Stratfor — The Apocalyptic Vision of Stephen K. Bannon

Useful short summary of Strauss & Howe's generational theory, chiefly The Fourth Turning, and Steve Bannon's interpretation of its implications for America and the world.

Financial Sense
The Apocalyptic Vision of Stephen K. Bannon

Stratfor

Reuven Brenner — Past perfect – Stephen K. Bannon’s generational view of history

One of the best assessments of Steve Bannon I have encountered. It is based the major influences on the development of Bannon's social, political and economic perspective as a strategist and political thinker. And it has the added advantage of being a short read.

Asia Times
Past perfect — Stephen K. Bannon’s generational view of historyReuven Brenner | Repap Chair at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management

Where did Steve Bannon get his worldview? From my book.

"Bannon's brain."

The Washington Post
Where did Steve Bannon get his worldview? From my book.

Neil Howe, co- author with William Strauss of “Generations,” “The Fourth Turning” and “Millennials Rising.”

Nathan Schneider — A conservative who was right about Occupy

Fits with Strauss & Howe's hypothesis that America is due for its fourth spiritual awakening, which they call the Fourth Turning. Fits in with Ravi Batra's hypothesis of a moral revolution, too, put forward in The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos

Waging Nonviolence
A conservative who was right about Occupy
Nathan Schneider

Peak Prosperity — Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning Has Arrived

Neil Howe of Strauss and Howe thinks that the Fourth Turning started in 2008 with the global financial crisis and the election of President Obama.

He is completely off his rocker about the economics of it though. Sociologists should stick with sociology and not do pop economics.

We cannot possibly afford the government we have promised ourselves. And, that will be a painful process of deleveraging, and it is not just deleveraging the explicit debt that we have already actually formally borrowed, it is all the implicit debt. And, I think we will deal with it, because we have no other choice.

I don't disagree with this analysis factually, however. Even though it doesn't have to happen, as a proper understanding of economics shows, the likelihood of it coming to pass is high due to ignorance, vested interests, and systemic hysteresis due to persistence of failed ideology and institutional arrangements. Neil Howe is unknowingly trapped in it himself.

Peak Prosperity
Neil Howe: The Fourth Turning Has Arrived
Interview with Neil Howe
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Fabius Maximus — News from the front lines of the battle to create a New America

Summary: One of the biggest stories of our time is the evolution of the America-that-once-was into The New America. It’s so slow to be easily missed, especially since it’s a melody the news media cannot hear. And those they look to for advice, the courtiers of the Versailles-on-the-Potomac, will not hear it. Here are the some of the latest reports on this grand theme. These were all reported on our twitter feed, @FabiusMaximus01. Subscribe to give yourself a front seat on this battle (it will become a battle if we decide to fight back).

News from the front lines of the battle to create a New America.
Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus — Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side

You might sneer and laugh at Wikileaks and Anonymous as quixotic — foolish and vain efforts. But the government knows better, and devotes great effort to stamp out these sparks. Without wider support our ruling elites will successfully suppress these movements. With our support these can mature into powerful engines of reform.

My guess: The government will crush these rebels. More rebels will appear. With them lies our only remaining hope for reform. The Republic’s fate is their fate. What we do now, and during the next few years, will decide its future. That’s the meaning of Democracy: its survival lies in our hands.

FabiusMaximus.com
Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side.
Fabius Maximus

FM may not have the economics right but he has the politics down.

Plug this into your reading of Strauss & Howe's The Fourth Turning and Ravi Batra's The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos.

The Millennial Declaration

Generation WE : The Movement Begins...

Generation-We.org

This was made in October, 2008, but it is still making the rounds. I just encountered it on FaceBook through the son of an old friend of mine. If you are into the analysis of Strauss & Howe, e.g., in The Fourth Turning, it will be of special interest. 

This is generational change in the making, and this generation is poised to take over as the largest voting bloc. They are represented as typically progressive, which has been my experience of millennials. But they also have a completely wrong notion of the national debt. MMT to the rescue!

Radicalizing Gen X

I've been writing for some time about the work of Ravi Batra (The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos) and Strauss & Howe (The Fourth Turning). Strauss and Howe's work, especially, is based on generational change. Lynn Parramore, a gifted writer who blogs at New Deal 2.0 provides her take about Gen X from her own experience and how Occupy radicalized her.

Many members of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers can relate to this process through experience, since they were on the ground during the anti-war movement and experienced it first hand at the barricades. But no generation since has had to go through this searing experience. All that has changed now, and it portends to change the world. That's why I think this is a big deal, which will affect all of us socially, politically and economically over the years to come.

Read the whole post at AlterNet
Back to the Future? Generation X and Occupy Wall Street
by Lynn Parramore

The brewing storm and a trend that will last for the rest of this decade

What is now happing is a rebellion rather than a protest, and that's why there are no explicit demands. All rebellions are basically spiritual — about "righteousness." When a critical mass of people feels deeply wronged, they rise up in anger. Their demand is wholesale change.

The catalyst for rebellion is almost always material. So, very often a proximate cause is mistaken for the actual cause. It may seem that the Occupy Wall Street protest or the London riots, or the rioting in Greece, Spain and Chile are about money and jobs, and the Arab Spring was about rising food prices. But these are just the sparks that set off a bonfire globally that had been years in the making. This is about a youth that sees no future for itself in the world under the existing system.

This rebellion is against false authority, and it is grounded in real outrage over a lot of things other than what media pundits are bloviating about — mass murder (neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism), violation of human rights (torture, war crimes), widespread lying and hypocrisy, endemic political corruption, unbridled lust for money and power, and unprecedented greed, etc. all leading to economic chaos.

This rebellion is not astroturf. It is grass roots and it is global. Most significantly it is inspired and lead by youth in a leaderless movement that has arisen spontaneously. However, it has been decades in the making, and it is has broad and deep intellectual underpinning. The media idea that this is a flash in the pan, a "return of the hippies," is wishful thinking on the part of the entrenched.

The people in charge of governing have violated their charge and have lost the spiritual basis of their authority. Al they retain is the material basis, which ultimately rests on the state's monopoly on violence. However, resort to violence has seldom worked for long against a determined and focused populace that feels deeply wronged. The velvet revolutions proved this.

Governing is about ordering a society for and toward good. When a critical mass of people comes to think that the elite has hijacked not only the country instead, but are also destroying the world and the future in the process, then expect agitation for change to be coming.

This is a long way from being over. It is a developing trend that will be with us for some time, and it will have an impact socially, politically and economically on the whole world.

The beginnings of this rebellion, which has gone global, can be traced to the velvet revolutions that toppled the USSR. This is the same "spiritual force" at work, which Hegel called the Zeitgeist, that is, the "the spirit of the time." The entire world is now in the throes of an ongoing velvet revolution that will last out this decade and transform the world one way or another. The outcome is still very uncertain and many scenarios can come into play before the dust settles on a new era.

This is pretty much the way that Ravi Bata approaches it in The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos (2007), and Straus & Howe also in The Fourth Turning (1997). Indeed, Batra foresaw the coming social, political and economic revolution decades ago in The Coming Downfall of Communism and Capitalism (1978). He got the timing of the fall of communism about right but was late with respect to capitalism. His 2007 book seems to have corrected that. Strauss & Howe were pretty much on target.

Both view this in terms of the temporal and historical unfolding of a spiritual force rather than the result of some purely material cause, although they give different reasons for their views. They agree, however, that it is the confluence of both objective, historical conditions and the subjective mindset of a generation ready to rise to awesome challenge since its future is at stake and they see nothing to lose in risking all. So expect big things to be happening, but not all at once or linearly — unless the world is very, very lucky.

Occupy Wall Street: "It Is a Revolution"

[Princeton professor Cornell] West, who compared the "U.S. Autumn" to the so-called Arab Spring, believed in the longevity of Occupy Wall Street, as long as protesters stay strong.

"I think we gotta keep the momentum going, because it's impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one or two demands," West stated.

"In the end, we are really talking about what Martin King would call a revolution - a transfer of power from oligarchs to everyday people of all colours. And that is a step-by-step process, it's a democratic process, it's a non-violent process – but it is a revolution."

Read the whole post at IPS, Occupy Wall Street: "It Is a Revolution" by Christian Papesch

This is a big thing and it is the real thing (not manufactured). It is going pretty much along the class and generational lines that Ravi Batra and Strauss & Howe have described.

Matt Stoller gets it right about Occupy Wall Street

A lot of pundits are pontificating that the Occupy Wall Street protest is unfocused and needs clear goals expressed as political demands. Matt Stoller disputes this, saying essentially that the protest is actually about the hope and change that President Obama promised and then promptly caved on. It's a grassroots movement, not an orchestration by political activists.

That Yves Smith chose to post Stoller's piece at Naked Capitalism acknowledges not only the political significance of the protest movement that is gathering steam across the US, but also it's economic significance. The protest is, after all, about The Big Rip-Off, in which a few profited wildly on the backs of the many, with many of the many suffering horribly for mistakes in which they were not involved.

Read Stoller's post at Naked Capitalism, Matt Stoller: #OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest. Kudos to Matt for writing it and to Yves (Susan) for posting it.

Also interesting is a report by David DeGraw of AmpedStatus on "How Anonymous, AmpedStatus, the NYC General Assembly, US Day of Rage, Adbusters and Thousands of Individual Actions Led to the Occupation of Liberty Park and the Birth of a Movement." Read it at Washington's Blog, A Report from the Frontlines: The Long Road to #OccupyWallStreet and the Origins of the 99% Movement.

While the Tea Party fades into the background, except as pushed by Fox News and astroturf organization like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, there is a grassroots movement rising up that seems to transcend ordinary categories, at least so far, precisely because it is amorphous and unfocused, except on eliminating corruption. If there is a demand, it is for accountability and restitution.

But mostly it is about changing course. About 80% of Americans agree that the country is veering off course. So it is conceivable that this movement will have strong legs and could even go viral if conditions do not improve or worsen.

This is very much the trend that was predicted to arise at around this time by economist Ravi Batra in The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos (2007), and historians/social scientists William Strauss and Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning (1007). Although Batra's most recent book was published in 2007, his initial published work dates back to The Downfall of Communism and Capitalism (1978).