Ian Welsh

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

Month: November 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 7, 2021

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On November 7, 2021

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2021]

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t….

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

The Democracy Crisis That Is Never Discussed

David Sirota and Andrew Perez [The Daily Poster, November 2, 2021]

In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” ….New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:

  • 82 percent of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare — and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
  • Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72 percent saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill….

This Is The Hostile Takeover

Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise — the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government and leads to all the down-ballot that unfolded on Tuesday night.

And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the January 6th insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.

That dichotomy is an expression of corporate power. Corruption is omitted from most corporate media coverage because their corporate sponsors are the ones doing the vote-buying. By contrast, the insurrection and GOP assault on voting are safe topics for corporate media, because they do not threaten the power of the media’s corporate sponsors.

 

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2021]

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India among world’s hungriest despite record harvests

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2021]

 

Neoliberalism requires a police state

WATCH: Hedges & Lauria on Assange Hearing

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2021]

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Open Thread

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On November 5, 2021

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Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

A Basic Meditation Plan Which Can Take You Far

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On November 3, 2021

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One of the reasons many meditators run into problems or limits is that they do only one type of meditation.

Vipassana alone can be dangerous, leading to de-realization or de-personalization. Even in good cases “dark nights” are common, and can mess people up. Vipassana is intended to make you realize you aren’t any sense objects, but without a buffer, that can turn into pathology.

There are other meditation types which are less dangerous, in particular concentration meditation and Metta (designed to create compassion), but even in such cases there can be dangers, and without insight meditation you’re also less likely to make real progress, especially as Metta and concentration, if you get good at them, both feel great and thus can be addictive without leading to awakenings or enlightenment.

Think of meditation as exercise for your mind: you wouldn’t do only deadlifts and no other exercise, and if you did you’d wind up hurting  yourself.

As with physical exercise, if you find it is causing problems the first thing to do is STOP.

All that said, I’m going to suggest a simple, effective and relatively safe mediation program for those who want it.

The program involves three elements: concentration, love and insight.

You will ALWAYS do concentration and love meditation before doing insight unless instructed otherwise by a teacher you trust. You will do at least twice as much concentration and love meditation as insight: so if you were doing a 30 minute session you would do 10 minutes of concentration, 10 minutes of love, then 10 minutes of insight. If you don’t have enough time to do all three,  you will skip insight.

Just do these three meditations, in order, for at least a few months.

Concentration

Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell).

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

  • “Roots” (an emotionally neutral word)
  • Om Mani Padme Hum
  • Om Nama Shivaya
  • Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it–when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: Intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: Put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: At some point, you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

  • Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important,” or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.
  • Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Love Meditation

Imagine that you are hugging a puppy. (Kitten if you prefer.) Imagine your arms holding it against your chest, it’s warmth, it licking your face, and its tail wagging.

Now, just keep imagining holding the puppy, and intend to notice when you are doing something else: when you start thinking or feeling something other than puppy holding.

When you do, pat yourself on the back, pet the puppy, and go back to holding the puppy.

After You Get Good.

Once you can reliably bring up love, expand this. Start with other people or things you love (I’ve often used trees.) Then go to people you feel neither good nor bad about, perhaps imagine the people you met on the street today or yesterday.

Reverse Engineer

You’ve also been doing insight meditation, so when you can generate love for both those you love and those you are neutral about, you will do this exercise and as you do it, you will observe the feelings in your body, watching how they arise and fall away. The idea here is to learn how to generate loving feelings directly, without intermediate steps. Don’t worry if you can’t at first, for most people it’s hard. But if you stick to it, you’ll see that emotions don’t require objects and you’ll learn how to create them out of what seems like almost nothing.

Insight Meditation

There are a lot of different types of insight meditation. What you’re going to do, to start, is simply notice a feeling in your body, place your attention on it without judgment (as best you can) then simply ask yourself “if this sensation was not here, would I still be me?”

Do this for a few months, at least three. When you’re comfortable with it, and when you find that you can be detached from most sensations, move on to—

Microscope attention

Most people can’t feel their bodies very well. They may only be able to feel the general area of a perception: feeling only a finger, or hand, or upper right back, and so on. What you’re going to do is linger on feelings. Move to the edge of a feeling and try and reduce the size of your attention: focus on the smallest bit of the feeling you can perceive. Do this for 30 seconds to a minute or so, then move on after asking “would I still be me if this feeling wasn’t there?”

Hard Feelings

Insight meditation can be dangerous, both because of the possibility of de-realization and de-personalization and because if something traumatic comes up, you can re-traumatize yourself. This is why you will always do concentration and love meditation first: they create a buffer. However, if a feeling is too much, STOP. Immediately go back to your object of concentration, and meditate on that till  you feel somewhat calmer, then move on to your love meditation.

Last Words

This program can take you far. Remember the warnings and if something seems alarming, stop and consult a teacher. As with any other type of exercise, consistency is the key. Try to do it as often as possible. For most people results will take time, but many will find it beneficial after only a few weeks.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

India Is Not The Next China

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On November 2, 2021

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One of the main reasons I took some time to read the smarter members of our international elite was to learn what their assumptions are. The smart ones disagree on the consensus in some places, but what is most interesting to me is where they don’t.

India is one of those places: almost all assume that since China modernized, India’s modernization is inevitable and it will be the next great power.

I don’t see it. India still doesn’t have the necessary government capacity to run the country. Despite the attempt to clean up corruption with demonitization, the civil service is still immensely corrupt, but it is also incompetent. Whatever one thinks of the CCP, they had state capacity; they could make things happen and discipline local elites. The central government in Delhi still mostly lacks the ability to carry out complicated actions in the regions; heck, often enough they can’t even manage the capital region well.

Next, the Indians haven’t taken the right lessons from China. They see that China was involved in global value chains, but they haven’t understood how China used dual currencies and currency restrictions, along with currency purchases to control subsidize exports. They don’t understand, that is, that China’s rise was Mercantalist and not Neo-liberal. Certainly China liberalized certain sectors, but they didn’t neo-liberalize monetary policy and they kept government firms in charge of large amounts of the economy, including much of the banking sector, which they used to direct loans where they wanted. Despite criticisms and problems, this worked.

Chinese liberalization was always within the context of a centrally controlled monetary and fiscal policy, ntended to create the necessary conditions for international competitiveness and to direct capital towards sector the government prioritized. Regional governments were allowed vast latitude to purse centrally chosen goals, but the center did determine the goals and keep an eye on what regional officials were doing.

Third, even if India modernizes faster than I expect, they aren’t beating climate change. India is one of the major countries which will be hit hardest. Crude effects like pure heat increases, potential problems with rainfall, increased extreme weather events, and loss of water from the Himalayas can all be expected to harm India. Since the Indians have also vastly overused their groundwater, they will be hit by serious water issues very early compared to much of the rest of the world.

Then there is Bangladesh, one of the lowest lying countries in the world: it will be one of the first nations to collapse under climate change, and it will send literally tens of millions of mostly Muslim refugees into India.

India isn’t making it. They still only have a small middle class, they regularly have food problems, their government is corrupt and incompetent and they don’t understand how modernization actually happens so they aren’t pursuing the right policies. Ironically they really should sit down with the Chinese and cut a deal through the Belt and Road initiative to be the nation which primarily receives industry China is offshoring but is suitable for India’s stage of development, but tense Chinese/Indian relationships are preventing making an arrangement which would benefit them.

(The Chinese cut deals with America, who they have many historical grievances with, and overlooked America’s primary support for Taiwan, when they needed what America offered. They weren’t over-proud, they did what they had to to get strong first.)

Unless climate change effects happen far slower than I expect (and so far my predictions have been far closer to what’s happening than consensus forecasts, but still slightly optimistic) and the Indian government gets a clue about how the world actually works and manages to actually fix their civil service, there’s no way India makes it before global value chains start collapsing under climate change and having to be re-engineered. At that point India will have so many problems that industrialization will be off the board, and only an extraordinary government and leadership would be able to take advantage of changed circumstances to build up India. Much more likely is government collapse and loss of effective control of huge swathes of the subcontinent as mass famines killing at least 10s of millions of people (and quite possible hundreds of millions) and mass migrations occur.

I wish my analysis indicated otherwise. I’ve spent time in India, I have family who stayed after independence, and I like the Indian people.

But I’m just not seeing it.

 

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

China’s Economic “Miracle” Was Normal

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On November 1, 2021

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading books by some of the smarter members of the international elite. One thing they all seem to agree on is how amazing and unprecedented China’s economic rise was.

It wasn’t.

China industrialized and modernized the way almost all nations have:

  1. Through mercantalist policies. In China’s case, keeping the value of the currency low, taking advantage of low wages, and starting with the oldest parts of industrial value chains.
  2. By exporting to large external economies which let them: the US and Europe.
  3. By grabbing as much intellectual property as possible.

This is how America did it in the 19th century. This is how Japan did it twice (Meiji, post WWII, Taiwan and South Korea did it. This is how virtually everyone did it.

Americans got greedy and stupid, from a geopolitical point of view. They believed the nonsense “End of History” bullshit about how capitalism and democracy are intertwined and capitalism inevitably leads to democracy and they were salivating over the profits they could make in China. So they traded and they let China into the WTO.

Contrary to the idea that democracy and industrialization/modernization are intertwined; Japan and Germany did most of it under authoritarian governments and with massive government direction. Even post-WWII, Japan was a one-party state, not a real democracy. Germany’s industrialization was based on Prussia’s command economy, and the great companies were practically state organs even if they were nominally civilian.

Japan didn’t become a nominal democracy because “capitalism” it became one because it lost WWII. The Kaiser had a parliament, but still a great deal of power and he didn’t step down voluntarily, he lost power because the Germans lost WWI.

But the emphasis on authoritarianism misses what is actually interesting and almost unique about China: it has the most decentralized government spending of any major country, with over 70% of spending decisions made below the Federal government. As a rule, the center made and makes goals and guidelines, but leaves it up to regional and municipal governments to figure out how to achieve them. China has a dynamic government, and there is a lot of competition between governments, as much as between firms.

It is also easier and cheaper to start a new business in most of China (free in Beijing to incorporate) than it is in most of America or Europe.

Meanwhile, the great danger to capitalism is capitalists being too successful, and buying the system, and then getting rid of necessary oversight and regulation. China has largely avoided that (though real-estate wealth is still a problem) and Xi Jingping has cracked down repeatedly those he considers bad actors. In one recent example he forced delivery app companies to treat their employees much better (better than in America). In another he got rid of the College prep industry almost entirely, which a lot of western observers thought was bad, but the industry was a pure “Red Queen’s Race” situation, because it existed everyone had to do it, and as with all such college prep industries it favored those with money over those without. Xi was entirely right to end it.

Democracy used to serve this purpose in the West. Almost everything FDR did, economically, was to stop capitalism from destroying itself.

Further, all evidence I have seen indicates that contrary to what I thought in the past, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) goes out of its way to recruit smart, competent people and has thus, so far, been able to avoid the generational nepotism and degradation cycle.

To bring this back to Western elites, a lot of the mistakes come from drinking their own Kool-aid. While virtually no country larger than a city state has ever modernized without mercantalist policies, the orthodox economic position of the West for decades was laissez-faire, and that’s what the World Bank and IMF made most countries do. Those policies are vastly destructive and don’t work IF you want a country to modernize, but if you really want it to become a helpless satellite state they work well. (Bad Samaritans, by Ha-Joon Chang covers this well.)

“Free” trade is not what America did, Germany did, France did, Japan did or even England did to industrialize, and it’s not what China did.

What it is truly unique about China’s industrialization is its size: it’s a subcontinental power with a huge population. Japan was never really a threat to the US, for all the screaming in the 80s, because of its population size and limited geographic extent. China is by some measures already a larger economy, and the only thing might stop it from becoming the world’s greatest power and eclipsing the United States is that climate change will  hit it hard somewhat earlier than it will hit the US, as best I can tell.

So, what matters about China is just that it’s not Western, and poised to become the first Eastern hegemonic power in about 200 years. Of course the US doesn’t like that, and of course Europe (still an American satrapy) is uneasy.

This could have been avoided easily enough, though it probably shouldn’t have been, simply by refusing to cooperate with Chinese mercantalist policies and certainly, if the US didn’t want a rival who would probably eclipse it, letting China into the WTO was insanity. (This was clear at the time, and many people objected.)

The other issue is that the West no longer has a veto on who gets to industrialize. For various reasons Japan, South Korea and Taiwan couldn’t serve as the necessary markets for mercantalist expansion, but China can and that’s what they’re offering many other nations the West never let develop. The European/US monopoly is broken.

The lesson is not to believe your own lies and bullshit. Fukuyama was obviously full of shit about “The End of History” and developed world suggested “development” policies in the last half of the 20th century were meant to stop nations from developing, which was their record, and anyone with  sense who spent a few hours examining the policies of countries which actually industrialized, could know it.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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