Ian Welsh

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

Month: July 2020

America’s Elites Live by the Rule of Power (Covid Version)

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On July 7, 2020

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There’s no question that the US response to Covid-19 has been awful.

So, is it just that American elites are incompetent?

Well, as of the end of April:

The total amount of wealth controlled by US billionaires’ swelled by more than $565 billion since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.

So, why would America’s richest want to handle Covid well? Small businesses being closed is an advantage to billionaires, who control the large businesses that keep going and take over market share.

And while we don’t have figures for the top three percent or so, I’m willing to bet they are doing better as well. Plus they get to work from home and have everything delivered to their doorstep while stocking their industrial fridges with ice-cream. It’s hard for them. Honest.

Now, there’s a core point here that is important: If you are American, you cannot count on your leadership, of any variety, to look after you. You cannot even count on them to be neutral. If there is a way for them to benefit, including benefit to the people who own them (most politicians are owned in the US, and if you do not believe this you are pathetically naive), they will hurt or impoverish or kill you.

Little matters to your elites except the well-being of themselves and their close associates. To the extent they have an ideology, their ideology tells them it is right for the strong to take from the weak, and that everything they have they deserve, while those who lose deserve to lose. This is true of Republicans, but it is as true of most Democrats. Oh, they’ll give a little bit of pity money, but they won’t stop the processes in place that destroy lives and kill people. Indeed, they speed those processes on–as Pelosi and Biden have throughout their career.

When you are making your planning you must take this into account. Power companies won’t clear brush or replace infrastructure they know will lead to massive wildfires (PGE in California) because they have executive bonuses to pay. Executives of pharma companies will raise prices on life saving drugs they didn’t even research like insulin. Developers and landlords will hold properties off the market to keep prices up, and will force long term tenants out so they can raise rents.

There is little of consequence that people with power in America will not do to those without power.

The rule of power, as composed by Thucydides twenty-five hundred years ago, is as follows:

The Powerful Do As They Will: The Weak Suffer As They Must

Most social progress can be defined as creating norms and institutions which reduce that truth. American elites have spent the last 40 years returning it to dominance, with a plurality to bare majority of American voters complicit. Fools in the middle class thought that helped both them and the rich would keep helping them. But what helped them 5% a year helped the rich 20% a year, and soon the rich took off, decided they didn’t need the middle class (they can do the same work for less) and started liquidating them. During OK times, a percentage point every couple years: during crises, far more.

(Trump’s numbers actually show the middle class more than the poor drove his rise, because they were scared and went with someone who sounded different. Though some poor did the same. But Trump is VERY late stage in this process.)

If you are to survive this era, let along prosper, you must understand this in your bones: emotionally. America’s elites, business and political and ideological (media), are your enemies, committed to eating the poor and middle class (who get eaten all the time, metaphorically. “Eat the rich” is an aspirational goal, not a reality.) When you make your personal life plans, understand this. You must be useful to the rich to prosper and the second they do not need you, they will discard you. This goes even for many elite lackeys (see what has happened to media jobs, and they were on their knees fellating their masters even as the axe fell.)

If you wish to oppose the rich you must also understand this. There is no making peace with this elite, they may occasionally throw you a bone to disperse you, but their overall ethos will not change. Nothing short of replacing them with an entirely new ruling class and structure will work. If you have not done so, if you have not destroyed the rules that run this particular America and world; if you have not replaced the actual people, then you have not won the war, you have just been given some scraps to placate you and make you stand down whatever alliance you have built.

It’s you, or it’s the rich and their lackeys. It is that simple.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

The Coming Homelessness and Hunger Apocalypse in America

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On July 6, 2020

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So, in June 30 percent of Americans couldn’t make their rent. July 25th, federal eviction protection ends. There may be another check, but another $1,200 (or even $2k) isn’t going to cut it, just as people couldn’t pay rent event with the $600 unemployment benefit top-up.

Covid now has more active cases than the previous peak. Less people are dying, because the new victims are mostly young (and due to the lag) but even non-fatal cases of Covid are nasty and can leave the victim with symptoms for months (or longer, we don’t know yet). Indeed, evidence is coming back that cases with no symptoms still do damage.

Even if there is an extension of eviction protection and some new checks, that will only push the problem back. People can’t make rent, and aren’t going to be able to. Because there are so many people competing for jobs (which are bouncing back somewhat), they have no wage leverage.

So, expect a huge wave of evictions, homelessness, and hunger. Food banks will be overwhelmed, people will go hungry.

Your lords and masters have decided that if you aren’t useful to them (aren’t employed, can’t make rent) that you don’t deserve anything, including life. This has been the case for a long time, it’s just that, in the middle of a pandemic, they see a lot of you as useless eaters towards whom they have no responsibility.

Besides, why should they care? Billionaires have actually gained wealth during the pandemic. Covid isn’t much of a problem for the rich, it’s mostly an opportunity.

Be aware, in your personal life, that this is coming down the stream. It is not going to be stopped. If there is an extension of the moratorium and a bit more benefits AND the economy continues to reopen (already being reversed in some states) then that might mitigate the homelessness somewhat, but will result in more deaths and long-term health problems from Covid.

This is going to lead to more, not less, riots. You should be ready for that, and for the possibility of civil disorder causing infrastructure and logistics problems. Stock up, have plans to shelter in place, and also to leave. Keep your head down. Make sure you are on good terms with your neighbours, friends, and so on. When shit really goes bad, the people who do okay are those other people care about.

I really hope I’m wrong about this, but the numbers on this are staggering. Assume that even five percent of Americans lost their housing over two months, that would be almost 17 million people. Each doubling is another 17 million. A ten percent loss is 34 million.

If anything like that happens, I cannot see how it does not turn into mass hunger and civil disorder.

Be prepared.

And if you are one of those who will be homeless, my genuine and true sympathy.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 5, 2020

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On July 5, 2020

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Pitchfork-wielding protesters descend on wealthy Hamptons estates
[Page Six, via Naked Capitalism 7-2-20]

More than 100 drivers and about 200 marchers paid a visit to the homes of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including ex-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“Tax the rich, not the poor!” the protesters chanted outside Bloomberg’s $20 million Southhampton mansion, with some calling the failed presidential candidate a “looter.”
Protesters, several of whom came in from the Big Apple, demanded that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo raise taxes on the state’s 118 billionaires to make up for a steep revenue shortfall amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The group is taking issue with Cuomo’s pitch to cut 20 percent in state funding from schools, hospitals and housing agencies. They noted that while the virus outbreak has deeply impacted low-income people and communities of color, the wealth of US billionaires has surged.

“Enough is enough — it’s time for New York state to raise taxes on the rich instead of cutting services for working people,” said Alicé Nascimento, director of policy and research for New York Communities for Change, which helped organize the action. Organizers also included the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, with about 40 medallion cabs taking part. The cabbies were already in a debt crisis before the virus emerged, and have been hit hard by the pandemic.

“Oklahoma voters approve Medicaid expansion at the ballot box”

[Oklahoman, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-2-20]

“State Question 802 passed by 6,488 votes, making Oklahoma the fifth state expand Medicaid through a ballot initiative. The question will enshrine Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma’s constitution — effectively preventing Oklahoma’s GOP-controlled Legislature or Republican governor from limiting or undoing the expansion.

[Counterpunch, July 1, 2020]

In tackling police violence and other social inequities rampant throughout the world today, we must address the underlying problems and not give overdue focus to the symptoms of the problems. For instance, we already know that class and not race is what determines who is affected most by institutional injustices, from the police murders of George Floyd to Tony Timpa to the the mass incarceration rates of the poor. Nathaniel Lewis demonstrates that after controlling for class, race is not “statistically significant” and that “class appears to be a larger factor than usually reported when studying racial disparities.” And from this query, other questions must necessarily emerge to include our involvement in having asked certain questions and not others and in having kowtowed to what Adolph Reed calls “race reductionism” at the heart of this issue.

It is in capitalism’s interest that we are all standing about the public square screaming about statues we don’t like rather than clamor for real reform of our governments. Indeed, much of the theory emanating from American higher education of the last thirty years has obtusely avoided discussing class while instead addressing representation, not participation. Just as the left has abandoned discussing class in favor of focussing upon symbolism and representation, political action of recent years has centered on the most superficial changes from language to public imagery. The actual stuff of inequality which engages people’s ability to pay bills, to eat, and to pay rent, has been unsurprisingly absent from both academia and the recent calls to get white people to atone for their sins.

For instance, why is the liberal soft-left not demanding answers from politicians such as Joe Biden who signed onto the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 leading to the mass-incarceration of mostly black men, and putting them in prison for longer? Or why the criminal justice system in the US is locking up so many poor women? Why are American liberals getting behind a presidential candidate who tells African Americans that they aren’t “black” if they don’t vote for him while not seeing how such positive racism still amounts to racism as usual?

….As protestors topple statues of Civil War generals and abolitionists alike, this might be a good moment for us to pause and think that perhaps the first problem in naming racism might begin with reflecting upon our embrace of “race” as a signifying real. Moreover, we need to deeply ponder if race might just be the side-show which is keeping us from addressing what are primarily class issues. As troubling as our country’s legacy is having been built on slavery, the decimation of the country’s indigenous population, and unbridled capitalism, the one common factor of the repression of humans in these situations was not decided by their “race” but was most definitely decided between those who held the money, the guns, and the power and those who didn’t.

Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

David Blight [The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 7-2-20]

In 1868, Edward A. Pollard, the former editor of a Richmond newspaper, in his book “The Lost Cause Regained,” urged “reconciliation” with conservative Northerners, as long as it was on Southern terms. “To the extent of securing the supremacy of the white man,” he wrote, “and the traditional liberties of the country . . . she [the South] really triumphs in the true cause of the war.” Such an achievement would take years, but it did come. When a former Confederate officer, John T. Morgan, addressed a meeting of the Southern Historical Society, in 1877, he framed the preceding nine years as the “war of Reconstruction.” The South, he maintained, had just won this “second war,” and therefore no one “need inquire who was right or who was wrong” in the first war. This was never easy for Union veterans to swallow, but it was how white supremacy became an integral part of the process of national reconciliation.

The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything: Imagine if the National Transportation Safety Board investigated America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
James Fallows, June 29, 2020 [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]

…. a biosecurity expert at Georgetown University Medical Center who has been extensively involved in pandemic-response planning, told me this spring: “Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”

….The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown. Did the warning system work this time, providing advance notice of the coronavirus outbreak? According to everyone I spoke with, it certainly did. A fascinating unclassified timeline compiled by the Congressional Research Service offers a day-by-day and then hour-by-hour chronology of who knew what, and when, about developments in central China….

During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals… the Trump administration had removed dozens of CDC representatives in China….

In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors. Typically this would mean working with and through the World Health Organization—which, of course, Donald Trump has made a point of not doing. In the previous two decades of international public-health experience, starting with SARS and on through the rest of the acronym-heavy list, a standard procedure had emerged, and it had proved effective again and again. The U.S, with its combination of scientific and military-logistics might, would coordinate and support efforts by other countries. Subsequent stages would depend on the nature of the disease, but the fact that the U.S. would take the primary role was expected. When the new coronavirus threat suddenly materialized, American engagement was the signal all other participants were waiting for. But this time it did not come. It was as if air traffic controllers walked away from their stations and said, “The rest of you just work it out for yourselves.”

….In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.

A military official told me, “I have wondered, as a thought experiment: If the outbreak had been in Tennessee rather than Wuhan, would the outcome for the world have been worse, better, or the same?” This person said that he thought the disease might have spread even more rapidly. Why? “I think it would have been harder to convince Trump to lock things down here, than to throw a ban on China.”

Fallows is not as thorough as an NTSB inspection, that will examine the design and manufacture of an aircraft, not just the details of a crash. He entirely overlooks the cultural roots of the “limited government” ideology, which should be traced back to its roots in the anti-Hamiltonian opposition of the Vriginia slave holders led by Jefferson and Calhoun, and the creation of movement conservatism and libertarianism by rich reactionaries intent on reversing the shift in power from capital to labor achieved by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The problem is not Trump. The real problem is the cultural shift that created the putrid petri dish in which he could gestate and emerge. 

[Business Live (South Africa), via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]

….This is not a comparison between SA and the US; it is an observation of two experiences — travelling in SA and in the US through airports, which are major vectors for the spread of the virus. From this experience you immediately realise why the virus may have gone wild in the US, which has the tools to contain such a pandemic.

The answer is not poverty. It’s not inequality. It’s really the politicisation of the medical response and, in particular, the wearing of masks. Trump continues to not wear a mask, apparently fearing it will project weakness and defeat, according to CNN. In all three US airports I travelled through, I saw the results of such ignorant leadership. It was mainly men who didn’t wear masks, spitting in each other’s faces as they shouted out their bravado.

“The Think Tank Gap Really Hurt Our COVID-19 Response”
[Mike the Mad Biologist, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-2-20]

“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, it’s becoming more apparent that using a paradigm generated by the American Enterprise Institute might not be the best way to proceed. Unfortunately, all of the think tanks, including the Democratic aligned ones, appear to be working from the same framework (i.e., kinder, gentler AEI plans)…. The problem is that the AEI plan is fundamentally affected by policy constraints. There are certain policies that a group like AEI can not and will not consider, and those policy constraints affect the range of policy responses…. [On the left] the overall goal was to use massive federal spending to place significant swathes of the U.S. economy into what multiple commentators, including Paul Krugman, referred to as a ‘medically induced coma.’ And not for a month either, but for as long as it took…. Since an AEI-backed plan that would result in massive federal intervention in the economy is an impossibility, we’re left with second-best options of relative improvements leading to partial reopenings. When massive federal intervention is off the table, then we’re left with these other metrics, such as decline for a couple of weeks followed by hoping for the best, because there’s no way to support the economy long enough to reach a meaningful low level of prevalence… That’s unfortunate because a low prevalence strategy is good public health policy and good economic policy. On the public health side, the best way to not get infected is to not come in contact with someone who is infected. While that sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said, it does have the virtue of being true.”

“By Denying Aid to States, the GOP Is Aiding the Coronavirus”

Eric Levitz [New York Magazine, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-2-20]

“By withholding aid to states, Republicans made it extremely painful for cities to implement responsible public-health policies in the middle of a pandemic…. America’s hasty reopening is doubtlessly attributable to a variety of cultural and political factors. But for many U.S. cities, erring on the side of public health — by keeping the economy restricted for a week longer than absolutely necessary — would have meant jeopardizing their capacity to maintain funding for schools and basic social services. Republicans could have empowered state and local officials to make decisions about reopening on the basis of what was best for public health. Instead, they engineered fiscal scarcity that forced states to choose between prudence and solvency. Which may have been the point. The president and his advisers pressured states to reopen quickly, so as to expedite the onset of economic recovery. Instead, our austerity-induced haste has bought us a new wave of outbreaks and a deeper recession.”

The Pandemic

[Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 6-28-20]

The data is in: Fox News may have kept millions from taking the coronavirus threat seriously [Washington Post, via The Big Picture 7-2-20]

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 6-28-20]


The Global Death Toll Now Tops 500,000

[NYT, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-20]

“Universal Health Care Supports Thailand’s Coronavirus Strategy” 

[NPR, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-29-20]

“While the pandemic has raged in the U.S. and Europe, Thailand has been able to control its epidemic with a caseload among the lowest in the world – just 58 deaths. Thai epidemiologists say the country’s universal health care system played a major role…. Dr. Pongpirul says the fact that the taxi driver sought medical attention early on, that he wasn’t put off by having to pay for something he couldn’t have afforded, made a huge difference in helping them control the virus.”

A travesty’: North Carolina grapples with reopening as Covid-19 cases surge

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 6-28-20]A new dilemma for Trump’s team: Preventing super-spreader churches

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-20]Why Meatpacking Plants Are Superspreaders

[Der Spiegel, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-20]

Economic Armageddon

Goldman Sachs did the math and a national mask mandate to slow the spread of coronavirus would save this much in U.S. economic growth
[MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

[Economic Policy Institute, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]As 45 million Americans lost their jobs, U.S. billionaires made $584 billion.
[ABC, via Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-30-20]

The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

A nice graph that summarizes how the price paid for the information economy was deindustrialization and financialization of USA
Click for larger image.
[Dimensional, via The Big Picture 6-29-20]

The Supreme Court Is Still Repeatedly Ruling in Favor of the Ultra-Wealthy

David Sirota [Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-20]The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Countries. These Charts Show Why.

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.

But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.

Government Sachs: Why Google, YouTube, Uber and the rest of corporate America are donning the costume of progressivism

Michael Lind [Tablet, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-29-20]
Powell and Mnuchin Agree to Work with a Proposed “Department of Reconciliation” to Deal with Effects of Slavery and Segregation
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 1, 2020 [Wall Street on Parade]Citigroup Has Made a Sap of the Fed: It’s Borrowing at 0.35 % from the Fed While Charging Struggling Consumers 27.4 % on Credit Cards
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2020 [Wall Street on Parade]The Pillage of India 

[New York Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 6-29-20]

June 11, 2020
The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, 522 pp., $35.00)
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor (Melbourne: Scribe, 294 pp., $17.95)

The one percent

Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate, arrested for recruiting and abusing girls in sex-trafficking ring CNN

Ghislaine Maxwell played ‘critical role’ in helping Jeffrey Epstein groom underage victims, US investigators say Sky (furzy)Ghislaine Maxwell, handler of pedophile Epstein, arrested
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-2-20]

Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg
Part of me want Ghislaine Maxwell locked up for a very long time. Part of me wants her to cop the plea deal of the century and spill the full story on some of the world’s most powerful men. Most of me, however, expects she is going to get suicided like her boss.

Information Age Dystopia

[Tim Bray, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-29-20]

“Why break it up? · There are specific problems; I list a few below. But here’s the big one: For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly has fueled invasions of multiple other segments, enabling Google to bat aside rivals who might have brought better experiences to billions of lives…. Financially, I think Google’s whole is worth less than the sum of its parts. So a breakup might be a win for shareholders. This is a reasonable assumption if only because the fountain of money thrown off by Web-search advertising leaves a lot of room for laziness and mistakes in other sectors of the business.”

Lambert Strether added: “Well worth a read, and from a solid and well-respected tech insider.”

[Electronic Frontier Foundation, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

Neoliberalism requires a police state

Corporate Backers of the Blue: How Corporations Bankroll U.S. Police Foundations
[littlesis.org, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

If police departments already have massive budgets – averaging 20% to 45% of a municipal budget – why do these organizations exist? Police foundations offer a few unique benefits to law enforcement.

First, these foundations can purchase equipment and weapons with little public input or oversight. The Houston Police Foundation has an entire page on its website showcasing the equipment it purchased for the police department, including SWAT equipment, LRAD sound equipment, and dogs for the K-9 unit. The Philadelphia Police Foundation purchased long guns, drones, and ballistic helmets. The Atlanta Police Foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of over 12,000 cameras.

In Los Angeles, the police used foundation funding to purchase controversial surveillance software from Palantir. If the LAPD purchased this technology through its public budget, it would have been required to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council. By having the foundation purchase it for them, the LAPD was able to bypass that oversight.

Climate and environmental crises

Nearly twice as many U.S. properties may be at risk of flooding as previously thought.
[New York Times 6-30-20]

New calculations estimate that 14.6 million properties are at risk from what experts call a 100-year flood, far more than the 8.7 million properties shown on federal government flood maps. Cities as diverse as Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Buffalo, N.Y., and Chattanooga, Tenn., show a large gap in the risk assessments. In Chicago alone, 75,000 properties have a previously undisclosed flood risk. The First Street Foundation, which compiled the data, also created a website where people can check their own address.

South Pole warming three times faster than rest of Earth: study

[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]How green sand could capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide

[MIT Technology Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]Fueled by High Temperatures and Ample Land, Locusts Swarm Italy

[LinkTV, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]How climate change misinformation spreads online

[Carbon Brief, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Yale captures first ever video of brain clearing out dead neurons

[New Atlas, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-20]

A Decade of Sun YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 7-1-20]

Dan K: “Holy crap — NASA compressed 10 years of solar observations into a one-hour long, buttery smooth time lapse.”

Take a Flight Over Korolev Crater on Mars

[Universe Today, via Naked Capitalism 7-4-20]

These stunning videos, created from imagery gathered by orbiting spacecraft, can give us a sense of what it would be like to fly in an airplane on another planet. This latest flyover video from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, provides a stunning view of one of Mars’ most eye-popping craters.

Progressive Policies into the Breach

Harry Hopkins was a genius….
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-1-20]
Jon Schwarz @schwarz

I had no idea Carl Reiner was on a path to being a sewing machine repairman until his brother told him about a free New Deal acting class. What a different country we could have if we wanted to spend our money on stuff like that instead of death machines. Carl Reiner, Multifaceted Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 98

Will Biden find his Harry Hopkins? Is he even trying to?

Democratic Party leadership insists on suicide

“Biden campaign staffs up from Obamaworld”

[Axios, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-30-20]

“In the past few weeks, four former staffers who worked for Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett joined Biden’s campaign…. Karine Jean-Pierre, Julie Chavez Rodríguez, and Ashley Allison all joined within one week starting May 20, in senior adviser roles. Yohannes Abraham joined the Biden campaign’s transition team in late June. All are women or men of color. All were longtime Obama White House staffers and worked with Jarrett in different capacities in her roles including senior adviser and directing public engagement and intergovernmental affairs…. Amid questions around Biden’s age and what that means for who he selects as a running mate, these hires show how the campaign is positioning a younger generation of former Obama aides to land the plane in November…. Parrt of Biden’s core campaign message is around his government competency. One Obama alum tells Axios: “By lifting up these particular individuals, he’s giving the rest of us a window into who’s going to help run the show in the White House, and I think that’s engendering more confidence in him.”

Lambert Strether added: “So, as I’ve been saying, you’re not really voting for Biden; you’re voting for the Obama Alumni Association. Based on past performance, expect the next recovery to be like this, but worse, because the initial conditions are worse….” 


No Harry Hopkins here.

“The woman Biden isn’t considering for vice president, but should”

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-29-20]

Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the AUMF. “In a better world, Lee’s prescience would already make her a contender for the bottom of the Democratic ticket. Her foresight contrasts with Biden’s many foreign policy lows, including a vote for the Iraq War and a proposal to federalize Iraq that Iraqis hated. (In no policy area is Biden more fortunate to be facing a complete incompetent.) That Lee isn’t on Biden’s list, while someone like former national security adviser Susan E. Rice is, speaks volumes about the hold the pro-intervention, pro-endless war national security establishment continues to exert over much of our politics.”

Charles Booker, Jamaal Bowman And The 7 Competing Camps In Black Politics

[FiveThirtyEight, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-4-20]

I have tried to order the camps by size, from largest to smallest. They are:

  1. The Younger (Under Age 60) Establishment
  2. The Older (60 And Above) Establishment
  3. The Younger Anti-Establishment
  4. The Obamaites
  5. The Older Anti-Establishment
  6. Trump-Skeptical Conservatives/Republicans
  7. Pro-Trump Conservatives/Republicans

“House panel votes against curtailing Insurrection Act powers after heated debate” 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 7-3-20]

“The House Armed Services Committee has voted against limiting presidential authority under the Insurrection Act, the law President Trump threatened to invoke to deploy active-duty troops in response to protests against racial injustices. The amendment, offered by Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), failed largely along party lines in a 25-31 vote. Several moderate or vulnerable Democrats voted against the amendment: Reps. Kendra Horn (Okla.), Xochitl Torres Small (N.M.), Jared Golden (Maine), Elaine Luria (Va.), Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.) and Gil Cisneros (Calif.). Last month, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act at the height of the protests, saying he would deploy active-duty troops if governors did not “dominate” demonstrators.nThe 1807 act creates an exception to the general prohibition on using the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws. It was last used by former President George H.W. Bush at the request of California’s governor to quell the 1992 Rodney King riots.”

Rudy Giuliani calls Black Lives Matter ‘a Marxist organization’

[McSweeney’s, via The Big Picture 6-28-20]

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Open Thread

By

On July 4, 2020

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As usual, feel free to use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

War Crime Apologia

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On July 2, 2020

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One is not required to bomb hospitals, to torture, or to engage in mass killing of civilians when one is a chief of state. “My favorite war criminal did less war crimes than your war criminal,” is not a defense.

That people feel the need to defend those who do such things when in power is why we live in Hell.

The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness, and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.

You who do, deserve your leaders. They reflect you and your ethics, and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say. You cannot commit war crimes as state policy and expect the evil you do not to eventually reflect in your own society. The best you can hope is to be a lord of hell, living on the suffering of others, but insulated from it, or to die before the worst comes home.

This is as true as, “bad people often have virtues.” Putin is not all bad; he has done good. Trump is not all bad; he has done some good. Obama was not all bad; he did some good. Blair was not all bad; he did some good. Etc…

The good does not wipe out the war crimes. Both must be acknowledged. But the war crimes remain real, and the people who ordered them are still war criminals; these men (and a few women) have done far more harm and evil than any serial killer who has ever lived.

If you believe that torture, mass killings, destroying civilian infrastructures, and so on is required of leaders in order to do their jobs, then you have acquiesced to live in Hell and all you are quibbling over is the details of Hell’s hierarchy, hoping you and your preferred people can avoid the Hell you inflict on others.

Update. Apparently a 101 on when civilian casualties are a war crime and when they aren’t is required.

When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.

Why is this hard for people to understand?

Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.

There are quantitative and qualitative differences between “civilians die in war” (collateral damage) and deliberately killing civilians.

This should not be hard to understand, and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.

You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions, Libya, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and both nuclear bomb attacks on Japan).

Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.

As for insurrections, these questions become blurred, but, even during the Terror, an attempt at at least pro-forma trials was maintained.

When you start killing civilians to create terror to break your opponents will as a government, you are worse than a terrorist, because you have the weight of a state behind you.

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Happy Canada Day

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On July 1, 2020

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I like Canada, but it has its flaws. In particular, it’s been a shitty country to indigenous people.

Plenty of spreading disease in the early years, and the deliberate destruction of their ways of life and cultures through residential schools.

Back in high school, I learned about the Metis rebellion, but it was never clear WHY it happened, and I didn’t learn the reason until I was in my 40s. Until the Victorian era, the Metis were the trading caste among the first nations; they controlled much of the economy and were the people who tied together various hostile tribes.

When the Brits/Canada pushed West, they didn’t respect that, and threatened the existing power structures and economic arrangements. So the Metis rebelled. Bit of a damp squib, mostly because the leader, Louis Riel, was unwilling to fight properly. He was advised to cut the rail lines, which would have made it a real fight.

Everything after that has been a downhill slide for the indigenous peoples, who are treated terribly and discriminated against. The worst racism in Canada is definitely against the natives, not against blacks (which is not to say there is no discrimination against them).

Canada has a mixed record for a lot of others, good for many. For a lot of people, it’s been a very good place to live, better than most in the world.

It’s heading in the wrong direction, however, and has been for decades. That’s accelerated recently in two of the most important states, Ontario and Alberta, which are both slashing and burning public services and ownership. Both want to get rid of universal healthcare and so on. They won’t quite manage it this time around, but when the centrist liberals get in power they won’t roll it back, so I figure we’ve got ten to twenty years. If politics don’t radically change by then, Canada will turn into USA North.

One thing I particularly love about Canada is that we have lots and lots of wilderness, one of the few countries where that’s still true.

Overall, I’m pretty glad I was born here.

Hope you’re having a good day, feel free to use the comments as an open thread.

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