Two Paths

Main audience: everyone

Lifering with lifeline, image from a blog post by Delana@dujour about moving from the USA to France at age 50

(Lifering with lifeline, image from a blog post by Delana@dujour about moving from the USA to France at age 50)

This starts out focused on the USA and on how tough things are getting for most people in both of my countries, then opens up to more—that’s the part to stick around for.

A few hours after publishing my previous post, my family met in Zoom for our weekly chat. Parts of the conversation suggested the May Day economic blackout might have a muted impact… because so many people already withdrew from the economy as much as they can, more of necessity than by choice.

Family Zoom is not a business meeting. I don’t take notes in it. Maybe I should. From memory, as best I can remember…

• Going past a favorite service station one day and the next morning going by it again. Overnight, the price of gasoline (Brits call it petrol) went up 60 cents per gallon.

• Visiting Ikea, where there were more employees than customers and the cafe was so empty it looked closed. Leaving without buying anything because prices were insanely high. (Going to Ikea without buying anything at all? Skipping those meatballs? Huh?)

• Dining at a favorite eatery, normally a busy popular place, now with hardly any customers. A few episodes like this were mentioned.

People are hurting in the UK too, but what I see is not escalating as fast as what I heard Thursday from the States.

Nearly the whole world is grappling with such inflationary pressures right now. My personal window into this focuses on my two countries, which are getting it at different paces.

Some Numbers

Gasoline prices gave me a few numbers to work with.

According to AAA, the average price per gallon where the 60 cent rise happened is currently $4.44. Deduct 60 cents and it was $3.84, which would be 15.6% overnight.

In my village in England, adjacent to Wales, the price of petrol before DJT attacked Iran was £1.299 per liter. It is now £1.559 per liter, a 20% increase, but over the past 60 days—not overnight. (Our stations have some of the lowest prices in the area and only go up a few pence at a time.)

If you aren’t accustomed to liters-versus-gallons, one American gallon is 3.785 liters, so we pay £5.90 per USA gallon. (The Imperial gallon is bigger, 4.546 liters. If you compare fuel efficiency between the two countries, UK cars get many more miles per gallon because UK mpg is based on a larger gallon.)

At the current exchange rate of 1.357 dollars per British pound sterling, that’s $8.00 per USA gallon. The dollar is falling, so if I calculate what we were paying 28 February when the exchange rate was 1.34832, it was $6.63 per USA gallon… It’s another route to finding that our gasoline prices have gone up 20% over the past 60 days.

Remember the olla pots and watering spikes I mentioned as part of this year’s additions in our garden? The price of watering spikes has gone up about 20% over the same couple of months. Only one vendor sells olla pots at the price we paid. (Everyone else charges at least twice as much.) They ran out of stock and briefly have stock again with increased shipping costs.

Council tax rates for this year took effect last month. For us that is up 8%. (It resembles property tax in the USA and funds our local Council.) Last month parking charges went up 20% at the Council-operated central car park in town.

The Bank of England forecasts that inflation may hit as much as 6% by the end of this year, but official figures don’t reflect how costs are actually moving.

Family anecdotes sound like costs are moving far more rapidly in the USA.

Foresight Is Not the Same as Living It

Anybody with their thinking cap even halfway on could see this coming, first from DJT’s tariffs and trade wars and demolition of federal programs, then assaulting Venezuela, then going to war against Iran with no idea how to finish it.

Intellectual foresight doesn’t have the psychological punch of living through this.

There was a moment during Thursday’s conversation when I had a vivid mental flash to Grandpa’s tales of sailing to ports in Germany between the two World Wars. Reparations demanded from Germany after World War I pushed inflation so high that when people got paid, they left work immediately to buy whatever food they could. They might be able to get a loaf of bread with it now and not be able to afford that loaf with the same money by the end of the day.

We aren’t there in either of my countries, but we are only in the leading edge of what waits ahead.

Anger and Unrest

Rampant inflation leads to hardship for all but the wealthy.

Hardship is fertile ground for resentment, frustration, anger and unrest. Whether it turns out to be ultimately for better or for worse depends upon how that is channeled.

The Bad Track

If people responsible for creating so much hardship make it hard for the public to hold them to account for it and if they harness resulting anger against some other target, they can fracture society and climb to the top through the fissures opened up. It’s what Mussolini did, and Hitler’s Nazi party, and Putin, and the Republican party in the USA, among others.

It’s what far right parties are attempting in a slew of countries around the world. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don’t. In several, how it will turn out isn’t clear yet.

I am pleased with how well King Charles exercised British subtlety to skewer the Republican agenda during his state visit this past week without crossing the line to forbidden overt politics. I am pleased that, somewhat ironically, the King stood up for small-d democracy and fairness. But the UK’s far right is using the same blueprint as Republicans in the USA, escalating in both countries from 1979 (UK) and 1980 (USA) onward.

The UK is experiencing a telltale rise in xenophobic, racist and homophobic violence, for example. This past week two Jews were stabbed in the Golders Green area in London (national headline news soon followed by raising the threat level for the UK), two men were attacked in Bristol in what police are investigating as a homophobic hate crime (which hardly got any press except near Bristol), and Ministry of Justice figures were released showing last year had the highest number of convictions for racial or religious hate crimes since 2017 (in the aftermath of xenophobia stirred up by Leave campaigns to win the Brexit referendum).

In the UK, this coming week we will have local elections in England and major elections in Scotland and Wales. Pundits expect Nigel Farage’s “Reform UK” party to do well. (Farage sees himself as our DJT.) Personally I hope whatever ground the ruling Labour party loses will go mainly to such parties as the Liberal Democrats and maybe in some places the Greens.

I might not get my wish—but I might get my wish. Funded by such wealthy men as Christopher Harborne, Jeremy Hosking, Richard Tice and Elon Musk, Reform won a boatload of local government seats a year ago, even gaining control of 10 local Councils. They have not performed well in office and lost many of the councillors who got elected on their ticket. (That link goes to an article by OpenDemocracy on the subject. Feel free to get details there—if I repeat them here, that would fill my entire post.)

In local government, people are getting a taste of who’s competent and who isn’t. “Reform UK” has not proven to be competent, perhaps distasteful enough to boost other parties—not necessarily Labour or Tory. Lib Dems and Greens have been gaining ground and providing some glimpses of how well they can work.

The Good Track

That’s how a painful crunch like these times can turn out for the better. When enough people are clear-eyed, channel their pain in a productive direction and pull together for the common good, a country—and this time maybe a good chunk of the world—can turn away from rising fascism instead of toward it.

In the UK, maybe a sample at the local level can keep Farage’s party from getting its hands on power at a national level.

Internationally, very quickly after DJT launched his trade wars more than a year ago, some of the rest of the world (especially but not only “the West”) began rejiggering relationships with each other. In the chaos since DJT got into the White House again, it’s easy to forget how quickly countries began to adjust their alignment. Here are a few memory refreshers.

With little fanfare, UK PM Kier Starmer made several trips abroad to help start this—something he did not seek plaudits for and does not get credit for at home. Other nations’ leaders worked on this too. I happened to notice Starmer’s efforts because I live in the UK.

The EU announced it is open to letting the UK join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean convention for tariff-free trade across borders. Techically that would not violate Labour’s pledge not to rejoin the EU or the European Common Market, but it would provide similar relief from trade barriers in the wake of Brexit.

Germany ordered Elon Musk’s social media platform X to immediately allow researchers to access data about its political content ahead of the country’s election, investigating whether Musk’s support of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland constituted an illegal donation to the party.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania switched their electrical grids from connection with Russia’s to connection with the European network through Poland.

An open letter from 3494 scientists to the Royal Society called for expulsion of Elon Musk, and at least two scientists resigned from the Society in protest of his membership.

An emergency summit of leaders from Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and UK, as well as the NATO secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission met to discuss how to respond to Donald Trump’s radical shift away from supporting Ukraine. Within days, another European emergency summit met with leaders from the same countries plus Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. In addition to announcing a unified position in support of Ukraine, the attending countries promised to bolster their own defense capabilities.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who acts as an authoritarian himself, declared Turkey regards Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty as non-negotiable.

Brazil charged former president Jair Bolsonaro and six associates with leading a far-right conspiracy to stay in office by military coup d’état. That was in February of last year. (By early September, Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his attempted coup.)

The UK and Norway began negotiating a new defense pact with each other.

China, Japan and the UK dumped $81 billion in USA Treasury bonds.

All of that happened in the first month after DJT’s inauguration.

It can be easy to forget in today’s swirl of the latest alarms.

Countries are not making knee-jerk responses to DJT’s actions. The international community is reordering itself deliberately.

Recently the Guardian published a good high level view of how this is coming together. The article quotes Mark Leonard, director of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, from his book Surviving Chaos:

[T]o talk about disorder implies that there is an order that people agree on and that people are breaking the rules, but I think our world is quite different from that. The rules are not being violated. They’re being ignored as irrelevant. There is no stable balance of power. There’s no agreement on what the rules are.

The article also quotes a speech in China by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who said “what is happening today is not a transfer of hegemonies. It is a multiplication of poles – not only of power, but also of prosperity[….] For the first time in contemporary history, progress is germinating simultaneously in many places across the planet. This is happening here in China, in Asia. But also on the African continent and in a region very close to Spain: Latin America.”

Canada has been especially public about turning away from previous reliance on next door neighbor USA, but it has not merely stormed off in a huff. Like some European countries, Canada reduced its orders for USA-made fighter jets and other military hardware, turning toward European-made equipment instead. It has rapidly developed new pacts and stronger relationships with other countries. Canadian PM Mark Carney laid out his ambition to bring together what he calls “middle powers” of the world to work with and support each other.

Carney is striving to create what Sánchez would describe as a new pole, a grouping of mid-level countries that combine their heft to be able to stand against whatever comes at them from a major power. Leaders in various countries use different terminology to talk to the public about what they are doing, but a heartening number of national leaders deliver what boils down to the same message.

These countries are clear-eyed, channel their pain in a productive direction and pull together for the common good. They know the recipe for the good way out of this mess and they are baking it as well as they can.

Wrapping Up

When all of this is over, the world will be a very different place. The USA has ceded its dominance. Russia too. China is ascendant. Lots of middle powers, as Carney puts it, are ascendant. If we end up with what Sánchez would call a genuinely multipolar world, perhaps that will be more stable and better in general.

A whole lot of bother is between here and there.

So much damage has already been done, there is no way to avoid these hard times getting harder before anything gets better. It’s upsetting. It’s infuriating. We’re stuck with it.

But we are not necessarily stuck on a one-way ticket to hell. There are people and nations working on a route up and out of the bottom.

That’s a lifeline to grip as we face these times.