Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 8 of 36

Why Do We Do That?

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On April 19, 2021

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So today I stopped by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and picked up a small bottle of sake.

The teller seemed unhappy, so we chatted for a bit. I told him I’d worked at the LCBO for a couple months about 25 years ago (for the Christmas season), and he opened up a bit.

“Yes, it was a better job then. It was also a better job eight years ago, or three years ago. It just gets a bit worse every year, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than most jobs: we have a pension, and not a lot of jobs offer one any more, but…”

The long and short of it is that every year management tries to take away a little bit of what makes working for the LCBO a pretty good job. It’s still pretty good, but if this doesn’t reverse, one day it won’t be.

This has been going on for decades; a couple generations at least, arguably three to four generations. In the US, working class male wages peaked in real terms in 1968, the year I was born, and I have white hair.

We just keep making life worse for a huge chunk of our population; this is true in Canada, in the US, and in most of Europe.

Our rich are the richest rich in his -— ah, forget it. You’ve heard me say it many times.

And I can tell you the “reasons,” but at the heart of it, I don’t fucking get it. How rich do these assholes need to be? How many private jets and vacation homes and $50k/day hotel room stays do they need? Do they really think their pleasure is worth so much more than billions of people’s suffering? Because much of what they do hits the developing world hard.

Why are they such scum? So evil?

Why do we run a society that is just making things worse for so many people (don’t waste my time with the “extreme poverty numbers,” they’re bullshit)? Why do we have more homes than homeless; waste a third of our food and have hungry people? Why are we on track to kill about half of all known life forms on Earth?

Why are we so stupid, evil, and selfish as a species? Why is our leadership made of so many people who could only, truly, improve the world by taking a long jump of a short pier?

I mean, Bill Gates fought hard to keep vaccines under patent. He’s never been a good actor, of course, but, here, he is protecting his interests by hurting people in the middle of a global pandemic, despite having more money than he could possibly need if he lived a million lifespans.

We have a pair of huge problems as humans:

  1. We’re badly led.
  2. Enough of us support terrible leadership for it to just keep happening.

Either we fix those problems, or Earth is going to continue to be Hell for much of the human race and worse than hell for non-human life.

But, emotionally, I still just don’t get these people. The Clintons’, Bushses, Obamas’, Bidens’, Bezos’, Waltons and so on. They just hurt people, hurt people, and hurt people, over and over again. There’s something deeply wrong with them, and with us as a species that these types of people wind up leading us over and over and over again.

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Only Zero Covid Worked and Everyone Knows It

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On April 6, 2021

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Vietnam has a population of 96 million and 34 Covid Deaths.

America has a population of 328 million and 550,000 Covid Deaths.

 

Australia has a population of 25 million, and 909 deaths.

The UK has a population of 67 million people and 127,000 deaths.

 

South Korea has a population of 52 million, and 1,752 deaths.

Germany has a population of 83 million, and 77,136 deaths.

 

Now here’s the thing, this has been known for at least six to eight months.

You shut down everything except actual essential services until cases are essentially at zero. You track and trace. You quarantine travelers. Any outbreaks afterwards, you shut down the area, HARD.

You can avoid mass lockdowns ONLY if you track and trace furiously at the start, with immediate traveler quarantine, and local quarantines as necessary, along with a mask mandate and other such policies. (See, Taiwan.) Never let Covid get out of control, and no widespread lockdown is necessary.

This works.

Taiwan, population 23 million, 10 deaths

New Zealand, population 5 million, 26 deaths.

Sweden, population 10 million, 13.5K deaths.

So, any government which had the capacity to do this and did not, after the first wave proved it worked, essentially chose to kill a huge number of people who didn’t need to die. Mass negligent homicide, at best.

It also turns out, to the surprise of no one with two brain cells, that Zero Covid produces better economic results than reopening repeatedly and allowing multiple waves.

What Zero Covid doesn’t do, however, is make the rich much, much richer while everyone else suffers. US billionaires increased their wealth 44 percent; 1.3 trillion, over the course of the pandemic until March.

That is SWEET. Forty-Four percent in about a year. Holy shit. This last year has to be one of the best times ever to the filthy rich.

Each US Covid death was worth $4,268 to America’s billionaires.

Is it any wonder that Covid was allowed to reign largely unchecked?

What a great time to be a billionaire! And it isn’t even over yet!

Edit: Article corrected to include the strategy which works with no or limited lockdowns.

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Has the Era of Ordinary Americans Thinking They Are “Pre-Rich” Ended?

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On April 2, 2021

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Nice statistic here:

Buried in the new Morning Consult/Politico poll is an eye-popping statistic: Voters by a 2-to-1 margin prefer a $3 trillion infrastructure bill that includes tax hikes on $400K+ and corporations over one that excludes those tax hikes.

For most of my life, tax-cuts were the mantra of the generation and tax-raises were automatically bad. These tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the rich, but Americans, Canadians, and Brits were all for it.

As many observed, it seemed they believed that one day they would be rich, and therefore that high taxes on rich people were bad.

Now, that seems to have changed, and I suspect it’s that Americans have finally got it through their thick heads that no, most of them will never be rich, and moreover the reason they’ll never be rich is because the people who already are, are kneeling on their necks (fortunately, just on their windpipes, not a full blood choke. Well, for most people the rich are only on their windpipes — most.)

This changes things. Certainly many politicians want to do what the rich want done, because the rich will take care of them, their families, their friends, and their mistresses and boy-toys, but there are always some who are more interested in power and winning, and if the rich don’t offer the best path to victory, they’re perfectly happy to stick a shiv in them and display the bleeding body for the masses.

Yup, that’s where we are. The Pandemic, with the rich getting massively richer while the working class died, was evicted, and generally suffered so that the wealthy and upper middle class could sip delivered lattes in their houses while tapping delicately into their computers, having Zoom meetings, and feeling sorry for themselves may well have been the straw that finally broke the back on the delusion of being “pre-rich.”

We aren’t all in this together, and we never were. It’s been class warfare for as long as humans have lived in “civilizations” (and often enough, before). Some people benefit by hurting other people. Since about 79/80, the rich have been clearly winning the class wars, driving their enemies before them, and thrilling to the lamentations of their men and women.

It’s been glorious! The modern rich are the richest rich to have ever existed, richer than in the Gilded Age. Shitting in golden toilets is nothing; these people travel the world in yachts the size of a village or on private jets, between their half dozen mansions or hotels which charge $50K a night, whose entrance you or I would never be allowed to see.

All while overseeing economies which have broken the backs of the poor and middle class and are on track to kill half the world’s species and over a billion humans.

Clarity having arrived at last, it’s time to break the rich even more than the Great Crash, Great Depression, and marginal tax rates of 94 percent did. Slap on the wealth taxes, raise the marginal tax rate on income more than 10x median to 99 percent, tax corporations, disallow share buy backs, kick foreign money out of real-estate markets, tax empty homes, create a wealth tax on anything more than 30x median, and slap an estate tax on anything over the same; your kids don’t get to rule over everyone else because you were rich. (Yes, yes, put in an exemption for actual family (small) farms and actually family (small) businesses.)

Drive the rich to the edge of extinction, into utter despair. Thrill to the lamentations of their men and women.

And don’t feel bad about it, they’ll just have to get by with, say, three or five times the median per year.

What a horror. They might only live three to five times better than most people ever do.

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When You’ll Get a More Equal Society

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On March 10, 2021

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So, it seems that the salaries of junior bankers are being cut so that senior bankers can have bigger bonuses. At UBS, the average bonus for senior bankers is $2.1 million.

Niiiiice.

Unless you’re a junior banker. Or a customer.

A given means of production, combined with a resource base, will throw off some amount of surplus. That surplus is divided among the population based entirely on their power. Sometimes that power comes from scarcity, often managed scarcity as in the Medieval Guild system, or un-managed scarcity during the first decades of a technological change (hello, programmers!), but most often it comes out of the barrel of a gun, from the point of a spear, or from the edge of a sword.

In Against the Grain, about the rise of early kingdoms after agriculture, the author points out that in agricultural systems where the farmer produces a single major crop, it is really easy to take away all but the bare minimum for the farmer’s survival; you know how much land, how much rainfall, when the crop is harvested, and where the farmer lives. The farmers mostly can’t run away, and they can’t win a fight against professional warriors, so you can just take their crops. In the Middle Ages, there are accounts of knights fighting peasants who outnumbered the knights a hundred to one and the knights came out not just victorious, but with nothing but minor injuries. The peasants, well, they got massacred.

Our own society is similar. Bankers have, along with various adjacent industries and central banks (somehow given “independence”), a monopoly on creating money (which they create as debt). This monopoly, of course, is enforced by the government, and the government’s enforcement rests on men with guns (and, these days, a few women), plus prisons where they brutalize you. Opening a new bank is very, very hard.

Then, within banks, the seniors take most of the gains, as one would expect.

None of this would work without those men with guns and ugly prisons, though.

There are variations on this, of course. After WWII, when a huge percentage of the male population knew how to fight effectively in groups, why, by coincidence the deal was more even. When those men aged out, why, somehow the deal got worse. (This isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one.)

Inequality tracks with force being unequal. When a few men are superior to a huge mass of other men, then inequality soars. The feudal knight was genuinely superior to peasants. Greek Hoplites were equal to each other, but ruled over a huge mass of slaves. The same goes for the Roman legionnaires — but notice the Equites (who could afford a horse to bring to the fight) had higher legal status and rights.

Mercenary armies and police, like most armies and police in the world, are wonderful for this. They’re loyal to whomever pays them. Most revolutions happen when there is a financial crisis for a reason.

So, get control of force and use it to control money/means of production, or get control of money/means of production and use it to create force. Obviously it’s really about some of both, but you use whichever one you have more of to get control over the other one. Wall Street bought DC so that it could have control over the police and courts, which is why Obama immunized them from their crimes and bailed them out — including from really raw and obvious crimes like illegally signing a document saying the bank owned someone else’s house. Absolute fraud and straight robbery: That’s what Obama made go away for the financial industry.

Some of those people who had their houses stolen, in a society with less police and military and nasty prisons, might have taken retribution and recompense into their own hands, but in the US, well, no, that’s really not possible. You might get retribution, but then the cops will imprison or kill you, which they didn’t do to the men who stole your house and probably your job, car, and future.

In raw terms, this is the situation in the US and a lot of other countries (certainly in Britain). A small minority has control over force and money, and as they feel more and more secure in their control of those two things, they take more and more of what the society produces.

The 2008/9 Obama and the Fed was a watershed incident. The rich had lost everything. Absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they had “won” the bet like Goldman Sachs, because if I win a bet with you and you lose all your money, I’m fucked too. The Fed and other central banks bailed them out to the tune of trillions; Obama and other political leaders immunized them from their crimes (and the entire bubble was based on fraud), and our elites then KNEW, without a doubt, that they were in complete control and that they could do anything, and that the violent authorities would bail them out and protect them from their victims.

And that, my friends, is where we are now. There will be no significant downward redistribution until elites either lose control of the violent apparatus, or genuinely think they are about to, or can’t win their side of an oncoming revolution.

Or, of course, until the fact that there is a real economy and environment, and they aren’t just mismanaging it, but effectively burning it down to make money, causes an economic collapse where suddenly money can’t buy the mercenaries’ loyalty any more.

Fun time to be alive.

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Jackson, Mississippi in Third Week Without Water

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On March 4, 2021

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So, another mess. Even before this, much of the water was unsafe and probably lead-poisoned. There are no high-level talks between the State and the city — which is the State capital!

American un-development continues. What is also striking is the complete incapability and unwillingness to handle problems. It’s the third week and the state and the city aren’t in high-level talks? Meanwhile, this news has not gone national: There is no American effort to help Jackson, any more than there was a national effort of any significance to help Flint with its water problems.

This is no longer a society where you can count on the public infrastructure OR on society to help you. Congress is currently cutting Covid aid even more, not just from $2,000 to 1,400 but more and more means testing and based on 2019 incomes, so if you lost your job during the pandemic, you are shit out of luck. (It is also true that people will look back and say Trump gave more money, with a $1,200 check and a $600 one.)

The level of malign indifference displayed by elected officials and senior bureaucrats is mind-boggling. They do nothing to help, but make sure to keep funneling money to the rich people who own them.

You can’t count on the US federal or most state governments. They aren’t interested in the basic duties of governing, like making sure the power and water keep flowing; the dikes are built, the forests are managed, and so on.

That means you have to count on yourself and whatever community you can find or create which is trustworthy.

At the least, build some reserves, but at the most, see what you can do to cut vulnerabilities. I know it’s hard, maybe even mostly impossible if you’re poor, but do what you can. This sort of event is likely to become more common until this political order is replaced, and it’s not clear when that will happen or whether it will be replaced by something better.

After all, California’s PG&E, which had disastrously mismanaged power and also been responsible for some of California’s worst wildfires has paid a heck of a lot of large dividends. To rich people and the politicians they own, it’s doing its job, so they don’t consider any of this a real problem.

Until that attitude changes, probably by changing the politicians, however necessary, you will continue to live in a country where your elites’ depraved indifference to your welfare or even death puts you in danger.

Prepare for it and remember: This state of affairs has actually the norm throughout most of human history. To rulers, people like you and me are cattle, and if the cattle are producing meat and milk, their pain, misery, and death is okay.

It was nice to have a few rulers who weren’t functionally depraved psychopaths for a few decades from FDR on, but for the US and Britain, those times are over.

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Our Society, the Slave Factory

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On March 2, 2021

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Near the start of the pandemic, I wrote a brief guide on how to emotionally handle isolation. A chunk of it was about self-regulation in terms of schedule:

The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists.

But the issue of self-regulation, indeed, of self and routine is much larger.

The fact is that between helicopter parenting and school, most people today have never had to learn how to self-regulate meaningfully beyond the self-regulation required of any good slave or servant. Their schedules, from childhood, were all determined for them. Their self was created by other people, and their fundamental choices boil down to reactions for or against it.

Then, when they become adults they have university (a bit more freedom) and on to jobs, where for 40 of the most useful waking hours, a boss tells them what to do.

Most people have thus never learned to truly manage their own time, thoughts, and emotions without schedules and activities imposed by other people. It’s no wonder that some people retire in their sixties and promptly die, with “nothing to do” absent an overseer.

You can’t be your own person, not truly, without unstructured time, and I would argue, alone time. There’s a study that found most people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with nothing to do.

They rely entirely on the environment, an environment controlled and structured by other people, for emotional regulation.

Without work/school/internet/tv/games, etc… they’re lost. I’d say without those things they stop being a self-regulating person, but the point is that most people have never been self-regulating people.

Worse, activities like school and jobs, despite the lies you have been told, and which some believe (especially, oddly, about school) aren’t designed with your interests at heart. School is a slave factory. You may get some knowledge out of it, but the UR lesson is: “Do what you’re told, when you’re told, the way authority wants it done. Ask for permission to even talk or go to the bathroom.”

That’s what children are trained to do for 12 years. Then university trains them some more: At elite universities, they’re trained to have a bit more freedom to meet goals (deadlines are negotiable at Ivy league universities, but not at most State universities), and you’re released into the job market, where those who went to elites have to make some decisions, and those who didn’t are expected to be good little slaves, and sure as hell not to think or feel for themselves.

We have a society that endlessly talks about freedom, but in our daily lives, the vast majority of us are not free and never have been. We have spent almost all our lives with our primarily daily activity is determined by other people, who often also tell us what to think and how we should feel.

Such a people are not, and cannot be, suited to freedom.

Forget all the other criticism, the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it allows only a small percentage of the population to live free lives, and makes the rest into either slaves or (if they don’t have work) so poor that they have no effective freedom because of their poverty.

Our society is a slave factory and until we recognize that and reorganize it so it isn’t, it will produce slaves.

What we call freedom today is simply the ability, sometimes, to choose who our master is.

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The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

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On February 15, 2021

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The faster we get everyone immunized, throughout the world, the more likely we can stop Covid from going chronic, becoming the new flu (but more deadly, unless/until it mutates to become less fatal, which the untried models say it should.)

However, if Covid is cured, well, you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?

Chronic Covid, mutating constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for vaccine makers.

Ghastly, and I know that many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both explanatory and predictive power?

Does, “Covid makes the rich, richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?

Qui Bono? Who benefits? Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)

I, too, dislike living in a society where this explanation has stronger predictive power than “our leaders don’t want us to die in large numbers, and become poverty-struck, just so they can get richer,” but that statement, well, look at it closely. If that was true, how would our rulers behave? Not just during Covid, but at other times?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve been saying this sort of thing for a while, because it’s obviously true, but I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize it applied to vaccine creators as well, especially since Pharma has a well-known bias towards medicines that are palliatives, not cures. Someone who needs your medicine again and again is much better than someone who needs it only once.

Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton.

It’s them or us, and so far, it’s us.

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Anti-Terrorism “Meat Grinder” Coming Home

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On January 19, 2021

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I can’t say it better than this, so…


If you think this will only be used against people you don’t like, you are delusional. This bat will swing left, hard, and hit BLM and Antifa, certainly harder than it hits the right.

What is laughable about this, of course, is that US anti-terrorism has been massively ineffective. So if they turn it loose in the US, it will, indeed, grind up lives, but it won’t stop any serious insurrection, in fact it will create the conditions for the insurrection to get worse.

Robb also observed that the wall are going up in D.C. and it is being turned into a “Green Zone”. The elites, terrified, are retreating from the public and isolating even further. That move never ends well.

Say what you will about Nixon, but he went to see anti-war protestors with only one aide and no Secret Service protection. FDR, after surviving an assassination attempt, removed the secret service officers from in front of his bedroom.

Our current society is ruled by bed-wetters. On the other hand, they have good reason to be scared, because they know that life for Americans has gotten meaner for over 40 years, and they know they are why. (Yes, the oligarchs bought them, but they sold.)

This American foolishness has gone on long enough. Americans have been divided into camps, hating each other and regarding each other as the enemy. And indeed, they are, but only because they have been suckered into fighting.

The people who have done the most harm to red-staters and to blue-staters are oligarchs and politicians. In a sensible world, differences would be put aside and the oligarchy and politicians who serve them would be taken down.

After that, you might find that you have more in common than not, and that the differences which seemed so important are a lot less important than regaining the over $26K of annual income they stole from you and the declining lifespan.

Meanwhile, the oligarchy is gearing up for a war of them vs. everyone who isn’t on their knees. They’ll hit your enemies, sure, but unless you’re on your knees, they’re going to hit you, too.

As for the Trump insurrection, it occurred only because of elite inter-factional warfare. More on that in another article, perhaps.

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