Ian Welsh

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

Month: July 2019 Page 2 of 3

Khameini’s Three Directives for Iran

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On July 22, 2019

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From the useful Elija Mangnier,

1 – Adherence to Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment and everything related to this science at all costs. Nuclear enrichment is a sword Iran can hold in the face of the West, which wants to take it from Tehran. It is Iran’s card to obstruct any US intention of “obliterating” Iran.

2 – Continue to develop Iran’s missile capability and ballistic programs. This is Iran’s deterrent weapon that prevents its enemies from waging war against it. Sayyed Ali Khamenei considers the missile program a balancing power to prevent harm against Iran.

3 – Support Iran’s allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and never abandon them, because they are essential to Iran’s national security.

Now, basically, this is an extended riff on the sad joke that Hussein’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya were destroyed after they were disarmed. Libya’s case is particularly sad: Gaddafi disarmed in exchange for safety and inclusion, and instead was attacked.

Everyone with sense knows this: You can’t disarm in the face of the US or its core Western allies, France and England. All three nations are rabid dogs who believe that, though they have the right to invade or fuck up other nations (the psychology behind this is beyond messy), no one has the right to harm them.

(And yeah, France is bad. Almost certainly worse than Britain at this point in its constant interference, especially anywhere they had colonial interests. The French know they are special and civilized, and that other nations need their bayonets.)

Other nations which completely can’t be trusted include Israel and Saudi Arabia, both key American allies.

All these countries, having been sheltered under the superpower’s skirts since the end of the Cold War, feel entitled to fuck up nations which are out of favor with the big bully, the US.

The dynamic, while messy, isn’t very complicated.

As for the Iranian situation, with the seizure of tankers, and the “maximal” sanctions, and with Europe doing basically nothing to help rescue the nuclear deal, I have to say the prospects for this spiralling out of control are high.

I don’t think that Trump wants war. He wants Iran to disarm, then another President will take them out (or their local enemies).

But Iran isn’t going to do that, and the sanctions are so harmful that they amount to war by other means. And as Trump’s administration ratchets up the pressure, and Iran responds, it won’t take much for it turn to hot war. All it will take is one mistake, one miscalculation and Trump deciding he needs to act tough.

The entire situation is very tiring and very stupid. This mess in the Middle East isn’t the US’s problem, everyone is willing to sell them oil (and the US is the world’s largest producer now anyway, thanks to Obama), and they have very few actual strategic interests which are served by meddling.

Even the argument that they must be there to keep the oil flowing is obvious BS, since their meddling is increasing the probability of a huge disruption, and over the past 30 years sanctions and war have tended to reduce oil supplies rather than increase them. (Some will argue that’s been the point. But reducing oil supplies is not in the US’s national interest even if some Americans want it.)

Go home, Yankee. You aren’t needed in the Middle East.

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 – July 20, 2019

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On July 21, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“Can the Left Even Understand Why the Right is winning?”

Philip Mirowski, who has detailed the history of the “neoliberal thought collective,” the Mont Pelerin Society, posted the first draft of a new paper,  “Can the Left Even Understand Why the Right is winning?” It can be viewed if you register with www.academia.edu and Mirowski grants you permission. Explaining the rise of Trump and a conservatism that is increasingly open about its bigotry,  Mirowski rejects the “bromidic term ‘populism’” and points instead to

the recent bounty of exceptional work on the history of neoliberalism [including] Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (Harvard, 2018); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Zone, 2015); Thomas Biebricher, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford, 2018); Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, (Viking, 2017); Melinda Cooper, Family Values (Zone, 2017); and Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, (Verso, 2019).

Mirowski observes:

…it seems many activists on the left hold out few ambitions for any sort of ‘fusionist’ project themselves, and instinctively shy away from an explicit political economy, and therefore have not been capable of understanding the relative unity of the forces arrayed against them. If someone suggests otherwise, the tendency has been to disparage such thinking as tainted by ‘conspiracy theories’….

The biggest intellectual failure of the left is its demonstrated incapacity to theorize the role and significance of markets. Curiously, unlike the most sophisticated neoliberals, much of the left still buys into the myth of the government vs. the market. That is, they imagine a separate entity called government existing outside of something called ‘the market’, with the former possessing the wisdom to identify ‘market failures’ and rectify them with judicious ‘regulation’.

After discussing how neoliberals themselves have not agreed on any exact definition of “markets” — perhaps intentionally (“to render political action by the masses so difficult as to be permanently stymied, both by restricting the franchise but also by the strategic production of ignorance, which renders political understanding inchoate”) — Mirowski gets to his key critique of the left’s ignorance concerning neoliberalism:

There are two very important facts about neoliberals that the left needs to take to heart: [1] They do not believe in laissez faire, but are unrepentantly constructivist about government—that is, they acknowledge the tenet that their minions must occupy the government at whatever level (local, national, transnational) and in whatever ways are deemed effective to bring about the sort of ‘reforms’ they believe are urgent; and [2] They take seriously the epistemic premise that people are generally imperfect cognitive beings, and that (their definition of) The Market knows more than any human being ever could about the world. Both principles may seem rather paradoxical given their publicly stated doctrines, something that numerous writers have explored in detail.  But those on the Left seem especially incapable of taking either one seriously, and thus to attain understanding how these two principles interact.

Ever since Hillary Clinton lost a presidential election that was uniquely hers to lose, I have thought it almost comical that we have Democratic Party elites and liberal leaders who, on one hand, have repeatedly rejected the argument that the creation and promotion of movement conservatism amounts to a dedicated conspiracy by wealthy reactionaries with manifold ties to Wall Street, and on the other hand, have been almost hysterical in their insistence that the election was stolen from Hillary by a conspiracy run by Vladimir Putin and his Russian minions. Why they reject the one conspiracy theory but embrace the other, is not too difficult to understand, in the context of the USA political system’s utter dependency on the rich for campaign contributions.

During my community organizing days in the 1980s, when I was with a radical group within the Democratic Party trying to stop NAFTA, I repeatedly encountered an unwillingness among leftists to even consider direct political action targeting specific individuals responsible for political atrocities. This unwillingness to “name names” approached hysteria when facts were presented that much of the USA industrial base was being bought and looted by “leverage buyout” corporate raiders with significant financial backing from organized crime. I remain of the opinion that this unwillingness to face these facts was a reflection of personal and institutional cowardice to confront the immense political power of Wall Street, and the potentially violent retribution of organized crime. Especially by the late 1980s, when it was clear to those willing to see that Wall Street and organized crime had pretty much merged. (See for example the conclusion by Catherine Austin Fitts, managing director of Dillon, Read & Co. at the time, that the $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989 only made sense if Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts — and whoever KKR actually was acting on behalf of — needed to launder billions of dollars of dirty money).

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UK Seizes Iranian Tanker, So Iran Seizes UK Tanker

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On July 20, 2019

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That’s the news, basically.

Well, Iran also seized a Liberian-flagged tanker, not sure why (may be operating for a British company).

Also not sure why the UK seized an Iranian tanker in the first place. The UK has said it supports the Iranian nuclear deal, and the US sanctions on which it was operating are destroying that deal.

But I suppose lap-dog nations will be lap-dog nations and the UK wants a free trade deal with the US badly for Brexit, and all indications are that the US is demanding massive concessions in exchange for one.

So this may be a little something on the side from Britain.

But as far as I’m concerned, the US sanctions on Iran are completely illegitimate, and no other country should be helping enforce them. That includes Canada, especially after we arrested a Huawei executive for breaking Iran sanctions, and that also includes the UK.

I rather doubt Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the first place, though I don’t see why they shouldn’t have nukes when Israel does. But neither of those observations are the point, anyway.

Meanwhile this whole mess has just emphasized, again, that you can’t make a deal with the US and trust them to keep it. The second some new politician gets in who doesn’t like it, they won’t just break it, they’ll hurt you badly.

(Admin: Feel free to use the comments on this post as an open thread, as well.)

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.

Inequality Is Unnatural

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On July 19, 2019

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I’ve been reading UltraSociety, by Peter Turchin. Turchin’s a biologist who turned to mathematical models of human society, and he’s done interesting work, not all of which I agree with (or agree is quite as radical as he claims).

But one of the points he makes in UltraSociety, a point which has also been made by many archeologists and anthropologists, is that for most human existence we were radically egalitarian.

One of the great curses on understanding ourselves has been a tendency to compare ourselves to other primates, in particular chimpanzees, with whom we share most of our DNA.

But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.

For most of our existence, we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.

In normal human society (a.k.a., not what we have now, what we had during most of our existence), if someone started to put themselves above others they were first mocked, then ostracized and if that didn’t work, they were killed.

Being stronger didn’t matter, because as Turchin and others have pointed out, what makes humanity unique as a hunter and killer is the use of thrown and missile weapons. Even thrown rocks are deadly. Sharp, thrown objects like spears and javelins are deadlier; bows deadlier still.

Get out of place, don’t accept social correction, get dead.

It was that simple, and that’s how we lived for most of our existence.

So what’s going on now is unusual, and it takes a great deal of coercion to have it happen.

The fundamentals are only two: First, you must have an ideology which legitimates radical inequality (CEOs earning 1,000 times what normal people earn; politicians who send people to war and don’t go themsleves); second, you must have violence specialists who are better at violence than random people who get tired of being unequal.

This is also why periods with good weapons of assassination tend to be more equal (the pistol or even the concealed dagger). It is why Nixon, who ruled in a period of relative equality, went to visit protesters with only one aide, while modern Presidents live in fortresses and federal buildings are armored up. As a young man, I remember being able to walk through the first floor of the Department of Defense in Ottawa. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do it in most buildings. In the 80s, you could.

So, as inequality increases, so too must defenses against violence. This is true for domestic inequality and it is true for international inequality, now that it is possible for those who feel aggrieved thousands of miles from our countries can see that our country is responsible, travel to it, and inflict harm.

Turchin makes another important point, which cuts against Pinker’s “violence just keeps decreasing.”

Violence actually appears to have the form of an A. Before agriculture it was relatively low, after agriculture it increased until peaking around the time of the Axial sages, whose teachings tried to reduce it, and when those teachings were applied by various rulers, did. Thus, a long decline in the odds of dying by violence. (This claim comes with sharp local exceptions in time and place–exceptions which may prove, in the end, larger than the generalized decline. The story isn’t over yet.)

In the meantime, inequality isn’t natural to humans. It’s bad for us in every way possible (it shows up on every metric from health, to happiness, to stress, to how long we live), including to those at the top.

And maintaining it requires an ideology which pretends it is justified, and a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.

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.

Eliminationist Rhetoric

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On July 18, 2019

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Real polarization in a country happens when different factions don’t accept the other faction has a right to exist.

When you say “traitor,” or “Go back home,” or “You don’t belong here,” what you’re saying is that someone doesn’t have a right to exist in your country. Traitor, in particular, is a strong word: Traitors are subject to the death sentence.

As long as I’ve been watching American discourse, there’s been a lot of it. It was almost completely on the right wing, but there is now some of it on the left.

Eliminationist rhetoric is dangerous, because it makes your fellows into enemies. It is the precursor to war. It is the statement: “If I could get rid of you (and killing is fine), I would.”

You see it in a lot of countries with problems. I’m always astonished at just how much the opposition in Venezuela hates Chavistas, for example. Many of them really, really want to kill them. They consider them illegitimate traitors.

The US has always had an “America First” bunch who aren’t just isolationists (US isolationism would be fine by me). They really, truly hate colored people, Jews, “liberals,” “Commies,” and so on. If they could, they’d hang them from lamp-posts.

But understand clearly that when you start saying “Nazi” and “Fascist,” you’re damn close saying that it’s okay to kill those people as well, because killing Nazis is justified.

Of course, if they are Nazis and close to taking power, well, perhaps they should be killed? You’d cheer for the Germans if they’d stopped Hitler in a huge purge, wouldn’t you? (This isn’t a way of saying don’t oppose Nazis, and that’s the dangerous thing about it.)

Seems to me the US is on a dangerous road. It’s entirely possible that this too will pass, but I see a lot of hate that’s reaching dangerous levels.

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.

Scenarios for America’s Political Future

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On July 16, 2019

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Big Brother Award

Let’s run through the most likely possible victories in the upcoming federal election and consider what they mean for the US’s future.

Put them in four baskets:

Trump wins. He does more bad stuff, the situation continues to get worse, American post-WWII-style multilateral hegemony and trade order takes huge hits.

Biden or Harris win. Harris will be a more effective President, but both will be neoliberals. More Obama/Clinton style politics. I very much doubt that Harris, who was a brutal prosecutor, will turn out to keep many progressive promises if elected. Both of these people perpetuate the conditions which created the possibility of a Trump worse.

Sanders wins. An actual left-wing President. He may have issues with Congress, but there is a lot that can be done by the aggressive use of executive power. Sanders is who says he is, he’s been that guy, with some updating for modern identity politics since the 60s and 70. He hasn’t changed, he can be trusted.

Warren wins. Don’t expect to get real universal healthcare, she’s talked out of both sides of her mouth on the issue too much. But she’ll be good on a lot of other issues.

Both Sanders and Warren will probably be good on the environment. None of the others who are likely win will be (and if you think they will…)

There are two important, longer-term issues at play here: (1) A real, right-wing totalitarian who seeks to end American democracy is the first (I maintain that Trump is not this man, largely because he is not organized enough), and;

(2) The environment. With permafrost melts happening 70 years ahead of schedule, we are out of time. Steps–aggressive steps–need to be taken now, and they aren’t being taken.

So let’s play this out a bit longer. Say Harris or Biden wins. The next chance to get a good President then becomes 2028 because there will be no primary challenge in 2024. So domestically, the situation will get worse (and better for a right-wing, totalitarian demagogue). Nothing of significance will be done about the environment.

Potentially catastrophic on both fronts.

What if Trump wins? Well, there’s another chance to have a decent president in 2024. That’s not good, and he’ll do damage in the meantime, but there is a schedule here with regards to climate change. As for a totalitarian demagogue (someone who sees what Trump did, combines it with Bannon’s politics, and is disciplined and charismatic), well, the risk is there, but odds are the next President will be a Democrat.

As for Sanders or Warren, well, they’ll be reelected if they deliver and won’t if they don’t. So it’ll be war, because Republicans will know that. But it’s always war with Republicans, so whatever.

I am not arguing, “Don’t vote for Harris or Biden.” I am pointing out the foreseeable consequences of certain electoral outcomes.

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 Problem with Neoliberal “It’s Never Been Better” Triumphalism

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On July 15, 2019

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Saying that humanity is currently the best off it has ever been (a dubious proposition in any case) is like saying “I’ve never been warmer” as you burn down your house.

Globe on FirePeople like Pinker have been trotting out stats to claim that we’ve never been better off. Those stats are questionable, based on a definition of  poverty that is beyond questionable. Meanwhile, in India, people eat less calories than they did 30 years ago. (I traveled in India and lived in Bangladesh 30 years or so ago. Eating less calories is unimaginably bad. That a small middle class and a new wealthy class has been created means little to those eating… less.)

But let’s wave that all aside. Let’s posit that human life now is the best it’s ever been.

Meanwhile, in India, people are dying in 50 degree C weather. France had a massive heatwave. Indian farmers are committing suicide in droves, in large part because of issues with ground water.

Extreme weather is getting worse, the permafrost is melting 70 years ahead of the consensus forecast, and so on. Ecologically, fish stocks are collapsing, the Amazon is being chopped down at a ferocious rate, more than one study has found collapses in insect populations at 80 percent or so, and others have noticed that without insects, you don’t have birds, and so on and so forth.

Blah, blah, blah.

Not only is no human an island, but humanity lives among other species, and they make our lives possible in ways we are barely aware of. Most oxygen in the world, for example, is produced by small ocean organisms, organisms which could have a mass die off.

Sigh.

So let us say that this is the bestest of best worlds, a Panglossian paradise.

Present prosperity is being paid for with future poverty, future mass death, and a non-trivial risk of human extinction. As for non-human species, they are already dying at a rate which will show up as the fastest mass extinction in Earth’s existence.

This is only a good bet if you are sure that you’re going to die before the bill comes due. That was a good bet for the GI Generation. A decent bet for the Silents and not a bad bet for about the first half of the Boomers. It’s a bad bet for everyone afterwards who expects to live to 70 or 80 or so (a normal human lifespan in most developed countries).

And, of course, it’s a bad bet if you actually, y’know, care about your children, or other people’s children, or the future of humanity when you’re gone. (Gonna be a shitty place to reincarnate too, if reincarnation exists.)

Now let’s bring this back to neoliberal “greatest time to be alive” triumphalism.

The sub voce message there is, “We don’t need to change, everything’s fine and getting better.”

But, if we’re living not just unsustainably, but in a way that will call Biblical level catastrophe within the lives of most people now alive and their children, perhaps we do need to change, and radically.

So this sort of triumphalism, even if it were true, would be a disservice to not just humanity, but life on Earth.

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 – July 14, 2019

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On July 14, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent

Alarming after-effects of Republican budget cutting in North Carolina 
Savage tick-clone armies are sucking cows to death; experts fear for humans
[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 7-13-19]

Ravenous swarms of cloned ticks have killed a fifth cow in North Carolina by exsanguination—that is, by draining it of blood—the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services warned this week….

The tick—the Asian longhorned tick, or Haemaphysalis longicornis—was first found terrorizing a sheep in New Jersey in 2017 and has established local populations in at least 10 states since it sneaked in. Its invasive sweep is due in large part to the fact that a single well-fed female can spawn up to 2,000 tick clones parthenogenetically—that is, without mating—in a matter of weeks. And unlike other ticks that tend to feast on a victim for no more than seven days, mobs of H. longicorni can latch on for up to 19 days.

The state government is North Carolina no longer has any capability to respond to this type of new public health threat – the Republicans who took control of the state legislature in 2010 eliminated the  Public Health Pest Management Section — which included the state’s tick control and research programs — in their 2011 budget. 

Strategic Political Economy

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