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 9 of 12

America Is About to Feel Like a Third World Nation

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On August 7, 2020

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I spent a good chunk of my childhood in third world countries. Most of that chunk was spent in Bangladesh, which was then arguably the poorest country in the world, but I visited or lived in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Nepal and India, among others.

There’s a feel to the third world one becomes familiar with: beggars, infrastructure that doesn’t really work, people doing terrible menial jobs. There’s the huge disparity between the wealthy and everyone else, or even those who have managed to attach themselves in a semi-dignified way to the wealthy.

Cruelty is routine and unremarked. Indian police officers routinely beat people as punishment (similar to their American counterparts). Servants are treated terribly, and in fact the locals routinely treated the servants far worse than foreigners. This has hardly changed, Vivekenanda, in the 19th century, noted that Americans treated their servants far better than Indians did.

The US is about to make a double digit percentage of its population homeless. Something like 20 to 30 percent — or more — of American small businesses have or are soob to shut down by the end of the pandemic. The jobs won’t all come back and those that do will pay worse and feature worse treatment than the ones before (which were mostly not well-paid and featured routine meanness).

We’re talking about 30 million to 60 million homeless.

These are staggering numbers.

The United States will feel third world. Oh, parts already did, when I landed in Miami airport the first time I immediately thought “third world.” Relatively prosperous third world, but third world.

Those places will be worse–and Florida (as I predicted near the beginning of the crisis) has handled the pandemic noticeably badly.

Of course, for many, little will change. They’ll keep their jobs, they’ll be fine. I recently witnessed a discussion of infosec jobs, talking about how for a person with a degree and a couple certifications, $120,000 was a lowball. There will still be good jobs, and you’ll still be able to lose everything in a few months if you become seriously ill.

But when those people who are hanging on go out in the streets, they’ll see, even more than now, the fate that awaits them if they slip.

So much of American meanness, and the culture is mean in the details of its daily life, comes from this fear. Because it is so easy to slip into the underclass, even if one “does everything right,” Americans are scared, even terrified, all the time. They suppress it with massive amounts of drugs (most of them legal), and most deny it, but the fear drives the cruelty.

In the Great Depression, people became less cruel, not more. They saw that the idea of meritocracy was absolute bullshit: The richest people in society had fucked up, good people wound up in poverty, and merit had nothing to do with who had how much.

I hope this is what will happen in the US this time. I fear, instead, it will lead to even more cruelty. Instead of saying, “We should make sure everyone is taken care of” and instituting universal health care, good wages, and a non-punitive welfare system (whether through a universal income or some other way), Americans will instead become even more cruel out of fear of losing their place.

The US is “undeveloping.” It is moving away from being a developed nation to being an undeveloped nation.

This process has been going on for a loooooong time. At least 40 years (1980), and arguably since about ’68 or so. The frustration, as an analyst, was that the trend was obvious but it took so long. There is, as Keynes said, a lot of ruin in a nation.

Change is slow, very slow, until it is fast. People who live in the slow period, of long decline, don’t really believe in collapse, they assume that things will get worse in a steady line.

But, in fact, there are long periods where everything changes slowly, then periods like earthquakes. 2008 was an earthquake (and collapse nearly inevitable by bailing out the rich). This is also an earthquake. Amercians will FEEL different afterwards, even if Covid goes away 100 percent, which it may not, because Americans refuse to do what is necessary. American media keeps having articles about how Covid will never go away. Well, except for quarantining visitors, it will for many countries. But not for the US, or Brazil, or India. Third world countries all.

Nor should we get too down on third world countries. The US is third world and experiencing the complete corruption of its ruling and governing classes, with the collapse of its administrative ability. When your post office can’t even deliver mail, you’re a failing state; this is such a basic part of being a government that it’s part of the Constitution, written in the 18th century, but because the post office isn’t a kleptocratic institution, the American political class is destroying it.

Most third world nations, indeed, are handling Covid better than The US.

Nonetheless the process is underway. The US is already governed like a third world nation, it just has a lot of legacy infrastructure and institutions to destroy to get the full experience.

So, expect that this is one of the times that matters. Expect that the US will be different after this. Expect that it will feel different. Understand that your personal position has become much more perilous. You must reduce your vulnerability and/or attach yourself to a corrupt money stream in a way which makes you indispensable. Being valuable is not enough, it needs to hurt important people if you you go down. If it doesn’t, the second the numbers say you go, you’re off, and any individual who can be replaced will be if you get on the wrong side of someone more powerful.

There’s lots of good paying jobs, yes, but almost all of them can be done by someone else. It doesn’t have to be you.

Bear all this in mind as you plan your future in the new third world United States.

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Understanding American Elites Means Understanding Predators

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On July 30, 2020

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American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

  1. There is no such thing as society.
  2. Greed is good.
  3. There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

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The Riots to Come… and The Revolution?

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On July 28, 2020

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This map, from CNBC, sort of says it all:

Assume the numbers are half that, you’re looking at 15 percent to nearly 30 percent of renters facing eviction in many states. Assume 75 percent of these numbers, and, well…

This is an apocalypse. If this won’t cause riots and revolution, nothing will.

Remember, the people who did this have names and addresses, as do those who bailed out the rich and left you to die on the street.

Don’t forget Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and every CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Every private equity guy, etc.

Do remember to display your displeasure to Congress when it’s in session and at the White House.

This, children, is what happens when you elect a woman like Thatcher who says, “There is no such thing as society,” or Reagan, who agreed. Trump is just a stage in the disease, and the choice to not do moratoriums, etc… was up to Congress. Likewise, the Fed has exceeded its legal authority multiple times for trillions of dollars to bail out the rich, and could have chosen to bail out ordinary people.

This is a choice. Not even Britain is making the choice this badly (though rest assured, Britain is a weak state, heading towards being a failing state, and having rejected Corbyn and chosen Johnson (who wants, among other things, to suspend jury trial), they will get there too.

I wonder if other neoliberal nations, like my own Canada, and Australia, Germany, France, and so on will take the lesson.

I’d like to think so.

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American Social Collapse Is Far Closer than Most Will Admit

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On July 27, 2020

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A rather lovely article on US social collapse by Susan Zakin includes this summary of the stages of failing states.

In State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Harvard’s Robert Rotberg writes that while every country is different, the signposts tend to be the same. It is worth attending to the characteristics he describes. They should sound familiar:

  • In a weak state, basic services such as education and health are privatized; public facilities decline. Infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, shows signs of neglect, particularly outside of major cities. Journalists and civil society activists are harassed. Tensions among ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups increase, but widespread violence has not erupted–yet.
  • In a failing state, a single leader gains control of the legislature, law enforcement, and the judiciary. The leader and his cronies are enriched while ordinary citizens are left without basic services.
  • In a failed state, living standards deteriorate rapidly. Citizens feel they exist only to satisfy the ruler’s greed and lust for power. The potential for violence increases as the state’s legitimacy crumbles.
  • Finally, in a collapsed state, warlords run the country. The market rules to the exclusion of any other concerns, while the social compact has been completely eroded. “The Id is unleashed.”

There’s no question that, by this measure, the US is a weak state. Trump is not the man on horseback quite yet, but if he gets a second term he may well be–not because he seems to really want it, but because people under him are working to bring the remaining pieces of the state (the military and judiciary) under his complete control.

Trump probably isn’t going to win re-election, and Trump’s brownshirts, made up primarily of the various services clumped under the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE, aren’t up to taking on the military. Yet. The cops, of course, would back Trump in a heartbeat, and the national guard will break down essentially by how red or blue their state is. The military is the last bastion, oddly, standing against a centralization of power.

So let’s say Biden wins, which is probable, mostly because of Covid-19 and Trump’s fumbled response–including the economic response. He’ll inherit an America with a 20+ percent unemployment rate and tens of millions of homeless people. Hunger will be widespread.

He’s already said he won’t change anything. His solution to the problem with the police is to give them more money for “training,” a solution which has never worked in the past and won’t work this time. He has told corporate America that he won’t be changing how business works. He’s against Medicare For All.

Etc.

Biden is the pre-Trump status quo, except like all Democratic presidents since Nixon, he won’t actually undo most of what his Republican predecessor has done. He isn’t going to push for getting rid of the Patriot Act, breaking up DHS, a wealth tax or high corporate and marginal income taxes, saving the post-office, breaking up monopolies and oligopolies, stopping pharma price-gouging or, well, changing pretty much anything which makes the US a weak state according to Rotberg’s scheme.

What this means is that Biden won’t stop a damn thing. At best, he is a pause. More realistically, the state will continue its slow descent under him, as it did under Obama.

And then the next Republican will become President in four to eight years. He will have learned from Trump that the US is ripe to fall into a strongman’s arms; that many Americans want that. He will run as a right-wing populist. And when he becomes President, he will systematically, in a way Trump is personally too senile and incompetent to do, take control of all the levers of power, including the military.

When predicting the future, the greatest mistake is often to not take into account reversals of trend.

But I’m having a hard time finding a cause for reversal of trend, at least in time. It is true that the Boomers are about done. Pelosi, with her corruption and weakness, is 80 years old. There will be a generational changeover, more to Millennials than to GenX, but it’s unlikely to be large enough to put a progressive majority in place. Neoliberals will continue to be the alternative to authoritarians, and neoliberals don’t actually care enough about authoritarians to fight them because they genuinely believe that the state shouldn’t be doing much, that there is no such thing as society, and that markets should rule. They can’t really oppose state collapse, because they are the ones who weakened the state, deliberately, due to their profound belief that the state is bad.

So, avoiding the next stage of the disease requires a rather fine needle-threading. It requires something like Biden stepping down after four years (because he’s already senile) and being replaced by a progressive, who then wins an election and is able to do enough to start reversing the decline. But this President will be working with a judiciary and a civil service systematically purged of people who believe in a strong communal state, not just by Republicans but by Democrats.

This isn’t a likely scenario.

The only other real chance of change, then, is a popular revolt that forces the current governing class out of power. That’s more possible than many people think, because they haven’t taken into account the mass homelessness, hunger, and unemployment coming down the line.

But is it likely? Are the odds good?

History is odd and one never knows, but I suggest that readers look at the situation hard in the face. The US is an un-developing nation, well on its way to being a failed state. Because you live among the infrastructure created by the great engineers of the Lost, GI, and Silent generations, it’s hard to see that, but that infrastructure is rotten–and so are the institutions and the souls of the people who run your society.

When the US goes bad, it’s going to go bad in truly awful ways. Americans have over 300 million guns, and an ethos that says violence is not just okay, but good. The right has been pushing eliminationist rhetoric for generations now; they think “liberals” are evil and need to be hung from lamp posts.

The odds on this turning around are terrible. Not impossible, any gamer or gambler knows you can roll one percent.

But while you can roll one percent, you shouldn’t bet your life on it, or risk rape and torture (no, don’t even pretend, many right-wingers believe rape and beat downs are suitable punishments).

Make your plans.

If you think I’m wrong about this, well, work it through. Carefully. Make the argument. What is going to go right to stop this trajectory? What is going to change? What are the odds?

Don’t just go with a feeling. Do the work. See if you still believe it’ll all turn around.

Protect yourself. Because if you’re American, odds are that within ten years, no one else protect you. And it could be a lot less than ten years. Stop putting off whatever it is you need to do to protect yourself.

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The Portland Seizures Are the Next Step to Latin American-Style Fascism

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On July 18, 2020

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As you my have heard, masked men without badges are jumping out of unmarked vans and grabbing people in Portland.

This is a clear violation of due process. They appear to choose their victims primarily by looking at videos of protests, identifying people, and grabbing them when they see them.

This is essentially a light version of what the US taught Latin American nations to do at the School of the Americas. It doesn’t yet, so far as I know, include torture and rape once the victims reach the sites where they are held, but if this is allowed to continue, that sort of thing is next on the menu.

The people doing it appear to Department of Homeland Security; primarily ICE–border control agents. They’ve always obviously been trained as brownshirts; that’s why they brutalize powerless people for a living, including children (something that happened under Obama, though it became worse under Trump). Brownshirts need to be dehumanized, and you dehumanize thugs by making them dehumanize other people.

If it isn’t clear, such seizures are a terror tactic, designed to break the will to resist. They are enjoyed by authoritarian followers; they feel that the people being brutalized deserve what happens to them, which includes beatings, arbitrary arrests, torture and rape (when those last two occur).

Americans have spent a lot of time teaching other people how to do this, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, where the US acted as “advisors” have engaged in such behaviour themselves. It was inevitable that such tactics would be used against American citizens when/ if they ever became too uppity.

Biden, or whoever runs his administration, will not take steps to change this. He may not do it himself, but he will not move to disband the Department of Homeland Security, get rid of the indefinite detention act, or end the Patriot Act, and so on. Children will no longer be detained in cages alone, they will be detained in cages with their families. Americans will continue to encourage other countries to engage in these behaviours, will continue to occupy Afghanistan, and will continue to degrade their military and police class to ensure that they will hurt civilians on command, and get off on it.

A momentary “cease fire” in this behaviour, assuming one happens (remember, Obama assassinated American citizens, killing without due process), is not a push-back. The second a Republican, or even a Democrat, wants to do this again, it will be easy to do–the people, organizations, precedents, and laws will all be available.

I don’t consider this a massive step up from what’s already existed (beatings and executions of Americans by people with badges), but it is a step down the path to authoritarianism. Fascism, if you like–but the model isn’t 1930s Germany, it’s Pinochet and El Salvador, and so on.

This is who and what the US is. It is what Americans have inflicted on others, and it is coming home. The question is whether enough non-degraded, non-authoritarian Americans remain to resist it.

I hope I’m wrong, but my suspicion is the answer is “not enough.” Certainly your lords and masters generally approve of the direction the US is headed, though they may “regret” this sort of activity, somewhat.

Make your own evaluation, and act based on it.

And remember, in a nation like The US is becoming, who you trust is the most important decision you will ever make. Trust one wrong person, and rape and torture will happen to you or those you care about.

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The Current Trendline Is Full-fledged American Social Collapse

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On July 17, 2020

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… or a full fascist turn.

Jared Diamond wrote a long book on why societies collapse.

Let me summarize his findings.

Societies collapse when elites are isolated from the consequences of their decisions as experienced by the rest of the population.

Here’s America:

Imagine that. The numbers nationally are worse. There is NO reason for the people who run America to change their Covid-19 strategy. None. Less than zero; the strategy is working brilliantly for them. Your suffering and deaths make them richer. Understand this. Understand it.

So, what does that mean?

It doesn’t mean that the US is likely to have 550K more deaths. Why not? Because the number one rule for understanding the US in the age of neoliberal greed is this:

No matter how bad you think something is in the US, it’s worse, even if you take this rule into account.

So, 550K is now the “good case scenario.” The case against it is based only on “lot of the old people have already died, and we’re better at keeping people alive now than at the start.” It’s not based on numbers of infections, which are already past the initial peak and nowhere near the top.

Then there’s those 32 percent of people who couldn’t make their housing payments in July, 22 percent of small businesses going bankrupt, etc.

So, I’ve been pounding this issue but today, looking at all this, it became utterly clear that the perceived self-interest of American elites is now so completely detached from the rest of American society and everyone else that there is no recovery without a revolution, peaceful or otherwise (and a non-peaceful revolution could trigger the collapse all by itself, while peaceful revolution is… unlikely).

Nonetheless, ordinary Americans are being pushed to the wall: broke, homeless and hungry will become normal for some number of Americans in the tens of millions. The actual economy will contract, but the rich will be richer.

Complete and absolute disconnect. This was visible in 2008, when the rich were bailed out despite being bankrupt and not just allowed, but encouraged, to set up an assembly line to steal ordinary Americans’ houses.

This is not recoverable.

It is not sustainable.

The Age of America is nearly done. Empires do not die cleanly. Russians died like flies when the USSR collapsed, and Russians were in far better shape to handle collapse than Americans are because they had garden plots and housing that wasn’t going to be taken from them.

Biden will probably win this election. He will not stop this. He will delay it somewhat, while furthering the conditions that made it happen.

Once Biden’s done, another right-wing “populist” will win the election, because the center would rather elect a fascist than even a 50s-style left-winger.

That President is likely to either turn the US full fascist or cause its collapse, or both.

When US passports start working again after Covid burns through the country, get out if you can. If you can’t, prepare as best you are able.

The time to get out or start preparing was 2008/9. But if you leave it too late, your life is on the line, or much worse.

Do not discount this, please. The numbers are staggering, but worse, those numbers are seen as good by the people who run US society. They want the displacement, because it is an opportunity for them to increase their wealth and power.

They will wind up ruling over rubble, but you will live in the rubble.

Do not discount this if you are American.

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Cycle of Civilization and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

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On June 11, 2020

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Many mainstream pundits now admit that the rise of the right-wing populism is due to the neglect, over the last 40 years or so, of many people, leaving them to rot, as the rich got richer. Four decades of stagnant wages, soaring housing prices, shitty jobs, and so on, have left people willing to vote against the status quo, no matter what they’re voting for.

This is all very nice. It is even a good thing.

But the warnings were given for decades. I remember very well warnings about rising inequality as early as the mid-eighties, and doubtless some were warning sooner, and I missed it due to my youth. The people doing the warning often said, “This is bad because it will lead to the rise of very bad people, like in the 30s.”

Yeah.

Learning after reality hits you in the face with a shovel, repeatedly, is good, but it’s not as good as avoiding getting hit in the face with a shovel.

Of course, the problem is that elites, and their “pundits,” only got hit in the face with a shovel recently. The last 40 years may have been a terrible time to be a peon, but they were the best time to be rich, or a retainer of the rich, in modern history. Maybe in all of history. Yeah, Babylonian kingdoms and Roman emperors were richer, but what they could buy with their riches was limited (though sex, food, and the ability to push other people around are the basics, and have always been available).

So, the people with power saw no reason to stop, because the policies were making them filthy rich and impoverishing people they didn’t know or care about. Heck, impoverishing ordinary people was good; it made services (and servants) cheaper.

For quite some time, I pursued a two-pronged (worthless) strategy. I told the people being fucked that they needed to fight back and scare the shit out of the elities, or the elites would keep hurting them. Then I told the elites that, as much as the peons seemed to be willing to take it and take it, eventually they would rebel.

Neither strategy worked, and even though the peons are now in revolt, they are backing policies which may help them somewhat in the short run, but which will be bad for them in the middle term–at least so far. (I have some hope that the left will win some in Europe. Spain’s leftists and Corbyn are the most promising signs so far.)

This is, really, just the normal cycle of history. There are bad times, and people eventually learn from them, and create good times, and the people who grow up in good times are weak and don’t really believe the bad times can return, so the bad times return, and the bad times at least make people tough and sometimes get them to pull together, and then they create good times.

Sometimes that cycle breaks down–usually because the bad times make people meaner and more desperate and break them down rather than bring them together, and then you get dark ages. Other times, the good times last for a few generations, not completely destroying the virtue of the people and their leaders immediately, for reasons I’ve touched on in the past and will discuss more in the future (you can read Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy if you need a fix now).

While this is the normal cycle of history, and it may be usually yawn-inducing, if tragic to those caught in it, we are unfortunately also at a point where we’ve done so much damage to our ecosystem that we’re in the middle of a great die-off. We also have climate change which, I suspect, is now not just beyond stopping, but which has reached an exponential, self-reinforcing period of its growth.

On the bright side (sort of), the technology which let us dig this hole gives us a better chance of digging ourselves out, but only a chance.

This is where we are at, and the hysterical reaction of many to Trump and to Brexit is a bad sign, because it hasn’t even begun to get really bad yet. It is going to get so much worse than this that people will look back to the reign of Trump as good times.

This is what we sowed, it is what we are going to reap, and it is what we are going to have to eat. It’s just that simple.

None of this means there is no hope. Some stuff will work out startlingly well, as was the case with the US and FDR in the 30s. Some stuff will be far worse than any but the most realistic thinkers are willing to contemplate, and in the middle of this it will still be possible for many to be happy, to find love, and to live satisfying lives, just as it was during the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s a weird metaphysical question, “Could this have been stopped?” and I’ll leave it aside for now. If we believe in free will, and if we want to have some hope that the future won’t follow the same pattern until we drive ourselves extinct, let us hope that it could have been stopped, not for what it says about the past, but what it says about the future, and about humans.

I’ll write more soon about our current period, best called The Twilight of Neoliberalism. For now, gird your loins. There will be ups and downs, but basically, it’s going to get worse. Find the happiness you can in the middle of it, and don’t let your happiness or well-being rest on geopolitical events you cannot control as an individual.

Originally published Nov 29, 2016.

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A Long, Hot Summer

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On June 3, 2020

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Back when Obama was elected, I was still an A-list blogger, and had some access. We advised Obama and the Senators creating the new financial laws that the correct action was to take over the banks and break them up, while bailing out Main Street. Criminal charges should be laid against bankers under RICO statutes for fraud, to ensure nothing like this happened again.

If they did not follow our advice, we warned that it would eventually lead both a strengthening of the populist right and to civil unrest.

Of course, they didn’t take that advice, and given who Obama chose to run his administration that should hardly have been a surprise. Indeed, it was Obama who pushed TARP through after it failed the first time–Pelosi was not going to pass it if Republicans would not vote for it in equal percentages, and they wouldn’t. Obama twisted arms, and the reports I received were that the threats were absolutely savage. TARP was, though most Democrats will not admit it, ultimately Obama’s bill, whether it was originally Bush’s or not.

It is after the 2008 financial crisis that American pathology starts going off the charts: We start seeing declining life expectancy among the working class, the opiate crisis spreads to poor and many middle class whites, and so on. It takes years for jobs to return, and inequality soars; it was worse under Obama than any other previous president. Yes, this is a continuation of trend, but Obama could have stopped it, simply by enforcing laws as written.

The response to the financial crisis set the standard: Bail out the rich, fuck the poor people–they receive some crumbs. This was repeated when Covid-19 hit, with multi-trillion dollar bailouts for the rich, and a single $1,200 check for everyone else, with some technocratic fixes around the edges. Billionaires gained control over more of the economy, small businesses were and are being gutted, and crisis capitalists are waiting to snap up billions in distressed businesses and properties.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile the neoliberal playbook, which was always about making the rich richer and everyone else poorer and about gutting the middle class the New Deal order built, kept the poors down by locking them up and with routing police brutality. Incarceration soared under neoliberal rulership, and Joe Biden was one of the architects, though you can see the trend starts under Reagan.

And so here we are, with protests and riots throughout the US. This was a long time coming, and it came because the lords and masters in the US refuse to throw anybody but the rich more than scraps. They funnel gold and caviar to the already wealthy at every opportunity; cat food to everyone else. They beat down anyone who acts uppity, giving cops massive license to be brutal, arming them with military weapons, and having them taught by Israelis whose experience is in beating down Palestinians in the occupied territories: people with no rights, regarded by Israelis as subhuman (no, don’t even pretend otherwise).

The cops see violence and brutality as their right. Any challenge to their authority is met with cruelty and abuse of power. They are fundamentally cowards, because they don’t believe their victims have any right to fight or even talk back. (Their essential cowardice has been proven when they are threatened, and is a weakness which could easily be exploited.)

Right now there is no reason to believe than any of the new Covid-19 bills will do more than give crumbs out. Food stamps are under threat of further restriction and, in New York, Governor Cuomo (whose popularity has increased despite his complete malign incompetence in handling Covid-19) used the crisis as part of his excuse to cut Medicaid, while keeping non violent offenders locked up in prison so that Covid could kill them.

Long and short, neoliberal elites don’t know how to give. They don’t have the instinct that New Deal elites, for all their flaws, had, that the job of government is prosperity for the masses. They know it is prosperity for the few, they feel in their bones that anyone who is poor doesn’t deserve more than a little bit of pity charity, and their instinct is punitive; the poor and middle class are undeserving and if they get uppity, what they need is a good smack.

Covid is not going to go away this summer. Multiple states have reopened without getting it even remotely under control. Testing has been reduced, but even so numbers show only minor decreases.

So we have a pandemic, a population nearing 30 percent unemployment, people who can’t pay the rent, and 40 years of impoverishment and brutality.

This summer has been a long time coming, and it’s only starting. Even if this wave of protests is crushed, or dies down, the smart money is that it isn’t the last wave.

And that’s a good thing.

Because as long as your lords and masters know they can only give you scraps and feed themselves at gold plated troughs, that’s how it’ll be.

If you are reading this, understand that this dynamic means that there can be no peace while the current ideology rules. The only possible peace is the peace of impoverished serfdom, of people beaten so far into the ground that they simply accept that everything will keep getting worse for them while the rich feast.

There is no good future for the US if neoliberalism, and neoliberal elites, continue to rule.

Take that into account in your planning.

And get ready for that long, hot summer.

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