Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 9 of 36

You Can Always Get Half the Population To Hate The Other Half

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On January 15, 2021

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So, there was a lot of violence, relatively speaking, during the Trump administration, though most of it was cops beating BLM protestors. (Generally violence erupted after police started it, though there were exceptions.)

There is going to be more during the Biden presidency, because Republicans don’t believe that Biden won legitimately. These numbers seem to be around 70% or so. Meanwhile Biden is unlikely to fix the economy, though hopefully he will get Covid get under control (an effort which will be hampered by the incompetence and stupidity of Governors, including many Democratic ones like Cuomo,)

My voice is small, the heyday of the blogs is done, but I will gently suggest that “cooling it” might be wise over the next few months. The fact is that the election wasn’t stolen. If it was, I would say so. You simply cannot get to the votes Trump needs with fraud allegations. The worst things the Dems did were actually voter suppression of third parties (keeping them off the ballots with specious bullshit), but Republicans routinely engage in totally egregious voter suppression of their own.

Biden is not going to be a bad President for Red America. He’s bending over backwards to try and appease Republicans. A lot of Democrats think this is a mistake, but this is how it is.

America is strongly polarized. Terribly so. Stories of family members turning in relatives for the Capitol storming are routine.

This is BAD. When you get to the point of families narcing each other out, you’re in a really bad place nationally.

Both sides are convinced that they are in the right. Republicans are, yes, wrong, but we live in media bubbles. I saw a stat that after Fox called the election for Biden it then continued calling the election in doubt hundreds of times. West coast elite techies came down on the side of Democrats, which is going to pay some awful dividends even if it was the right decision (because this has made them a partisan branch of government making decisions that should be made democratically. Places like Faccebook, YouTube and Twitter are Commons, and that they are privately owned does not change that fact.)

If you don’t want this to spiral out of control, find a way to cool it. I am one of the few blogs left who is read by both sides, even though I’m a left winger.

The people who are responsible for this are the people who have spent 40-50 years dividing America. Fox and conservative talk radio started it, places like MSNBC continued it by creating partisan media for centrists (there is no left wing media of significance, Jacobin and WSWS don’t cut it.). Matt Taibbi’s summary of how this happened is essential reading.

Right and center and left have been divided into tribes by the masters. The simple fact is that there is only one enemy, and that is the oligarchy. Everyone who isn’t in the top three to four percent is oppressed by them. They have used culture war to divide. The elites who supported Trump don’t want regular people to be better off: they’re willing to give them anti-abortion policies, sure, but they don’t genuinely want to pay them more or give them more rights.

The same is true of the elites who support centrists: the “Resistance”. Silicon Valley regularly engages in activities meant to suppress wages (the late, sainted, Steve Jobs put together an agreement they wouldn’t hire each other’s engineers, for example.)

Almost no members of the oligarchy support the left: BLM and Antifa have little actual support. They get some nods, but note that Democratic Mayors and Governors, with few exceptions, still let the cops crack down on them terribly and Biden’s response was “we should give the cops more money.”

If the people who stormed the capitol had been successful in overturning the election, it would just have been a victory for one set of nasty elites over another set of nasty elites.

The actual problem in America is people aren’t sharing a reality any more. This isn’t just isolated to Republicans; they’re wrong about the election, yes, but Liberals (centrists) have been terribly propagandized too. Remember the BS story about how Russia was paying bounties for the Taliban to kill American soldiers. It was obvious BS, at the time, and still treated seriously. There have been many such stories floated in the Liberal press, keeping Liberals in a frothing rage at Russia and Trump for the entire Presidency; insanely angry and unable to think even as Democrats voted for almost all of Trump’s bad bills and Democratic governors like Cuomo fucked up the Covid response terribly.

Killing each other; hating each other, at the behest of oligarchical factions is insane. Doing a coup based on lies (as opposed to a revolution based on truth) is insane and self-destructive.

You have an enemy. It is only your fellow Americans because they have been lied to for 40 years. This doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous to you now, of course, but remember the cries of the Capitol protestors; their anger,  when they realized that most of the cops were still willing to fight them.

The cops work for the oligarchy. The red-teamers thought the cops were on their side. Oh, they’re more sympathetic, yes, but they work for the Man.

Divide and keep conquered is the oldest playbook in the hands of ruling classes. America has been riven by it and may be destroyed by it.

Look past the hatred (often well deserved) and see the enemy: the one that manipulated you into hating each other so you wouldn’t go after them. The one who stole $26K in wage increases from you over the last two generations.

Someone’s pulling your strings, and you’re dancing like puppets.

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The Terrible Bind America’s Elites Are In

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On January 11, 2021

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One point worth highlighting right now is that, despite the push to impeach AND convict Trump, Hawley, and others, it’s unclear that it will happen — even unlikely.

These folks did push the invasion of the Capitol, and it’s more and more obvious that some of the invaders had rather sinister plans had they been able to grab Senators, Pence or Reps; the zip-ties make this rather clear.

They made US elites feel unsafe in a way that hasn’t been true since 9/11. US elites regularly kill, impoverish, and hurt millions of people, but for them to even be so much as scared is intolerable.

The problem is, this is colliding with another principle: The principle of elite immunity from consequences. Elites don’t really go after other elites. Trump, pre-Presidency had committed dozens of crimes, but was never prosecuted, because everything he had done, did others had done also.

Essentially, every senior Wall Street and banking executive is guilty of fraud in the lead up to the sub-prime crisis, and they were all let off with slaps on the wrist. George Bush was unquestionably a war criminal and so were many of his senior officials, and I’d argue the same is true of Obama.

Even Clinton’s “emails,” widely dismissed as “no big deal” is the sort of offense which, if done by someone junior, would — at best — end their career and would more likely lead to jail time.

US elites send other elites to jail very rarely, and political elites do this almost never.

So there’s a real bind here. On the one hand, some Republican elites put the rest of the US federal political class at risk. On the other hand, well, who wants to set a precedent that a US president, senator, or representative can be truly held to account? Impeaching is one thing, convicting another (which is why Biden is wishy-washy about impeaching and convicting Trump).

Who knows? After all, where it would end if elites started holding each other accountable, when they all know that almost every one of them has violated many laws and far more norms?

For elites, the law is a sword they use against their lessers, not a weapon intended to be used against them. It is a shield against the hoi-polloi and has nothing to do with justice or equality before the law.

Feel for them, in their terrible dilemma: What is more important? Their physical safety or their legal immunity?

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Effects of the New 60 Percent More Infectious Covid Strain

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On December 28, 2020

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Cases have been found outside of Britain, including in the US and, ironically, France (slammed the door too late.) The practical result of the increased infectiousness are discussed by Tomas Pueyo.

The points are, as you’d expect, that it increases the speed of exponential growth. If it becomes the dominant strain (and it almost certainly will, because it grows faster), you have to really lock down. No sham lockdowns, people don’t go out for anything but food (maybe you even deliver that); schools are closed, no one works outside the house unless they truly are an essential worker.

Herd immunity now requires 75 percent+, not 60 percent of the population. That means it will take longer, and with respect to vaccines, people will need to be convinced to take them, or if necessary, forced to.

Countries that already got Covid-19 under control, like Vietnam, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan (notice a trend?) will be fine. They just keep tracking and tracing; keep quarantining visitors, and keep clamping down hard on even a hint of a break-out. Those of us who haven’t, like most of Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil, and so on, can either get serious RIGHT now and close schools and go to a real lock down, or we are going to have to wait for vaccine immunity, which may take until the end of 2022 depending on how many doses your country is getting and when (and if people will take them, or be forced to).

In general terms, my sense is that the first half of 2022 is going to be worse than 2021 in countries that have fumbled Covid, after that things should start improving noticeably.

This was a pro-active choice by our elites: They decided not to handle Covid. It was handled in many countries, the playbook is known to anyone who cares to know it just by seeing what was done or reading a 101 textbook, but “fumbling” Covid made elites in countries like the UK, Canada, and the US a lot richer and more powerful, so it was allowed to rage through the population and destroy the small business economy so that those who were able to stay open, like Amazon and Apple, and so on could grab huge amounts of market share.

Grandma died and young people got life-long heart problems so Jeff Bezos and private equity scum could get richer.

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Twelve Million Renters To Be Homeless Soon Because It Benefits the Rich

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On December 9, 2020

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And so we are where knew we would be:

Nearly 12 million renters will owe ~$5,800 in back rent and utilities by early January.

This was predicted regularly: people lost their jobs, they got one $1,200 and improved EI benefits for a while, and that’s pretty much it. Eviction protection is nice, but it doesn’t pay the rent and ends. This was 100% predicted and predictable, your lords and masters knew it was happening and would happen.

Oakland Homeless Encampment

They could easily have stopped it, and chose not to. The Fed and Treasury and Congress bailed out rich people, and their wealth has skyrocketed. Meanwhile New York wants to put a tax of $3 on deliveries of anything but food and medicine to bail out the subway system; taxing the poor and middle class rather than the rich who made out like bandits.

The money to fix this is fairly trivial. 69,600.000,000 – about sixty-seven billion dollars. In context, the TARP bailout for rich people was 700 billion back in 2008. The Federal reserve, by some calculations, floated about 20 trillion dollars. Seventy billion isn’t even real money in the modern world.

 

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But when renters can’t pay rent, the landlords will go bankrupt, and the actual rich will buy up the properties. Meanwhile desperate unemployed people keep wages down and ensure that current workers will do anything they are told with no back talk, because they know there are way fewer jobs than workers. Win/win/WIN.

If you’re rich.

So, if you’re going to be homeless, or lose the property you rent, rest assured it’s in the cause of allowing the rich to control even more of the economy, gutting small and medium landlords and small and medium businesses (who have had to shut down, while companies like Amazon and large retailers make mint.)

Your leaders impoverish and kill you for money. That is all. Wouldn’t want you to think this is for no reason at all or because of incompetence. Your poverty and desperation does help somebody, and that’s why it is happening.

 

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The Fortune of the Commons

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On December 7, 2020

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There is a theory, called, “the tragedy of the commons” that if no one owns something, it will be overused.

You can see this in pollution. No one owns the air, so assholes over-pollute it because they get the profits and bear only a tiny part of the costs. When I was young the BC coasts had tons of clam and oyster beds. In the 90s people with no connection to local communities (Vietnamese) came along and stripped them clean. Made a lot of money, but destroyed most of the beds.

The problem is that these aren’t “commons”.

Commons are resources a community or group in the community manages together. The air and oyster beds weren’t managed.

The commons, in England and elsewhere, lasted for well over a 1,000 years. They were managed well, were over 90% as productive as enclosed fields and produced a far better standard of living for more people than enclosed fields, which were associated with throwing people off the land they had lived on for over a thousand years, so they could work over 80 hours a week in factories with horrific rates of dismemberment, in cities rife with disease where people died far younger and were ill far more often.

There is no tragedy of the commons.


What we call commons, aren’t. To be a commons, a group of people which benefit more from the continued existence of something than its destruction or degradation have to be charge in it. No short-termers or outsiders (people who don’t need it to continue in their lifetime and beyond) need apply. In the terms of Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” no one playing a finite game can ever be allowed close to a commons.

 

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The tragedy of the commons is that people who didn’t benefit from them continuing used the power of the state to break them up (enclose) them for their private profit, thus improverishing millions of people.

The modern tragedy of shared resources (which are NOT commons) is that the people in charge of them are playing finite games. My friend Stirling Newberry called this the death-bet. Simply put, the people fucking the world up with massive pollution and over-using resources, will be dead when the bet comes due. Nancy Pelosi, clinging grimly to power, is 80 years old.

The people you want in charge are people who are young and people who care about their great-grandchildren. Or, in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) phrase, for the next seven generations.

As for old people, the problem is twofold: first they think their money will help their kids, second they don’t /really/ care about their children or grandchildren. (Based on the behaviour I see, I assume most Americans don’t actually care much about their kids, especially once they’re adults. They scream that they do, but their actions show otherwise.)

They also have to be, for types of commons which are not global, locals, so that they can’t leave when things go bad. People who aren’t committed to the local area can’t be in charge of the long-term sustainability of a local area.

Put crudely, people who don’t have to eat where they shit can’t be in charge of anything.

Because this isn’t always possible, with global resources, you need to put people in artificial boxes. They need to experience the consequences of their failures. If they have both authority and power to act, after a certain time in office (and when out of office for a certain amount of time, so they don’t dodge their failures) they need to eat their own dogfood, to use the business expression. Make them live in the place with the worst pollution. If there are people there without a mask, then they don’t get to have one either. Make them drink the water. Make them eat the fish from the river.

This sort of personal responsibility, if combined with actual power, will clear problems up fast. If you want to make it really potent, give them a bit of time then make their non-adult children do the same.

In India there is a longstanding problem, not primarily environmental, but similiar, called manual scavenging. Simply put, untouchable (Dalit) caste members clean sewers and so on manually. No other jobs are available to them.

If you simply made it so that the governor and police chief and Prime Minister all had to do a day of manual scavenging every week till there was no manual scavenging (or so close to none as to unmeasurable) I guarantee this problem would be solved so fast your head would spin.

As for heads of industry, making the Shell CEO and every executive and all major shareholders eat fish from the Gulf oil spill for a year would be laudatory.

No wealth or power without responsibility for results. None. No scapegoats. If you have power, you’re in charge, no saying someone is responsible without giving them necessary authority.

The Ganges, in India, is horribly polluted and Indian politicians constantly wail, promise to do something and do nothing. Make them drink it every day, in front of witnesses, and the problem will resolve itself. (Sure, there can be some time lag. But perhaps make them drink one glass at the start of their term of office. Concentrate the mind a bit.)

No one gets to be in charge of anything unless they are affected by the results of their actions. Nothing.

This may seem similar to “Skin in the Game” by Taleb, but it is an ancient idea. Even in modern thinking, before Taleb, Jared Diamond made the same point in his book Collapse. But the idea is as old as civilization, and I am quite sure older.

As for the generational altruism idea, the ancient Greek saying was “a society is great when old men plant trees in whose shades they will never sit.”

We know all this, but in the modern era bunch of people who were either fools or evil or both, starting with Adam Smith (who was, admittedly, not quite as bad as his idea’s misuse would lead one to believe), created the idea that governing the world based on short term greed would lead to good results.

It did, for some people, and for a larger group for a while (that while is coming to an end.) It was based on genocide, enclosure (aka the violent removal of property rights from peasants) and the conquest of 70%+ of the world.

Or, if  you want another authority, Keynes,

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Put that way, it’s pretty obviously nonsense.

The Tragedy of the Commons is that we don’t have properly constituted Commons, that is all.

 

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The Rise of the Guillotine

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On December 3, 2020

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There was a time when almost no one would have put forward anything like the below, today, guillotine references are routine.


Back in the 2000s, I spent a fair bit of effort advocating for policies to help the majority of Americans and Westerners by pointing out to the wealthy and powerful that, historically, sometimes oppression ends very very badly. This effort failed abysmally, as have other similar efforts, sometimes by the brighter and more forward looking of our inbred overlords.

Fast forward to today, and these sorts of images are everywhere. What was once verbotten, because the Terror is taught to everyone to be the worst thing possible and the French Revolution as the bad revolution (as opposed to the American revolution, which was supposedly good, unless you were a slave or a native).

The terror was, well, a TERROR. The revolution did not last, but the vast majority of those who ruled pre-revolutionary France did, indeed, die. When the allies won, despite their attempts, the Bourbon restoration was a failure. The people necessary to have made it a success, were, simply, dead.

As I have noted a few times here, the Terror was less terrible than the millenium of oppression that came before it. For those who need the point spelled out in angry detail, Mark Twain has you covered.

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At any rate, Western elites have continued this process. Huge swathes outside the core of Paris are, I am told, essentially third-world slums. Vast numbers of Americans have been driven into poverty and homelessness and huge tent cities spring up, and then are cleared by police in the most punitive way possible (destroying homeless peoples’ possessions), but then spring up again, because what the hell are they supposed to do?

The middle and even the lower upper class lives in terror of falling out of their comfortable spot into the lower class or homelessness. Covid has vastly enriched the already rich and about triple decimated small businesses, while throwing further millions into poverty.

Americans are now willing to vote for men on horseback types, Trump proved that, even if he was a fake, a blowhard and essentially incompetent at anything but campaigning (which he was very, very good at, and if he hadn’t fumbled Covid, I am confident he would have been re-elected).

People are tired. Younger generations like the Millenials and Zoomers have never seen good times, and even X-ers only got a whiff of them, with most never having been part of them. The dotcom boom was short, and passed a lot of people by entirely. Same with boomlets like the Massachussets miracle.

The standard way to deal with the hoi polloi is to split them into groups and make them compete with each other. Our elites have dutifully run this playbook, and sometimes even very well, but as there is less and less upward mobility, less and less chance of being one of the blessed few (mobility has collapsed), this becomes harder and harder to pull off. People stop thinking they’ll ever get ahead, stop seeing the guy or gal next to them as the problem and look up towards the top to see who’s really oppressing them.

Add in the joy of climate change added to normal imperial decay and generational economic cycles and you have a triple whammy slouching down that road, baring its thousand mouths dripping with blood.

There was a possibility for a gentle revolution. For a sweet, kind, caring redistribution of wealth; a gentle and careful breakup of power and wealth, leaving the wealthy still rich, but not obscenely so, still powerful but not an oligarchy.

If that was going to happen, Corbyn would be Prime Minister (instead of virtually thrown out of the party, as Labor leader Starmer continues his purge of the left), and Sanders would likewise be President. Everything necessary was done to make sure neither of those things would happen, that the gentle revolution would die aborning. There will be no rebirth of the great society of the post war period, with environmental protection and equality for women and minorities added.

This being so, there will either be a steady state police-surveillance state, abetted by modern company store serfdom, keeping people in eternal debt and despair, or there will be revolution. That revolution may come from the right, or from the left. If it comes from the right, the oligarchs will mostly be okay, a few stupid ones will be made examples of (as Putin did with Russia’s oligarchs), the others will bow, patronage will go to the half of the poor willing to kill the other half, and life will continue.

If it comes from the left, well, the rich are right, that’s the real danger. At best they will lose everything, at worse, well, those guillotine memes tell you their fate. Machiavelli understood this, and he was right. When you hurt a man you must destroy him entirely: He must have no power left at all, or he will take vengeance. The left cannot tolerate oligarchs or anyone who was willing to work for them who does not jump to the left’s side immediately as the revolution begins.

Hopefully, it won’t be a Terror, but it may be, and it may be because people are terrified already and they want their overlords to feel what they have felt, to know despair and fear and hopelessness. They want revenge, and indeed, something that is close to justice, because their overlords, as Covid has demonstrated, have been killing them and impoverishing them for money for a couple generations now.

The guillotine is a symbol of the fact that the powerful aren’t always the only ones who may inflict terror.

If our elites were in any way wise, they would back down, but they are not, and so the guillotine will rise ever higher in our collective consciousness until, perhaps, it reaps its bloody harvest once again.

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Abundance Mindset, Scarcity Economies and the Great Game Of Musical Chairs

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On November 29, 2020

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Like a lot of older Gen-X I remember the good times without having every participated in them. By the time I was an adult stagflation, the Federal Reserve, Reagan and Thatcher had done their work and the decline had begun. Everything kept getting shittier for most people in the western world and it has kept doing so for about 40 years now. Depending on what group you’re in, it might be fifty.

This has given rise to a whole body of how to get rich works. They rival those of the gilded age: Napoleon Hill’s “How To Think and Get Rich” is a good example. (The best of them is still “How To Make Friends and Influence People,” its advice will work as long as humans are human.)

The catchphrase these days is “abundance thinking”. There’s a ton of good stuff in the world, and you just have to figure out how to get some. The world isn’t full of scarcity, it’s full of too much.

This is, of course, true. There are money spigots, like various central banks, early entry to crypto, being attached to important resource economies like oil (though that’s ending) and so on. There are people who have way more money than they need, for whom money is a trivial concern, a way of keeping score, and those who just have too little.

You want to move to a position of abundance. You want to find a spigot. On the right this selling is courses on how to get fit or slim or rich or whatever. Sometimes the courses are bogus, sometimes they’re pretty good stuff, but they price them high and find desperate people to buy them.

So it is, so it always has been. Sell the dream to desperate people and you’ll get rich. Attach to a money spigot and you’ll be fine. It’s why the fights are so savage these days. Corbyn in Britain threatened the money-spigot attachment of Labour elites and they hate him for it and will do anything they can to destroy him. Nothing was too low to do to stop Sanders, because he would have brought in his own administrative class into the Democratic party. Democrats used many of the same vote suppression tactics against Greens and Sanders as they squealed about Republicans using against them.

It’s all about position. This is why the standard advice in prosperity circles is to ditch your loser friends and hang out with successful people. They’re attached to some spigot, or have found some vein of insecurity to mine and they can cut you in or show you how to get in.

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But this is the larger issue: it’s all about position.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs. Some people are in abundance economies, other people are in scarcity economies (these have little to do with national economies, though it’s easier to get into an abundance economy in some places, obviously.)

But there are only so many money spigots and only so many people who can mine veins of insecurity. There aren’t enough good seats.

So the abundance stuff focuses on how you can become one of the winners, one of the people in an abundance economy. If you do it ethically, you help others get inside. If  you do it unethically, you’re just a parasite and you reduce the number of prosperity chairs. (Jamie Dimon, for example.)

The issue with all this, even when done ethically, is that even the “good” guys are rarely increasing the number of seats in the abundance economy. They’re just redistributing who gets them.

In econo or math-speak that’s a zero sum game. But because most of the people attached to money spigots like the Federal Reserve are actually reducing the number of good seats, it’s actually a negative sum game. Every dollar someone like Dimon earns hurts other people.

Abundance thinking could be a good thing: there’s no reason the world can’t be abundant. I am perfectly aware of limits to growth, but  every human could have a good life if we wanted them to. But right now it’s all about winners and losers. It’s about each of us, perhaps on team with the other “winners.”

You can win such games, of course, but they produce a world that is hell, and worse a world that keeps heading towards worse hells. This is how downward spirals happen: when we’re concerned only with a few people’s well-being, rather than the well-being of all.

Eventually the hell becomes so bad that practically everyone is in hell, with perhaps a few lords of hell still enjoying life (almost every post-apocalyptic story still has some people doing fine.)

This is the treadmill we’re on, as we seek to save ourselves from the horrible fates we see around us.

So we resort to “I see what it takes to be successful and I’m going to do it and I have those characteristics or can get them. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner!”

The worse things get, the more we focus on what it takes for individuals to grab onto a money spigot.

We grab a prosperity chair (or we don’t, I haven’t!) And that’s great, but the number of chairs relative to the number of people keeps going down, the carbon goes up, and every day more species go extinct.

And hell looms.

A solution that just works for a few is a solution: but it’s only a partial solution unless you don’t care about others, about the future, or about non-human life.

Not everyone, as we’ve designed the modern world, can live in an abundance economy.

Perhaps we should try for a world where people don’t have to do everything just right, or be born to wealth, to live well?

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Know Your Enemies

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On November 23, 2020

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An enemy is someone who means you harm and has the means to inflict it.

A friend is someone who has wants to do good for you, and has the means to bestow it.

I once wrote primarily to predict and to change the world.

I now write to help a few people, those who listen.

So, listen, because other than understanding climate change is written in, won’t be stopped (can’t at this point, minus geo-engineering), this is the most important message I have for you.

You must know who wants to harm you and has the means.

Let’s start here:

“If America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the 3 decades following the second world war… A low-income American earning $35K this year would be earning $61K. A college-educated worker now earning $72K would be earning $120K.

Everyone responsible for this is your enemy, unless you’re in somewhere between the top 4% to top 10%.

How much money, how much good, has the end of the post-war economic order inflicted on you? Adding in interest (because you wouldn’t be in debt, but have investments) it’s over a million dollar for almost everyone. You’d have a home and probably have the mortgage paid off if you don’t. You wouldn’t be drowning in student debt if young (especially since that order kept college costs down.)

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So the people who are responsible have robbed you of a million or more dollars, and a good, prosperous life. These people had names. It started with with intellectuals like Milton Friedman and the oligarchs who funded economics departments to overturn the economic orthodoxy the old order ran on. It moved onto politicians, executive and CEOs. Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan; then Blair and Clinton, who made their victory complete. Thatcher understood that it was Blair who made her victorious, until Labour accepted “There Is No Alternative” they could have simply undone almost everything she did. Clinton, cutting welfare and smashing blacks and poor people in the face with punitive jail sentences, was Reagan’s heir more than George Bush Sr. ever was.(Biden, of course, was there for all of it and supported almost every shitty piece of it. Enemy. If you can’t manage “enemy, but perhaps not as bad an enemy as Trump, you can’t think.”)

This piece isn’t primarily about ideas and the influence of intellectuals and academics, but I do want to give another nod to Milton Friedman. Please remember, always, that in politics and economics ideas do usually come before action, despite everyone telling you otherwise.

1970, Baby! The sound you hear, to paraphrase Ross Perot, is your jobs going down the drain to every low wage countries around the world.

Now, here’s another fact: wage theft is almost equal to ALL other theft combined, except (get this) it isn’t considered a crime. That’s right, when your boss steals from you, it’s a civil/regulatory matter! 

Who’s the enemy?

Now, when it comes to dying, if you live in America or Britain or most of Europe, who is most likely to get you killed?

That dastardly Putin, twirling his metaphorical mustache and cackling about how much he hates the West, “muahahahahahaha, I hate democracy,” he cackles, or your own elites?  Did Putin send you or your children to war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Did he bungle your Covid response.

Did Putin do this?

It is very rare, unless you are an Iraqi, say, that the leadership of any country save your own is more dangerous to you than your own. On those rare occasions when they are, it’s because a great power is fucking you up (yes, sometimes that’s Putin, but not if you’re American or a member of the EU.)

Your enemies are you own elites. They are the people who price drugs so high you can’t afford them, fuck up a pandemic response so your parents and grandparents die, or send you to war. They are the ones who create economic policies which funnel money to the rich and impoverish you, and if you don’t think being poor isn’t bad for you, you ain’t ever been poor, that’s for certain.

So, when you prioritize the people to be wary of, to be scared of, and to hurt or harm if you ever can, remember, a wise person knows who their enemies are.

Be a wise person.

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