Ian Welsh

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

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 11 of 12

Looking Back at the Year That Was, and Looking Forward to Hell

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On January 1, 2019

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Globe on FireSo, it wasn’t the greatest year for me, personally, though it certainly wasn’t the worst.

It was the second year where the heavy hand of climate change was obvious for all to see, with the endless West coast fires leaving cities wreathed in smoke for weeks at a time. Climate change is now reshaping the environment.

Trump was a nasty piece of work domestically. In foreign affairs, his legacy remains to be seen: If the Syrian and Afghan withdrawals actually occur, if the North Korean peace winds up being worked out, and if he avoids war elsewhere, notably with Iran, he will go down as a great peacemaker–whether those who hate him or not like it.

The economy is about due for another crisis and recession, but I don’t follow economic matters as closely as I did back in 2007/8, so I can’t call it exactly. Still, be wary, and store away fat in the larder when (or if), you can.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the so-called populist right continues to rise, Macron (a heartless, neoliberal technocrat), is running scared of his own protests, and in Britain, despite the Tories being demonstrably incompetent monsters, the Labour and the Conservative parties are running even in polls (which means Labour is almost certainly slightly ahead.) A recent study showed that 75 percent of all news articles about Labour leader Corbyn lie about him, so that explains rather a lot. Much of the rest is explained by the fact that Remain spends most of its time attacking Corbyn and by the fact that a lot of Brits are heartless scum. (There is a reason why neoliberalism started in Britain with Margaret Thatcher.)

Nonetheless, the simple fact is that there obviously has not yet been enough suffering among the comfortable classes, because they still seem to think the status quo is acceptable. They need more people they actually care about to suffer and die as they watch, I guess. That’s unfortunate and not a prescription; it’s just an observation.

The US 2018 mid-term elections mean much less than people make them out to. Nancy Pelosi, hamstrung by an ideology which insists on PayGo and attempts at comity, will do nothing significant. Even if Democrats lurch back into power in 2020 in the face of Trump’s unpopularity (as opposed to their own popularity), it will mean nothing if they continue to run “slightly less nasty policies than the Republicans.”

This is not to say there is no possibility of hope. Despite Democrats deciding to be the war scum party, objecting to Trump actually trying to end wars, it is true that Medicare For All is becoming party orthodoxy. Perhaps we can hope that Americans will be slightly kinder to each other even as they kill foreigners in large numbers.

And perhaps someone like Sanders will win the Presidency.

Still, the Democratic party remains firmly neoliberal and hates people like Sanders.

Despite all the squealing, 2018 wasn’t the worst year ever or anything. There wasn’t a World War, we weren’t in a worldwide depression, and the worst of climate change and environmental collapse has yet to happen. Certainly, for some people, it was the worst year ever, but that’s true of every year.

No matter who wins what, politically, the trend is decidedly to the worse. The Paris accords on the environment will not be met, and if even they were met, they would be insufficient. It is already too late to stop the worst of climate change. Meanwhile, the old political order is staggering, and what will replace it is by no means guaranteed to be better.

Even if it is better, it will come to the scene too late to stop us from hitting a wall. We are, for example, just going to lose a few hundred million in India. Unstoppable. The SouthWest of America is going to run out of water. Unstoppable. And so on.

This is now triage time; if you are wise, you will put less of your effort into “saving the world” (now impossible, by any reasonable definition) and more into choosing who is going to survive. The survivors will determine what the post-catastrophe world is like, so who survives matter.

Grim? Yeah. But this is what is, and denial will just get more people killed.

Meanwhile, there is still beauty in the world, real maple syrup is still sweet, and love still warms. There is plenty of good in the world to celebrate, enjoy, and live in. I suggest doing so; your misery serves only your enemies, not you.

Be well in this New Year to come. Survive your enemies, spit on their mass graves, and write the histories.

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.

Actual Sovereign Nations and the End of the Unipolar Moment

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On November 3, 2018

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This chart is a “sovereign nation” chart. Spot the only sovereign nation.

Japan could be a great power, but right now it is still an American subject state. South Korea obviously is, and so is India. Of these four, only China is sovereign. The rest have to do what they are told to by the United States.

This period is ending. The US (primary) and European (secondary) stranglehold on the world payments system WILL come to an end, and the world is most likely to split into two primary trade blocks.

Since things like the US-imposed Iranian sanctions are crimes (along with the strangling of various other countries, as is killing people–with reports of Iranians dying from shortages of insulin as a result of the sanctions), the end of the US unipolarity will be a good thing.

Those who abuse their power should lose it.

That does not mean that China is a nice and cuddly power either, but they have more respect for most other countries’ sovereignty than the US does and want a “great power” influence area, not a “superpower” area (i.e., they do not want to control the world).

The process of this split is ongoing. The recent NAFTA renegotiations were about breaking the near-satrapies to American will. Mexico gave in immediately, Canada crumbled under auto export tariff threats. You can tell this is about the split, because the new trade agreement, the USMCA, had in a clause intended to stop Mexico or Canada from having new trade deals with China.

This is the new world being born. It doesn’t have to be better than the old one, and may not be, but that doesn’t mean the old order doesn’t need to die.

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.

Is Ocasio-Cortez the Start of a Movement?

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On June 30, 2018

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Most of you have, probably, by now, heard of Ocasio-Cortez, the insurgent Democratic Socialist candidate who defeated incumbent Joseph Crowley in a New York House Primary–and by a large margin.

Ocasio-Cortez is, for the US, quite radical: free tuition, true universal health care, re-instating Glass-Steagall and he out-and-out called Israelis shooting Palestinians a massacre when it was, in fact, a massacre.

Ocasio-Cortez is not the only such candidate to win in this cycle, but she is the most visible and Crowley was touted by many as Nancy Pelosi’s likely heir in the House Leadership. The New York Times barely even covered her, they just assumed Crowley would win.

Now it has been observed by many that the reason the Republicans are very right-wing is that they are scared of their base: An incumbent is more likely to lose in a primary than a general.

The Netroots movement that ran from about 2003 to 2010 had as its goal “more and better Democrats,” and tried repeatedly to take down Democrats from the left. By and large it failed and so the Democrats continued to be what they’ve always been; a party which agrees with 80 percent of what Republicans do, but wants to be a little nicer about it.

What matters about Ocasio-Cortez and her small cohort is whether they are precursors of a larger change. Will Democrats challenging from the left win, and win often? Will incumbent Democrats have to move left to try and hold their seats? (Crowley tried, but he wasn’t credible.)

I have long agreed with my friend Stirling Newberry that 2020-24 is the change-point in the US. It is at the point where, simply due to age, Boomer politicians will have to give up power, and younger politicians (Millenials and GenZ or whatever we call it now) will take over. A few leaders may come from GenX, but not many, because we are too few, and anyway, as a generation, we have awful politics.

If this first wave turns out to have what it takes, and have a decent ideology they stick to, then the US stands a chance at a sharp turn towards becoming a kinder, more equal nation which is better to live in. (And Ocasio-Cortez’s plan for environmental change is stunningly good: a massive green build-out which many have suggested for decades.)

I am simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. While Millenials overall have fairly good politics according to polls, the generation after that is more questionable. Further, as with Boomers, it may not be those with good politics who win most (no, the hippies did not storm Congress in the 70s.)

But this is the early movement of the hinge. The door opens fully between 2020 to 2024 and that will determine the future of the US.

If you wish to see a precursor, watch Corbyn in Britain. Just as Britain preceded the US into neoliberalism with Thatcher, it may precede the US during this turn of the hegemonic sub-ideology.

(Oh, and Ocasio-Cortez? She uses the phrase “For the many, not the few,” which is Labour’s motto under Corbyn.)

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.

Why Free Trade Isn’t Efficient

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On June 26, 2018

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a raft of literature by lawyers, economists, and bureaucrats involved with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other free traders. It’s been a fascinating journey into an alternate world, one in which frictionless trade and money flows, and unified regulations and laws are considered to be a good thing.

The reasoning behind this virtually unquestioned acceptance is as follows: If there are no barriers to trade, whether financial or regulatory, goods and services will be created (or done) wherever they cost the least. If they are done in the lowest-cost place, they are being done in the most efficient way, and that means more is created and consumers also pay less.

It is thus a good thing, virtually always, to reduce barriers to trade and services. If it can be done for cheaper somewhere, it should be. Some people may lose, but overall more (or the same) is created for less, and this is good.

This is basically an article of faith in everything I’ve been reading from people who make their living around the WTO.

But you may have caught the error in the thinking: It assumes the lowest cost is equivalent to the most efficient.

But it isn’t. When manufacturing moved from the US to China, it cost less to do in China, yes, but it produced more carbon (climate change); it took more people to produce the same amount of goods, and it generally used more materials, as well.

In other words, it is less efficient in every way except the monetary cost.

The rejoinder to this might be that those people who were manufacturing those goods would be better employed elsewhere; people were being wasted. If it can be done for a few dollars an hour, rather than $20 or more (if labor was unionized), then the higher-paid workers should do something else.

But everyone knows now, and trade advocates admit, that the people who lose the jobs to offshoring and outsourcing were mostly not employed again, or never had as good a job again. People are not fungible, they don’t just fit into any spot.

Moreover, as those jobs moved away, those people earned less money, and local businesses got less money from them as consumers. Everyone’s employees are someone else’s customers: When everyone cuts wage “costs,” they’re also cutting demand.

The core problem with capitalism is that it assumes that money measures benefit: If someone is willing and able to buy something (is in “demand”), then that something is good.

But the cheapest cost and the highest profit don’t take into account actual efficiency or actual good in the world. Producing less climate change gases to produce the same stuff is more important than saving five or ten percent manufacturing cost, or making five percent or ten percent profit. Using less resources that are limited is more important than the lowest cost. And good wages are also important, because they measure good lives. (There is an argument that China’s industrialization required America’s de-industrialization. I don’t think that’s true, but that subject is too large for this piece.)

The core assumptions of capitalism are wrong. They are simply wrong. But that doesn’t mean they don’t create a very effective system, where effective means “good at sustaining itself” and “good at telling people what to do.”

Capitalism is really very simple. It’s an algorithm for directing human behavior, and it works because it makes sure that the people who obey the algorithm are the people who have power.

Until they run the world off a cliff.

More later, but for now the point is simple: Neither the lowest price nor the highest profit automatically equal the most efficient thing to do in any way except with respect to money.

And money, while it’s lovely, is not actually food, water, or a livable environment, nor will it be able to buy those things for everyone (or perhaps anyone) when there just isn’t enough of it to go around.

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 Class War: The Rich Won and the End of NeoLiberal Capitalism

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On June 22, 2018

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Many years ago now, I wrote a post called “There Was a Class War and the Rich Won.”

Ironically, after the financial meltdown of 07/8, and thanks to Bush, Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner both bailing the rich out and immunizing them from their crimes, that victory has accelerated. This chart, from Harvard, tells the story of the last 30 years.

 

What this chart doesn’t show is that the those gains went primarily to the top one percent, and in the top one percent to the top 0.1 percent and in the top 0.1 percent to the top .01 percent.

What happened was a vast centralization of wealth, and therefore of power. This power was used to buy the government: the presidency (Obama acted in the interests of the rich in every important way–so has every President since Carter); congress and definitely the courts, both of which have, ruled, time and time again, in favor of capital and for large and larger concentrations of wealth and power, culminating with “Citizens United,” which classified money as speech and sharply limited government’s power to regulate money in elections. This legislation was the crowning glory of the rich’s victory in the class war.

One of the problems with capitalism is that its benefits rest largely on having competitive (free) markets. But the first thing capitalists do when they “win” the markets is take their profits and use them to buy government so that they can end free markets (our markets are nowhere near competitive or free). Free markets, to anyone who has won, are a threat.

You can see this in the march of so-called “intellectual property.” There is no such thing in anything close to a state of nature: Intellectual property is entirely the product of government. Ideas are free, in nature, and can be used by anyone, and one person using an idea doesn’t mean someone else can’t use it. There is no natural property of ideas.

But we have extended intellectual property well beyond the life, even, of creators. Walt Disney is dead, long dead, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are still the intellectual property of a company.

Competitive markets require that other people be able to compete. They must be able you use your technology, your ideas, etc… to bring down the price of goods. If you want to keep charging a premium, you have to keep coming up with new ideas. But when key technologies and ideas are locked behind patents and copyrights forever, this isn’t possible. (I can’t see any argument for most patents beneficially owned by companies to last more than five years, and even that is questionable. There is an argument for longer copyrights, if they are beneficially owned by individuals, but even in such cases, not long beyond the life of the copyright owner.)

All of this is putting aside other vast barriers to entry and laws and subsidies which benefit incumbents and which push hard towards monopolization.

So we don’t have free markets, and we do have vastly rich rich, and those rich own the government, without question (the events of 2007/2008 proved it).

Capitalism without free markets doesn’t provide most of the benefits of capitalism, and democracy which has been captured by oligarchy doesn’t provide most of the benefits of democracy.

And so both are being discredited, and fascism rises and non-market alternatives become more and more popular. You see it in Corbyn, you see it in the challenge to so-called free trade epitomized by Trump, and you see it in the fact that, for most young Americans, socialism is no longer a four-letter word.

Corbyn’s program includes a vast swathe of straight up de-privatization. It includes rent-controls and a program for the government to just build housing. It isn’t radical from a 60s point of view, but to a neoliberal capitalist, it is terror indeed. And if Corbyn was elected by just those under 40, he’d win in a landslide.

The days of our form of capitalism are nearly over. It is done, and that it is done is concealed by an overhang of older people in the developed world. What will replace it remains to be seen: there are alternatives on the right and left, and the right-wing alternatives are pretty ugly.

But that neoliberal capitalism is nearly done, that is obvious.

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 Slow Bipartisan Slide to Authoritarianism

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On January 17, 2018

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The funniest thing about Trump are those who feel he is of a piece, separate from US history and somehow a break from it. That this government is significantly, qualitatively worse than those that came before, rather than an extension of it. (A good example is immigration policy, about which Trump is somewhat worse than Obama, but only somewhat, and where Obama had a chance to end Bush’s policies, he embraced them, instead.)

We now have the spectacle of the success of the cloture vote for re-authorization of section 702 of FISA, which allows warrantless spying on Americans who have contact with foreigners, and which has been changed to allow the database of all such conversations to be searched, trolling for crimes.

These seems like a fairly clear violation of the Bill of Rights prohibition on, well, warrantless searches, but there you go.

Eighteen Senate Democrats crossed the line to make this possible and so did 65 House Democrats. Obama, of course, supported the FISA bill (which was bad even without this newest addition).

Indeed, going back to 2001, the Patriot Act, the 21st century “daddy” of authoritarian overreach was opposed by only one Senator out of 100 (and he’s no longer in the Senate).

One can cavil that at least less Democrats voted for this, but somehow “enough” always do, and those who know how legislatures work will suspect that those who didn’t were given “walks” so they can say they voted against.

There are three likely possible outcomes of our ongoing realignment period. One is left-wing populism. The second is right-wing populism (a very different thing, and not what Trump is actually doing. Its policies are what Bannon prefers.)

The third is an authoritarian surveillance state which attempts to freeze current power relationships for as long as possible.

And that’s what too many Democrats and Republicans are more than okay with; that’s what they want.

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.

What the Republican Tax Bill Portends for the Future

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On December 2, 2017

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I haven’t written about this before because I don’t have a great deal to say that hasn’t been said by other people. The bill is an obvious cash grab by various private interests which will cause great hardship.

The idea that it will “pay for itself” is ludicrous, and no one with a shred of intellectual integrity believes it.

It is six trillion in tax cuts, with 4.5 trillion in tax raises, including not taxing private education, but taxing public education.

A lot of Americans will suffer greatly as a result and a smaller number will do very well.

There will be an attempt to gut Medicare and Social Security next year, and it will be argued as necessary on budgetary grounds, after decades of deliberate acts like this tax bill, which hurt the budget. (And is basically bullshit even on budget grounds, but that’s a different article.)

As for the corporate tax cut from 35 percent to 20 percent, well, the 35 percent was paid by very few large companies–if any, but the last thing the US needs is corporate tax cuts: Corporations are sitting on vast quantities of cash, and they are not investing it. They should be taxed punitively on any non-reinvested profits, and that money should be spent by the government, if corporations don’t. This is common sense stuff.

Taxing overseas profits at a lower rate than domestic profits is a special sort of insanity.

None of this is likely to stand.

A lot of people in the US will suffer because of this. Some will die. All of it will most likely be repealed within eight years, because, as with the Tories in Britain completely destroying the economy for ordinary people, this will lead to a huge backlash.

It will stand only if “centrists” succeed in making sure that genuine left-wing principles are locked out of the Democratic party, as Blairites tried to do with Labour, only barely failing.

However, a genuine left-wing candidate on the Democratic ticket, with policies similar to Corbyn’s, will win in a landslide, because the youngs will vote for them in massive majorities (and, as Corbyn showed, the rule “young people don’t vote” isn’t true when someone champions their causes).

By 2024 at the latest, there will be enough of a generational shift, and enough people hurt badly enough and unable to pretend that the status quo ante was every good, that the Left, if not prevented by internal party politics, will win.

And they will win with a fairly radical agenda.

There are alternative scenarios, of course, nothing is 100 percent. But the feared fascism is unlikely to stick in the US, because the youngs aren’t onside with it (unlike the youngs in Eastern Europe). The people who want fascism in the US are mostly old and getting older (and dying).

Every time fascists come out for a march, Antifa outnumber them vastly.

What is more likely, if the possibility of a large shift to the left is stifled, is cyberpunk dystopia (sadly, so far, minus the cyberwear). Surveillance police state, vast slums abandoned by corporations and governments, corporate syndicalist towns and enclaves (already happening, as tech companies start building housing for their employees), and so on.

Those are the two most likely scenarios for the US. Those who think they can go back to the (illusory) Clintonian prosperity are deluded. The present marches into the future, and the neoliberal era is dying. The question is not if it will be replaced, but by what.

Choose your sides.

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.

Five Hundred Million Dollar Negative Yield Bond Issued

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On November 17, 2017

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No, central banks aren’t screwing the economy up with their purchases:

Veolia (Paris:VIE) has issued a 500 million three-year EUR bond (maturity November 2020) with a negative yield of -0.026 percent, which is a first for a BBB issuer.

To be clear: Central banks didn’t buy those bonds, investors did. But central bank purchases of government debt are a large part of what is causing this issue.

The ECB (European Central Bank) has been buying SEVEN times the issuance of government bonds. Seven times. Seven times.

They are straight up financing governments (which, done right, could be a good thing, but isn’t in this context).

The problem in the world today is the same as it was 15 years ago, before the financial collapse: There is too much money chasing not enough returns. Because there isn’t enough real growth, so money moves into bubbles and fraud, and destroying companies through leveraged buyouts and so on. This also means that, if there isn’t enough fraud or predation going on, it sits and stagnates and does nothing worthwhile.

What the developed world actually needs is stuff to invest in: high marginal tax rates (higher on capital gains than on earned income), distributive policies to the bulk of the population to create wide-spread demand, and moderate inflation of about five percent a year to motivate people to actually invest in new businesses, as opposed to financial speculation.

The problem with this solution set is that it must also include effective regulation, otherwise it can have environmentally devastating effects; for instance, because solar is not fully online, the above solution set could lead to oil price spikes.

Those problems, however, are not why people are ignoring the suggestion solution set. These solutions are not being implemented because current leadership does not believe in high taxes, wide distribution, or regulation. They are neoliberals, and 40  years of neoliberal disasters cannot convince them to engage in anything other than neoliberalism– because neoliberalism has made them and their friends very, very rich.

But the game is coming to an end. Normally, they want to tax the middle class and poor people, sparing the rich. But now, they are now starting to tax the rich through the back door of negative interest rates. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class, especially the young ones, are losing patience and are willing to go either straight-up socialist or straight-up fascist (see: the Polish 50K rally).

This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

There will be three choices for countries: Fascism, left-wing populism, or dystopic surveillance/police states.

Choose.

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

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