order Washington built over those 80 years. After fighting for four years and sacrificing 400,000 lives during World War II, Washington captured vital bastions at both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass and spent the next 40 years of the Cold War ensuring its control of that strategic continent with circles of steel—military alliances like NATO, hundreds of overseas military bases, powerful naval fleets, and a massive armada of nuclear-armed aircraft and missiles. With the Sino-Soviet communist bloc largely trapped behind what came to be known as the Iron Curtain, Washington crushed most of their attempts to break out of geopolitical isolation with deft covert operations. As the communists flailed, the US continued to build a global order, while patiently waiting for those socialist economies to implode.

President Trump has put forward a tricontinental geopolitical vision for the world’s major powers—with Russia dominant in the old Soviet sphere, China acting as an Asian hegemon, and the US securing the Americas.

When the Cold War finally ended in 1991, Washington got busy knitting the world into a unified market through massive capital exports, free-trade agreements, and a grid of global communications, thanks in part to satellites and fiber-optic cables. Beyond its awesome array of raw economic and military power (and the distinctly less than successful wars that it fought), Washington prettied up its intrusions into sovereign societies worldwide through its advocacy of universal human rights, its commitment to the rule of law (unless it got in the way of American interests), and its support for international institutions like the United Nations that assured inviolable sovereignty for even the smallest of countries. Thanks to a delicate balance of force, beneficence, and self-interest, the United States would enjoy both great national wealth and historically unprecedented global dominance.

Washington’s world order, like any complex global system, was distinctly flawed and its failings were (to say the least) legion, but its achievements weren’t inconsequential either. After two world wars that left 100 million dead, there has not been a major global conflagration for 80 years (though from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, there were all too many disastrous American-inspired local or regional wars). The share of the world’s population living on less than $3 a day dropped markedly from 43% in 1990 to just 11% in 2020. Reflecting those improved conditions, average life expectancy worldwide rose sharply for the first time in several centuries, from 46 years in 1950 to 72 years in 2020. Similarly, the world literacy rate climbed from 66% in 1976 to 87% in 2020. Whether from choice or necessity, we humans have enjoyed increasing freedom of movement, with the number of migrants globally reaching a record 304 million in 2024, representing nearly 4% of the total global population.

Not only did the US have the largest economy and military budget, but until recently, it was the world’s leading donor for public health and poverty eradication, sparing many millions of the world’s poor from the worst kinds of hunger and disease. All of those significant improvements in the human condition had complex causes, but the fundamental fact remains that they were products, direct or indirect, of Washington’s world order.

Then came President Donald Trump. From the first day of his second term in office in January 2025, he set out to tear down the US global order and transform America’s place in the world. With billionaire Elon Musk serving as his in-house wrecking ball, he quickly demolished the US Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than 80% of American nutritional and medical aid in ways expected, by 2030, to lead to a staggering 14 million extra deaths globally (including more than 4.5 million children). The misery now being inflicted on poor people crowded into cesspool camps from the Congo to Bangladesh defies description. In addition, by shutting down Voice of America broadcasts along with those USAID programs, the US has committed what one former NATO official called “soft power suicide,” clearing the way, as political scientist Joseph Nye put it, for China “to fill the vacuum that Trump is creating.”

Throughout the Cold War and its aftermath, a key US force multiplier was its global network of alliances—the Rio Pact for the Americas, five key bilateral pacts along the Pacific-island chain from Japan to Australia, and, above all, the extraordinarily effective NATO alliance for Europe. In 11 short months, Trump has already ruptured all the alliances that assured America’s security for some 75 years. On April 2 (or what he called “liberation day”), the president also slapped punitive tariffs on imports from loyal allies, ranging from 20% for the European Union to 24% for Japan.

Reflecting his longstanding hostility to the NATO alliance, particularly its Article Five mutual-defense clause, Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) states that Europe faces “the stark process of civilizational erasure,” battered by “regulatory suffocation,” multi-racial migration, and “cratering birthrates” that raise the question of whether its nations will stay “strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Through their supposed “subversion of democratic processes,” the president has also claimed that European governments are resisting US attempts “to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.” To save Europe from itself, in that NSS the Trump administration came out for the growth of “patriotic European parties” (in other words, far-right ones), while discouraging the very idea of NATO “as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

In case anyone missed the meaning of that message, Trump told a Politico interviewer on December 8 that some European leaders are “real stupid” because their tolerance of immigrants from places like the “prisons of the Congo” will ensure that key European nations like Germany “will not be viable countries any longer.”

The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

More broadly, President Trump has put forward a tricontinental geopolitical vision for the world’s major powers—with Russia dominant in the old Soviet sphere, China acting as an Asian hegemon, and the US securing the Americas. By claiming Greenland, branding Canada “the 51st state,” and threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal during his first weeks in office, Trump articulated a strategy grounded, not in global hegemony, but in geopolitical dominance over the Western Hemisphere.

Formalizing that strategy in the recent NSS, the White House proclaimed a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at a “potent restoration of American power” to achieve an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” To that end, the US will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the US Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” It will also push out “non-Hemispheric competitors” (think: China), giving the US distinctly preferential access to the region’s “many strategic resources.” In essence, according to the NSS, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”

In reality, Trump was miming the convoluted Victorian rhetoric of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famed corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a December 1904 message to Congress, Roosevelt disdained any “unmanly” inclination to a “peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice.” Instead, he embraced the manly duty of the “great civilized nations of the present day” to ensure that the countries of the Western Hemisphere remain “stable, orderly, and prosperous.” Cases of “chronic wrongdoing… may… force the United States, however reluctantly… to the exercise of an international police power.” Faced with the “intolerable conditions in Cuba” (then under Spanish rule), T.R. proclaimed it “our manifest duty” to take “justifiable and proper” action “in asserting the Monroe Doctrine.” (Think Venezuela at the moment!)

Though he promised the use of only a restrained “police power” in the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt opened the door to decades of US interventionism, with the Marines occupying Nicaragua for 20 years (1912-33), Haiti for 19 years (1915-34), and the Dominican Republic for nine years (1916-24). Just as Trump’s chatter about making Canada the “51st state” has sparked “anger and incredulity” in America’s closest ally, so his proclamation of a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, exemplified by his recent devastating gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Sea, is likely to inflame the anti-imperialist sentiment that lies just beneath the skin of Latin America, thereby corroding relations with our southern neighbors.

Trump’s Asia-Pacific Policy

While Trump’s posture toward Latin America is grimly clear, his Asia-Pacific policy seems muddled by ambiguity, if not outright confusion. In early October, oblivious to the rapid erosion of US hegemony in Asia, Trump declared a “trade war” with China, imposing a 130% tariff on its imports and a complete ban on exporting “critical software” to that country. By month’s end, however, he had to swallow his bravado after Beijing retaliated by barring the export of strategic rare earth metals needed for the US military’s weaponry (and so much else). That forced Trump to “fold” during his October 30 summit with China’s President Xi Jinping in South Korea—quickly rescinding his high tariffs and removing the ban on the export of Nvidia’s semiconductor chips that China desperately needs for Artificial Intelligence.

In the seven years since Trump’s last trade war with China in 2018, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that country has pursued “greater self-reliance in food and energy… for an era of sustained hostilities with the US.” According to the New York Times, the vivid diplomatic defeat at that South Korean summit was an historic inflection point, showing that “China could now face America as a true peer” and had already become “America’s geopolitical equal.”

Trump’s delusions of dominance over China pervade his recent National Security Strategy. Amid all its self-indulgent palaver, it displays a dangerously willful ignorance about fast-changing geopolitical realities in the Asia-Pacific region. By the time Trump leaves office in 2029, China’s gross domestic product will already be larger than America’s and it’s expected to become 36% bigger in the years to follow.

Trump’s Domestic Legacy

Just as Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is damaging the country’s diplomatic relations with Asia, Europe, and Latin America, so his domestic policies are likely to cripple this country’s economic competitiveness. Despite his stated commitment to building “the world’s most robust industrial base,” his energy policy is damaging, if not destroying, the country’s largest industry—automobile manufacturing. In 2024, the US automobile industry produced 3% of the country’s gross domestic product, created more than 8 million jobs, supplied transport for 92% of all American households, and accounted for $1.6 trillion in consumer finance, second only to home mortgages.

By his aggressive attack on the very idea of climate change and on America’s once-promising green-energy infrastructure, President Trump is inflicting serious damage on Detroit’s future capacity to compete against China’s rapidly rising production of electric vehicles (EVs). According to the International Energy Agency, EV purchases will reach 20 million in 2025, or one-quarter of world auto sales, and are on track to hit 40% by 2030, with China already accounting for 70% of global EV production. While EVs are still 30% more expensive than gas vehicles in the US, in China they are less expensive and now account for 60% of that country’s car sales (compared to just 11% in the US).

By 2029, Trump’s inept mix of foreign and domestic policies will confront American workers with a “hell-broth” of powerful economic troubles not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

With massive robotic factories cranking out EVs by the millions, a fleet of dedicated ships to carry those low-cost cars to global markets, and new factories opening in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, China seems poised to conquer the global car market with models like BYD’s self-driving Seagull EV priced at only $9,000. Just as making an iPhone in America now seems almost unimaginable, by the time Trump leaves office, the US automotive industry could find itself incapable of producing a competitive EV, potentially losing access to half the world’s auto market. “I have 10,000 dealers around the world,” said Ford’s CEO Jim Farley recently. “Only 2,800 are in the US. So you do the math.” And given Trump’s costly tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (among other things), that core American manufacturing industry is likely to be in truly unsettled shape by 2029.

More broadly, the Trump administration is crippling this country’s overall economic competitiveness by cutting its scientific research and conducting a shotgun wedding between fossil fuels and the nation’s electrical grid. According to the International Renewable Energy Association, in 2024, solar power was 41% less expensive (and onshore wind 53% less) than the cheapest form of fossil fuel. When backed by cost-effective storage batteries, those alternative energies now provide the quickest, most affordable means to expand electrical infrastructure in developed and developing nations.

But by slashing EV tax credits, blocking offshore wind farms, and opening yet more federal lands for oil and natural gas drilling, President Trump is using the full powers of his presidency to derail America’s adoption of cost-competitive green energy. And keep in mind that he’s doing so at the very moment when a boom in energy-intensive data centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is straining the national grid, while simultaneously raising electricity costs for households and businesses. By the time he leaves office in 2029, American industry, still wedded to costly fossil fuels, could be paying double the price of foreign competitors for energy, rendering its products unaffordable, even at home.

Through a mix of ignorance and arrogance, the Trump administration is also hampering this country’s ability to conduct basic scientific research, the seedbed of its economic innovation for more than a century. Although immigrants have won 36% of the country’s Nobel Prizes in science over the past 125 years, the White House has now restricted H-1B visas for skilled immigrants and imposed a nearly 20% cut in foreign graduate students at US universities. By denying university science labs such critical student workers and slashing the nation’s budget for basic science by up to 57%, the Trump White House is liquidating the world’s most successful research industry and effectively ceding the rest of the 21st century to China.

A Witch’s Brew of Failure

Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has used a seemingly random mélange of policies to mix a malevolent brew. Think of it as akin to the one that the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth cast into their cauldron to see the future, as they chanted: “Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog… For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.”

Indeed, by 2029, Trump’s inept mix of foreign and domestic policies will confront American workers with a “hell-broth” of powerful economic troubles not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 2030, Trump’s tariffs will have cut US consumption by a projected 3.5% and, over the longer term, are likely to reduce average wages by 5% and GDP by 6%—a major change for an economy that has long enjoyed steady growth. With AI data centers projected to consume as much as 12% of the nation’s electricity by 2029, and Trump blocking the green energy that’s the only quick fix to meet rising demand, consumers could face an average increase of 20% in their electric bills by 2030 (and a possible 25% rise in states with data centers). While AI might raise living standards over the long-term, its unchecked expansion, as mandated by one of Trump’s executive orders, could contribute to the loss of 300 million full-time jobs globally and negatively impact two-thirds of all employment in the United States.

Worse yet, his demolition of the Biden administration’s attempt at a green energy revolution will have untold consequences for the US economy (not to say for the planet itself). As China, with its low-cost, high-efficiency EVs, conquers the global auto market by 2030 (and the larger green-energy production market as well), it will become the world’s largest economy, with exports surpassing its present record-breaking trillion-dollar mark and its currency increasingly dominant in global trade.

With the US global retreat leaving China and what’s likely to become its satellite state, Russia, dominant on the Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the world’s population, Washington will be forced to fall even more fully back on the Western Hemisphere (where its welcome is already wearing ever thinner). With its presence certain to shrink across the planet, the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency will, as J.P. Morgan noted in a recent study, certainly “come into question.” With erratic US government policies undermining “the perceived safety and stability of the greenback” and US tariffs causing “investors to lose confidence in American assets,” there are already clear market signs of a global “de-dollarization” that will raise the cost of servicing this country’s national debt and cut into every aspect of the American economy. By 2030, the sum of those changes—compounded by a 20% increase in household electricity prices, soaring healthcare costs, and a “white collar bloodbath” as AI kills off half of all entry-level jobs—will have distinctly begun to reduce the quality of life in this country.

As Shakespeare’s witches saw the future in their cauldron’s bubbling brew and said of Macbeth, a man who would be king (whatever the cost), “Something wicked this way comes,” they also caught our Trumpian moment so many centuries later.

© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Alfred W. Mccoy
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power". Previous books include: "Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation" (University of Wisconsin, 2012), "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project)", "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State", and "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade".
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