February 18, 2024 | The Coming Crash of Bigness

[Globalism has peaked, says my colleague James Howard Kunstler, and with it a trend toward corporate bigness that has all but extinguished quality and vitality from the marketplace.  Bloated corporatism is about to come crashing down, he says, in a process of creative destruction that will allow us to rescale the economy so that it better serves our needs as individuals.  With his permission, I have reprinted his most recent essay, Think About It, from Clusterfuck Nation.  On Amazon, here’s a selection of his brilliantly insightful books, many of them bestsellers  RA ]

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“It’s not enough to be against globalism or the WEF, we have to also be for something better.” — Tom Luongo, Gold, Goats ‘n Guns

Mr. Luongo makes an important point. I want you to think about this: There is a reason that the WEF-Globalist cabal is losing the battle to control and dominate the rest of us. They are trying to power straight into the opposing currents of reality. Above all, they seek to centralize power and decision-making. But the world is moving in the opposite direction. All of the WEF’s aims founder on the macro trends unspooling in history.

The rising rule for human affairs now is that anything organized at the giant scale is going to wobble and fail. There will not be any world government run by the creatures of Davos or Brussels, or Washington DC, or any other place that the grandiose imagine would be their seat of global power. It’s not going to happen, so you can stop worrying about it. But you’d better prepare for what is happening: everything in our world wants to get smaller, slower, finer, and more local. Anything that opposes these trends is pissing into the wind.

Since every activity we humans practice has to move in that direction, we are seeing colossal industries, institutions, and arrangements crack up: everything from national government to long-distance supply chains to giant retailing outfits to worldwide business networks to overgrown universities and high schools to transport matrices to metroplex cities to mega-farms to political parties.

Where the Rot Is Greatest

Where the rot is probably greatest, but more veiled for the moment, is in the operations of organized capital, the banks and money systems, including financial markets. When these monsters blow, as they must, all the others will shake, rattle, and roll. They have to blow because the fuel tank is emptying.

American oil production may be at an all-time peak now at about 13-million barrels-a-day, but most of that — about 8-million — is shale oil, which is a manifestation of our tremendous debt roll-up since 2009. Now that we’re at the absolute limits of debt, we’re also at the limits of shale oil. The production of shale oil paralleled the accumulation of all that debt both in size and rate of increase, and as the debt goes bad — meaning, unpayable — the organized capital sector will blow and shale oil production will fall as sharply as it rose. It is also a fact that shale oil is subject to natural limits — we’re out of “sweet spots” to drill.

That’s America. Europe is way worse because aside from whatever oil is left in the North Sea (not much), Europe has no oil. Europe’s largest gas field — Groningen in the Netherlands — is scheduled to cease operations in October of this year. You all know what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines. And then Germany, in some psychotic fugue state, shut down its entire nuclear power industry, while France is just not replacing its nuke plants as they age-out. Europe is completely screwed. They won’t have anything we might call modern industry. In the meantime, the WEF is playing them like a flügelhorn, keeping them distracted with “green” politics, an unchecked immigrant invasion, and sexual confusion.

The ‘Secret’ About Biden

A lot of the same nuttery afflicts us in the USA, of course, but none of that alters the real macro trends. Our federal government is not really getting more powerful, it’s cracking up, starting from the very top, with a mentally incompetent president — the secret that everybody knows. Agencies like the DOJ and Homeland Security may seem more tyrannical for the moment, but they are actually breaking as institutions because in their lawlessness they’ve lost the trust of the people — and nothing is more fundamental to a civilized society than trust in the law. That’s what consent of the governed  means.

So, the period of disorderly transition we’re in is not moving toward greater dominance by giants, but to the survival of the small and nimble. We will not see capital formation like the orgy of recent times; rather the vanishing of things falsely presumed to be capital, contraction not expansion. You’ll be struggling to identify and preserve real wealth, which you’ll find in unexpected places, like the friends you can count on, your reputation for honesty, your dependability, acquired skills, and your health, physical and psychological.

The WEF won’t be able to impose its Globalist nightmare of elite transhumanism and surveilled bug-eating serfs, and they know it now. They’re running scared. The vile Yuval Noah Harari has even said so publicly. The political figures and agents serving that cabal will be lucky if they are not hanged in the public squares. The political criminals here in America, the hoaxsters, the grifters, the seditionists, the Lawfare agents, the election fraudsters, know very well the danger of their looming prosecutions, and that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its blob henchmen and flunkies are acting like desperate lunatics.

Failed…Everything

Expect: failed national governments, maybe even state governments; failed supply lines; failed electric supply, failed trucking, failed big box stores, failed supermarkets, failed giant companies; failed banks, failed investments, failed money, failed news orgs, failed airlines, failed car dealers, failed hospitals, failed colleges, and much more. But don’t discount human ingenuity and resourcefulness, our ability to work-around and reinvent systems for daily life, even if it’s on a downscaled and more modest level.

Expect rebuilt local economies from production to wholesale to retail. Expect smaller stores, fewer things to buy but much of it better quality. Expect a lot less long-distance travel but a lot more happening in your locality. Expect the rebirth of local culture — theaters, live music, news-sheets, dances — to replace all the canned entertainments we’re used to. Expect small private academies to rise to replace the shuttered central schools. Expect small, local clinics to appear from the ashes of the medical conglomerates. Expect Americans to return to churches as an organizing mechanism for community relations. Expect more formality and less slobbery in public. Expect all of us to feel a renewed sense of gratitude for being here instead of rage, resentment, and grievance, because it’s likely there will be far fewer of us around.

Rick Ackerman February 18th, 2024

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