The Children of Kali

Shooting the Rich

Just this week an unidentified (but undeniably hunky) gunman whacked the CEO of United Health Care in downtown Manhattan.

#entourageeffect

But what’s quickly subsumed the news cycle is the overwhelming schadenfreude of the collective public.

“Just desserts” and “poetic justice” are looming large in the comments sections.

One Reddit forum of doctors and nurses got shut down because of all the gallows-dark parody responses.

Clearly, this moment struck a nerve.

There was far less “thoughts and prayers” sympathy for the slain CEO than there was for all the patients and families who’ve been getting the shaft in their moments of need.

Really, this is just the latest flash point in rising “ Eat Shoot the Rich” sentiment. It’s unlikely to get better anytime soon.

Collapse-historian Peter Turchin argues that the two driving forces of civil war are “elite overproduction” where there’s too many Ivy League lawyers and not enough white shoe/gov’t jobs to house them all, and public “immiseration.”

Which is really just a fancy way of saying the citizen’s are getting increasingly broke, angry and screwed.

And that’s the flash point that erupted again this week when the United Health CEO got capped.

Today I want to focus on that “immiseration” factor that’s so electrified the zeitgeist.

(But it’s worth noting briefly that it’s those over-produced elites that are quite often harnessing all that populist resentment to their own ends. They come as a matching set in the culture game).

So before we unpack this rising public resentment, let's take a quick look at the key players on the MAGA "burn it down" patrol of “populist” 1% ers that fit Turchin’s predictions.

It's only after they got within sight of the last few rungs of the aspirational ladder that they looked to separate themselves from the edifice they'd been climbing.

Like Maleficent, privy to the palace, but not invited to Sleeping Beauty's baptism (or the Biden White House’s EV summit), they cursed the kingdom and then vowed its undoing.

The MAGA roster is fascinating matchup of Turchin’s prediction.

Steve Bannon–Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs

Ron DeSantis–Yale/Harvard Law

Ted Cruz–Princeton/Harvard Law

Josh Hawley–Stanford/Yale Law

DJT–where was it he went to B school again? I forget

J.D. Vance –Yale Law/Thiel Capital

Vivek Ramaswamy-Harvard, Yale Law

Add on the anti-establishment Democrat, independent Republican(?) political scion RFK Jr. with a Harvard undergrad and London School of Economics/UVA Law, and we've got a full sweep.

(Side Note: Fidel Castro was a lawyer. Maximilien Robespierre too. Vladimir Lenin as well. Lesson? If you really want stability of government, you should hang all the lawyers)

And yet, somehow, despite their pedigrees, all of these current American politicians have positioned themselves as vox populi "voices of the people!"

If this notion of "elite overproduction" seems like a weird term in need of defining–think simply that since the 1970's we’ve had an almost 250% increase in college graduates.

Along with a 126,000% increase in student debts! (that’s the angry and immiserating part)

Now, being a "college grad" is little more than a box to check on your application to wait tables.

Millions of folks have been sold and enrolled in the education-guarantees-success story their whole lives, so up the ladder they have to keep climbing.

Only to get to the end of law school or med school, often with six-figures of debt, and realize that AI Legal Zoom and Insurance reimbursement schemes have reduced them to little more than blue collar cogs in a machine.

Doctors, lawyers and college professors–professions that used to reflect the top of social respectability and attainment, are, in this era of tech titans, info-marketing millionaires and #lambo crypto bros, embarrassingly middle class.

And that’s to say nothing of the folks who are struggling just to make ends meet.

***

Back to the other half of our story today–the Pissed Off Poors.

Factor in what Turchin calls the "Wealth Pump"–where owners get to extract more profits out of the system than trickles down to the workers–and you have heightening "immiseration."

AKA–poverty.

And a populus increasingly suggestive to the critiques of the counter-elites.

Add on wildly costly insurance, for our homes, for our bodies, for our lives (as we saw again during this Fall’s hurricane season where companies denied claims and pulled out of anywhere that floods or burns), that’s not even pretending to protect us anymore. Only to enrich them.

You can see where so much of the backlash to the United CEOs death is coming from.

The wealth pump has been shunting all kinds of extreme profits to the 1%.

We're suffering more financial inequality today than we did on the cusp of the Great Depression!

The Prole is understandably pissed.

But really, it’s been simmering along and occasionally boiling over for a while now. Remember those Extinction Rebellion protests of 2018 and the soup on Van Gogh efforts a bit later? Or Occupy? Or the Bundy Ranch standoff in Oregon? Or Jan 6? Or Antifa? Or Anonymous?

Or check this (and fact check this) recent meme making the rounds

That’s Turchin’s wealth pump in meme-ified relief.

***

A couple years ago when Ted Kaczynski, the OG Unabomber had just snuffed it, a writer for the Babylon Bee (the Onion for the alt-right) tweeted the opening line to his Unabomber Manifesto:

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

Elon Musk replied: "He might not be wrong."

Which, in this era of AI hype, El Nino heat domes, and insurance meltdowns is quite an admission from one of the most industrious industrialists in history.

#whoops

Thirty odd years ago when the Unabomber posted his infamous manifesto, the condemnation came swiftly and crossed all aisles. Even Lefty enviros and others sympathetic to the general cause, denounced in no uncertain terms his murderous methods.

But in just the last few years, his sentiment, that perhaps our democratic-capitalist game has become so rigged that more violent interruptions are necessary, has been quietly spreading.

That’s what we’re seeing again this week with bullet casings scratched with “Deny, Depose, Delay” (a not quite word for word reference to a book title on the shady tactics of health insurers).

You can pan back a bit and also track the recent hoopla about the film How To Blow Up a Pipeline that "re-centered" Monkey Wrenching sabotage for Gaia and sparked freaked out responses by the FBI and other intelligence agencies

The 2019 novel Overstory features a gang of five environmentalists driven to eco-sabotage, arson, and accidental murder.

And it won the Pulitzer!

Kim Stanley Robinson's bestseller Ministry for the Future imagines a black-ops UN sponsored department that clandestinely coordinates with the Children of Kali, an India-based eco-terrorist group who bombs private jets and oil tankers.

(android jones art, KALI)

They single-handedly cause more change in behavior than all the COP summits and blockchain carbon credit schemes put together.

(see HERE where I wrote about this in more detail last year).

In fact, Ministry had such an impact on powerful people, politicians and policy makers that the author was invited to keynote the last COP summit!

If we're relying on fiction writers whose best solution to our current crises is a shadowy gang of super ninja assassins, we're in deeper trouble than most of us realize.

---

But for all of this demographic analysis, what's Turchin's solution to elite overproduction and the inevitable siphoning of wealth from the people to the 1%?

It's not pretty.

In almost all historical instances, you have to kill them off.

War. State Collapse. Insurrection. Epidemics. Assassinations.

The guillotine and a Robespierrian Reign of Terror.

Or brute force like the U.S. Civil War which effectively bankrupted or slaughtered most of the Dixie gentry.

Stalin did it.

Mao too.

Pol Pot's hit list was first and foremost all of Cambodia's intelligentsia. It became a virtual death sentence to be caught wearing reading glasses!

Out of thousands of data sets, Turchin’s lab could only find a few examples of the entrenched elites realizing what's happening and reversing the Wealth Pump just enough to forestall violent revolution.

The "Glorious Revolution" in England and FDRs New Deal “revolution” in the 1930s (that continued through LBJs Great Society moves in the 1960s).

In England, the deal that made that revolution Glorious instead of bloody, was "hey old guard ancien regime stuffy nobles! We're going to take over now and the bourgeois merchant class are gonna pretty much run things from here on out.

You can keep your titles, lands (and heads), but eventually it will all end up Downtown Abbey-style for the lot of you, a bunch of broke ass lords and ladies pimping out your country piles for dough."

Or, consider the 20th century USA.

Coming out of WWII, the effective tax rate on the top income brackets had climbed to over 90%! (Today, as Warren Buffet admitted, 1% ers pay lower effective taxes on their incomes than their secretaries).

Back then, billionaires kept only $10 of every Benjamin they pocketed. Imagine that!

With the GI Bill funneling more veterans into university and graduate schools, the whole Keynesian pump-priming project was in full swing all the way through the Sixties.

Wealth was more evenly distributed then that at any time in American history, and it set the stage for the most prosperous decades of the Pax Americana.

That is, until Reagan broke the stagflation of the Carter years with a return to bare knuckles free market ideology.

Clinton cannily realized that this center might actually hold, and ditched the blue-collar union Left (sorry Ol' Joe B) in favor of the NAFTA multi-national corporations.

Bushes were gonna Bush. No surprises there.

(But in this brave new world, Clintons are gonna collect 400K speaking fees from Goldman Sachs).

Even Obama wasn't dumb or brave enough to upset that golden apple cart.

The wealth pump had reversed and began siphoning prosperity ever upwards. It hasn’t stopped since.

Now we’ve just elected a Silicon Valley Ayn Rand crew that plans to gut taxation and regulation hampering the billionaire “Builders” even more. Cut social services. Gut public education.

The common citizen might be so enraged that we cheer their efforts. But this is a “trickle down” economics that feels more like getting pissed on.

So what are the odds that our newly installed MAGA counter elites running the show soon will be willing to reverse the Wealth Pump and turn trickle-down economics into an actual waterfall of shared prosperity?

Anyone?

Anyone?

For those that aren't exactly optimistic that the last thirty years of increasingly neo-liberal ratcheting is going to reverse anytime soon, here's how Turchin suggests these things usually go.

Generation One: civil or international war, revolutions, violence.

Generation Two: uneasy peace, with the #neveragain horrors of the last conflicts still front of mind

Generation Three: subsequent outbreaks of war by the bratty grandkids who don't remember the wanton destruction of the last lap.

(it's a slightly less heartening version of the old "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" quip about intergenerational wealth creation and destruction)

For the United States, if we do nothing proactive to reverse the Wealth Pump and actively redistribute more of the spoils, Turchin predicts the 2020s will get increasingly violent and unstable.

But that will peak fairly quickly, followed by the 2030s-40s of relative restructuring, followed by flare ups again in the 2050s.

Cheery!

That's the argument in brief. About where we're heading, and what we're looking at in the decade ahead.

So as you scan the media this week and elections this year, see if what we're witnessing doesn't map fairly neatly to Turchin's analysis?

Everything from the smash and grab glee of the DOGE bros (“counter elites” the lot of ‘em), to the rising rage of the citizenry.

Also ponder if, in this rampantly neoliberal, free-market age, where even progressives barely mention income and other wealth taxes (preferring to fight race and identity battles instead), whether, maybe, just maybe we should get inspired to more equitably share the love before folks come and take it with hate?

After all, this isn't personal. Or even political.

It's just historical.