Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Fundamentals Series: On Problems, Principles & Solutions

When we want to change the world we’re usually reacting to a problem. Even positive visions usually come out of negatives. We want liberty because we have tyranny. We want health because we have sickness. We want prosperity because we have poverty. We want equality because some people have way more than they need and others less than need.

When we solve a problem it’s generally mediated by a principle. Very often the principle is just the problem stated slightly differently.

Problem: Some people have more than they need, others have less than they need.

Principle: Make sure no one has more than they need while anybody has less than they need.

A principle tells you, generally speaking, what you should be doing about a problem. It doesn’t tell you how to do it.

So, for the example above, post-war Welfare states generally came upon the solution:

Solution: Tax the rich heavily and put the poor on Welfare, controlled by social workers and other bureaucrats because poor people can’t be trusted to use money wisely.

If you think poor people aren’t stupid, then you have another solution, basic income + progressive taxation.

Restate the problem slightly by removing having too much as a problem, and the principles and solutions change:

Problem: some people don’t have enough.

Principle: Make it so that everyone has enough, or more than enough.

Solution: Just give everyone who has less than enough money, enough money. (Basic Income.)

Solution: If we make the rich even richer, enough will wind up flowing down to take care of everyone else. (Trickle Down Economics.)

Solution: The rich should give away most of their money over time, on good works or to organizations which do good works. (Charity.)

The difference between welfare and a basic income is instructive: one trusts those without enough money to spend it themselves, the other doesn’t. It’s mediated thru a view of why people are in poverty. Welfarism assumes poor people are somehow defective, basic income assumes they’re fine, they just don’t have enough money.

The first solution assumes having too much is bad, the second solutions all assume that some people having too much isn’t wrong, it’s that others don’t have enough


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Let’s look at another Triune, closely related, which focuses on being rich or powerful as the problem.

Problem: rich and powerful people use their power and wealth to take control of society and direct the benefits to themselves, hurting everyone else.

Principle: Keep the rich poor and the powerful weak.

There are a lot of different solutions to this and solutions are often in used together. Those that work usually only work for a while.

Solution: If they have enough money to influence politics or society, take it from them. (Specific policies like progressive taxation, estate taxes, wealth taxes, and so on.)

Solution: Don’t let the rich spend their money on politics. (Public finance laws, donation limits and so on. Doesn’t work all that well, but does have some effect.)

Solution: Don’t let the rich have private specialists in violence.

Solution: Don’t let rich people happen at all. (Proposals for maximum income and maximum wealth taxes.)

But wealth isn’t the only type of power, so something also needs to be done about people who control rich or powerful organizations. If I only have 3x as much money as median, but control a large bank, that’s all bullshit. I’m rich, I just have some limits on how I can spend that money. And this is where you come up with things like anti-trust law, limits on how large any organization can be, limits on corporate political spending, separation of church and state and so on.

Let’s move to another problem, primarily from the 18th and 19th century.

Problem: industrialization requires large numbers of people willing to work in factories but most people don’t want or need to work in factories because they can support themselves thru agriculture on common lands and factory jobs involve much more work in horrible conditions.

Principle: Large numbers of people must not be able to support themselves without working in factories.

Solution: Take away their commons rights so they must take any other job.

Note that other principles and solutions could have been tried. Perhaps:

Principle: Make factory work more desirable than agricultural commons work.

Solution: concentrate on safety and wages and don’t have 6 1/2 twelve hour shifts a week.

Pay them better and treat them better, in other words. The argument against is that it wouldn’t have been profitable, but profit is a function of political and social choices.

In fact, in post WWII America, that solution was tried, and it worked. China had to deal with this problem, and used both principles and solutions in concert.

Problems suggest principles, and principles suggest solutions, but there relationship isn’t 1:1, it’s mediated thru ideology, which is to say how the decision makers think the world is and should be.

I’m going to write a series of articles on the principles which would create a good society: the Fundamental series.

But it needs to be understood that every principle is based on a perceived problem or vision. Every principle is based on a set of assumptions about the world, an ideology, and that solutions are extensions of principles.

You don’t discard problems unless you don’t think they’re problems.

You don’t discard principles unless you disagree with their underlying ideology.

You blow thru solutions until you find some that work, and work without creating problems you can’t mitigate.

When FDR was in charge he knew what he wanted to do, but if a solution didn’t work, he’d throw it out and try something else. He wasn’t wedded to specific solutions.

There are non-negotiable means, mostly along the lines of “don’t torture or rape”, but mostly the question is “are you actually solving the problem and doing so while respecting the principle?”

This three part design is the first fundamental.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters 

Zoë Schlanger, October 5, 2024 [The Atlantic]

…This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School….

The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution….
…A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation….
Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance….
But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.
Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes.
[TW: “a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government,” which the rich are exacerbating by their lavish funding of the stridently anti-government conservative and libertarian movements, and, more importantly the corruption of the judiciary so that it provides judicial legitimacy and bite to these anti-government ideas and policies, as in Loper-Bright. As tragic as these disasters are, progressives should be planning beforehand how to use the inevitable public clamor for disaster relief as climate change worsens, and direct that clamor against the anti-government conservative and libertarian movements that are the root cause of unprepardeness. As Stoller writes below: “we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order [but] the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility.]
Matt Stoller, October 08, 2024 [BIG]
…All of that is a way of saying that hurricanes are really dangerous, and involve massive sums of money and important questions of market power and shortages. And that’s especially true today, with our monopolized and thus fragile supply chains. For instance, when North Carolina got hit with immense rain from Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago, it killed hundreds of people, and also knocked out a mine making 90% of the key pure quartz on which the semiconductor industry depends. To take another example, the American Hospital Association has already asked the President to declare a national emergency due to a shortage of IV fluids as a result of the disaster….
((One factory about 35 miles east of Ashville supplied 60% of the nation’s IV fluids…))

….So what’s the right approach to addressing the resulting crisis?

The response will require more state capacity. Clearly there’s search and rescue and immediate crisis response, which requires a lot more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We’re going to need a permanently larger FEMA, since climate change has dramatically increased the pace of natural disasters. The government should probably just rebuild and then make all cell phone service free in the area for the next two months, and find a way of extending Medicaid to everyone so no one has to deal with billing. Or they could just temporarily nationalize hospitals.

What we can learn from the Covid crisis and the CARES Act is that we should immediately be sending resources to individuals and small businesses in the area. A quick disbursal of cash to everyone in the region, as well as a revival of the Paycheck Protection Program for small business loan/grants, would help people afford basic necessities, and keep businesses alive. Bank regulators should also freeze credit reporting and student debt payments for people in affected counties.

Given the potential crisis of Florida property values and all the financing attached to those, we need to think about bank solvencies. To address the possibility of a financial crisis, Congress should stop working through the Federal Reserve, which is too focused on helping private equity and large banks and far too opaque. Instead, the government should structure a new public bank called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It should be run by the FDIC, and be allowed to use the Fed balance sheet for loans, which would all be publicly posted.

We can also learn some lessons from the post-Katrina moment, as well as what happened during Covid, and the CARES Act. What we can learn from Katrina is that it’s important to do as much within the government as possible, instead of through contractors….

… we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order. Last July, I wrote a piece on how we are forgetting the lessons from Covid. We are still highly dependent on China, and the fragility of our supply chains hasn’t improved. And that’s because, while there are some good policymakers in positions of authority like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra, the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility. And this dynamic is as much an ideological problem as anything else….

Who Helps and Who Hinders the Climate Conversation

Chapter 3 of A Climate of Corporate Control: How Corporations Have Influenced the US Dialogue on Climate Science and Policy [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012), pp. 20–30, via JSTOR Daily 10-06-2024]

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Domestic Consequences Of The New War Paradigm

Image by DigitalMuses

So, the new paradigm for war is: if you can see it, you can kill it.

And drones all over the battlefield mean you can see it.

This has lead to a strategy of dispersal. Until the artillery, air and attack drones are neutralized troops need to avoid massing, because masses get taken out fast. The use of motorcycle infantry is one example of this: move fast, stay dispersed, and swarm.

This has particularly been the case in the Ukrainian war, but it’s also made Hezbollah’s guerilla tactics less effective and forced them to use their tunnels far more.

But forget all that. What happens in war, comes home. Combined with modern surveillance tech, by which I mean various recognition systems, including facial, gait, body and IR, not to mention the tracking devices known as phones everyone insists on carrying, this means that governments which are willing to invest in the necessary hardware and software (AI seems to be good for this), can easily track individuals.


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And once they’ve tracked you, they don’t need to send cops: they can just send drones.

What I expect, and not too far in the future, is for this paradigm to spread to domestic law enforcement. Lots of drones keeping an eye on everything, and drones being used to take out whomever they want. I’d also expect ground drones to be used far more for crowd control and suppression.

The great thing, if you weren’t a government, about pre-internet/cell-phone tech combined with huge cities was genuine anonymity most of the time. People could fade in the masses, and if they were able to break contact with internal security forces (that’s what cops are), you stood a good chance of not being identified, and even if identified, finding you wasn’t easy.

That era has been passing for some time: the ubiquitous security cameras, often with listening devices attached were the first step.

But what’s coming down the line is going to allow for some truly dystopian levels of control and scary levels of individual targeting.

And remember, drones can be very cheap.

We’ll talk a little about the weaknesses of current internal security regimes, and how to stay ahead. But for now, to start, if you’re doing something the government doesn’t like (perhaps demonstrating against a certain genocide) don’t carry a phone, even one that’s “turned off” and wear a mask. If you need to break contact, get inside a building and merge with a crowd, then find some simple way to change your clothing profile and ideally your IR profile.

Don’t, at least, make it easy for them.

What Elites Do To Others They Would Do To You

Here’s the thing about Iraq, or Palestine, or Libya: what your leaders will do in these countries is what they would do to you if they though it would benefit them.

Israel has long used skunk-water, incredibly foul smelling stuff, on Palestinians.

In the last year they used them on Israelis who were protesting the war (not because they care about Palestinians, because they want the hostages back.)

But that’s minor league.

American elites, when they say, “we have to make hard decisions” always mean by that they have to hurt those below them. A hard decision for them is never about doing something against interest: say cutting their own compensation to keep employees working. Nope.

American and Western elites are predators, and their population are sheep. The cops are, as they say themselves, sheep-dogs. They make sure the population holds still for the shearing, and when necessary, the killing.

Covid is instructive: elites have well ventilated and filtered rooms. They test regularly and keep Covid-positive people away from them. But they don’t make their offices and factories safe by installing the necessary ventilation and filtering available, instead they just force workers to come into unsafe offices. (And no, the pandemic isn’t over.)


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Policy since about 79 has been about deliberately impoverishing the mass of people, while making themselves rich. This isn’t close to in question.

There is no group solidarity between Western elites and those they rule. Never do they lead by example, “we’ll give up private jets to help with climate change and impose a carbon tax on farmers” is something we never hear. I doubt it ever occurs to them that they should sacrifice something.

Through the Gaza war they’ve increasingly cracked down on any sort of protest, and often made protest illegal, with penalties which are more severe than for crimes of violence. This is particularly true in Britain and Germany, but they aren’t alone, simply the vanguard.

Obama ordered the assassination of an American citizen. Multiple American citizens have been killed in Gaza and Lebanon and the US has done nothing.

Police in America steal more money than burglars. They kill and beat people in significant numbers.

And the day they perceive it to be to their benefit to Iraq or Gaza a big chunk of Americans, they’ll do it. Don’t think otherwise.

 

The Czechloslovakia Analogy Is Overused, But It Fits Israel

Yesterday I wrote an article about how lack of aggression has allowed Israel to control the initiative and choose the time and place it wants to fight. If you haven’t read that article, please do so now.

Back in 1938 the Allied powers agreed to let Hitler cut up Czechloslovakia. At the time the Czechs had a huge army, and if supported, they were willing to fight. They weren’t supported and, soon enough, France and Britain had to fight Germany minus a massive central European army at their side.

Woops.

October 7th took the Israelis by complete surprise. For two days Hamas roved free. After that, the Israelis systematically bombed the hell out of Gaza and then invaded. They were incompetent and Hamas fought well, but Hamas was vastly outnumbered and out-equipped. To this day they haven’t been able to stop Hamas entirely, but they’ve done a lot of damage and certainly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

During all this Hezbollah just launched missiles. Oh, they did damage, for sure, and they caused hundreds of thousands of internal refugees and an Israeli economic crisis. Iran supplied Hezbollah and Yemen but unless hit, did nothing directly.

Hezbollah could have hit far, far harder. They could even have invaded, especially during the period when much of the army was tied up in Gaza.


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There’s a concept in military strategy and tactics called “initiative.” The side with the initiative is forcing the other side to react to it. Hamas started with the initiative, but soon lost it and the Resistance sat back and let Israel do what it wanted, when it wanted. Israel mapped out Southern Lebanon, took its time setting up assassinations and figuring out where the missile stocks were: then it struck.

Israel was gifted the initiative by the Resistance (well, not so much Yemen, they did what they could).

Hamas wasn’t ever very strong, to be sure. Not Czechloslovakia, but no joke. Their hope was always that if they provoked a war, the Resistance would join in and they could win.

But the Resistance, who were resentful that Hamas didn’t warn them of October 7th, half-assed it, and didn’t strike when Israel was most vulnerable. (It’s clear Hamas was right not to tell Iran and Hezbollah about October 7th given how compromised they both are by the Mossad.)

Now Hamas, though still fighting, is no longer a serious threat to Israel and Hezbollah was caught on its back foot though I hear at least one credible report that they’re recovering fast.

To go back to the Nazi analogy, Israel is a genocidal power with wants lebensraum.

If the shoe fits.

You don’t play around with Nazis, and so far the Resistance has been doing just that. And even more than Hezbollah, this means Iran.

Surrender, or fight. Stop the half measures.

How Lack Of Aggression Cripples Resistance Orgs

Let’s talk about Corbyn and Hezbollah and Iran.

These three things aren’t the same in many ways. But all three are fighting an entrenched system.

When Corbyn was leader, he had the majority of the membership behind him, he took control of the executive committee and he only lacked control of the MPs, who were almost all neoliberals united in hatred of him and his program.

This was a simple situation to deal with: Corbyn had the power to force re-selection: to make MPs face elections in their ridings. Almost all would have been replaced by left wingers: they weren’t popular and couldn’t win.

He refused.

He also had the power to replace the administrative class running the party and elections. He didn’t, and they sabotaged him. Without that sabotage he would have won the 2017 election, which was extremely close. This isn’t hyperbole, we have emails showing they deliberately sabotaged the campaign: they would rather the Tories win than Labour under Corbyn,

Starmer has had no such weakness: he has ruthlessly purged the party membership and leadership of left-wingers.

Now let’s turn to Hezbollah. They kept up steady pressure on Israel since October 7th, but they never seriously attacked. They did damage, for sure: most of the Northern settlements are abandoned and there has been a huge economic cost, but they never did what they could. They were scared, I think, of Israel attacking Lebanon.


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Israel is now attacking Lebanon, hitting multiple hospitals, at least one orphanage and telling first responders that if they go to help injured civilians, they’ll be killed.

What Hezbollah wanted to avoid, happened.

Hezbollah really had two choices: go all in and attack with everything, or do nothing. Half-assing it was not smart. It let Israel choose the time of their attack and spend a year planning and executing, which has lead to the loss of much leadership and apparently a good chunk of Hezbollah’s missile stocks.

This is not 20-20 rear view sight. I said at the start of the war that Hezbollah should attack. Why wait for Israel to beat Hamas down, then turn on them? (Yes, Hamas is still fighting, but attacking when most of the Israeli military was in Gaza and before Hamas had been badly degraded is obviously optimal.)

Now, as for Iran, they too have been overly cautious. I’m impressed by their missile capacities, but they too are sitting on their asses. This is getting close to a North Korea/China situation and it’s time for them to just go all in and stop with the proxy bullshit. Send men and stop the crap.

Khameini himself is 70% of the way to understanding this. He said that the enemy comes for countries, and if you do not defend those countries, why then they eventually come for you. Iran is the end-goal. If Hezbollah is defeated conventionally (they won’t lose a long term guerilla war) then Iran is next.

Caution: building up resources, has served Iran well. But there is time for that, and a time for using the resources. Mao was a war leader, and one of the great generals of the 20th century. He was not afraid of war, and he understood when it was time to fight.

If Iran doesn’t, they put themselves at great risk. Including the possibility that they lose a lot of their weapon stocks in a pre-emptive attack. Are they less compromised by the Mossad than Hezbollah was? Are they sure?

The bombing and so on they seek to avoid will come to them anyway, just as it has to Hezbollah and Lebanon.

Either fight the war or give up, bow to the US and Israel and stop the Resistance.


(Machiavelli observed that most men don’t change. They keep doing the same thing they have always done, even when circumstances change to make old strategies ineffective. Hezbollah has a chance, because their old leadership is dead. Iran needs its old leadership to wake up before they wind up dead and Iran loses.)

The Leadership Competence Crisis

By StewartM

(This is an elevated post by commenter StewartM.)

What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.

I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.

But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.


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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.

This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!

The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.

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