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http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-bidens-summit-of-no-shows/

Biden’s Summit of No-Shows

I tip my cap, as we all should, to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico. And to Presidents Luis Arce of Bolivia, Xiaomara Castro of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala and Nayib Bukele of El Savador. They all pointedly declined to join President Joe Biden at his Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last week, joining to protest Biden’s refusal to invite Miguel Díaz–Canel, Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega, the presidents of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua respectively.

Add it up. Eight of the region’s 33 nations were absent when Biden convened the summit “to demonstrate the resurgence of U.S. leadership in the region,” as the government-supervised New York Times forlornly put it. Don’t they ever get tired of these long-exhausted phrases over on Eighth Avenue?  

“There can be no Americas summit if all the countries of the American continent do not participate,” López Obrador explained at a press conference announcing his decision. “Or there can be, but we believe that means continuing with the politics of old, of interventionism, of a lack of respect for the nations and their people.”

Well said, Señor Presidente. Speaking more bluntly, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president until the U.S. cultivated a coup that forced him into exile three years ago, called the summit “stillborn.” There is nothing like clear, plain language to get a clear, plain point across.

This, the ninth such summit since Bill Clinton convened the first in Miami in 1994, was far more than Biden’s latest flop on the public relations side. In my read it is another sign among many that Washington is losing its hold over its southern neighbors. This could prove an historic shift, reversing more than a century of usually coercive influence.

Dollying out still further, the administration’s failure in Los Angeles last week signals a startlingly swift decline in American power everywhere other than Western Europe and among longtime allies such as Japan and South Korea. Biden drastically misread his moment with his “America is back” bit as he took office 18 months ago. Having overplayed his hand, he is now destined to preside over a significant inflection point in the late-phase imperium’s crumbling hegemony. It is exactly what Joe “Not on my watch” Biden wanted most to avoid.

A New Pink Tide

In the larger scheme of things, the L.A. nonevent is merely a passing signifier of more profound trends across Latin America. It is now evident that a second “Pink Tide” is flowing across the continent.

The original Pink Tide dates to the 1990s, when Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela turned sharply against the neoliberalism of the “Washington Consensus.” That wave ebbed in the first decade of the new century. The second wave began with López Obrador’s election in 2018.

Since then, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, El Salvador and Honduras have all returned left-tilted presidents. Luiz Inácio da Silva, the tenacious “Lula” and a leader of the first Pink Tide, is ahead of Jair Bolsonaro in the polls as Brazil’s October presidential elections approach.

To describe this tilt as leftward is to miss the larger point. As López Obrador makes clear every chance he gets, it is also an assertion of sovereignty and postcolonial pride. Nobody is judging anyone else’s political stripe.

And the tide is likely to prove more enduring this time, in my view. A fundamental shift in sentiment is evident across the continent. The region wants economic policies that serve its populations and to rid itself of the corrupt leaders los norteamericanos have long favored. It is also more conscious of its shared identity and increasingly intolerant of the long record of U.S. interventions, coups, occupations, electoral interference, and the rest of the entries in Washington’s blotted copy book.

Let us watch carefully as Colombia holds its runoff presidential election June 19. The first round, May 29, and all the opinion polls suggest that the nation’s next president is likely to be Gustavo Petro, a left-wing populist, a member long ago of the M–19 guerrilla movement, and a one-time mayor of Bogotá. If Petro proves victorious, we can consider the second Pink Tide consolidated. Colombia has long been Washington’s closest and most constant ally on the continent.

A year ago López Obrador proposed replacing the Organization of American States, which Washington has reduced over many years to a ventriloquist’s dummy that many Latin nations no longer take seriously, with a truly autonomous organization — “not a servant to anyone, but a mediator,” as he put it at the time. He subsequently called for a continent-wide institution similar to the European Union.

Who knows how long it will take for such ideas to bear fruit, if, indeed, they are destined to? But the drift in Latin America is clear, and it is not in Washington’s direction.

Latin America suffered arguably more than any other region in the Global South during the first Cold War if we measure this by the violent dictatorships the U.S. supported for decades in the name of countering an imaginary “Communist threat.” What Washington truly feared, as argued previously in this space, was a working social democracy that inspired others.

Latin American leaders, including rightists such as Bolsonaro, are emphatically not on for Cold War II. They’re rejecting the Biden administration’s framing of our moment as a war between democrats and authoritarians. Most immediately, they stand with the global majority in refusing to side with the U.S. and NATO in the proxy war against Russia they provoked via the filthily corrupt regime in Ukraine.

It’s interesting to watch now as variants of these currents manifest across the Pacific. America’s allies in East and South Asia are by and large more developed, less prone to political instability, and, with exceptions such as India, more inclined to cooperate under the vaunted American “security umbrella.” But something of the same picture emerges: You find few East Asian enlistees in America’s late-imperial campaigns.

A Stalled Pivot

Since the announcement of the Pentagon’s Pacific Defense Initiative (PDI) two years ago, it is increasingly acknowledged that the U.S. is not capable of waging the Cold War it dearly wants with China without the help of nations in the region. The emergent strategy, threaded through the PDI documents, is to build new air and naval bases in host nations, get them to let the U.S. station ballistic missiles and other weapons on their territory and persuade them to spend more on their militaries in America’s anti–Chinese cause.

Maybe it would have worked in past decades, and past decades are the Pentagon’s frame of reference. But there are no takers this time. Nobody wants American missiles pointed at China on their soil, not even the Japanese. Even the South Koreans insist as a matter of longstanding policy, that U.S.-deployed weapons are not welcome if they are used in Washington’s campaign against the mainland. 

During his summit with Japanese, Indian and Australian leaders in Tokyo last month, Biden announced the launch of a long-gestating Indo–Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) intended to counter China’s extensive aid and development programs in the region. What did the final communiqué promise? Little more than four poorly defined “pillars” in the IPEF and “collective discussions toward future negotiations.”

Are Biden’s people kidding? This is what they have to say in reply to China’s  extensive aid and development assistance throughout the Pacific, through which it is doing perfectly awful things such as building schools, hospitals, roads and bridges in the region’s underdeveloped nations.

Horrible, dangerous, a “threat to our national security interests” if ever there was one. We had better respond with “collective discussions.”

Is Joe Biden turning out to be the Rodney Dangerfield of American foreign policy? It’s tempting to think so: The man is one flub after another and he don’t seem to get no respect.

But he has the Europeans on his side. It is a mystery to many, but they have lined up via NATO in the proxy war against Russia and gone full-tilt with a sanctions regime that will hurt them more than the Russians. We will see how this goes as the war grinds on, inflation breaks records and furnaces go cold. Households in England are already burning wood.

Let’s net this out.

Biden has arguably reasserted American leadership in Britain and on the Continent, but he is failing everywhere else. He hasn’t divided the world into democrats and authoritarians, the Cold War II formulation to take the place of the Communist–anti-Communist binary that kept America going for the 40–odd years of Cold War I. He has divided the world between the small minority of the human community known as the West and the global majority.

My words for this are regression and failure. The first is to be regretted, always. But failure in the case of American foreign policy is almost always to be applauded. This is necessary if the empire is to be brought to an end.

I say this not because I dislike my country, though I am not much for nationalism, patriotism and all that. I say it because I refuse to let go of the great potential America has to do better.

The rest of the world will be better off when American primacy passes into history. So will Americans. The Spaniards, let us not forget, were better off once we relieved them of their empire during and in the aftermath of the Spanish–American war.

Let events relieve us of ours.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-economic-meltdown-has-roots-in-lockdown/

The Economic Meltdown Has Roots in Lockdown

American’s capacity for denial is truly a thing to behold. For at least 27 months, it should have been obvious that we were headed for a grave crisis. Not only that: the crisis was already here in March 2020. 

For weird reasons, some people, many people, imagined that governments could just shut down an economy and turn it back on without consequence. And yet here we are. 

Historians of the future, if there are any intelligent ones among them, will surely be aghast at our astounding ignorance. Congress enacted decades of spending in just two years and figured it would be fine. The printing presses at the Fed ran at full tilt. No one cared to do anything about the trade snarls or supply-chain breakages. And here we are. 

Our elites had two years to fix this unfolding disaster. They did nothing. Now we face terrible, grim, grueling, exploitative inflation, at the same time we are plunging into recession again, and people sit around wondering what the heck happened. 

I will tell you what happened: the ruling class destroyed the world we knew. It happened right before our eyes. And here we are. 

Last week, the stock market reeled on the news that the European Central Bank will attempt to do something about the inflation wrecking markets. So of course the financial markets panicked like an addict who can’t find his next hit of heroin. This week already began with more of the same, for fear that the Fed will be forced to rein in its easy-money policy event further. Maybe, maybe not; but recession appears impending regardless. 

The bad news is everywhere. Even in the midst of very tight labor markets and very low unemployment (mostly mythical when you consider labor force participation), companies have started to lay off workers. Why? To prepare for recession and the prospect of more economic chaos ahead. 

High-flying tech giants are curbing their enthusiasm too. Facebook apparently got tricked into paying big-time news outlets to let FB users have free access to articles — no doubt to those that reinforced government propaganda, since Mark Zuckerberg volunteered his entire company to be messengers for the regime back in 2020. FB got robbed and is now rethinking. No more freebies. 

This might as well be the theme of American life. No more charity. No more kindness. No more doing something for nothing. In inflationary times, everyone becomes more grasping. Morality takes a back seat and generosity is no more. It’s every man for himself. This can only get more brutal. 

There was something of a psychological break last Friday on the news of the CPI. It was not better than last month. It was not the same as last month. It was worse: 8.6% year-over-year, the worst it has been in 40 years. Honestly, everyone sort of knew this already in their heart of hearts but there is something about the official announcement that codified it. 

But let’s say we stack the data at two years rather than one year. What does it look like? It comes in at 13.6%. We have never seen anything like that. And it is truly starting to hurt as never before. Gas is above $5 and rents are more than $2,000 a month on average. The raises at work have stopped coming too. On the contrary, employers are expecting more productivity for ever less money in real terms. 

Prices have a very long way to go to wash out the paper sloshing around the world economy. Here is the wave of printing compared with current price trends. No way is this getting better before it gets much worse. 

Put it all together, especially with declining financials, along with supply-chain breakages and other economic dislocations, and this is why it feels like the walls are closing in. It’s because they are. And there truly is no way out for anyone at this point. 

No one should be shocked by any of this. It was all in the cards, an outcome guaranteed by ghastly policy over two presidential administrations, all enacted by a government that knows nothing about economics and cares nothing for basic commercial and human rights. You dispense with these things and you court disaster. 

And this is how you get the worst consumer confidence rating ever recorded. 

What makes today different from the 1970s is the pace at which this has all unfolded. Even a year ago, administration officials were claiming that everything would be just fine. Many people believed them, despite every bit of data pointing to exactly the opposite. Truly it feels like our lords and masters believe that their fantasies are more reality than reality itself. They say it and it somehow becomes true. 

Can you imagine that only last month, the Biden administration concocted the idea of establishing a “Disinformation Governance Board”? It was designed to script the truth to all social media and mainstream media outlets, censoring all dissent. The plan blew up only because it was too overtly Orwellian for public consumption. What matters here is the intent, which is nothing short of totalitarian. 

Politics is good fun for many people, a real sport and a good distraction from real life. But politics becomes a very serious business once personal finance makes the good life ever less viable. Right now everyone is searching for someone to blame and most people have hit on the old guy in the White House, who they somehow believe should do something about all these problems despite a lifelong career of knowing nothing and doing nothing about anything. 

What an astounding thing to see unfold before our eyes, and so quickly! The “malaise” of 1979 was a long time coming but the meltdown of 2022 has hit many people like a hurricane that somehow evaded detection from the radar. And yet it might be far from over. 

In 2020 and following, money appeared like magic in bank accounts all over the country. A third of the workforce had gotten used to languishing at home, pretending to work. Students started Zooming instead of learning. Adults who had spent a lifetime embracing the normal disutilities of labor gained for the first time a vision of a life of luxury without work. 

One result was a huge boom in personal savings, if only for a brief time. Some of the money was spent on Amazon, streaming services, and food delivery but also much of it landed in bank accounts as people started saving money as never before, most likely because the opportunities to spend on entertainment and travel dried up. Personal savings soared to over 30 percent. It felt like we were all rich! 

That feeling could not last. Once the economy opened up again, and people were ready to get out and spend their new riches, a strange new reality presented itself. The money they thought they had was worth far less. Also there were strange shortages in goods they once took for granted. Their new riches turned into vapor in a matter of months, with each month worse than the previous month. 

As a result, people had to deplete their savings and turn to debt finance just to keep up with the decline in purchasing power, even as their income in real terms turned dramatically south. In other words, government took away what it gave. 

The long period of denial seems suddenly over. People of all political persuasions are fuming in anger. The crime everywhere these days is not incidental or accidental. It is a mark of civilizational decline. Something has to give and will give at some point. The ruling class in this country and their friends around the world have caused tremendous wreckage. 

Here is the purchasing power of the dollar since 2018. Behold what our rulers have done!

And yet, what do our rulers have to say to us? They tell us to rely more on wind and sun — Janet Yellen’s exact words to the Senate last week. I used to think she was a smart cookie but I guess power turns even good minds to mush. Mush is exactly what they have created out of a once prosperous and hopeful nation. 

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is the rampant failure to connect cause and effect. The cause should be clear: this was all kicked off by the most egregious, arrogant, irresponsible, foolhardy, and brutal policies ever perpetrated on the whole of American life, all in the name of disease control. I’ve yet to see evidence that any of the people and agencies who did this to us are willing to reassess their decisions. Quite the contrary. 

There must be a reckoning. It was not the poor, the working classes, or the person on the street who did this. These policies were not an act of nature. They were never even voted upon by legislatures. They were imposed by men and women with unchecked administrative power under the mistaken belief that they had it all under control. They never did and they do not now.