When the problems can no longer be patched over, it becomes necessary to step back and consider what is causing them to begin with.
When you are talking hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not a computer, it's not a machine, it's biology.
People have been going forth and multiplying for a hundred thousand years and America represents, literally, humanity washing up against the edge of the global petri dish. Our essential culture is based on growth, geographic, population, economic, technological, industrial. Topped off with a half century of increasingly parabolic debt to keep the party going. Debt doesn't matter, until it does. That, more than the political charade, is what has to be understand and addressed.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system. While money and finance serve as blood and the circulation system.
Given our systems of perception and communication tend to revolve around personalities and only secondarily round the concepts and forces they express, there doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement of these basic forces, both driving society and directing it.
Much as our circulation system delivers the energy the digestive and respiratory systems generate around the body, while the government, as well as the culture, tries to give it some sense of overall cohesion. So there will always be that tension between desire and judgement.
The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise.
Meanwhile it has not occurred to the supposed intellects that money is a social contract which enables mass societies to function, not a commodity to mine from society. Markets need it to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised. Since it is a contract, in which the asset is backed by a debt, similar amounts of debt have to be generated, to store the asset.
One way is simply squeezing the money flowing through the regular economy, forcing it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation. This tends to set up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Consequently the effect is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much money and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients devised debt jubilees to reset the process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other primary method is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The elephant in the room is that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The bloated military and endless wars developed as a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. Which explains why they are such strategically inept boondoggles, but the same clowns and parasites are left in charge.
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt, backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure this out, but economists are just creatures of the system.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing though our bodies. It is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible fr maintaining its value.
the reality is that there is not the productive investment potential to save the amounts necessary for a stable society and reasonably secure lives, but we do save to many of the same reasons, so eventually the concept of the public commons we have to be resurrected and updated.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the fact the relationship is a two way street, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Which is not to say banking can be a direct function of government, any more than the head and heart are one. Politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing extra money is a handy sugar rush, but there will never be the willpower to back off, which that starts.
It is just one of those stages of human evolution.
I would summarize Biden's foreign policy as follows: splashy headlines, but when you read the fine print, it becomes clear that not much has changed. Yemen, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Palestine all come prominently to mind.
Whatever passes for US "foreign policy" is just a sum of major lobbying interests projected outwards: Israeli, Military/Industrial, Oil/Gas. In the Covid era the pharmaceutical can be added to that list too. Only mechanism is some variation of "stick" - from expulsion of diplomats, through sanctions and acts of theft and piracy up and including military intervention. And of course promoting and financing "color revolutions" and "regime changes" via various deep-state cutouts such as NED and USAID etc. Nobody can get anything of value from US diplomacy (except Israel of course, it seems sometimes that the only reason State Dept even exists is to give never ending cover to whatever crime and landgrab Zionists commit), not even consistency of keeping own signature - in the last decade or two US reneged on own commitments walking out from ABM treaty, Paris climate agreement (rejoined, but it is moribund so useful just for cosmetic purposes), JCPOA (pretending to rejoin), INF, Open Skies...
From my position here in Australia there is little to nothing I can find to disagree with Patrick in your assessment excepting to add that the US sycophant and Pentecultist PM Morrison (and several of his governing Cabinet Ministers of the same cult or of similar end-of-days fundamentalist cult beliefs) is/are more-or-less in lock-step with whatever inanity drips from the lips of Pompeo/Blinken and Trump/Biden. Tragedy is on the nearing horizon of our world future!
When the problems can no longer be patched over, it becomes necessary to step back and consider what is causing them to begin with.
When you are talking hundreds of millions and billions of people, it's not a computer, it's not a machine, it's biology.
People have been going forth and multiplying for a hundred thousand years and America represents, literally, humanity washing up against the edge of the global petri dish. Our essential culture is based on growth, geographic, population, economic, technological, industrial. Topped off with a half century of increasingly parabolic debt to keep the party going. Debt doesn't matter, until it does. That, more than the political charade, is what has to be understand and addressed.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system. While money and finance serve as blood and the circulation system.
Given our systems of perception and communication tend to revolve around personalities and only secondarily round the concepts and forces they express, there doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement of these basic forces, both driving society and directing it.
Much as our circulation system delivers the energy the digestive and respiratory systems generate around the body, while the government, as well as the culture, tries to give it some sense of overall cohesion. So there will always be that tension between desire and judgement.
The function of government is to make the tough choices. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Nor can we go both directions at the fork in the road. So government will step on people's feet on occasion and not just be there to hold people's hands. Not all desires are healthy, nor all decisions wise.
Meanwhile it has not occurred to the supposed intellects that money is a social contract which enables mass societies to function, not a commodity to mine from society. Markets need it to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised. Since it is a contract, in which the asset is backed by a debt, similar amounts of debt have to be generated, to store the asset.
One way is simply squeezing the money flowing through the regular economy, forcing it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation. This tends to set up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Consequently the effect is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much money and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients devised debt jubilees to reset the process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other primary method is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The elephant in the room is that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The bloated military and endless wars developed as a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. Which explains why they are such strategically inept boondoggles, but the same clowns and parasites are left in charge.
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt, backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure this out, but economists are just creatures of the system.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing though our bodies. It is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible fr maintaining its value.
the reality is that there is not the productive investment potential to save the amounts necessary for a stable society and reasonably secure lives, but we do save to many of the same reasons, so eventually the concept of the public commons we have to be resurrected and updated.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the fact the relationship is a two way street, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
Which is not to say banking can be a direct function of government, any more than the head and heart are one. Politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing extra money is a handy sugar rush, but there will never be the willpower to back off, which that starts.
It is just one of those stages of human evolution.
I would summarize Biden's foreign policy as follows: splashy headlines, but when you read the fine print, it becomes clear that not much has changed. Yemen, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Palestine all come prominently to mind.
Whatever passes for US "foreign policy" is just a sum of major lobbying interests projected outwards: Israeli, Military/Industrial, Oil/Gas. In the Covid era the pharmaceutical can be added to that list too. Only mechanism is some variation of "stick" - from expulsion of diplomats, through sanctions and acts of theft and piracy up and including military intervention. And of course promoting and financing "color revolutions" and "regime changes" via various deep-state cutouts such as NED and USAID etc. Nobody can get anything of value from US diplomacy (except Israel of course, it seems sometimes that the only reason State Dept even exists is to give never ending cover to whatever crime and landgrab Zionists commit), not even consistency of keeping own signature - in the last decade or two US reneged on own commitments walking out from ABM treaty, Paris climate agreement (rejoined, but it is moribund so useful just for cosmetic purposes), JCPOA (pretending to rejoin), INF, Open Skies...
From my position here in Australia there is little to nothing I can find to disagree with Patrick in your assessment excepting to add that the US sycophant and Pentecultist PM Morrison (and several of his governing Cabinet Ministers of the same cult or of similar end-of-days fundamentalist cult beliefs) is/are more-or-less in lock-step with whatever inanity drips from the lips of Pompeo/Blinken and Trump/Biden. Tragedy is on the nearing horizon of our world future!