Faceless Feds at War With America

Republished from Ken Klipperstein.com on Substack

Faceless Feds at War With America 

Why law enforcement are suddenly blurring their own faces in press releases

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN

APR 28, 2025

Wisconsin judge arrested by three faceless federal officers

When federal authorities arrested Wisconsin circuit court judge Hannah Dugan this week, they publicized photos of police escorting her into an unmarked vehicle, their faces blurred out so they couldn’t be identified.

Since Donald Trump came into office, the federal government is now routinely blurring out law enforcement’s faces in its frenzy of triumphant social media postings and press releases containing photos of arrests and immigration actions in particular. They tell me it’s for operational security. But I see something different: an army of nameless, faceless goons whose anonymity reveals their alienation from the American public they’re supposed to serve. 

Presumably the White House thinks these G-men photo ops are good publicity for its immigration agenda; they instead smack of the exact politicization of the FBI and other agencies that Trump railed against during the election. Swarms of faceless immigration police are raiding workplaces, night clubs and other venues, carrying out arrests with the zeal of a cop manning a speed trap on the highway — and often with a photographer nearby. 

“No one is above the law,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X containing the photo of Dugan’s arrest. 

But are they above transparency? The question appears in countless replies to virtually all of these triumphalist social media posts, with angry users demanding to know the reason for the lack of transparency — a question the news media hasn’t bothered to ask, as far as I can tell.

So I put the question to both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The FBI did not respond, but homeland security, the largest federal law enforcement organization in the country, did. A DHS spokesperson attributed the blurring of officers’ faces to an increase in “threats, assaults and doxing events,” pointing to the case of a “lunatic” accused of threatening the life of homeland secretary Kristi Noem (of purse-losing fame).

Here’s the spokesperson’s full statement to me in an email:

“DHS’ heroic law enforcement personnel are working tirelessly to restore the rule of law in this country, and doing so has exposed them to an increase in threats, assaults, and doxing events. ICE officers right now face a 300% increase in assaults during enforcement actions. Federal law enforcement, including HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] Dallas, recently arrested a violent lunatic named Robert King for making threats against DHS officers and Sec. Noem. DHS will take all necessary precautions to protect our employees while they carry out this critical mission. In some cases, that means blurring some officers’ faces in social media posts.”

When I read the email, I immediately recognized Robert King from a ridiculous arrest photo HSI had posted on social media. The photo depicted a sullen looking young man with cuffs around his hands and ankles flanked by five law enforcement officers with their faces all blurred out — as if they had captured El Chapo. 

“Robert King, a U.S. citizen was recently taken into custody in McKinney, Texas for making terroristic threats against ICE agents and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem,” HSI’s April 2 post said. “King’s alarming social media posts included intentions to "open fire” if agents are seen in his neighborhood.”

When I saw the post, I remember rolling my eyes at how melodramatic I thought the feds were being about what seemed to me like some sad keyboard warrior just acting like a tough guy online. A Justice Department press release several days later flagged the following two social media posts allegedly authored by King:

• “If I see ICE agents in my neighborhood I’m opening fire. It’s time to stop being p[redacted] and put the second amendment to work. ICE are not real cops, they are a secret police force with no real legal authority. Kill them.”

• “Just wanna double down on what I said the other day: if ICE comes to your neighborhod, fucking shoot them and kill them. No mercy for the Gestapo.”

While the posts clearly call for violence, neither post references any specific ICE agent. The criminal complaint paints a pretty sad picture, saying King “had nowhere to live” and “was presumably living out of his vehicle.”

The federal complaint filed in court describes several other social media posts which portray a pretty ordinary liberal Democrat (aside from the violent rhetoric). An Instagram post refers to the “GOP” with the USSR’s Hammer and Sickle forming the “O”; another post is a meme he shared from “The Other 98%” alongside a photo of Vice President JD Vance and his wife alongside text: 

“JD and his wife had to stay at a US Base in Northern Greenland because no one else in the country was willing to host them. That’s how much Greenland wants to be a part of the United States.”

Aside from King’s alleged caption (“They should have done us all a favor and blown them the fuck up”), these are the same cringey memes shared by countless Facebook grandmas every day! Far from a Weather Underground-style radical the federal government is imagining, King is much closer to Rachel Maddow.

The criminal complaint also includes a screenshot of King’s alleged threat to Noem, a caption he added while sharing an article by PBS NewsHour about Noem’s visit to El Salvador’s high-security prison, CECOT, where the Trump administration is warehousing alleged gang members. King’s caption reads:

“I truly hope, and I mean this with all my heart, that Kristi Noem meets a horrible and agonizing demise. I hope she is tried in a war criminal court with the rest of the Nazis when this is all over and I hope he is ripped apart in a gulag. Nothing less for Nazi scum. This is America now. A Nazi fascist state. Disgusting.”

All of this precipitated by some homeless PBS NewsHour fan’s post expressing his “hope” that Kristi Noem is tried and executed by a “war criminal court” (whatever that means). 

The King case is not even the most absurd. Other arrest photos posted to social media by federal law enforcement portray even the backs of officer’s heads blurred. 

If this is the 300 percent increase in threats that homeland security is referring to, then it’s pretty thin justification. The administration is behaving as though they’re at war with some kind of ruthless domestic insurgency. White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka employs rhetoric suggesting he actually believes that’s what this is. Left unchallenged, the result will be a 21st century COINTELPRO against the domestic opponents of the Trump administration, the boys in blue recast as the boys in brown. 

The above photos capture everything that’s wrong with our current domestic security state: needless secrecy arising from the paranoid belief in unseen threats, justified by a bone-deep conviction that all of this is for the greater good, to uphold the rule of law.

This is a war on the American people, whether national security officialdom realizes it or not.

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Canada: election under the shadow of Trump

by Michael Roberts

Canada has a snap general election today.  It’s been called by the new prime minister Mark Carney, the newly elected leader of the incumbent Liberal party government. The Liberals had been led by Justin Trudeau for years, but he stood down in 2024 because of his increased unpopularity and splits among the government leaders.  The ensuing party election saw Carney take over.

Mark Carney is the epitomy of a banker turned politician.  Formerly, yet another Goldman Sachs executive (13 years), he became governor of the Reserve Bank of Canada and then governor of the Bank of England (seven years).  On leaving that post, he prepared himself for a political career.  Luck follows the ambitious and when Donald Trump became president and began to talk of making Canada the 51st state of the US, Carney launched his campaign on strong nationalist lines. 

Up to then, the opposition Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre had held a significant lead in the polls from the summer of 2023 to the beginning of 2025, but after Trump’s blusterings, Carney has been able to turn things in the Liberals’ favour, particularly as the Conservatives had gone ‘Trumpist’ in their policies – a big mistake after Trump talked of ending Canada’s sovereignty.  By his blatant appeal to Canadian nationalism, Carney has been able to garner the support of most of those who usually vote for the labour-leaning New Democrats and the French-nationalist Bloc Quebecois.  

In so many ways, Carney is like a Canadian Mario Draghi that Italy and Europe have continually looked to provide leadership.  Both were ex-Goldman Sachs; both were central bankers and both became heroes of capital – Draghi for Europe and now Carney for Canada. It seems that in some countries when the ruling class gets in trouble, it turns to the ‘money men’ to bail them out.  Alongside his nationalist anti-Trumpist rhetoric, Carney has adopted the usual neo-liberal economic formula: tax cuts and government spending cuts as the solution to the country’s economic problems. As for Carney’s economic ideas, read my old post here. https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/…/mark-carney…/ 

And there are plenty of problems. Given the state of the Canadian economy and the ranting from the White House, Carney will have his hands full if he wins.  Of the top seven (G7) capitalist economies, Canada is the smallest by GDP and population But it is the second-largest country by land mass, with the world’s longest coastline. It is bookended by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, making it ideally situated for global trade (similar to the US). The country is energy independent, with the world’s largest deposits of high-grade uranium and the third-largest proven oil reserves. It is also the fifth-largest producer of natural gas. Canada boasts a huge supply of other commodities too, including the largest potash reserves (used to make fertiliser), over one-third of the world’s certified forests and a fifth of the planet’s surface freshwater. It has an abundance of cobalt, graphite, lithium and other rare earth elements, which are used in renewable technologies.

Despite these comparative advantages in natural resources, Canada’s GDP growth has long trailed its G7 peers, ranking just 16th globally in purchasing power parity terms. A country with its geography should generate higher output. But Canada’s capitalists have fallen behind in productive investment (outside energy) and in raising the productivity of their labour force.

Economic growth has been almost entirely driven by more people.  In the 21st century, Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, growing at an annualized rate of 1.1 per cent—more than twice the annual population growth rate of the G7 as a whole at 0.5 per cent. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 30% compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.  Adding one million people in one year to a base population of about 40 million is unprecedented. But Canadian’s standard of living, as measured by real GDP per person, is little higher in 2024 than in 2014 – a ten-year stagnation.

That’s because a massive slowdown in productivity growth. Over the decade prior to the pandemic, business sector productivity grew by a respectable rate of 1.2% annually. But since 2019, it has ceased to expand at all, setting Canada apart as one of the worst performing advanced economies.

Indeed, productivity growth within Canada’s goods-producing industries has not only slowed but has reversed. As a result, the goods sector has subtracted an average of 0.4 percentage points from Canada’s overall productivity growth every year since the pandemic.

The main reason for this collapse in productivity growth is that investment growth in productive sectors of the economy slowed towards zero. As Canadian Marxist economist, Geoff McCormack says, “given poor profitability, lacklustre capital accumulation, truncated capacity utilization, low employment and low real wage growth, it is unsurprising that real GDP growth, too, was weak.” Instead, there has been a credit-fuelled boom in housing.  With a population of just 40m, Canada is one of the world’s least densely populated countries. But remarkably, it also has one of the developed world’s worst housing shortages. Average house prices have tripled in the past two decades, with high mortgage debt straining consumer spending

The investment rate has fallen because of a sharp fall in the profitability of Canadian capital. The trajectory of the Canadian profit rate has always been driven significantly by the crude oil price. In the 13-year period following the ‘Great Canadian Slump’ of 1990-92, the profit rate on Canadian capital rose.  But after peaking in 2005, it began to fall rapidly, as the oil price fell, reaching a low in the pandemic slump of 2020.

Source: EWPT 7.0 series, AMECO, author

Between the years 1993 and 2005, the mass of profit grew by 142%. After 2005 and until 2019, however, it stagnated, having grown by merely 1.5% over the entire period.

Canada’s corporate sector is now weighed down by debt service costs with more than half of corporate income going to pay interest and principal payments on loans. Around 25% of Canada’s publicly traded companies can be considered as zombie firms ie. they persistently do not earn enough revenue to cover interest payments on their outstanding debts.

Canada increasingly relies on its production of oil and gas and other mineral resources. And so there is no drive to phase out fossil fuel production to save the planet. Previous Liberal prime minister Trudeau put it openly in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” So Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. Canada is failing by a long way to meet the net zero emissions target set for 2050 ( but then so are many other major economies).

Now President Trump is casting a dark shadow over Canada’s economy.  Trump has announced increased tariffs on imports from Canada of steel and aluminium and threatens even wider tariffs. Canada is the largest supplier of both steel (with a turnover of $11.2 billion, to the US, ahead of Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Germany) and aluminum ($9.5 billion).  Trump has insisted “Canada would cease to exist as a country” without the US buying goods from it. “We don’t really want Canada to make cars for us, to put it bluntly. We want to make our own cars.” Trump said: “I have to be honest, as a (US) state, it would work great.”

Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada, has said the US tariffs would probably put Canada in a recession: “Depending on the extent and duration of the US tariffs the economic impact could be severe; the uncertainty alone is already causing harm.”  And“Higher US tariffs on the rest of the world will significantly weaken global demand and deepen the recession in Canada,” said Tony Stillo, Oxford’s director of Canada Economics and senior economist Michael Davenport. 

The Oxford economics say US tariffs on other countries will also weaken Canada’s exports, while “the trade war and pervasive uncertainty will paralyze private investment.” Oxford now expects a 1.3% pt peak-to-trough drop in GDP between the second quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. And it predicts Canadian house prices to fall 8 to 10 per cent by mid 2026 and 200,000 jobs to be lost, driving the unemployment rate to 7.7 per cent by the end of this year. Further down the road, Oxford forecasts GDP growth will average only 1.9 per cent a year between 2030 and 2050. In a worse scenario, where the trade war escalates, creating more barriers amid rising protectionism, growth could slow to just 1.1 per cent. 

Carney says that: “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation, is over. The time will come for a broad renegotiation of our security and trade relationship,” whatever that might lead to.

Afscme Local 444 History From a Participant #2

Richard Mellor

I'm reposting this that I posted a couple years ago as I just noticed the video was private. I've changed it to public and it's a little bit of labor history, my former local Afscme 444 during the early eighties.

As I say in the video, it's not likely I will write about this history so I'll speak it for my own satisfaction and for my grandchildren and anyone else who might find it interesting. As far as workers as union activists go, it's pretty similar to all of them. It is, after all, working class history and that history belongs to the vast majority of us but it is hidden and ignored by the big business media. When we think about it, the 44 day Flint sit down strike should be labor's 4th of July. The regular 4th of July is the celebration instituted by the capitalist class of the British colonies on this continent, in particular the northern industrialists, honoring their break from the semi-feudal British Empire.

The first short I did is here.   https://www.facebook.com/679989067/videos/2039094356431052/

The Consequences of Trump's Tariffs | Michael Roberts

An excellent presentation by Michel Roberts on the situation in the US with Trump and his tariffs. He's backed off on China a bit like he does after everything he says. He thinks it's an episode of the Apprentice. He failed in every business venture he was involved in and doesn't comprehend at all how a global economy works. Michael Roberts's contribution here is very easy to follow.

Pigs are People Too. No One's Life is Boring. We all Have History

 

Richard Mellor

7-19-09

Picture: Annabelle in the back yard with my sister.; our home in the background. Not unlike a scene from the US South in the mid 20th century.

I was sitting around a campfire in Yosemite with my son and daughter-in-law recently and, as seems fitting when sitting around a warm fire with a cup of wine in one’s hand, we began to talk of life.

 

“What was it like living in that pub in that small village, dad?” my son asked.  After my dad left the army he had taken a pub in a small Oxfordshire village.  It was a huge place, an old seventeenth-century inn with lots of rooms, as well as old stables and a garage once used for stagecoaches that passed through the village on their way to London or Manchester. It sat on a fair bit of land.

 

The pub was called the Red Lion and had a huge sign outside with a red lion on it, much like the lion on the Welsh flag. 

 

“It was an interesting place”, I said buying a little time in order to think about what was interesting about it. Then I remembered one real treat, “There were small traveling circuses that used to stop there as they traveled around the country.”

 

“Real circuses?” my son asked somewhat amazed. “Real circuses with animals and stuff?”

 

Many memories were coming back to me now, “Yes, real circuses.” I replied.

 

I would have been about ten years or eleven years old and as part of the deal to set up on our land (it wasn’t our land, we just rented) my sister and I used to get in for free as the circus put on one or two shows for the locals and folks from surrounding villages who would come to see the performers and animals.

 

I remember having elephants in my backyard basically, a performing bear, big cats---although I can’t remember which ones.  There were all sorts of carney folk: trapeze artists, jugglers, acrobats and such. My sister and I used to hang around with them during the day watching handlers work with the animals while jugglers and high wire acts practiced under the big top.

 

The more we talked, the more I remembered about that part of my life and how lucky I was in some ways.  We had lots of animals and injured birds that my mother and I used to feed, or abandoned chicks that would have died without our help.  We used to feed them with a matchstick dipped in a mixture of bread and warm milk. As soon as the matchstick came near they would lift up their heads and open their beaks just like you see on the nature shows when the mother returns to the nest for her offspring.

 

My dad was a bit of a hustler.  He fancied himself one at least.  He had been a moneylender in the army and was always looking for the angle.  The farmer who farmed much of the land around the pub gave us a runt, a small piglet that was too weak to compete for the teat.  We bottle-fed this animal and she grew up in to be a nice healthy sow called Annabelle.

 

Annabelle was a domestic animal.  We kept her in the house for a long time until she got too big.  The first day we put her in the backyard was a bit of a calamity.  Our kitchen table where we ate was at ground level. We would sit around it and look out of the big window in to the yard.  We had ducklings in the yard that we hatched ourselves and they used to follow me around all the time, a long straight line of them like you see in the park or at the lake. They thought I was their mother.

 

I remember my mum, sister and me sitting at the table enjoying a healthy breakfast of eggs bacon and sausage cooked in lard saved from previous meals, when Annabelle appeared at the window.  She was clearly distraught and not too pleased at not being where she thought she belonged, with her family on the other side of the window. Hell, Brutus the bull terrier was there, why wasn’t she?

 

I can see it clear as a bell after all these years.  My mother having this look of desperation on her face as she shouted, “No Annabelle, no.”  But Annabelle wasn’t listening; she came straight through the window and on to the kitchen table.  She was a pet, not a farm animal.

 

We also had two sheep, one named Friday and the other Easter because the farmer gave them to us as lambs on Easter weekend.  My mother and I used to go out at night and feed them with bottles of warm milk; they went berserk when we came with those bottles sucking the teats like crazy.

 

Annabelle and the sheep were domesticated animals.  They would not perform the way farm animals are supposed to.  My father, always after a buck, sold Friday and Easter back to the farmer when they were grown.  They liked good food and Cadbury’s chocolate.  The farmer sent them to the abattoir. Friday and Easter would attack his border collie when it tried to round them up; can’t have sheep not behaving like sheep.

 

Annabelle was worse.  I remember the vet coming over to inject her for something and my mother warning him to keep his eyes on her.

 

“She can’t be pushed around, she’s spoiled” she told him

 

The vet was quite confident, in fact much too cocky; he had been dealing with farm animals for years.  But Annabelle was no ordinary pig.  I can see it now. Annabelle was not in a good mood the way he was grabbing her hind legs and shifting her hind-quarters around as he saw fit.  I think she had arthritis or something similar.   After getting her in the right position he turned his back on her and bent down to reach into his bag.  Annabelle wasn’t about to let that opportunity pass and took a fair chunk out of his ass.

 

After a while we had five or six sows and it was my job to walk about 2 miles and fetch Jumbo.  Jumbo was a boar and he was rented out by another farmer to service sows.  He was easy to handle; I had just a small stick and walked the two miles back to our place like walking a dog.

 

Jumbo had a delightful time with our sows. I remember him sticking his snout under their bellies and sort of tossing them in the air a bit.  I assume it was some sort of foreplay.  But Annabelle would have none of it.  She refused his advances and took a chunk out of his ear.  Annabelle was determined to remain a virgin.

 

My sister and I used to light bonfires at night and sit around the fires with the pigs, sheep and maybe a duck or chicken for company.  Brutus, our bull terrier never missed out on those evenings either.  We would wrap potatoes in aluminium foil and bake them in the fire. Pigs are very clean animals, and when they are little they are so cute.

 

I am grateful for those experiences. I understood animals in a way that I found urban kids didn’t when I moved to the city.  We also saw sex and reproduction around us all the time with ewes lambing and piglets being born.

 

The saddest moment for me was when my father decided he couldn’t make any money breeding pigs so he sent them to the abattoir.  I remember when they came for Annabelle.  She went crazy.  “She knows, she knows,” my mother said.  They had a terrible time getting Annabelle into the truck; she literally fought for her life.

 

I never forgave my dad for that.

Book Review by Michael Roberts: Abundance or scarcity?

By Michael Roberts

Abundance is a new book that has been attracting attention and debate among mainstream economists and politicians.  It aims to explain to Democrat members in the US why their party lost the election to Trump (narrow as that result was).  The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at very liberal mainstream The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, argue that it was because the Democrats and supporters of ‘liberal democracy’ have lost their ability in government to carry out great projects that could deliver the things and services that working people (called the ‘middle class’ in America) need.

Why did the Biden administration fail, despite the infrastructure programme and despite the green climate change programme?  Well, according to the authors, it was not to do with high inflation causing falling average real incomes etc.  It was more because of the failure of Democrat administrations to get the US back to making stuff to meet people’s needs.  Abundance, not distribution; growth, not stagnation. What was really needed was not more environmental controls or equality measures, but just more things – in abundance. You see, the Democrats and the liberal elite were only interested in things like regulations on pollution, or on housing projects, or on roads etc.  This stood in the way of just allowing capitalism (or to be more exact, capitalist combines) to get on with delivering. 

The authors outline many examples of how production, resources and projects could be done to raise living standards if only government regulations and middle-class nimbyism stood aside. Take housing, the authors argue that the housing crisis in America with rising rents, and unaffordable home prices, is due to a sheer lack of supply.  This housing scarcity has been caused by restrictive zoning regulations and community vetos, which collectively prevent housing from being built where it is most needed, sending house prices skyrocketing.

Take global warming and climate change.  Environmental regulations intended to stop the use of fossil fuels have actually inhibited the large-scale deployment of clean energy alternatives. For example, efforts to build energy infrastructure—from solar panels to the transmission lines needed to connect them to electrical grids—face fierce opposition, often from the same liberals trying to block housing projects.

Fellow ‘Abundist’ Matt Yglesias reckons these blockages to delivering the needs of working people is due to the liberal left adopting the interests of the upper-middle class elite, which has led to “the adoption of a kind of English gentry attitude that prioritizes ‘open space,’ quiet, good taste, and a harmonious social order over dynamism, prosperity, and the kind of broad, upward absolute mobility that is made possible by growth.”  These interests are what stop governments and companies from delivering ‘abundance’.

A central argument of the authors is that it is these middle-class well-off, property owners who oppose getting things done. Projects that would make a difference are blocked by local participation and litigation from a narrow band of rich homeowners and interest groups.  Abundance is a call to dislodge these concentrated interests, who are basically the friends and neighbours of the authors themselves.

There is much truth in the author’s argument that America is no longer delivering on basic needs; and it is falling behind in implementing important technologies. But is it true that why America is failing to deliver a decent, reasonably priced health service is because of too much regulation and nimbyism ‘(not in my backyard’)?  Is it true that America has failed to deliver a high quality education service for young people without huge student debt because of too much regulation and cultural elitism?  Is it true that America’s roads and bridges are falling apart because of planning regulations and legal actions? 

Surely, the reason that America has the most expensive healthcare in the major economies with the lowest health outcomes is because it is the only major economy that does not have a health service financed by government and taxpayers free at the point of use.  Instead, it has huge private health insurance companies and hospital hiking up fees and avoiding payments and services at every opportunity. 

Surely, the reason education levels have deteriorated is because public investment in education has been continually reduced and governments have imposed huge debt burdens on students that deter many from getting qualifications. 

Surely, America’s poor infrastructure is due to the very low levels of government spending for decades. The US rail network is tiny, slow and inadequate not because of nimbyism and regulations, but because it has been left to the private sector to consider it and it is just not profitable.  Compare that to the massive state investment in the rail network in China that has transformed transport and communications there in just a decade or so.

When one of the Abundance authors, Klein, was asked if he favoured a universal public health insurance model, he said that it would be hugely preferable over the status quo, but making Medicare for All the centrepiece of a Democratic health care agenda was not ‘politically practical’. Klein argued that this was so because of the vested interests of the medical profession.  But surely the main reason is because of the mighty power of the health insurers, drug makers and private equity-owned hospitals that lobby the political parties.  And since when do we not advocate the right solution because it won’t be accepted by vested interests?  Should people have not fought to get rid of slavery in 19th century America because it was not ‘politically practical’?

The authors make much of the housing crisis in America – a crisis that they blame on regulations, local opposition to planning etc.  But whatever truth there is in that, it pales into insignificence with the real cause of the housing crisis. There are just not enough homes being built, even though US population growth is slowing and household formation is slowing. 

Though estimates vary, experts put the US housing shortage at somewhere between 3.7 million and 6.8 million homes.  If more homes were built and demand for homes was met, then the price of homes would fall or stop rising and incomes would start to close the gap on affordability. But at the current rate of build, it would take 7.5 years to close the current housing gap – in other words, never.

Why are not enough affordable homes being built?  It is because the privately owned building sector does not want to build them unless they are profitable. More research has emerged over the last few years showing the link between the housing shortage and higher costs.  So does America have a national house building programme funded by federal and state governments and built by a publicly owned national construction agency to solve this problem?  No, of course not – this is America.  Such a policy proposal would be ‘politically unacceptable’.

The abundance agenda appears to be an attack on the Trumpist right, but it is really an attack on the socialist left. The left is attacked for concentrating on inequality and discrimination and not on increasing production to meet working class needs.  But what is the authors’ solution to getting more stuff – it is getting rid of regulations, even those supposedly there to protect our health, the environment and the planet.  By the way, we hear the same argument in the UK from our ‘Labour’ government – namely the way to get millions of houses built is to do away with local planning and environmental regulations. Apparently, there is nothing wrong with capitalist system in the US (or in the UK), it’s just that it is hampered by petty regulations and bureaucracy.  

Yes, we need more stuff and an ‘abundance’ of what working people need. But this book directs its sights towards planning regulations as the obstacle to abundance not to the real blockages imposed by the vested interests of the fossil fuel giants, the private equity moguls, the building and construction companies, and private sector control of America’s health and education.

Moreover, the authors have a naïve belief that new technologies can transform people’s lives if only they were freed up from unnecessary obstacles to implement them. The authors have a completely techno approach: “whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.”  Take their view on AI. AI means “less work . . . [but] not . . . less pay. [It] is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared”.  Really?  Are the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia etc going to share the profits of AI implementation with the rest of us? Intellectual property rights and monopoly control of new technology are the biggest obstacles to getting abundance.  This book has an abundant title, but a scarcity of answers.