Ian Welsh

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

Month: May 2019 Page 2 of 4

The Imperial Presidency and Eterna-War

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On May 23, 2019

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Constitutionally, only Congress can declare war. Congress has given up that power, and continues to affirm that they have given up their war powers.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday rejected a Democratic proposal to require congressional approval before the US can take military action against Iran.

Machiavelli has a dictum, “Good laws cannot save bad people; and good people can make bad laws work.”

The US constitution, despite American worship, is a flawed document. But it’s not its flaws that matter, because where it has virtues, such as putting war-powers in the hands of Congress and not the Presidency, Congress has refused to embrace it.

Likewise, as Pelosi twists in the wind, and is taunted by Barr when he refuses Congress’s subpoenas, there is a Congressional remedy: The Sergeant-at-Arms can arrest Barr. It would be constitutionally valid to do so. (And Congress runs DC, and DC has plenty of jails, so yes, there is somewhere to put him.)

The issue is that Congress members and leadership don’t want to use their power. They want an Imperial President. They want war, without the responsibility for it.

The Founders assumed that Congress members would want power and would protect their powers–they didn’t anticipate this debilitating weakness, this cowardice, on the part of Congress.

Bad people can’t even make good laws work.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Everyone’s Noticed the Oncoming US/China Cold War

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On May 22, 2019

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Horowitz calls it a tech cold war, but it is unlikely to stay that way.

Cutting Huawei off from all non-open source Google services, including the Play Store, and not allowing it to buy US components is a huge blow to Huawei.

Huawei is ahead in 5G, and American allies have been reluctant to ban it, but the US can do great damage to China’s tech industry, because in many other ways it is still far behind America’s. (Horwitz is good on this.)

China has ways of retaliating. The most potent is to embargo rare earths. China did this once before and the WTO declared it illegal, but that won’t necessarily stop the Chinese from doing it again. The WTO, which is also under attack by the Trump administration, may not have the teeth necessary to stop the Chinese, especially as the US is scarcely innocent in the tariff escalation.

I’ve been on the Huawei situation for months, because I believed it was the first step in a dangerous escalation between the current hegemonic power and the challenging power.

The best book on the subject is Thucydides Trap, by Graham Allison. Allison also wrote a foreign affairs article on Thucydides Trap. The summary is that in the past 500 years there have been 16 similar challenges. Twelve of them led to war.

America was a particularly aggressive rising power: seizing huge amounts of Mexico, grabbing the Alaskan panhandle under threat of war with Great Britain (who couldn’t afford to move their forces away from the Germans, and so let Teddy Roosevelt, an aggressive asshole in foreign affairs, take it.)

And of course, America terrorized South and Central America, as it still does, while claiming foreign naval forces had no right to be in the Americas (an echo to China’s expansion in the South China Sea most Americans refuse to acknowledge.)

Now that America is the hegemonic power they want to stay the hegemonic power.

The current international order was mostly created when China was weak, recovering from arguably the worst position it had been in for 2,500 years.

The Chinese do not accept the current international order; created by America, with European help, after WWII as legitimate, because it was created almost entirely without their input when they were weak. Indeed, a clear-eyed realpolitik view is that America enforced the order because they were massively strong, then further enforced it after the collapse of the USSR.

Put aside all the bullshit, the Pax Americana, like all Pax’s comes out American force: the barrel of a lot of guns, and the boom of a lot of nukes.

So China is moving to retake what it regards as its rightful place in the world: The greatest nation in the world. America is doing what all hegemonic powers do when an upstart rises: Resisting.

This is not a temporary thing and it is not just a result of Trump. There are real differences, and the pivot to China as the big enemy began under Obama, not Trump. Ironically, the Trans Pacific Partnership (which Trump refused to ratify) was an effort to contain China.

Trump’s addition is a preference for unilateralism. Under mulitalternalism the Americans had found it harder and harder to get their way, as the failure of the Doha round of WTO negotiations showed.

One-on-one America is always greater than anyone else. It always has the advantage. Trump is not wrong about that. So he is using that might to “re-negotiate” with other nations, including China.

Meanwhile the Chinese have been forming their Belt and Road system, which is an alliance and trade organization substitute, meant to form deals 1:1 with other countries, and to create trade links, especially a land-route across Asian to Europe,  which will allow China to bypass America’s stranglehold on naval power, and especially on the Straits of Malacca.

And so on.

Let’s cut to the chase. There will be many tactical and strategic moves, but China is about as economically powerful now as the US. They are currently, overall, a middle income country, but many cities are high income.

Because China has three times the population of the US, if they can move their population to high income, they will have an economy about three times the size of the US.

They will win.

The US should think about that carefully, because if they oppose the Chinese at every point, when China becomes the hegemonic power, the US may find themselves treated badly. The Chinese won’t feel badly about it, at all, given how they feel about how China was treated when it was weak by Europeans and Americans.

The Chinese, meanwhile, should remember that their rise to hegemonic power isn’t certain, and that if it requires great power war in a world with nuclear weapons, that may go very badly for everyone involved.

Neither side, as an aside, are good guys. The Chinese are, domestically, creating a rather nasty authoritarian surveillance state. America domestically is a shit show for many, and it has been far more likely to go to war with other countries than the Chinese have.

In fact, while Chinese actions in the South China Sea are nasty, they are mild by rising hegemonic power standards, and certainly, so far, less nasty than how the US acted when it was the rising power.

A new cold war, with the world dividing into two blocs, would be shitty. A hot war would be worse.

But I’m not at all sure “cooler heads” will prevail. The simple fact is that Americans think they are the indispensable nation, and good people, and therefore have the right to rule the world. Meanwhile the Chinese nurse their own powerful sense of superiority, added to a massive feeling of grievance and ill-use. Nor can the Chinese Communist Party allow economic growth to falter without danger to their own power and legitimacy. If it does, be sure they will focus the anger at foreign enemies.

I’m not sure there’s much point being worked up by all this, mind you. Rising and falling hegemonic powers act like this, that’s just how it is. Most of us don’t have enough power to affect these events. Just be aware of them, and if you have some power, perhaps put your finger on the scale that at least avoids hot war.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: The Collected Essays of Ian Welsh”

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On May 20, 2019

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The book is about how we made choices, as a species, which have led us into a very bad situation; what we can do as individuals to cope with the mess coming down the line, and how to create a society that wouldn’t make such huge mistakes.

In my 2017 fundraiser (there was no 2018 fundraiser), I promised a collection of 16 essays with commentary on each article, and two new essays.

It wasn’t possible to get the full scope of the argument with sixteen articles. I wound up with 31 essays, two long new essays and two shorter introductory and concluding pieces.

The first new essay is on how to create a good, stable government and the second on how to evaluate one’s personal risk during the catastrophes to come. These two essays are not available anywhere but in this collection.

There are two versions.

The PDF version of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” is the definitive version.

An EPUB version of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: The Collected Essays of Ian Welsh” is also available. The formatting is not as clean, so I offer it as an alternative. You will also need an EPUB reader, in a web browser it looks awful.

In the future, there will be a cleaner EPUB version and a Kindle version as well. I’ll let you know when those are available.

Both versions of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” can also be downloaded on the book page. Both are free for now (and will always be free to those who gave during the 2017 fundraiser, or had a subscription then).

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.” Even if you’re a long time reader, putting articles in an order that makes sense and reading them as a group with commentary should make the ideas much clearer. Blogs, as wonderful as they can be, tend to atomize ideas and leave out context.

So, please read, enjoy, and let me and others know what you think.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 18, 2019

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On May 19, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 18, 2019

This post is by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Pivot Point

[Craig Murray, via Naked Capitalism 5-17-19]

The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.

It was a rotten system, bound to collapse. But unfortunately, it was a system in which the political elite were so financially bound that the consequences of collapse threatened their place in the social order. So collapse was prevented, by the use of the systems of government to effect the largest ever single event transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the course of human history. Politicians bailed out the bankers by using the bankers’ own systems, and even permitted the bankers to charge the public for administering their own bailout, and charge massive interest on the money they were giving to themselves. This method meant that the ordinary people did not immediately feel all the pain, but they certainly felt it over the following decade of austerity as the massive burden of public debt that had been loaded on the populace and simply handed to the bankers, crippled the public finances.

The mechanisms of state and corporate propaganda kicked in to ensure that the ordinary people were told that rather than having been robbed, they had been saved.

How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power
[Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 5-16-19]

Turkey now rivals the U.S. and the U.K. as the world’s most prolific user of killer drones, according to a review by The Intercept of reported lethal drone strikes worldwide. (Other countries that have reportedly killed people with drone-launched weapons include Israel, Iraq, and Iran.) The technology has been used by Turkey against ISIS in Syria and along Turkey’s border with Iraq and Iran, where ever-present Turkish drones have turned the tide in a decades-old counter-insurgency against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

While the U.S. was the foremost operator of armed, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the world for more than a decade, launching the first drone attack in 2001, today more than a dozen countries possess this technology. The U.K., Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and Turkey have all used armed UAVs to kill targets since 2015. Efforts by Washington to control proliferation through restrictions on drone exports have failed to slow down a global race to acquire the technology. Meanwhile, the U.S. has set a precedent of impunity by carrying out hundreds of strikes that have killed civilians over the last decade.

Turkey’s Anka drone showcased during a ceremony at Turkish Aerospace Space Industries Inc., near Ankara on July 16, 2010.

The U.S. Has Been Eclipsed in Every Sphere But War

Glen Ford [Black Agenda Report 5-16-19]

The U.S. 5G eclipse by China is permanent, rooted in the systemic mayhem of the imperial economic (dis)order. Although the U.S. virtually invented the Internet as a byproduct of military technology, the early U.S. global hi-tech lead was squandered in the chaotic and criminally wasteful corporate capitalist game of all-or-nothing. As recounted by the South China Morning Post (“How US went from telecoms leader to 5G also-ran without challenger to China’s Huawei”) the U.S. refused to set national standards for mobile carriers, allowing tech companies to choose between wireless networks like TDMA, CDMA and GSM. Since 1987 — the year Huawei was founded — Europe has mandated that all its wireless systems use the GSM standard. But the Americans allowed U.S. corporations to wager billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of competing jobs on rival mobile systems. The deregulation of U.S. telecommunications in 1996 further fueled the high-tech capitalist pandemonium. “The US was like the Wild West,” said Thomas J. Lauria, a former AT&T employee, telecoms analyst and author of the book The Fall of Telecom. “Europe managed itself more contiguously than the US, they did not have a lot of disparate networks and picked the [GSM] standard that everyone had to agree to.”

The Sanders-AOC Bill to Cap Interest Rates At 15% Is Too High

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On May 17, 2019

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Sanders-021507-18335- 0004

All right, let’s get this out of the way: It’s better than the status quo.

But most credit card interest rates are about 20 percent or so, so this is about a five percent decrease.

Twenty percent is already insane. Given that banks have access to money, right now, at a little over 2.5 percent or so and have had it at less than one percent for most of the last ten years, it’s crazy low and would still leave them with a profit of 12.5 percent or so (minus administrative expenses).

That’s way more profit than anyone should earn for just lending money. Heck, it’s way more profit than almost anyone should earn for anything. Healthy economies have profit rates at no more than 5 percent or so, with profits for lending money less than those for actually doing things, a lot less.

So the interest rate cap for credit cards should be linked to the cost of the bank’s borrowing. Feeling generous to banks? Put it at four percent more than the Fed Funds rate. Remember that credit cards also charge merchant fees, which is how they make money off people who always pay their bills in free.

And any legislative act must count fees as part of the interest. Fees + interest charges are the actual interest rate of a card.

Lending money is the best business in the world to be in. Banks and other lenders, as the MMT people like to point out, don’t actually borrow money then lend it out, they create it out of thin air.

Any fool who can’t make a profit with the ability to create money out of thin air and lend it at four percent more than Fed Funds, shouldn’t be in the business–especially when they’re getting a fee for every purchase on the card.

When it’s easier to make money by lending than by doing, as well (which it is now, and has been for about 40 years) you don’t get as much actual new work, companies and innovation, because it’s safer and easier to just lend.

So being generous to banks and shadow banks is a recipe for economic stagnation. It also tends to push money towards the rich, because they are, after all, the people who can lend money (and borrow it cheap).

So, good first step on the part of AOC and Sanders, and it may be all they think it is possible to pass (much like the $15 minimum wage is inadequate and should have automatic yearly increases, but is still a good start), but it’s not enough. Not even close to enough.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Open Thread

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On May 16, 2019

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If there are any topics you’d like to discuss that aren’t relevant to recent articles, please do so here.

Deaths of Despair Soar in the UK

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On May 15, 2019

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But hey, who can imagine why so many Britons were so angry at the status quo that they decided to chance Brexit?

Yes, yes, the EU is mostly not to blame for the misery of Britons. (The EU is still evil, as shown by their treatment of Greece, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Mostly it’s the Conservatives (though Labour, before Corbyn, often voted for Conservative austerity bills).

But when people are hurting, they turn against the current order. People in this much agony are rational like animals caught in traps. If they have to chew off their leg to escape, so be it.

The British have only one real chance, right now, to end the pain. Ending austerity is far more important than Brexit, far more to blame for Britain’s woes, and the only person who will end it is Corbyn.

If you’re British, and you vote against Labour/Corbyn in any riding where Labour can win, no matter what happens around Brexit, you are voting for increased misery (and for policies like taking away wheelchairs from cripples).

What people just don’t seem able to understand is that “more of the same” doesn’t offer any hope for people for whom “more of the same” is so unbearable, they may wind up deciding that killing themselves is better than being alive.

If your life sucks, and you have no hope for the future, you need change, and you’ll take a chance on almost any change.

Sigh.

But British elites demonize Corbyn (lying about him at least three-quarters of the time). Eventually, this is going to turn actually nasty, and, well, guillotine.jpg if they aren’t lucky.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Telecom Revolution Is Mostly Authoritarian

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On May 14, 2019

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All major communications advances have had both liberating and authoritarian uses. And, I believe, every one has been stronger on the authoritarian side than on the liberating side.

(Originally published Jan 3, 2018. Back to the top, because this needs to be re-emphasized.)

Writing improved access to knowledge, but it was primarily used by nobles and temples to track slaves, debt, and workers wages (in grain). It enabled centralized states and a vast web of debt-slavery (with interest rates in Mesopotamia often at 30 percent or so.) Without writing, centralized states always amounted to feudal states; with writing, central administration, and bureaucracy were possible.

Taxes could be tracked, property assigned, and citizens could, in effect, have files (and very often did).

The telegram, which triggered the real beginning of the modern telecom revolution, centralized control in capitals. Viceroys and governors lost power, rebellions were more easily crushed (because news could travel fast) and companies could be run from HQ far better.

Each continued step in the electronic telecom revolution has continued the centralization, and the invention of recording devices and video cameras made possible a type of surveillance not possible before.

The problem with prior surveillance states was that they required a lot of people. They were inefficient. Paying everyone to watch everyone else has sharp limits. It also doesn’t record everything: What you were doing 14 years ago at 2:17pm in the afternoon is not usually available to be used against you now, when circumstances have changed, and something “on you” is needed.

Modern computer networks, which allow files to be easily shared, mean that your life is available to anyone with access, which increasingly, due to all the leaks, means anyone who really wants to know.

These records already control a vast amount of your life: Your credit score is used not just to determine how much money you can borrow, but often by landlords to see if they will rent to you, and by companies to decide if they will hire you. A criminal record makes almost all good jobs unavailable, and you can’t just “leave town” to avoid that.

China is putting together a central scoring system which will give every single citizen a number. Spend a lot of time playing computer games? Lower score. Have friends who say bad things about the government online? Worse score. And so on.

Meanwhile, the combination of security cameras everywhere and biometric recognition systems based on face, gait, and even infrared profile, means that combined with AI, where you are all the time can be tracked and stored. Cameras increasingly have audio attached.

And heck, most people in the first world now voluntarily carry a phone with them which acts both as a tracking device and a bug (turning the microphone on to listen to you is trivial).

Online, everything you do is tracked: where you go, what you buy, who your friends are, what sort of words you say, what your political opinions are, and so on. This information, while it still misfires often, can generally tell if you’re sick, what you’re sick with, what you want to buy, how your finances are doing, if you’re pregnant or have a young child, and far more besides. It will only get more all-encompassing as AI and algos improve, and as more information is hooked into the web.

It takes quite a bit of work now to go dark, and a great deal of work to leave your past behind. Even faking your death is harder than it used to be.

Further, computer networks make centralized control far, far easier. Even telephones in the age of expensive, long distance calls were not as good as what we have now. You can run Shanghai from Beijing or New York: or New York or San Francisco from Shanghai.

There has been a liberatory effect, best understood by those of us old enough to remember before the internet was widely available: It amounts to “information at our fingertips,” and it is far more a good than a bad. No longer, if we don’t know and don’t have a book at our fingertips, do we have to find an expert or run to a library for most inquires. If we want to learn about many things, including advanced topics like engineering or law, we need only an internet connection.

This is a real increase in freedom from experts.

But this is outweighed by the horrors of close supervision, as in Amazon warehouses, where workers are tracked not even minute by minute, but in seconds per task, by remote electronic supervision.

This is hell. This is the sort of supervision that could be used only rarely, at great cost, in the old world, because the supervisor had to be right there, with you.

Meanwhile, drones assassinate people in every continent but Australia (I think) and Antarctica, from central control in America. This easy assassination is something no one could do 30 years ago.

This is technology with hellishly authoritarian potential, and history tells us it will be used that way. The printing press may have broken much of the power of the Catholic Church, but it also led to states we still call absolutist.

The same will be true of these telecom technologies, especially combined with AI behavioural pattern recognition.

The bet, on the part of elites, is that this tech breaks the inefficiency problem of classical authoritarian surveillance states: Only a few people, comparatively, are needed. It will require a few percent of the population at most, not the previously necessary twenty to thirty percent for true comprehensive surveillance (with all the possibilities of petty corruption that then ensue: The USSR’s surveillance was extensive and, eventually, worthless.)

There is a widespread myth in our society that Progress is always Good.

It is not. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn’t. Generally, it is mixed, with bad dominating.

Right now, in much of the world, the good of the telecom revolution seems poised to be swamped by the bad (and this is without even discussing the data coming in showing that the more time you spend on your phone/computer, the unhappier you are. This data is not mixed, it is virtually all bad.)

Technology which can be used by elites to make other humans inferior, will be. It always has been, and it always will be, and the only way that is challenged is by commoners rising up, often violently, to insist otherwise.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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