American Apocalypse? By Howard Bloom

Cory Booker, during his 25-hour record-breaking Senate speech Monday night March 31st to Tuesday night April 1st described the current state of America as a “crisis” and emphasized that “these are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.” 

Booker’s statement was dismissed as pathetic whining by MAGA cheerleader Sean Hannity. But it leads Democrats to a question: are we on the brink of an American Armageddon, an American Apocalypse.  Will the policies of the current president bring a depression raining down upon us and spreading like a tidal wave across the world economy.

Is our current president, like Sampson, pulling away the pillars on which our prosperity is based?  Or is he clearing the ground for new pillars that will reach even greater heights?

Here’s a clue.  Tuesday morning April 1st at ten AM, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its JOLTS report, its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.  The interpretations of that report were immediate and pitted the White House against the Democratic media.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which speaks for the Trump administration, said everything was just fine, things were “little changed,”  nothing to look at here.  But CNN, speaking to the liberal community, said “extreme fear is driving the US market.  Job opportunities are shrinking and layoffs in the federal government just hit their highest level in four years.”

CNN went on to report that:

US employers pulled back on their hiring plans last month…The number of job openings — a measurement of labor market demand — fell to 7.57 million in February.

Actually, things were worse than that. Yes, in February 2025, there were nearly 7.6 million job openings.  But that’s a decrease of 877,000 compared to February 2024, when there were 8.8 million job openings.  In other words, in the first month of the Trump administration, there were nearly a million less jobs than there had been in the Biden administration.

But let’s turn the analysis of the new Bureau of Labor Statistics survey back over to CNN, which quotes Elizabeth Renter, NerdWallet’s senior economist, saying that “uncertainty across the broad economy will hold hiring at lower levels.”  She means the uncertainty being precipitated upon us by what Democrats see as the wildly gyrating policies of the current president.

CNN quotes Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, explaining that “businesses need strong signals about the economy in order to feel comfortable in hiring, investing and expanding. However, in recent weeks, the messaging around tariffs has only added to uncertainty.”

In other headline stories, CNN also reports that “‘It’s a bloodbath’: Massive wave of job cuts underway at US health agencies.”  “Americans haven’t been this worried about rising unemployment since 2009.” “Recession odds are rising as Trump’s trade war escalates.”   And “The American consumer is on the ropes. Tariffs — and anxiety — could deliver the knockout blow.”

Just what would be the knockout blow?  A depression that lasts ten years, like the Great Depression of 1929 to 1939.  Which many blamed on, guess what?  Tariffs.

But economist Allison Shrivastava is right when she says, “the messaging around tariffs has only added to [the] uncertainty.”  In other words, the real blows to the economy will come in response to the tariffs Donald Trump announced at 4 pm April 2nd in the Rose Garden.

These are blows that even Donald Trump foresees when he says, “”There will be some pain.” In other words, we will all have to undergo a little agony before prosperity comes raining from the skies and we all become rich.

The blows will come as the world adjusts to President Trump’s new tariffs, tariffs that are gigantic. Tariffs of

• 46% for Viet Nam, where a lot of the manufacturing for Japanese and Chinese goods is being done,
• 49% for Cambodia, where a lot of your inexpensive clothes are made,
• 54% for China itself, and
• 20% for our ally in NATO, the European Union.

What did the president say about all this?  “April 2nd, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

But will the result of the new tariffs be the opposite?  Has the American Armageddon arrived? Not quite yet.  But we shall have to see.

References:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/04/tariffs-work-and-president-trumps-first-term-proves-it/

https://www.cnn.com/markets/fear-and-greed

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/economy/us-jolts-job-openings-layoffs-february/index.html

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-2054514

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Trump-administration/Trump-reveals-reciprocal-tariffs-34-on-China-24-on-Japan

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/Trump-tariffs-risks-700bn-blow-to-global-GDP-with-U.S.-hit-most

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-announces-sweeping-range-of-reciprocal-tariffs-10-worldwide-tariff-in-liberation-day-proclamation-203505547.html

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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s next book, coming out in spring, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.”  One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.  Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American.  Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment.  I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”   For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute