Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 11 of 36

Being Held Hostage by the Cost of Insurrection

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On June 29, 2020

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The US is in the middle of a low-grade civil insurrection; that’s what all these protests and riots are. (When you torch an entire police station, that counts as insurrection.)

When a civil insurrection happens, riots and protests, and bad stuff will also occur. People will be hurt and killed, property will be damaged. Some of it will be done by the police or military, but some of it will be done by those rising. People will be hurt or killed who don’t deserve it. Property will be torched whose owners didn’t deserve it.

That’s a given. An insurrection is like war: Bad shit will happen to innocents.

This is why the bar for insurrection is high. It’s higher than for war, because, in war, the population and elites think the damage will be done to the other country. (They may turn out wrong, but that’s what they believe.)

So, yeah, bad things have happened during this US insurrection. That was a given, and anyone who thought it would be otherwise is a fool.

This is, however, what elites count on: That the costs of insurrection will be high, and made higher by the elite reaction. Most violent protests were started by riot cops being violent with protesters who were peaceful.

Because the cost is so high, people put up with terrible situations for a long time. The damage drips and is spread out over time and the community, whereas the costs of insurrection are immediate and hit a lot of people more or less at the same time.

The death and casualty count from the US not having universal health care is far higher than any possible casualty count from these riots. Nor have as many people been killed during this insurrection as are killed by cops in the US every year (a number in excess of 1,000).

By the pure math, a very high cost should be acceptable to tear down the current order. If all that did was move police violence to a European number (1k), enact universal health care (26k), end wars (slightly under 1k), and allow the US to deal with a pandemic properly, the saved lives would be 28K yearly, plus a few hundred thousand from the pandemic.

This leaves out people committing suicide, the highest incarceration rate in the world, the epidemic of drug abuse, the death and suffering from inflated drug prices, and all the suffering caused by massive income inequality.

At the most conservative estimate, if you overthrew the current order at the cost of 100,000 lives, it would pay back in five to six years.

The argument for all out revolt, replacing the current system with Nordic style social democracy (Finland/Norway, not Sweden) is airtight if you think you can succeed. (I know many people, observing the US military lose almost every war since WWII, think it is undefeatable in a country far better suited to guerilla warfare even than Afghanistan, but of course, there is a very good chance it would not come to military vs. population.)

No one condones violence that hurts the innocent or destroys the property of innocents. But if you take violence entirely off the menu, and won’t do full social-solidarity general strikes, then a depraved elite (which the US has) will simply ignore you and outwait you.

Minneapolis City council just approved, with every councilor voting for it, a motion to end the Minneapolis police department.

Clutch pearls all you want, but insurrections are always going to be at least somewhat nasty.

But the question isn’t the hurt of the insurrection, the question is whether the status quo after it is better enough to swamp that harm.

Don’t target innocents. Also don’t allow yourself to be held hostage by those who are hurting even more innocents right now, “We can kill tens of thousands and impoverish millions while destroying entire countries, but if you add even one more innocent life to the total opposing us, you are the bad ones.”

No.

(Also, ignore scaremongering about Stalin and Mao. Communism of that variety is long dead and NO ONE is trying to re-impose it.)

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Do Not Ask Western Leadership to Fix Anything

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On June 24, 2020

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References to Corbyn aside, this is as true as it was when I first published in, Nov 16, 2015. I was going to write a new article on trust in leadership, and I will, but I want to emphasize the basics first.

Why are people calling for Western leaders to “fight terrorism”?

Global deaths from terrorism:

2002: 725

2010: 13,186

2014: 32,727

Those attacks mostly weren’t hitting the West. Now, a tiny fraction are.

Next.

Without the US arming and organizing the Afghani Mujahideen in the eighties there is no Al-Qaeda.

Without the US and British invasion of Iraq, there is no ISIS.

Understand this: Widespread global terrorism exists because of the US’s actions specifically and the West’s generally.

Let us turn now to economics. Inequality has been increasing since the 1970s. It has become worse every decade, with only minor reversals. After the financial crisis, it became so bad that more than all the productivity gains in the environment went to the top three percent.

This happened in large part due to various financial, economic, and legislative “reforms.” It was deliberate, in other words. Inequality is a result of deliberate action by US leadership.

Austerity is, likewise, the result of deliberate action by Western elites, generally. They decided to deliberately impoverish their citizens and have done so.

This is not unique to the West. India claims much economic progress, but the average number of calories eaten per capita has gone down over the last thirty years. The average Indian is worse off than they were when India was run on frankly socialist principles.

The leadership classes are chosen for their ability and desire to become leaders. If that overlaps with an ability and desire to make their society good for the majority of the population, that’s great, but in most countries right now, that’s not how or why they are selected.

These people are selected by oligarchs, for oligarchs, and their skillset is pleasing oligarchs. This is done through a system that selects candidates before they get to voters, even primary voters or the equivalent. In most cases, you do not get a choice of a leader who will put ordinary people’s interests first.

To see what happens when someone does slip through, take a look at how UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been treated by the Press. I have never seen such libelous coverage of a political leader. One UK headline yesterday read “Corbyn and his friends must choose what side they are on” with respect to the Paris attacks.

Here is what Corbyn said, by the way:

“Today, all our thoughts and sympathy are with the people of Paris.

“What took place in the French capital yesterday was horrific and immoral.

“We stand in solidarity with the people of France – as with all victims of terror and violence.

“I have cancelled my engagements today to hold discussions on events in France with shadow cabinet colleagues and be briefed by Downing Street security officials.

“It’s vital at a time of such tragedy and outrage not to be drawn into responses which feed a cycle of violence and hatred.

“We are proud to live in a multicultural and multi-faith society, and we stand for the unity of all communities.”

This is an eminently sane, statesmanlike statement that simply says our response should not make the situation worse, but Corbyn is being vilified for it.

This sort of propaganda works, Corbyn took over the Labour leadership with negative favorability ratings, virtually unheard of. He did so because he had been endlessly smeared by the Press.

Let me blunt. Anyone who wants our leadership to “fix” terrorism has either not been paying attention, is a fool, or is a tool who knows they’ll make it worse but expects to personally benefit in some way.

This situation is similar to the Iraq war in the sense that anyone stupid and immoral enough to invade Iraq could not be expected to run the war in a way which would lead to good results.  One can make a  theoretical case that an invasion of Iraq could have worked out well, but that can’t happen in the real world because no one who would invade Iraq in the first place would be competent or just enough to actually implement improvements.

Note, however, that the Iraq war was an immense profit opportunity and that a great deal of money was funneled to the right people. Again, this is one of our leaders’ core competencies, this is what they do well.

Years ago, Stirling Newberry told me that the job of modern politicians was to wrangle the masses for oligarchs. He was right. That is what they do. They are good at manipulating enough of the population, and they are good at giving money and power to those who already have both.

They are not good at anything else, and expecting them to do anything else is insane.

You do not want Hollande, Obama, and Cameron (let alone Erdogan) trying to fix the Middle East. You do not want the people who report to them trying to do so. You do not want western militaries trying to do so.

At least not if you want a reduction, rather than an increase, in terrorism.

The first rule of holes applies. The first thing you want the leadership to do is stop digging. Other than criminal investigations, you should want them to do nothing. No military action, no legislative changes. Military action hasn’t worked, legislative changes will just be more gutting of civil liberties, and that hasn’t worked either.

This is true of virtually everything. They cannot and will not fix inequality, because their raison d’etre is to create inquality. They cannot fix the financial system or the economy because it exists as it is to increase inequality. They cannot run a war because they were not chosen for that sort of competence.

If you want to fix any problem in the West, or have the West be helpful for fixing any global problem, you need to fix the Western leadership class. That means fixing Western media, education, corporations, etc, etc. The list is long, because they have deliberately broken virtually everything to turn it into an opportunity for a very few people to become richer.

If you are British, you have a decent, honorable man who actually wants to do almost all the right things: Corbyn. Get to work supporting him, however you can. If he goes down, the political class will take it as a lesson that trying to help ordinary people is a really bad idea. (Well, they have already decided this, so work to prove them wrong.)

But, in general, you need to retake control of the system which creates leaders, you need to restructure, bypass, or break the media conglomerates (or all three), and you will need to restructure society from the ground up so that it does not produce either such corrupt leaders or the people who enable them.

This is a goddamn big job. It is far harder than dropping some bombs on the Middle East, or sending in the troops again. But it is an actual solution to a whole series of problems.

In the meantime, don’t ask your leadership to “fix” anything. That’s not what they are there for. Whenever they want to do anything, your default position should be to oppose it–unless you are 100 percent certain it’s in your interest and have done the hard, cold research and thinking to support that conclusion. Sure, sometimes you’ll be wrong, but most of the time you’ll be right, because they are not in power to make your lives better, but to enrich a small class of people and impoverish the majority.

Any knock-on effects, like terrorism, are secondary to them, and even if they had the desire to fix such problems, they cannot–they do not have the ability. They will simply make them worse, even if it was possible they were sincerely trying to do good.

If you live in the West, the great danger to your life, health, and prosperity is your leadership. It is how your society is run. This is cold, hard, and true.

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Truly, Truly Good News as Americans Get Serious

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On June 9, 2020

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The first really good news of the uprising was the burning of an entire police station.

This is the second really good news:

Now this has been done, fairly often, in other countries, but to see Americans do it? This is all good. This shows people getting serious, “We don’t want cops and we will keep them out.”

The assholes who like driving cars into protestors (which Republican lawmakers want to make legal) are partially responsible, but this is a big deal because it shows planning, and forethought, and a rejection of police legitimacy.

One main piece of why cops have been rioting is that they believe that because they are guys who “protect” everyone else, and because they feel the job is dangerous (it’s less dangerous than many other jobs, but that’s now how they feel), that they have the right to go anywhere, tell anyone what to do, and be obeyed, and to hurt or kill anyone at their discretion.

They feel they’re the people doing the hard work, the “sheepdogs,” and that the sheep just don’t understand. They make the hard decisions, and the sheep should just obey.

And most of American discourse around cops is, “Don’t resist, obey any order, and pray they don’t hurt you too bad.”  That’s reasonable when it’s just you and a bunch of cops, but it’s not reasonable as a group, or a society.

So giving cops the finger, saying, “We don’t need you, or want you, and we are going to keep you out,” is a psychological break.

I’m very pleased to see this. For decades, I’ve wondered if Americans would just take anything, no matter what, lying down. The last couple weeks have begun an answer in the negative.

Keep it up. You don’t need cops who run like the ones you have.

And, the next step? You don’t need politicians or executives like the ones you have now, either.

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Power Concedes Nothing Without a Credible Threat: Riots Work Edition

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On June 8, 2020

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So…

… a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department

This doesn’t mean “no police” it means get rid of the current bunch, and create a new police department. This was done by Camden, New Jersey, for example…

By the department’s account, reports of excessive force complaints in Camden have dropped 95 percent since 2014.

There’s some stuff about how they did it that I don’t like, but the point that it can be done matters.

More important is something which wasn’t going to happen, disbanding Minneapolis’s police department, is now probably going to happen. Without riots, it wouldn’t have.

Riots are, actually, one of the most effective ways to create change. Politely worded letters don’t work. Completely non-violent protest only works if it shuts things down. Voting doesn’t work if the political system is entrenched, because entrenched political systems know how to co-opt or marginalize actual radicals.

If you want something from powerful people, you have to show you have power of your own. If you don’t have enough power to at least scare them, to show them the limits of their power, why should they give you anything?

Americans are showing the rich and powerful the limits of their power; of what their violent lackeys can do, and the powerful are making concessions. (And they are just that–concessions. They wouldn’t have done these things without the riots. They didn’t want to do them.)

This is also a result of the weakness the US’s current elites; in-touch, wise elites would have given much more to the poor and middle class during the Covid-19 bailouts, instead of letting tens of millions lose their jobs and worry about their rent.

Elites thought Americans were completely whipped. They had reason to believe that, admittedly, but they overplayed their hand.

Always boil the frog slowly, smart evil elites know that.

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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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Protect Yourself from Retaliation After the Riots

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On May 30, 2020

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In the years since the Ferguson riots, prominent protesters have been systematically killed. Nobody knows who is killing them, and police somehow can’t catch anyone.

The most likely explanation is that they are being killed by cops.

In New York, the man who filmed the choking death of Eric Garner was repeatedly hassled by cops, and is now in jail.

After the Minneapolis riots, the police will take revenge. If they know who you are, they will come for you. If they can find a way to get you legally, they will. If they can’t, they’ll take care of you anyway.

Fortunately, we are in the age of Covid-19.

WEAR A MASK. During the day, wear shades as well. Do not carry your phone, it is a tracking device which the police can use, retroactively, to see exactly where you were at all times. If you must have a phone, use a burner. If you are going to take pictures and video and upload later, make sure you don’t have people’s identifiable faces in them. Do your research into how to upload data safely, in a way you can’t be identified. To begin with, do NOT use a US-based VPN. I suggest a VPN from an unfriendly country: Vietnam, Russia, whatever.

Also, if you are willing to destroy property, make sure to destroy all surveillance cameras first. Every camera you destroy may save multiple people from jail or death.

Insurrections such as this one come to an end. The cops will want revenge, and they will take it.

Protect yourself.

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The False Choice of Deaths Versus the Economy

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On May 19, 2020

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There is a vast amount of hand-wringing and angst going on about how we can either save the economy by re-opening, or we can let the economy crash and save lives. Of course, the economy crashing (and the US unemployment rate will probably hit 30 percent) will cause the loss of lives also.

This is a manufactured, completely unnecessary choice.

To understand why, you have to understand three facts about money:

  1. Money is imaginary. It is a fiction created by humans. People are not fictions. Land is not a fiction. Buildings are not fictions and neither are physical objects. Money, even when it exists in paper form rather than 0s and 1s in a computer, is fictional. It has value only because we agree it does.
  2. Money is used for two things: First, it determines who controls what. Can you control land, people, or objects? If you buy land or an object, you control it for as long as you own it. If you hire a person, you control their time. Money is control of people, land, and things.
  3. Second, money is a feedback mechanism. If people who have money want less of what you offer, you get less money and control less people, land, and things. If people who have money want more of what you offer, you get more money and can control more people, land, and things. (What people who have no money think is of no concern.)

What Covid-19 closures are doing is providing feedback–“people with money want less of these things.” That causes the people who control businesses, or live in apartments, or have to pay mortgages to run out of money, and lose control of those things. Businesses go out of business. People can’t pay rent or mortgages or their employees.

That causes an economic crash.

This is 100 percent unnecessary. We want feedback in an economic system because we don’t want people doing things that other people don’t want or need (or, in Capitalism, other people with money).

But when a one-time event happens which does not reflect a fundamental shift in what people want (i.e., this pandemic will end) then you actually want to stop the feedback, because it’s bad feedback. You don’t want to change long-term economic arrangements because of something that is a one-time event.

So, because money is fictional, because we just create it out of thin air (central banks create trillions routinely), this means that we can do one of two things:

  1. We can just give people who have lost their income due to Covid-19 enough income to pay their bills
  2. we can freeze payments up and down the line – rent, mortgages, interest payments.

Or, of course, we can (and should) do a combination of these two things.

When Covid-19 closures have clearly run their course, we stop doing these things. If there are permanent changes (a lot of people keep working from home, or we don’t get a vaccine and restaurants aren’t going to be popular again) at that point the feedback is allowed to operate.

To allow a one-time event of limited duration to fundamentally reshape the economy means one misunderstands what an economy is. An economy is not money, it is people, land, and objects. Those are what must be preserved, not money. When the one-time event is over, if those objects still exist and are still controlled by people who can use them to create what other people want, then the economy has been preserved.

To allow people to die to preserve the economy is idiocy: It hurts the economy. People are the economy; it is people and natural resources which produce everything of value.

So, when people squeal about the economy vs. lives, understand that they don’t know what an economy is or how money works. Or, they do know how money works and what an economy is, but they are taking advantage of the situation to give themselves more money, and are good with other people dying while they get more money, because they are concerned with their relative position.

If the Fed and the government give rich people lots of money, and everyone else not much, and if assets become cheap and can be bought out, and if small businesses go out of business, at the end the economy is smaller, BUT the rich people control more of it

And that’s what they want. Too bad your grandma and your dad have to die for it, but that’s not their problem.

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How Covid Will Play Out in America

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On May 11, 2020

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Almost every day this blog publishes the John Hopkins Covid-19 numbers. They are undercounts of both deaths and cases, but they give the trendline. Recently the trendline has very slowly started to move down.

Meanwhile, Trump and many governors have started to move to ease isolation requirements. This map shows that only five out of 50 states (and Puerto Rico) aren’t easing.

There are three problems here.

First, the curve hasn’t been crushed. In fact, in some states, it’s still increasing.

Second, even once a curve has been crushed, to keep it under control without a vaccine, you need to test and trace. The US would need to hire hundreds of thousands of tracers to do this, and would need many more tests than are currently available. If you don’t test and trace, one person can infect many other people, and then all those people infect many other people.

Third, Covid-19 takes about two weeks from infection before people show symptoms, and two weeks more before they start dying. During that asymptomatic period, carriers are contagious.

What this means is you can have a significant outbreak going on and not know it is happening. That’s why countries that got Covid-19 under control crushed it into the dirt, then put everyone coming in from outside the country into quarantine, and they test like mad.

Humans are really bad at making decisions where the consequences are delayed. (See Change, Climate). Even a two week- to month-long delay is more than the decision makers in many countries, including the US, can handle.

So, the numbers seem to be in decline, and there will be removal of restrictions, and then the numbers will start increasing again in two to six weeks. Because infection rates will be moving off a larger base, they will create a second wave where people start dropping like flies–much larger than the first wave.

This is acceptable to the people who run the US because they have jobs where they can work from home, and if they don’t, like in the White House, they can test every day. It is the lower class who will be forced to go back to work and to die.

That’s not a problem for American elites; killing unimportant people for money is pretty much what they do for a living.

It’s possible this narrative can be cut off if those states which are handling Covid properly close their borders to non-isolating states, presumably by calling up the national guard. There is also some hope because Americans are generally not flocking back to venues like restaurants–even in States which have re-opened.

But overall, this looks like the first wave passed its peak, is slowly declining, before the second wave comes in and culls the poor for the rich. Numbers of deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands at a minimum. If this is bungled completely, it could be that 80 percent of the population will have to get Covid-19 to create herd immunity, and that a little under one percent will die. The rich will isolate and test throughout all this, of course.

This is a worst case scenario, and many mocked the possibility even two months ago. Surely, they said, American elites couldn’t fuck this up that much?

They can, and they are. But it isn’t fucking up. They’re now isolated and in little danger. They’ve bailed themselves out, given themselves even more control over the economy than before. If ordinary Americans get sick, die, or can’t pay rent and go hungry, well, why should American elites care? It doesn’t effect them.

That’s their bet.

As for you, do what you can to prepare. We may get lucky and get a vaccine earlier than expected, but if not, the US has made the choice to let Covid-19 continue to wend its way through the population.

And remember, Americans, if you decide you’d rather not die so the top one percent can own more of the US, they have names and addresses.

Never riot in your own neighbourhood.

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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