Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 14 of 36

Happiness, Love, and Terrorism

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On May 8, 2019

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So, we’re seeing more attacks by motorists. (edited since the Japanese attack turned out to not be an attack. Woops.)

Many years ago, decades ago, I used to wonder why people didn’t use cars and trucks directly in terrorist attacks, not just as vehicles for bombs. Automobiles are one of the only things government can’t take away from people, because our entire society is set up to require them.

John Taylor Gatto, amusingly, used the fact that everyone had cars and almost never deliberately hit anyone as proof that people could, basically, be trusted.

That’s breaking down.

Look, this is simple enough. Our lives suck ass. Despite Abe’s manipulated stats, living in Japan is hellish, even if you are in the system. If you aren’t in the system, it’s beyond hellish.

As for most of the West, most people haven’t had a raise in 40 years, and while inflation stats say, “Hey, that’s okay, because wages have slightly exceeded inflation,” that’s BS, especially in the US, where prices for everything you MUST have, like food, medicine, and housing have increased far faster than wages.

The culture has also moved increasingly to a surveillance culture. This isn’t just about government (cameras everywhere) or private companies who try to track everything we do and are pretty successful; it’s about us–with parents, for example, turning into helicopter parents who basically never let their children have unsupervised time without adults around.

And if you do try, well the cops and children’s services will take your children away from you.

In workplaces more and more electronic devices track what workers do minute by minute and in some cases, like Amazon warehouses, by seconds.

Meanwhile, we have an ideology which says that if you have money you deserve to have it, and if you don’t, you don’t deserve to have it. So not only do you get to be poor, you get to feel bad because you weren’t enough of a psychopath to climb the corporate ladder. (Yes, yes, a few people get rich without engaging in psychopathic behaviour. Maybe you’re one of them. You are an exception.)

Back in the 70s and even 80s, which I remember well, there were no security guards in most buildings. Most governments did not have blast barriers. You could just walk into legislatures. This is not an exaggeration.

We have created a hell world, then we wonder why people eventually freak out and do hellish things.

Why they take what little power they have and kill.

Oh yes, they shouldn’t, blah, blah, blah. Why you are in just as bad a place as they are and you haven’t, so they shouldn’t, because you are the measure of all things.

But human nature resides on bell curves. There are always going to be some people at the ends of the curves. Move the center 10 percent over and you get a lot more than a 10 percent increase in violence.

Who doesn’t commit violence?

Happy people who love the people around them and are looking forward to their future. Those people only commit violence when they or their loved ones are attacked, or if their government tells them to (the last one is rarely to their credit).

It isn’t more complicated than that. If you create a dystopian surveillance society, raise prices on things people need faster than wages will provide for and tell people they are bad people for not being successful when your society makes it harder and harder to be successful and worse and worse for those who fail, some of them are going to flip out.

Eventually, enough may lose patience and stop believing they are the ones who suck, and cause a revolution instead.

I just hope they kill the right people when the time comes. Because don’t think they won’t kill.

A reminder to any members of the elite reading this: Those who have more power have more responsibility. Your subjects are largely what you made them. You will eventually reap as you have sowed.

Indeed you are already, but so far most of this violence hasn’t hit you.

Don’t expect that to continue. More flip-outs are going to target people with power as time goes on.

Bank on it.

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.

Disney Explains that the Reason Poor Working People Are Poor Is Executives

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On April 25, 2019

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One of the most extraordinary threads I’ve read recently is Abigail Disney doing the math on how the Disney corporation could raise the income of its bottom tier workers.

The poor are poor because the rich are rich.

Disney was interviewed a while back, and these two questions and answers are germane to this conversation.

In what ways did your dad change, other than having a jet?Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human…

How did the jet change your dad? It wasn’t just the plane, but it’s not a small thing when you don’t have to be patient or be around other people. It creates this notion that you’re a little bit better than they are. And for the past 40 years, everything in American culture has been reinforcing that belief. We say, ‘Job creators, entrepreneurs, these are the people who make America great.’ So there are people walking around with substantial wealth who think that they have it because they’re better. It’s fundamental to remember that you’re just a member of the human race, like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your money that makes you better than anyone else. If you don’t know that and you have money, it’s the road to hell, no matter how much stuff you have around you…

See, here’s the thing, as I’ve pointed out in the past. Airport security is awful for one simple reason: No one who matters goes through it. They fly on private jets. On the rare occasion those people go first class, well, first class security is far less unpleasant than what the peons go through.

Any problem that does not affect elites, they do not act on, unless they can make money on it. (In which case, their solution is likely to make things worse.)

This is exacerbated by the fact that elites effectively live in bubbles: They don’t have ordinary people as friends. They don’t identify with the middle class or the poor, and if you don’t identify with someone, their pain doesn’t bother you. (This is why, in wartime, the enemy is demonized. It is also why slave owners mostly believed that blacks were were inferior, and subhuman.)

Iger is a bad, even evil man, for the same reason most high-level American executives are. He could easily make his employees lives better and give up nothing that matters (see Disney on what executives would sacrifice) but they don’t do it, because they don’t care about the pain of their “lessers.”

This is a matter of the structure of modern capitalist society, but it is also an affirmative choice by the executive class. In the 50s and 60s these sorts of executive excesses were both illegal and frowned on ethically. It was felt that earning so much more than regular people was actually immoral.

Later generations of executives didn’t see it that way. They felt that “greed was good,” that they “earned it” and that anyone who didn’t earn that much was a loser who was getting what they deserved. If they deserved more, the market would give it to them!

So they worked very hard to change corporate culture, buy government and change laws. For example, stock buy-backs, which are very good for executives with stock-option bonuses, used to be illegal. Then there’s the reduction in top marginal tax rates, the refusal to enforce antitrust laws and on and on.

It took a lot of work, by a couple generations of US executives and other rich people, to get here.

And now they’re rich, and  a lot of Americans are poor. And the reason other Americans are poor is that the rich are so rich. (Yeah, this isn’t the full argument, but the argument is easy enough: Buy the government and have it represent your class interests and everything else follows easily.)

And Bob Iger is evil, though I’m sure he thinks he’s a good person. But a lot of people are poor so he can be rich, and he and his executives could make their employees’ lives a lot better and give up nothing that matters to their own lives. When the situation is “I can help and I won’t even notice it” and you choose not to, well…

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.

World Poverty Is NOT Decreasing

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On January 31, 2019

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I’ve said before that world poverty isn’t reducing, but let’s say it again.

The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.

Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy…

…So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today.

We also know, for example, that Indians have been eating less calories than 30 years ago (and having traveled in India in the 80s, I can tell you they weren’t overfed.)

As Hickel also points out about the earlier parts of the graph, and as I have pointed out previously, most of the “people are making more money” comes from “people were forced off their subsistence farms so that they had to use money to buy what they got from their own labor before.”

So, for example, when NAFTA went into place, millions of Mexican susbsistence farmers were forced off their land. This lead, directly, to the massive increases in immigration to the US that occurred in the 90s and early 2000s, by the way.

People miss the essential point: it’s not how much money you have. It’s whether or not you have enough food, shelter, clothes and so on. It’s whether you have what you need and some of what you want.

Only a moron (or someone as disconnected from the realities of life like Bill Gates) could think that being able to buy as much as $1.90 a day, in the United States of 2011, would qualify as enough money. I have been poor. I have been very poor, by first world standards. I can tell you that even back in the late 80s, $1.90 wasn’t enough (I could have barely eaten on that, I could not have saved up and paid rent.) Today it is completely inadequate, and the diet it would barely allow is basically starch and sugar.

(Which, again, anyone who actually has tried to shop cheaply would know. That won’t include Bill Gates.)

These people who say with certainty how poverty is massively decreasing make me sick. They are either ignorant, very stupid and disconnected from reality, or they are very evil.

Essentially all of the poverty reduction of the past 30 years comes from one source, and one source only. China. Which industrialized by classic protectionist policies which the IMF, World Bank and poverty ghouls do their best to make impossible.

And as for China, what is also clear from their experience, and in the data, is that the Chinese who moved to the cities to get those great new jobs are less happy than the people who stayed in the villages. Further, great amounts of force have had to be used to move peasants off the land, because they know the new factory jobs suck even worse than being a peasant. (As they did in Britain during the Industrial revolution.)

What made some parts of the world better wasn’t capitalism, per se. It was steam power and oil power. Those parts of the world then used that power, along with gunpowder and whatnot, to conquer most of the world and take what they wanted.

Today we do it different ways, but the bottom line is simple enough: measured by any semi-reasonable standard (would you want to try to live on $7.40 a day, including paying your rent?), poverty is not getting better. It is getting worse.

If you say poverty is decreasing, what you are saying is “it is ok to keep doing what we’re doing.”

If you’re wrong, you’re a monster, because you’re saying “we don’t really need to do more.”

And you’re wrong.

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 Rule of Alienation and Stability

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On December 16, 2018

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One of my favourite sights is people complaining that marginalized people don’t understand that their support for Bad Politician-X results in fucking themselves.

“Sure,” runs the line, “their lives suck now. But they’ll suck even worse if this guy gets into power.”

This is often (but not always) true. It is also irrelevant.

The rule is simple: Alienated people are always targets for alternative political movements. Sometimes those movements are good, sometimes bad. But if you don’t want this to happen, your society has to give alienated people genuine expectations of a better future when they play within the system.

When a huge number of people, a plurality, feel that they have little hope for a better future, and a realistic expectation for a worse future, they are willing to roll the dice, even if the odds are bad. After all, they already know that the current world is shitty and the future is worse.

It does not matter if this seems irrational on cost/benefit scales; what matters is the chance, rather than what they see as a certainty.

Now, understand always, that sometimes what is offered IS better. FDR was better. So was Huey Long. Corbyn in Britain will be better than the status quo. (This is why the voting gap for youngsters disappeared for him. Young people vote when they are offered what they need.)

Sometimes it is worse, if not in the short run, then in the long run. Or, if not for you, then for other people in your society (see Hitler and Mussolini for cases of both).

People who love the status quo, who want it to continue, have to make it work for most people. If their policies, no matter how reasonable they seem to the beneficiaries of the current system, whatever it is (Ancien Regime France, for example) plunge a plurality into despair, that plurality will always be ripe for turning on the system.

It really is that simple? Love your system? Okay. Make it work for almost everyone. In excess of 90 percent. Not because you are moral or ethical, most of you probably aren’t, but out of sheer self-interest.

If you don’t, don’t whine when those you left behind decide to take almost any chance to change things.

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.

 

How Over-priced Is the US Housing Market?

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On October 2, 2018

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This is one answer:

The bottom line, then, is that it’s more overbought than it was in 2008.

If the government had not intervened to keep it over-inflated, it would likely have reverted to mean, but trillions of dollars were spent, and many laws were bent and indeed, broken, to keep house prices up.

Indeed, 2008 was used as a buying opportunity: Distressed homes were bought up at cents on the dollar, then rented or sold at inflated prices.

The entire economy is crooked: It is designed to favor the rich no matter who else that hurts.

There are little people who win, but they are fewer and fewer. And virtually no one below the age of 40 is a winner in this unless they are professionally involved, i.e., in on the scam.

Housing should never have been thought of as an investment. Houses should be for living in, and people who own them to flip them should be heavily penalized. Those who own them and leave them empty should have them seized by the government and auctioned. And, yeah, some form of rent control is needed in most places.

Of course foreign buyers must be kept out of the market. Housing is for people who live in the country; foreigners can rent.

As for mortgages, they should be dead boring; for most people fixed rated mortgages of 20 to 30 years fit.

None of this should be objectionable. But there are people making a lot of money out of the misery of other people, and parasites don’t like letting go of their hosts.

Parasitical economies–and most developed countries have one–exist by immiserating people.

This is the real reason for the current push for basic income: The parasite class is scared they may be about to kill the host, and want a government infusion to keep the poor and the (reduced) middle class stumbling on.

I don’t oppose a basic income, but understand that billionaires aren’t supporting it out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect to take every cent the government gives you.

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.

 

Most “High Performers” Are Just Better Parasites

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On May 2, 2018

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Most so-called high performers are just excellent parasites. Amazon pays no tax and many of their employees are on food stamps and welfare. Walmart encourages its workers to go on food stamps, while it guts municipal tax bases. Apple actively avoids taxes and both Apple and Microsoft built their entire business on technology they stole from Xerox. Microsoft, in particular, built their business on monopolistic practices that would have led to the breakup of the company if Bush’s administration hadn’t interfered.

The asshole “high performers” in the financial industry required a many trillion dollar bailout. They should have all gone bankrupt and most of them should have gone to jail. They threw much of the world into an economic crisis which has still not ended. They are high performance ticks (leeches have benefits, they are very close to pure negatives.) The oil industry receives massive subsidies, and so on and so forth.

Studies show that consumption of social media correlates with decreased well-being and unhappiness, and the more you consume the worse it is. The evidence for this is overwhelming. They do it with less employment than prior industries and pay less taxes. This is not the behavior of a symbiote, it is the behavior of a parasite.

The simple FACT is that during the 50s and 60s, when high earners (whom fools seem to think are the same as high performers) were massively taxed the economy did far better.

All other things held equal, it is relative equality (not absolute, do not straw man) that makes for better economies and societies.

(The data on this is not even slightly ambiguous, read “The Spirit Level” to see it nailed in place in tedious but apparently necessary detail.)

If this economy is what the “high performers” produce, I’ll go back to one run by the mediocre people, thanks.

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 Unemployment Rate Isn’t Used to Keep Unemployment Low (with Graph)

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On April 13, 2018

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Years ago, I complained to my friend Stirling Newberry that the unemployment rate didn’t seem to track how good the economy felt, or how many people were in desperate need of employment.

The unemployment rate was, then, and is now, taken as a proxy for the health of the economy for ordinary people. However, I could see and feel that the economy was getting worse for ordinary people, and that fact was showing up in other statistics. Plus, unemployment rates that were considered a crisis when I was young in the 70s, were now considered acceptable.

(See: The Economy Has Not Recovered, With Graphs)

Stirling said, “You need to know who an economic statistic is designed for, and what they use it for.”

A little history is necessary here, about inflation. In the 70s, due to the oil crisis and other mishandled economic problems, inflation got out of control in the West. Very high interest rates were used to bring it down, by Chairman Volcker at the Fed. Western policy makers became obsessed with inflation. It was considered Enemy Number One. They decided that the worst cause of inflation was wage increases and called this “wage push inflation.”

To track this, they turned to a statistic called the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). NAIRU was the rate below which the unemployment rate was assumed to cause inflation.

The unemployment figure measures the number of people actively looking for jobs, compared to those who have jobs, remember. Thus it measures the active demand, in the market, for a job. Therefore, theoretically, if there are too few people looking for jobs, employers are expected to have to raise wages to attract workers.

(This is, to be clear, when wages rise the most, which is something non-economists and non-oligarchs want to happen.)

If you are old enough, you will remember that during the 80s and 90s, and even into the 00s, when the unemployment rate would drop, the stock market would take losses. This is because stock investors expected the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which is bad for the economy and bad for stocks.

So, the unemployment rate from late 70s and on, has been used to determine if wages should cause inflation, and to then raise interest rates to make sure they don’t.

Not incidentally, the result is also to crush wages, because, essentially, wages that improve are nothing more than wages that increase faster than non-wage inflation.

The unemployment rate not only doesn’t measure how good the economy feels for ordinary people, it was actually used, with purposeful action, to crush wages.

You’ve all been waiting patiently for your pretty graph, so here it is.

NAIRU vs Unemployment vs Fed Funds

NAIRU (Civilian Unemployment Rate) vs Unemployment (Natural Rate of Unemployment) vs Effective Federal Funds Rate

You’ll notice that while effective federal funds rates (the green line) increase during low unemployment periods (the red line) before Volcker, it is after Volcker that they correlate strongly to whether the unemployment rate is approaching or below NAIRU. Before Volcker, the unemployment rate is often below NAIRU and people get a lot of raises.

Note, in particular, and with amusement, that the flat, blue line rate (the natural rate of unemployment) in recent years shows a period where unemployment has stayed above NAIRU. Note that Yellen started talking about increasing rates as the unemployment rate came closer to NAIRU.

Your wages were crushed, deliberately, supposedly to crush wage inflation.

And this is why unemployment doesn’t have very much to do with how the economy feels for ordinary people, especially not now (it effects how the economy feels some, but not much). Unemployment has to get below NAIRU and stay there for you to get real wages.

I will point out, for completeness, that the idea that wages are the most important source of inflation is questionable, but I’ll deal with that at a later date.

(Read: A More Detailed Look at the End of the Post-war Liberal Era)

Originally published Feb 17, 2006. Back to the top because it is an actually important post. We just recently had another case of the stock market declining due to low unemployment rate figures. This is why.

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.

Slavery, Amazon Version

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On February 2, 2018

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Because Hell (a.k.a. working at an Amazon warehouse (and plenty other places)) is about to get worse. Amazon has patented wristbands which track where your hand is at all times AND can nudge you.

Amazon already tracks warehouse workers by the second, with supervisors watching their location.

This is hell. Absolute hell. It extends assembly line horror to a vast range of other jobs, allows a smaller number of supervisors (and soon AI) to watch them, and control them like flesh-robots.

Revolution is the only sane response to the extension of such technologies. And quite probably, revolution French-style.

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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