Contributed by Joe Montero

One thing is certain now. The United Sates of America is heading into a crisis so serious that nothing like it has been seen for a very long time. From the Wall Street crash of 1928 and World War Two, to be precise. This crisis takes on economic and political dimensions. The bottom line is that the country can no longer provide an adequate standard of living for many of its citizens and ensure a stable society.

Growth has measured by GDP is declining and predicted to go into the negative this year.

jobs and opportunities are being. These brings along a rise in discrimination due to colour, ethnicity, and any other difference, which is fanned by a government and bureaucracy that can’t deal with the reality and tries to find scapegoats on which to blame everything.

This is a volatile mix that erodes the legitimacy of political leadership and gives rise to frustration and anger. This is why there is unrest on Los Angeles’s streets. Genuinely resolving the crisis means to pay attention to the reasons for the anger and work with people to apply solutions. Instead of this there is bombast and a military solution to crush the victims. These victims are cast as villains, worthy of punishment and cast aside.

Donald Trump is making a bad situation worse. His own policies have given rise to even more anger, and his hammer strike solutions promise a slide into totalitarianism.

If we want to know what is at the rotten core of all this, it’s critical to understand that the problem emerges out of the American economic system and the political institutions that serve it.

The post-World War Two era saw the further rise and consolidation of what has accurately been termed rentier capitalism. Distinct from the forms involved in making the things we use and the services we access, this type of capitalism concentrates on the creation of credit and the associated collection of rent in different forms through dividends in shares, buying and selling securities, dealing in all forms of property, and speculation on currencies and other futures markets. The big new ones are rental of access to applications on the internet and trade in virtual money.

What they all have in common is that at a point they no longer contribute to economic growth and become parasitic. They eat away at the economy that feeds them, diminishing its real wealth and the means to pay is way. By products of this are the devaluation of money, an unsustainable explosion in credit, the dismantling of manufacturing, and the loss in real jobs. The rise of rentier capitalism has led to economic decline, and nowhere more so than in the United States.

The United States now faces a massive $US36.2 trillion debt to the rest of the world, and this does not count the scale of the internal private debt, which is now standing at almost 150 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is now at $30.4 trillion. This means $US45.6 trillion. Add to this that $US9.2 trillion of the debt to the world is due to be paid in 2025. There is little chance of this being paid unless something drastic happens.

The rise of rentier capitalism has meant that while it raids the economy, it reduces its capacity to generate the value. If it could, a portion of this would be converted into the money needed to pay the debt. This is no longer possible. The solution so far is to create even more debt to pay what is immediately due. This can’t continue indefinitely, and the end of this road has come.

Because the United States has been the world’s biggest economy and the dominant global exporter of capital, its crisis has been exported into the global economy for years. There was a time when the cost could be imposed on other nations. This can no longer be achieved on a sufficient scale, and the world is breaking away from the burden in any case. This is why BRICS has come into existence.

More pressure is put on its closest allies to pay up, and this includes Australia. How far can this go? The other means is to impose the burden on Americans generally, and a larger share of it on the more vulnerable, like Latinos, Afro Americans, and increasingly, Asian Americans. Attention is put towards attacking the union and community movements to remove their potential to lead resistance.

This connected to the drive to push down government spending, and why the DOGE under Elon Musk was let loose. Under the Trump regime, rentier capitalism that holds sway. Most of those in the administration, from Trump down, are rentier capitalists, and so are most of the behind-the-scenes backers.

The objective is to maintain their own sectional interests at all costs, and this means maintaining their parasitic existence. The economic doctrine for this is known as neoliberalism.

This is what is behind the immigrant threat diversion, and behind the rising tide of anger in Los Angles and elsewhere. It signals growing resistance, and resistance brings the potential for the rise of answers to crisis.

Since the crisis is concerned with the rise to power of rentier capitalism, the solution lies in ending the power of rentier capitalism, to clear the way for the rise of an alternative economy and politics.