This essay from the Substack of IFLA is a sobering view of our country through the analogy of the Titanic disaster written by an Australian who understands where we are & where we're heading better than many Americans do.
Here's what Gman had to say…
"The iceberg’s already hit. The first-class passengers have their lifeboats. The S&P 500 is the orchestra still sawing away on the upper deck. And even three-time MAGA voters are starting to scan the horizon for a raft.
"Picture this. The global economy is the Titanic. Only it’s the size of the planet. So when you do hit an iceberg - and we have, mate, we hit one weeks ago, the moment the spray-tanned bilge rat in a captain’s hat ordered the missiles into Iran - you don’t feel [anything]. Not for a while. The ship’s so big the floor only starts tilting weeks later. The piano slides slow. The chairs slide slower. The crystal in the dining room rattles a little, but it’s still upright. And the band keeps playing.
"The band keeps playing because that’s literally what they’re paid to do. The band’s job is to keep the punters drinking and dancing on the upper deck while the cabin boys quietly load the first-class passengers into the lifeboats. The band knows the ship is going down. The band has known since February. The band keeps playing.
"The S&P 500 is the band. Wall Street is the band. Fox News is the band. Every Fox Business headline that goes 'stocks notch fresh record high on resilient consumer' is another measure of Nearer My God To Thee while the ocean creeps up the steerage staircase three decks below.
"You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Listen to the people whose actual job is to track supply chains, energy flows, food shipments. The blokes who’ve got a stethoscope pressed against the hull. They can hear the iron screaming.
"Here’s John Denton, Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce. Operates in 170 countries. Sat down with Bloomberg at the Milken Conference last week and laid it out in one sentence:
“'There is a disconnect between the market and the real economy.'
"That’s the whole thesis. Wall Street is partying like it’s 2007 because that’s what Wall Street does. The actual economy, the bit with farms and factories and groceries and rent and people not being able to feed their kids, is a different planet. Denton went on to spell it out. A fertiliser crisis is brewing because of the Strait of Hormuz. A price shock and a supply shock are arriving at the same time. Food production is going to collapse in 90 days across Africa and Latin America. He invoked the Arab Spring, which is the polite way of saying when ordinary people can’t afford to eat, governments fall.
"Then there’s Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler. Sat down with CNBC. Different metaphor. Same disaster:
“'It’s a slow motion car crash, and we’re sleepwalking through it.'
"12,000 flights cancelled in May alone. 2 million empty seats. Jet fuel exports out of the Middle East down by a third. Asia can’t get the crude to refine. Europe can’t get the jet fuel because Asia is hoarding what’s left. America is exporting its own barrels to plug the gap. Which means US pump prices keep ticking up - national average now nudging $4.50 a gallon, which, fun fact, is roughly the price that got Joe Biden absolutely savaged on every Republican bumper sticker in the country in 2024.
"Smith called it the dominoes. Jet first. Then everything else. Diesel into Africa. Naphtha into Asia. Europe pulling from the US. Every product, every region, getting squeezed at once.
"This is not a forecast. This is now. The deck is already tilting. The orchestra has gone slightly off-key, and the punters in the casino haven’t yet worked out they’re playing roulette at a 5-degree angle.
"Gas at $4.50 is the floor tilting. Jet fuel cancellations stranding millions of Americans on their summer holidays is the floor tilting. Fertiliser running short and threatening world hunger in 90 days is the floor tilting. Manufacturing employment down 80,000 jobs since the geriatric purser with the launch codes took office in January - that’s the floor tilting. Auto manufacturing down 25,000 in his second term alone, in the middle of a tariff regime that was meant to bring auto jobs roaring home from China. Tilting.
"And then there’s Lordstown, Ohio. CNN’s John King drove 900 miles through rural Ohio looking for the answer to one question: is MAGA cracking? He stopped at Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers. They’re sitting on a GM plant that closed in Trump’s first term despite his promise it would stay open. They’re sitting on a Foxconn factory that’s mostly idle. And down the road, Altium Cells - a GM and LG joint venture making EV batteries, the exact factory Trump promised would be the future - laid off 1,460 workers on the 5th of January this year.
"Same 5th of January, incidentally, that Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress and slithered off to wherever Adderall casualties go to write substack newsletters about Jewish space lasers. But I digress.
"Here is the bit that’s actually new. The bit that wasn’t true six months ago. The base is noticing.
"A three-time Trump voter from Machias, Maine, working-class bloke, sat down with Senate candidate Graham Platner and said three words I never thought I’d hear from a guy who voted for the sun-cured ham on the bridge three times:
That’s not a Lincoln Project guy. That’s not a Never Trump pundit on MSNOW. That’s a bloke in Down East Maine who voted for the discount Captain Smith three times and is now telling a Democratic Senate candidate, on camera, that he got rolled. He went on to say nothing else Trump’s done has been good for the country either. Then he and Platner spent the next 20 minutes finding 90 percent common ground on healthcare, the VA, social security, corporate land grabs, and the rigged system. The whole conversation is the rainbow you see at the end of this whole storm. We’ll come back to it.
"CNN’s John King found the same fracture in Ohio. Mark Skines, ex-Tea Party, ex-MAGA, served combat tours in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, now backing Democrats because he thinks Trump and MAGA are dangerous to democracy. Dell King, gym owner in Portsmouth, two Iraq tours, voted Trump in 2016 and 2024. Voting Dem in 2026 because of Iran. His line, said with the kind of quiet veteran’s authority that should rattle every Republican strategist still drawing breath:
“'You can’t be flippant about war. You cannot.
"Trump won 81 of 88 counties in Ohio in 2024. More than half of those counties now have energy, housing and grocery costs running ahead of wages. The deck is tilting in the rooms where the working class lives. They can feel it in their wallets. They can feel it at the pump. They can feel it at Lordstown. They can feel it watching Iraq vets explain on the local news that the bunker-bound bridge troll just dragged them into another war.
"The polls are not lying. Trump’s approval rating, per Pew at the end of April, is 34 percent. Lowest of his second term. Net approval per the Silver Bulletin polling average is minus 18.4. Cost of living approval is net minus 41.5. That last number is the one. That’s the band stopping mid-song. Hispanic Trump voters are down 27 points since early 2025. Trump voters under 35 are down to 57 percent approval, which means damn near half his own youth coalition is wobbling. Democrats have consistently overperformed in every special election since the day this discount Captain Smith took the wheel. Last week they won a Michigan State Senate seat with a firefighter Marine veteran in a district Harris carried by less than a point.
"Marjorie Taylor Greene is gone. Bannon is fading. The MAGA influencers are quieter than they’ve been in a decade. The whole rotting carnival is starting to sound less like a movement and more like a cult holding a vigil for its own cult leader.
"So why is the band still playing? You already know why. The people in first class already have their lifeboats lined up.
"The 1500 or so wealthiest Americans, the ones who own a country’s worth of stuff between them, the people who paid donor-class money to get TCJA passed in 2017 and locked in again in 2025 - they didn’t write those tax cuts because they thought America needed more billionaires. They wrote them because they could see the iceberg coming a long way off. They are already in the rafts. Their wealth is hedged into gold, into property, into private equity, into offshore accounts your accountant has never even heard of. The S&P 500 is propped up because the same private wealth that’s already evacuated wants you to keep buying their shares on the way out.
"Here is the historical bit, because it matters.
"The top marginal tax rate in America under Eisenhower - the Republican president who built the interstates, ended Korea, and presided over the greatest middle-class expansion in human history - was 91 percent. Under FDR and Truman during World War II, it peaked at 94. That’s how America funded the New Deal, the GI Bill, the highways, the GI generation’s universities, the rise to global hegemony. Tax the obscenely rich, build the country, and the country thrives.
"The Trump 2017 tax cut dropped the top marginal rate to 37 percent. The 2025 extension locked it in. The three richest Americans now own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. The top 1 percent owns roughly 30 percent of all American wealth. The top 10 percent owns about 70. The bottom half owns about two and a half. Elon Musk pays his entire annual social security contribution within about 90 seconds of midnight on New Year’s Eve, because the FICA cap stops at $176,000 and Elon makes that much before he finishes his first cup of Adderall.
"That is not a country. That is a feudal estate with extra steps.
"So here’s where we are. The iceberg is hit. The deck is tilting. The band is still playing. The first-class passengers are already in the lifeboats. The steerage class - the working blokes in Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan - is starting to feel the floor tilt and is finally looking around going hang on, what the heck. The polls are in the toilet, the special elections are bleeding red into purple, MTG has resigned, the influencers have gone quiet, and the wax-figure White Star ticket clerk in the Oval Office has nothing left to sell but lies and tariffs.
"I think within the next four weeks we’re going to see something break. Maybe it’s the GOP self-preservation instinct kicking in - any Republican congressman who wants to still have a career in 2027 has to start working out a way to peel off this rotting carcass before it drags them down with it. Maybe it’s the 25th Amendment, with Vance taking the wheel, and yes, Vance is a different flavour of awful, but at least he’s a coherent kind of awful, the kind that won’t accidentally start a hot war with three different countries before lunch. Maybe it’s impeachment number three. Maybe it’s the steakhouse demagogue waking up one morning at Mar-a-Lardo and tweeting his own resignation by mistake while Cocksbreth nods proudly in the background. Maybe it’s something we haven’t even imagined yet. But this current arrangement, with the gold-plated dipsh*t in a clip-on captain’s tie at the helm, does not have legs.
"And here’s the part that actually matters. Here is the rainbow on the other side of the rain.
"Sometimes you have to go through some [crap] to get somewhere better. Sometimes the ship has to actually sink. Sometimes the system has to take enough damage that the people running it - and the people who keep voting for whatever shiny pyromaniac comes along promising to burn it down - all stop, look at each other across the lifeboats, and go: what the [heck] were we doing.
"Because the three-time Trump voter in Maine, the Iraq vet in Portsmouth, the laid-off auto worker in Lordstown, the dairy farmer in Ohio whose costs are outrunning her wages - they don’t disagree with the Bernie Sanders types about anything that actually matters. They both want corporate America to stop buying up their land. They both want the social security cap removed so Elon and Bezos pay the same percentage as a bricklayer. They both want a healthcare system that doesn’t make you take a second mortgage out for a knee replacement. They both want a VA that works without three lawyers and a miracle. They both want a country where 1500 people don’t own everything.
"The Trumptanic going down is the worst thing that could happen to America in the short term. Real pain. Real hunger. Real economic devastation. People losing their homes, their savings, their faith. I’m not romanticising it. It’s going to be ugly.
"But on the other side, if America gets it right, there’s a chance, just a chance, that the people in power look at each other and decide this experiment in late-stage tax-cut donor-capture neoliberal feudalism wasn’t actually working. That cutting taxes for billionaires while a quarter of veterans can’t afford to feed their families is, on reflection, kind of obscene. That when 81 of 88 counties in Ohio can’t keep up with their own grocery bills, maybe the system is broken in a way that needs more than another tax cut for the donor class.
"Forget the band playing.
"Get to the lifeboat. Even if it means growing kale and hoarding lentils.
"The Trumptanic is going down.
"And on the other side, hopefully, is something worth building."
