California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.
Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”
Some day, Donald Trump may lead America into a golden era of reindustrialisation, or perhaps one last hurrah before China’s domination of materials and manufacturing knocks the US off its number one perch. Yet what if we start to build new factories and ports but no one shows up to work in them?
The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.
As in his first term, Donald Trump now presides over a visibly sinking ship as his approval ratings slide. MAGA, a movement built around the personality of one man, never amounted to a coherent political force or even a workable coalition. Claims that Trump and his lieutenants won a mandate in 2024 and then ‘saved’ the country were always delusional. After all, his margin was thin, as was that of his party in Congress.
The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centered in urban areas. Having survived the pandemic and the 2020 “summer of love”, America’s cities — most critically, New York — are adopting politics that seem designed to make the much-feared “urban doom loop” a reality.
Developer Shaheen Sadeghi’s vision of an artisanal, small-business-driven economy seems oddly incompatible with his environment. After all, Orange County, Calif., where the 71-year-old Sadeghi has worked for four decades, bristles with mass-produced fabrication. Home to several of the nation’s most successful malls and endless shopping centers, the region has incubated such firms as McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Cheesecake Factory, Marie Callender’s, Taco Bell, and the epicenter of faux American conformism, Disneyland.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent cordial sojourn to Washington, and his claim of a close relationship with Dr. Demento, leaves some hope that for a reconciliation between our two countries. This is a necessity for the United States, which needs its closest neighbour as an ally, but even more important for a Canada largely dependent on U.S. markets, tourists, and military power.
This is not an audacious or disrespectful statement. Throughout history smaller nations — in this case in terms of population and economy — have always tried to secure alliances with larger and more powerful ones. Sometimes it makes sense to gain leverage by feinting a possible shift in allegiances, but that does not sweep away strategic logic.
Simply put, Canada, whose economy has been a laggard in recent years, and already feels the impact of tariffs, has limited options about its long-term post-Trump future. Like other nations Canada will be forced to support one of two alliances, one anchored by the U.S. and the other by China, with strong ties to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
There are some who see a pro-China tilt as the path to Canada’s “independence.” Fortunately, Carney, however daft on some issues, recognizes China’s aspiration in the Arctic to constitute a leading “geopolitical threat” to the country’s prosperity and security. The Canadian military is already acting to monitor aggressive moves by China and its more trigger-happy sidekick, Russia.
In this tussle, Carney may hope that the EU or other countries could help, but in reality, only the U.S. has the wherewithal to resist Chinese encroachment. The binational alliance may be hard to endure under Trump, but ultimately the U.S. is a vastly superior choice. The once ultra green Carney suggesting the Keystone XL pipeline be resurrected demonstrates that we should be fated by geography to progress together.
Canada also may want to consider what to expect in a China-centric world. China’s historic strategy focuses not on establishing colonies but vassal states from which it can draw what it lacks, mainly raw materials, and customers for its increasingly sophisticated industrial machine. This is precisely why China has targeted Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, keeping them as suppliers of rare metals, copper, and foodstuffs.
In virtually no case does China try to lift up its client states to the status of competitors, as the U.S. did for Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. China knows what it wants. In terms of strategic materials — a major trade issue — China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American or Western competitors.
Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: World Economic Forum, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
Zombie foreclosures. They sound like the dullest disaster movie ever — but, in fact, represent the grim reality for a rising number of Americans. The theory is simple. First, giant real estate funds buy up properties, deliberately allowing them to deteriorate. That takes homes off the market, and drives up prices, especially when demand is so high and supply so persistently low.
The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.
Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.
Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defence, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.
And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.
Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.
Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realised, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.
And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent.
“Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.
Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Nick Bastian, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.
The “anti-colonial” Left wants Western societies to atone for their “original sins”. From its historical role in slavery, imperialism and the extirpation of native peoples to class oppression, progressives argue that the West should pay penance today by allowing unrestricted mass immigration Read more
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