There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse. Here’s how to survive if that happens | George Monbiot
R.We may find it difficult to imagine, which we cannot now exclude: the possibility of the peripheral collapse in the United States. Federal government deterioration By Donald Trump and Eileon Musk can lead to a series of converging and complex crises, which leads to social, financial and industrial failure.
There are many possible mechanisms. Let’s start with a clear one: their assault on the financial organization. Trump was appointed to the US Consumers Financial Protection Office (CFPB), Russell Fion Stop all the agency’s activityShe reduced her budget and can follow Musk’s ambition for “”WipeThe office. CFPB was created by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from predatory activity that helped operate the accident. The signal to the financial sector cannot be more clear: “Fill your shoes, boys.” The financial crisis in the United States will become Immediately a global crisis.
But the risks extend beyond that. Musk, calls for “Remove the wholesale regulations,, He sends his child’s soldiers To attack government departments that settle the entire American system. The regulations, although they are endless by companies and oligarchy, are all the ones that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial effects, the abolition of the restrictions is the war of layer, as it reaches the poorest layers and middle classes at the request of the wealthy. With the spread of effects, an attack on everyone’s welfare becomes.
To give some examples, the fires in Los Angeles are expected to cost this year, on various estimates, Between 28 billion dollars and 75 billion dollars In secure losses alone. The total estimates of the losses range from $ 160 billion to $ 275 billion. These huge costs are likely to dwarf us from future climate disasters. As Trump Environmental protection rupture and Federal response garbageThe effects will spiral. It can include non -linear shocks for either of them Insurance sector Or homeowners, and escalating to the economic and social crisis at the United States.
If (or when) hit the other epidemic, which can involve more transitional pathogens and more deadly than Covid-19 (which which is 1.2 million have been killed so far People in the United States), will hit a nation The defenses have been stopped. Basic public health measures may not be accessed, such as vaccination and quarantine. A pandemic in these circumstances may end millions of lives and cause automatic economic closure.
Due to the presence of a little general understanding of how complex systems work, the collapse tends to almost everyone. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have properties that make them too Flexible or fragile. The system that loses its diversity, repetition and its system (the degree of drilling), and “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative to achieving a goal) less flexible than those that maintain these features. So it is a system that becomes simultaneous operations. In a fragile system, shocks can be enlarged faster and become more transmitted: disable in one place It is spread in a disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldan, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, He brilliantly explainedHe is What happened to the financial system In 2008.
Consistent feature of globalized capitalism Unintended assault on systemic flexibility. While companies followed similar strategies for achieving profits, and financially and digitization permeates every institution, the economic system loses its diversity and begins to sync. While uniting them, the largest conglomerates are centers that are associated with many other institutions (think about Amazon or Cargill giant food and agriculture), the main failures can sneak at amazing speed.
Since every institution is looking for efficiency, the system loses repetition. Since trading rules and physical infrastructure are unified (think about these identical container stations, shipping networks and trucks), the system loses typical strategies and backup. When the system loses its elasticity, the small external shock can lead to a consecutive collapse.
Ironically, with its commercial wars and assaulting global standards, Trump can help remove the synchronization of the system and re -display some of the model. However, while at a time he was mixing circuit breakers, undermining preparation and treating land systems as an enemy to be crushed, it is possible that the pure effect is Human systems More vulnerable to collapse.
At least in the short term, the extreme right tends to take advantage of chaos and disruption: this is the last counter -feeding rings that can turn the crisis into a disaster. Trump presents himself as a hero who will save the nation from the rupture he caused, while he turns into blame for a scapegoat.
Instead, if the collapse seems imminent, Trump and his team may not want to respond. Like many of the main vital personalities in or around the administration, you enjoy a kind of psychological delusions that are immersed by Ain Rand in her novels in Atlas ignored and fountains, where Bluetocrats leaves the pols for death in hell they created, while they migrate to New Zealand warehouses, Mars or Ocean bottom (Forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, authority and survival depends entirely on others). Or yearn to the end of the world, where the rest of us are grilled They are a party with Jesus In his recovered kingdom.
Each government must hope for the best and prepare for the worst. However, as they do with Climate and environmental collapseand DrainThe possibility The collapse of the dietand Antibiotics resistance and Nuclear proliferationIt seems that most governments, including the UK, now hope for the best and leave it there. Therefore, although there is no alternative to the effective government, we must strive to create our backup systems.
Start with this principle: Don’t face your concerns on your own. Create friendships, meet your neighbors, prepare support networks, and help those who struggle. Since the dawn of humanity, those who had strong social networks have been more flexible than those who had no.
Discuss what we face, and explore the means we might respond to. Through neighborhood networks, he started building a deliberative participatory democracy, to resolve at least some issues that can be reformed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for society (in England, it will be easier with the next The right of society to buyLike Scotland).
From democratic neighborhoods, we may seek to develop a new policy, along the lines it proposed Murray BukchinWhere decisions are passed up, not to the bottom, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we are currently, but also allow more diversity, repetition and unity.
Yes, we also – urgently – need a national and global action, mediated by governments. But it started to look as if no one had our backs. Prepare for the worst.
