Ian Welsh

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

Month: January 2023 Page 3 of 4

Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless

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On January 9, 2023

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Watching “left wing” reactions to the Speaker’s election in the US House was instructive. Too many people were appalled when I pointed out that the left, the “Squad” specifically, could have done the same thing to get concessions in 2024.

If you were appalled at the idea then you are not a member of the left in any useful way.

(That statement and this post will occasion another torrent of abuse in the comments for me to throw into spam, and laugh about. If you think that after 30 years online, most of it moderating comments, you can insult me in a way I haven’t heard before, you are a fool as well as a piece of human garbage.)

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Usually when a House member tries to vote in a way that the party leadership doesn’t like, they are threatened with the cut off of money or votes.

Right wing Republicans have power because they can deliver votes and money. Right wing Republicans who chose to get concessions in exchange for the votes in the House Speaker election (which is an entirely democratic thing to do an in line with what the founders intended) have their own, largely small money, donor networks. They don’t need the Republican money machine. Furthermore their voters expect them to act on their stated beliefs.

The difference with the Squad is instructive. They claim to have left wing beliefs, but won’t vote them when it matter. Either they are scared of the threats made by leadership, or they don’t really believe their beliefs, or they know their supporters don’t really believe and won’t hold them to account. If you won’t do something when you have the power to do it, you don’t really believe in it.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

This, by the way, is why the Netroots movement failed. For a while we had influence and were a rising power in the Democratic power.

Why? Because we could raise money from sources Democrats couldn’t; we could deliver votes and we threatened incumbents with primaries.

The Netroots lost because Obama figured out how to bypass us to get the money and votes without us and our primary threat proved weak.

The radical right has succeeded to a large extent because the institutional Republican party has not been able to bypass them and their primary threat is real. They stand a good chance of winning many primary challenges and they will make an incumbent’s life miserable if crossed.

The voters are loyal to their beliefs and, while not perfect, do have an expectation that their representatives will represent those beliefs. You may laugh at them for supporting even Trump, say, but if so you’ve missed the point: Trump gave them what they wanted most, control of the Supreme Court and an end to Roe vs. Wade. Those of you old enough will remember when Bush Jr. was forced to back down on his preferred Supreme Court nominee because she was too moderate and nominate someone acceptable to the pro-life movement.

No political movement has power if its “supporters”” do not actually vote their beliefs; donate based on their beliefs; volunteer based on their beliefs and hold their elected and un-elected representatives responsible when they violate those beliefs. (This doesn’t mean you expect reps to be perfect, but on whatever matters most — say abortion for right wingers — you hold them accountable.)

If you can be peeled off because of appeals to lesser evildom or some-such, you make your movement weak and your beliefs are worthless. Without solidarity and accountability there can be no movement which matters.

I don’t agree with radical Republicans about almost anything (except that the world and America would better off if the US interfered a lot less in other counties business). They are, essentially, my ideological enemies, though so are mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

But they have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

(There’s some conflation in this article between Republican groups, that’s unavoidable. But basically the bleeding edge, wherever it is, has been winning internal Republican party battles for about 50 years. The left edge has been losing those battles and that’s why America has become an authoritarian dumpster fire with soaring inequality which is in possible terminal collapse.)

We’ll talk a little more about real belief and the use of power soon.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 8, 2023

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On January 8, 2023

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

Paul Krugman [New York Times, via The Big Picture 1-3-2023]

…the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

When an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch….

Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public….

[TW: Montesquieu wrote (see below)]

“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury….” [emphasis by TW]

 

SBF and the Injustice Democrats: How SBF, AIPAC and pro-Trump billionaires coordinated to crush the left 

Max Berger [via Naked Capitalism 1-4-2023]

When I looked into SBF’s political giving to write a follow up to last week’s piece, I thought I knew what I was looking for. It’s a subject I’ve written about before.

But, when I looked at the end-of-cycle FEC data, the results were truly shocking.

I found more evidence SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.

Five billionaire funded PACs were coordinating closely on a strategy to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries — a kind of Injustice Democrats.

Mark Mellman, a long-time operative and AIPAC ally, appears to be at the center of the effort and likely spearheaded the shared campaign. He was hired by four of the five groups this cycle, who collectively paid his firm $476,016.67… According to FEC data, over 75% of the money SBF contributed to Democrats in 2022 went to groups that spent nearly all their money on competitive primaries in the Democratic Party.

SBF personally contributed $29,250,000 to Protect Our Future and DMI PAC (which later contributed the money to Web3 Forward). Both of these groups spent the vast majority of their money on Democratic primaries. They also worked closely with two AIPAC affiliated SuperPACs called the United Democracy Project (UDP) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and a group called Mainstream Democrats which aimed to defeat the “far-left.”

Conservative Political Parties Embody The Politics Of Nihilism

Howie Klein [DownWithTyranny 1-6-2023]

Yesterday public intellectual Umair Haque took a stab at explaining why democracy is broken in the U.S. and Britain to the point where both countries appear ungovernable. He began by asking why the Tories and the GOP are so incredibly incompetent that their nations are falling apart. And his answer goes back to the old truism about conservatives not believing in public goods. “If you don’t believe in public goods,” he wrote, “you are basically saying that the there is no job of governance to be done. Because there’s nothing to administer, oversee, nurture, invest in, shepherd, keep ship-shape for the next generation.”

Now the crux of his argument: “Neither the GOP nor the Tories believe in public goods. Not believing in public goods, they can’t do the job of governance. Because of course, to them, the task they’ve set out to accomplish isn’t governance at all. It’s the destruction of public goods. But that’s not governance, especially not in a modern democracy. What is it? Well, it’s a lot of things: ignorance, folly, hate, bigotry, rage, stupidity, and self-destruction, to name just a few… [After being ravaging in two World Wars] Europe’s living standards rose to the highest levels in human history because Europeans enjoyed the greatest public goods in history: from public health, to education, to transport, and so forth. There is absolutely no debate on this score… This is the great lesson of the 20th century, one of the most crucial in history, and now I can restate it in a simpler, more powerful form. We know the key to human prosperity. It’s called investment in public goods. They a) lift living standards while b) keeping societies equal and c) sharing wealth broadly, thus d) creating a relatively stable middle class that e) is the key for democracy to endure… [America and Britain] have been overrun by parties which genuinely don’t believe public goods should exist.”

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Open Thread

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On January 7, 2023

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Republican House Speaker Votes Show Progressive’s Disbelief In Their Own Legitimacy

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On January 6, 2023

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So, 4 days, 13 votes as of this writing. A small band of right wing House members are holding candidates hostage.

To win the bloc of rebels thwarting his rise, McCarthy was apparently prepared to agree to conditions that he had not been previously willing to accept. That includes reinstating a rule that would allow a single lawmaker to force a vote to remove the speaker, effectively placing himself at the mercy of his detractors who could trigger a vote at any point.

McCarthy and his allies hope the concessions and several other commitments will be enough to persuade enough holdouts to drop their objections and end the stalemate that has clouded the opening days of their new majority.

In 2020 Democrats had a House margin of 9 members. Five members, committed to vote as a bloc, could have held Pelosi or any other candidate to ransom until they got what they wanted.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

You have power if you’re willing to use it. The “Squad” is a joke because when they have leverage, they don’t use it. They don’t really believe in their own ideology: they don’t think they have the right to force other Democrats to govern better.

Republican right wingers, as much as I disagree with them, know how to use power. They don’t believe they are illegitimate.

Until left-wingers get over the idea that exercising power is bad, they will remain meaningless, and politics in most of the developed world will continue its 50 odd year swing to the right.

Some Good Covid News From France

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On January 5, 2023

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They are going to put CO2 monitors in all classrooms, with a limit of 800ppm.

This sort of thing is what has  needed to be done for a long time now. We need to clean up our air the way we did our water to get rid of waterborne diseases. Aggressive ventilation, filtration and UV (with ozone detectors to make sure it isn’t too much) should be standard in all buildings.

As a plus, as CO2 rises due to climate change, we’ll know how bad it is. Leaving aside pathogens, CO2 is toxic. One of the larger problems we have, but fail to acknowledge is also the reduction in oxygen content in cities and buildings, which is also bad for us. Were I rich, I’d have a positive pressure house built with filtration, CO2 monitors and scrubbers, and oxygen concentrators and O2 monitors. (Positive pressure is more than doable. The SciFi author Robert A. Heinlein created one back in the 50s.)

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Water monitoring and filtration/purificiation in all houses would also be wise. For the first time in history, rainwater is no longer safe to drink.

Generally speaking the world is going to become a lot more variable: forest fires, droughts, pollution and erratic weather. The US just got hit by a huge massively cold winter storm, meanwhile Europe had a heatwave in January. We need to prepare.

 

Canadian Housing And Immigration Policy

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On January 4, 2023

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So, Canada has done two interesting things in the last couple years to deal with the effects of Covid. The first is let in a lot more immigrants:

Canada added more than 431,000 new permanent residents last year, the largest annual increase in its history, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeks to ease the country’s labor shortages.

The new admissions met the 2022 target set by Trudeau’s government and exceeded the prior year’s record of about 401,000 newcomers, according to a release from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Tuesday.

The Canadian government has consistently raised its annual immigration goals in recent years, with the latest plan targeting 465,000 new permanent residents this year and half a million in 2025. The policies have also propelled population growth to a fresh record and may be contributing to a decline in the country’s median age.

Immigration accounts for nearly all of Canada’s labor-force growth and about 75% of the nation’s population growth.

When you realize that the Canadian population is only about 39 million you’ll understand how radically large this number of immigrants is.

This is an attempt to keep wages and inflation down. Without immigrants, wages would rise quickly, and that can’t be allowed, since Canada, like most developed countries, considers wage inflation almost the only type of inflation which matters.

Almost. To my surprise, Trudeau has decided to do something about housing inflation (something I’ve been calling for for many years):

A two-year ban on some foreigners buying homes in Canada has come into effect.

The ban aims to help ease one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world.

As of this summer, the average home price in Canada is C$777,200 ($568,000; £473,700) – more than 11 times the median household income after taxes….

…As of 1 January, the ban prohibits people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents from buying residential properties, and imposes a C$10,000 fine on those who breach it.

This won’t be enough to cool the housing market much, though the last year has seen a slight decrease in prices. Still, Canada remains one of the most expensive markets in the world: more than New Zealand or the USA.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

(Correction: In addition to a fine, the government can order the house sold, but it’s not automatic and should be)/ In addition a ban of all AirBnB rentals not of the own person’s home (or perhaps one vacation property) and the seizure of all non vacation/summer housing left empty of residents for more than 3 months for any reason other than ongoing renovations would actually cut prices and rents significantly.

The Canadian government needs a lot more people to keep wages down, but if immigrants can’t find housing in cities with jobs (and they can’t, the markets are insanely pricey and few rental units are available at prices immigrants can afford), then the immigration push might well stall out.

Thus the attempt to cool the housing market. This is more intelligent policy than I’m used to from Western governments, but it’s still in service of expanding inequality, virtually the only priority of most developed world nations.

Nonetheless, a golf clap for Prime Minister Trudeau. He’s stupid and venal, but not a complete idiot.

 

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As China Rises, Europe Falls

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On January 3, 2023

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Some interesting news in the semiconductor wars:

Now, ASML had indeed opposed US restrictions. They said explicitly that in the case of sanctions, China would learn how to make the machines themselves.

Europe’s technological lead is being destroyed by following US policies. Energy intensive firms are fleeing Europe because US energy prices are much lower (this is due to sanctions on Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines) and following US sanctions on China means that China just learns how to make what Europe supplies them now.

It’s sort of rocket science, actually. As you may remember, the US banned China from the International Space Station, so China just built its own and now looks likely to have a base on the moon before the US.

Woops.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

China, to repeat myself, is the world manufacturing floor. Mercedes moved their auto-design center to China. When the US took the lead over the UK in manufacturing, the UK retained its tech lead for about 20 years, but it did lose it.

Repeated sanctions on any area where the West has the lead, whether space, aerospace, semis or anything else only provide a perfect complete tariff to a country with millions of engineers and scientists and more manufacturing capacity than any other country in the world. They speed up, not slow down, the day when China will both have the tech lead and the manufacturing base.

Back in the late 90s and the early 2000s I warned, repeatedly, against transferring the manufacturing floor to China. That was the decision point, that was when it could have been stopped.

Sanctions against key points only make sense if you’re going to either go to war or move massively back to industrial policy, and the West is not going to do either of those things. I’m not sure a full move to industrial policy would even work, but it’s certainly what should be done. However, it could only be done if you were willing to crash real-estate and securities prices by about two-thirds, because the cost-structure matters.

What Europe should be doing is aligning itself with the rising power, China, or remaining a neutral bloc and negotiation places where they will keep the tech lead with China, as part of specialization. China wants trading partners and they see benefits in not having to rush every tech sector out of fear of sanctions. The US is both going down and fundamentally, at a policy level, willing to feast on Europe to slow its decline. Euro elites though they were part of a trans-Atlantic elite, but they only sort of were. When push comes to shove, American elites will let Euro elites swing. Generations of dominance have created an American elite willing to almost anything, or perhaps even anything, to retain dominance.

Europe has hitched itself to the wrong ship, and trusted the wrong nation, thinking that being a satrapy is the same as being an equal ally, and they have joined a cold war that will hurt them more than help them.

They will pay the price.

 

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Obvious Predictions For 2023

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On January 2, 2023

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Covid will not miraculously end. New variants will continue to be born, and they will generally be optimized for immune escape and damage. Hospitals in most countries will continue to be under high strain, because governments will keep pretending Covid is over when it is not and that it doesn’t ravage people’s immune systems. I find this chart of Canada’s Covid experience applies to most countries in spirit.

This will likely be the warmest year on record, but the coldest year of the rest of your life and if it isn’t, it’ll be in the top 5 on both lists. Same with extreme weather events. These will combine with water shortages to cause more problems with the food chain and there will be serious food price fluctuations, though how serious will depend on where you live and who gets hit hardest by climate events. Frequency and severity are increasing, but predicting exactly what where is in most cases impossible, which is part of the problem.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Nothing of significance will be done about climate change or ecological collapse, though some agreements may be signed which will have no teeth and no noticeable effects on the top line numbers.

The US will continue to pile sanctions on China in an attempt to stop it from challenging the US. Those sanctions will be damaging in the short run, but nothing the US sanctions will be something China can’t genuinely learn to make themselves because they aren’t racially or culturally inferior, and they have the largest industrial base in the world.

Cold War will continue to develop, with the BRICS at the heart of the other side, and movement towards an alternate financial system which bypasses the dollar will likewise continue. China will not allow Russia to be strangled by Western sanctions. Countries outside the developed core will continue to sway towards China, which offers cheaper loans and goods and is their primary trade partner, and also, with a few exceptions, interferes less in their internal politics.

A continued movement towards vertical integration in companies and to countries trying to be able to produce more of their own key goods. People are figuring out that as the cold war develops and neoliberalism collapses, you can’t, actually, trust the supply chain and the poorer you are, or the more the US dislikes you, the more that is true. This will play into countries choosing sides, as well. China does produce more of what most countries need than the US does now and that is going to become more, not less, true, especially when you add in Russia.

Europe will continue to lose industry to America and other low-energy cost nations. I rather doubt they’ll prioritize protecting their industrial base over being American satrapies and anti-Russia, so the EU’s decline as a great power will continue even as they militarize under US guidance and control, using US weapon systems and thus making their dependence higher.

I’d like to be wrong about this one and there’s a small chance I might be, since as the economic consequences become worse, the population may become desperate enough to realize that the cost to anti-Russianism may be a bit too high.

Join in with your dead-obvious predictions in the comments. The best way to be right about things is just to accept the blindingly obvious. Oddly, most people are really bad at that.

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