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In the first part of this series, I looked at how the Trump administration's blend of ignorance and unscrupulousness has led them to consider a cryptocurrency stockpile as a win-win for both scammers and the public being scammed alike. Or perhaps they're being a bit disingenuous there. Here I go on to look at how their profound misunderstanding of money threatens to turn the US into an impoverished kleptocracy. Which, on reflection, might also be a deliberate part of the plan.

In February, Donald Trump carried on appending his distinctive zigzag scrawl to a growing pile of executive orders, including A Plan For Establishing A United States Sovereign Wealth Fund. This declared:

A while ago my online chum Miriam, whom I have officially dubbed The Sunniest Girl on the Internet™ (because she is), posted this:

my cohort of trans girls, the girls who transitioned about a year before or after i did, give or take, all seem to be looking, and i dont mean this disparagingly at all, so profoundly normal. just regular women. half of them look a lot like the women i grew up around, my mother's friends, church ladies, teachers. absolutely love to see it.

This is one of the least obvious and most true observations I've ever come across.

[Note: this post suffers from my slow writing speed, and since doing the bulk of the writing of it, has been overtaken by events. I will catch up in subsequent posts.]

I've been trying to avoid reading too much on the Trump administration's governance by imperial fiat, in an effort to preserve some measure of mental health. In ordinary times I've an inexhaustible appetite for grim news, but these are not ordinary times, and even I have my limits.

However there have been a series of executive orders since January which, together with prior pronouncements from those in the administration's inner circle, imply a wholesale reconfiguration of the US financial system, with foreseeably disastrous consequences. It's clearly madness, but I think I can see the method in it. Let me run it past you.

About a month ago, my online chum kat posted this:

Trying to understand the latest executive order.

You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
- The Doctor, the Face of Evil.

In many countries which have enjoyed (if that is quite the word) half a century of bipartisan neoliberal politics, nominally conservative political parties are breaking with not only this consensus, but also with conservatism as a guiding set of principles. In the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump, nowhere is this phenomenon so apparent, so obsessively analysed, or so globally consequential as in the US.

Back in a past life, I found myself in the habit of making little video mixtapes to listen to and glance at while doing jigsaw puzzles and overeating at Christmas, or to fill in embarrassing conversational gaps when entertaining visitors. These would run to anywhere up to 70-some videos, which I'd pull from various online video sharing platforms (multiple services are available), and painstakingly sequence them so that they flowed seamlessly from one to the other. I'd even manually pull the audio and adjust the median amplitude to more or less the same level for each track, and re-encode each video so that you could stick them on a USB drive and plug it in the back of an early-2000s semi-smart TV, press play, and you're all set for good few hours background entertainment.

I've long been astonished by a particularly irrational form of loss aversion that I've taken to calling "Zero-sum NIMBYism". Here's how it works:

A lifetime ago, I was living in a little seaside village which had an annual festival day that the local chamber of commerce would put on. Every year, the chamber would arrange to close the main street, invite stallholders, entertainers, and so on, and a lovely time would be had by all. Visitors would come from all over the country (in the off season!), and cars would be parked all along the streets for anywhere up to a kilometre. A day wandering up and down the street in the sunshine, snacking and drinking; what's not to like?

And every year, the owner of the local surf shop, plus one or two similarly entitled misers, would complain bitterly about the cost to the chamber of organising the thing, and the loss of on-street car parking directly outside his shop.

Cory Doctorow recently cited this article which talks about how insurance is a terrible instrument for mitigating climate risk. The standard neoliberal patter on this runs that insurance will send a price signal that steers investment away from environmentally damaging activity and towards adaptive responses.

One problem with this is that the people doing the damage are not necessarily (or even likely to be) the people who will experience the worst of its' effects, so this will do little to prevent investment in — for instance — fossil fuel extraction. In fact, you'll likely see investment flowing away from the uncertain business of keeping populations alive and secure, and directed towards digging up minerals and sludge.