Ian Welsh

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

Category: Power Page 11 of 14

The Culture of Meanness

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On February 23, 2016

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One of the most striking things about much of American culture is the simple meanness of it. The cruelty.

Most of this seems to come down to three feelings:

  • My life sucks. I have to work a terrible job I hate in order to survive. I have to bow and scrape and do shit I don’t want to do. You should have to as well.
  • Anyone who doesn’t make it must not be willing to suffer as I do, therefore anyone who doesn’t make it deserves to be homeless, go without food, and so on.
  • Anybody who is against us needs to be hurt and humiliated, because that’s how I see my superiors deal with people who go against them.

“Life is shit, therefore your life should be shit.”

“What you’ve got is what you deserve.”

There is also a culture of punching down, as commenter Lisa has observed. America has a high-violence, high-bullying society. As Lisa noted you can have a high-violence society in which it is considered unacceptable to attack the weak (doing so is viewed as cowardice), but that’s not the case in America.

In American culture, the weak are the preferred target. Failure is punishable by homelessness, suffering, and death.  Sick people sure don’t deserve proper pain medication. Poor people are poor because they “don’t add value.” If you’re poor, you definitely shouldn’t have good healthcare, because if you don’t have money, you don’t deserve money, and that’s because you’re a waste of space.

This appears to be a result of something simple: At every stage of American life, it’s a zero or negative sum game, and who gets ahead is decided by authority figures. Need to get into a good university? You need good grades from adults, you need to have done the right extra-curricular activities, you need references from adults.

On the job, only a few people will be promoted, and the competition is fierce. But worse, in many fields, people are often let go, and the competition to avoid getting fired or laid off is severe.

Who decides? Your boss. You’d better get down on your knees and do whatever your boss wants, because if you’re fired or let go you may never work again, and if you do hang on at a bottom-wage job, well, your life will suck.

When dealing with police, the constant American attitude is OBEY. If you don’t obey, then whatever the police do to you is justified. The police are like bosses in a way. One cop can ruin your life, even if you aren’t killed, beaten, or raped by them. A criminal record means you will never have a good job again.

OBEY.  ACQUIESCE.

On your knees, citizen.

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And as my friend Stirling once noted, the next demand after, “Kneel!” is, “On your belly, worm.”

Failure to comply means your advancement is over, and maybe your job.

Americans are desperate for the approval of those in power, because without it, they are destroyed. This is true to a lesser extent in many other Western societies, certainly in Britain.

Having learned that the right way to treat anyone who is weaker than them is with demands for acquiescence and dominance displays, to many Americans, to interpret any sign of weakness as requiring them, as a moral duty, to dominate and hurt the weak person.

People become what is required of them. They learn from authority figures how to behave.

The desperate need of certain demographics to keep, say, women or certain minorities down is part of this. These people need to know that there are some people who, no matter how degraded their own situation, are always lower than them, can always be beaten down.

Contrary what many right-wingers think, dominance structures aren’t innate to humanity. Evidence supports that, for most of human existence, we were hopelessly egalitarian. But surplus combined with scarcity changes that, as do large populations.

Still, while high-density agricultural and industrial societies are innately more inequal than paleolithic hunter-gathers, there is plenty of variation, and within that variation plenty more variation as regards to the level of meanness and cruelty–how much a culture can be defined as “bullying.” In the modern, Western world, America ranks high as a mean, bullying culture.

The effects of this cascade, and can be seen as high up as America’s constant wars, drone assassinations, and the routine torture in prisons, and as low down as cities passing by-laws that the homeless can’t be fed or the desperate competition amongst parents and school-children for those few elite university slots which virtually ensure one’s future.

The entire process makes America a far more unpleasant place to live or visit than is necessary. The structure of dominance, meanness and cruelty is palpable to the visitor, and distressing; even as it warps the best inhabitant.

I find myself without a real conclusion. Obviously (I hope), this is BAD. Obviously it should change. But it’s hard to change something that people have taken and turned into a moral imperative: Be mean to the weak and poor, who deserve their fates. Kick down, kiss up, because a failure to pucker up can have you thrown out of the charmed circle, and obviously higher-ups want to see you acting like them, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery.

It’s all very depressing, all very unnecessary, and all very much in the interests of the people who run your society.  Meanness in the chattel means they can rarely get together to challenge the masters, because they hate each other more than they hate the masters.

Kindness is a revolutionary act.

What Can Rich Countries Afford?

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On February 18, 2016

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Remember the American GI bill, which put ex-service members through university?

GI Bill

When people talk about how much health care for all will cost, or any other program, you need simply remember the above, or that military spending makes up over 50 percent of all discretionary spending in America.

Spending is a fairly good indicator of a country’s real priorities. It’s easy to afford the cost of something you believe is first priority in a rich country–and the US is still a rich country.  And if you don’t “have enough,” well, by historic standards, the US is hardly taxing anyone at all. Remember, back in the 50s top marginal tax rates hovered around 90 percent and corporate tax rates were much higher (and with far fewer loopholes).

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Basically, America can afford whatever America wants to afford, and the same is true of a variety of other countries like France, Germany, and Britain, and so on. The choice not to do something, in rich countries, is a choice, and reflects the goals of the people who run the country, and very little else.

This is especially true because the more a country does, the more it can afford, since doing more means more economic activity and generates a larger tax base.

It’s just a choice. There are countries that are literally unable to choose prosperity, it’s not so easy for them. But all of the major developed countries are perfectly able to do so.

 

What Is Capitalism?

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On January 26, 2016

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The responses to my article The Death of Capitalism made something clear:

Most people don’t know what Capitalism is.

We’ll need two definitions.

Market: An economic arrangement in which price signals direct people’s actions.

Markets are old. There were markets in Sumeria thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, Sumerian society was not Capitalist. Most people were farmers, living on the land. They produced their own housing, their own food, and their own clothes. They bought some goods on the market, sold grain on the market (there was a very active market in loans denominated in grain or silver), but most of their needs were met through non-market methods.

Some people in that society (arguably) had their lives regulated by markets. There were money-lenders, urban inhabitants, merchants and traders, specialists, and so on who used money to buy what they needed. There were other such people who were essentially feudal lackeys; you might be a market scribe working for money, or you might be a palace or temple scribe.

The primary financial markets, by the way, were run out of temples.

But the rule is this: Most people in most agricultural and pre-agricultural societies produced what they needed, generally as part of an extended family, a tribe or some other arrangement. Sumeria was more mercantile than most agricultural societies.

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Capitalism: An economic system in which people are directed towards particular actions by price signals from markets AND in which they obtain the necessities (and luxuries) of life from markets.

You may measure HOW capitalist a society is by how many people cannot create their own necessities as part of a relatively small group.

Now, let us return to markets. A market says:

  • Do more of what makes more money
  • Do less of what makes less money
  • Stop doing that which is losing money

This is an oversimplification, but it’s less of an oversimplification than it seems. Take Amazon, for example: Amazon did not make a profit for many years.  However, the decision makers at Amazon (Bezos, senior exectives, etc.) made plenty of money from Amazon.

What matters is not whether fictional entities are making money, or even if all human beings are making money, but whether decision makers are making money.

Prices are not set solely by markets, they never have been and they never will be. Governments lean on prices through direct and indirect subsidies, taxes, and so on. Roads are a subsidy for trucking, auto-manufacturing and a host of other businesses, for example.  The US interstate highway system was the death-knell for the hugely powerful railroads that preceded it.

This is true despite the FACT that, if you include all costs, shipping people and (especially) freight by rail is cheaper.  The final price, as it effects the individual decision makers responsible for those individual, economic decisions, is what matters.

Markets are a way of telling people what to do and what not to do and how much of either.

The more money a person makes doing something, the more they try to do of that something (including hiring workers to do it for them).

If a decision maker’s profits are not aligned with social utility, well then, capitalism does not produce results with social utility. Bankers make a lot of money. Their businesses lost so much money the entire world economy could barely contain the damage and trillions of dollars were required to bail them out. So why do bankers keep doing what they were doing? Because they are still, personally, making money.

So what if a few brokerages and banks went out of business? Their executives are still rich.

Capitalism is dis-empowering. Serfs and peasants, for all we sneer at them, could support themselves, because they had access to the land they needed to do so. They spun their own clothes. They raised their own houses.

Peasants and serfs were better off than the industrial workers who replaced them. There is a reason land clearances had to be done by law and force: The peasants and serfs didn’t want to leave. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t fools–they knew they lived better than the people working six and a half days a week, ten to 12 hours a day, in the new factories amidst cities and towns, choking in their own filth before modern sewage was put in place.

Capitalism forces most people to base their decisions on price (salary, comissions, hourly wage vs. goods they buy) levels. It takes away their ability to support themselves without working for someone else.

Capitalism is the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few people.

This is why it is called Capitalism. Capital is what allows you to make other things. Land can be capital. Machines that make things, even machines as simple as a spinning wheel, are capital. You add labor to capital and you have products.

(It may be, with the rise of the sophisticated automation we call robots, that capital will be able to make capital soon, with little to no human intervention.)

Capitalism removes productive capacity from most people so they can’t support themselves. It orders the behavior of almost everyone through price signals.

Capitalism is a way of making decisions about what people should do, what products should be created, how they should spend their time and so on.

Because Capitalism is one of two major decision making methods in our society, and has been for the most important societies (starting with Britain) for hundreds of years (in varying forms; there are different types of capitalism), it is fair to judge capitalism by the results produced by those societies, especially the economic results.

Capitalism is NOT synonymous with industrialization, but most industrialization (outside the USSR) occurred under capitalism. Capitalism made the decisions about how to industrialize which were not driven by the internal logic of industrialization itself (too big a topic to go into in this article) or by government.

Capitalism fed back into government, however, because pricing matters. That coal was cheaper than solar for most of history (until about last year) mattered. In theory, we could have overridden that decision and said, “At X times the price is worth it and the sooner we make more the sooner the price will drop,” but in practice we did not.

We went with the flow.

Social choices, including those made by government, modify market signals. But when you live in a Capitalist society, you think first about VALUE as PRICE, even though the two are very different. The price of your life can be determined very accurately by life insurance charts (future expected earnings, discounted).

I doubt you consider the insurance market’s valuation of your life as the actual value of your life. If you do? Congratulations! You have splendidly adapted to the mandates of capitalism and markets.

Having read this far, and considered what you have read, next time someone yammers on about capitalism, you will know what they should be talking about. Because most people don’t know what capitalism is, despite living in it, you will also know, perhaps, what they are not talking about.

Capitalism uses markets as the main method to determine human economic behaviour and removes humans’ ability  to support themselves without engaging in the market.

Note the second characteristic listed: Removing humans’ independent means of support. In many cases, this had to be done by force. In others, it was done through blandishments. In both cases, the end result was a reduction in effective power for individuals who do not CONTROL capital–who are not capitalists (ownership is not always control).

To a remarkable extent, people are Skinnerian behavioural machines. Markets are one of the main methods used to condition people, to create their personality, to create them.

To control them.

To control you.

Under Capitalism, virtually everyone is subject to that control and conditioning, on penalty of living a miserable life, or, indeed, of death.

(This is part 2 of a semi-series.  Read part one on “The Death of Capitalism” and part 3 on “Did the Industrial Revolution Require Clearances, Genocide and Imperialism.” and part 4 “How The Rational Irrationality of Capitalism Is Destroying the World”.)

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Free and Prosperous Societies Occur Only When the Basis of Power Is the People

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On January 5, 2016

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Any apparent exception will end quickly, and is usually a legacy from a time when the people were needed.

Franchise tracks the dominant military arm pretty close to exactly. The Swiss are free because of their fights in Pike formations.  Most of Dark Ages and Medieval Europe’s were not free, because the dominant military arm was cavalry. As the dominant military arm moves to infantry, the franchise and freedom expand.

When a society becomes militarily mass-mobilized, all the men get the vote. When a society is militarily mass-mobilized and it’s industrialized, all the women get the vote because they are needed to run the industry while the men are away fighting.

Militarily mass-mobilized societies require that the citizens be healthy enough to fight. In WWI, the British were aghast at the number of men who were ineligible for the draft because their health was too weak, or they were too short, and so on. They did something about it.

Agricultural societies tend towards the patriarchal, because much of the work requires men’s heavy muscles. Horticultural societies, where women can do the work, tend towards egalitarianism. Likewise, hunter-gatherer societies in climes where gathering provides most of the food, tend towards egalitarianism; the exception here is when the most valued food is gathered by the men. In traditional Eskimo society, for instance, where the men provided essentially all the meat and the women processed it, was not egalitarian.

Humans have three sources of power: military, productive, and (in modern societies) consumptive. Consumers are not useless in our society, but consumption is still the weakest leg of the tripod. The rich are happy to consume more, after all.

The conditions for widespread prosperity have faded. We no longer have mass-mobilized armies, but professional standing armies, and we are moving towards smaller armies with more robots, both autonomous and remote-guided.

Technological progress has made manufacturing far more efficient, and it requires far less people. The rest of the economy, unless it is required for manufacturing, now matters far less. Most service work is not highly valued and does not translate into military power, and extraction labor is a minor part of most economies.

The final source of power for ordinary individuals is simply the threat they pose to elites. As we move away from the mass-mobilized “just need a rifle” military, this fades as well. To the extent it still exists, it is being managed by the time-honored “oppression” method, with new technology allowing for a Panopticon State which would have made Orwell pine for the weak and limited surveillance of Big Brother.

This is not to say the commoners are entirely powerless. The full power of denial of area techniques shown in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere hasn’t been properly appreciated.  These strategies would have worked just fine in the First World. Drones are cheap, and, in principle, could be manufactured by ordinary technicians. These aren’t F-16’s; you can make them in your garage.

Still, mass mobilization warfare is no longer the model, factories are not begging for more workers, there exists no longer any large expanses of land needing to be conquered in the name of colonialism, administered, or farmed.

As for money, banks make it, not people. We may move to a world where we fully appreciate that money is made out of thin air and reclaim control of money for the public, but so far the movement has been in the other direction–printing more and more of it for rich people.

At this point, most people are superfluous. As such there is no reason for elites to allow them freedom, power, or prosperity.

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In France, There Is a Cost to Executives for Laying People Off

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On October 11, 2015

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This is mild compared to what happened to managers in the early twentieth century, mind you:

Union activists protesting nearly 3,000 proposed layoffs at Air France stormed the headquarters during a meeting Monday, zeroing in on two managers who had their shirts torn from their bodies, scaled a fence and fled under police protection.

There are two great problems with our attitude towards violence today. The first is that we condemn it as “bad,” but permit it for people who abuse it. What we really mean is that violence by the state is ok, but violence by anyone else isn’t. You can justify that when the state doesn’t abuse its monopoly on violence (much), but that’s hard to do for most states.

The second is that we fail to recognize non-violent actions that have horrid consequences as serious. Laying off thousands of people has serious consequences for those people–consequences that are much more serious than having some clothes shredded.

We lock up “violent criminals,” but we hardly even bother to lock up most white collar criminals and, when we do, they get off lightly, as a rule. No one went to jail for the financial crisis, despite the fact that the fallout from that is far worse than a hundred serial killers each killing ten people.

I don’t like violence. But neither do I like going hungry. I don’t like homelessness. I don’t like millions of people in refugee camps. I don’t like—well, add to the list as you please.

Corporations are given a very valuable set of privileges by the government, including protection of their owners and officers from a wide range of normal liability for financial losses, negligence, and, indeed, in effect, criminal actions. Effective immortality and a wide range of tax advantages allow corporations to do things no actual person can do.

These privileges are granted because it is presumed that corporations are in the interest of society.

When a corporation does not act in the interest of society, the law allows it for it to be dissolved. This is done routinely to small corporations, but almost never to large corporations.

Corporations have multiple responsibilities: to shareholders, to employees, to customers, and to society as a whole. Officers and managers in corporations receive extra compensation (a lot of extra compensation, though less in France than in the US) in exchange for, presumably, taking on extra responsibility and being more skilled (or something, I’m often unsure what) than line employees.

I don’t know the specifics of Air France’s situation. Perhaps the layoffs truly are required.

If so, whose responsibility is that?

Barring an Act of God it is hard to make the case that it isn’t the responsibility of management. No? They are paid to be responsible, after all, and they are supposed to be competent.

The buck stops somewhere. If it doesn’t stop with a company’s management and officers, it stops nowhere.

Equally important is the fact that we keep precisely, and only, the rights (which includes property and jobs) that we are able and willing to fight for. Any other rights we have in excess will eventually be taken away from, awaiting only someone with enough power to gain the opportunity and motive to do so.

This is the real law of the jungle. Nothing. You have no rights, no possessions. Nothing. Everything you “have” is because it was at one point in the interest of others that you have it. Once it is no longer in their interest, watch out.

Union negotiating, in whatever form, is about making sure that management, officers, and society understand that taking what union members have incurs a cost. Air France may continue with layoffs, but be sure that a message has been received, and will be taken into account.

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Being Effective and Liked in the Workplace

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On June 12, 2015

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to be liked by service employees and blue collar workers. I wasn’t writing about “in the workplace” or “as a manager,” but most commenters read it as both.

Today, let’s actually talk about being effective (and yes, liked) in the workplace. I’ve been out of a corporate environment for years now, but my last corporate gig was at a large insurance company. It wasn’t managerial, though I led the occasional team and was responsible for one large departmental reorganization. Instead, I was a senior line employee: responsible for getting stuff done that required the help of many other people, but without the authority to just make them do things. By my count, at one point, up to 16 other specialties, spread across almost a dozen different departments, could be required.

I had no authority, but I needed other people to get my job done.

Until I went off the rails in my last year or so, I was very good at this job. And I’ve held line authority positions elsewhere, including being a dispatcher and a managing editor.

So, here are Ian’s guidelines for getting folks to do what you want, at work, and having them like it. To be clear, these never worked on everyone, but they have always worked on enough people.

First, find something to admire. A couple years into that corporate gig, I was talking to a friend who was complaining about our co-workers and how she could never get them to do anything for her.

I said, “Most of the people you’re complaining about are happy to help me. It might be that I like them.” The co-worker she found a persnickity snob, I found precise, knowledgeable, and willing to share his knowledge. The boss she disliked (our mutual boss) was one of the best bosses I ever had, understanding and kind, who never failed to give me the material support I needed. And so on.

Most people go through life with very little admiration. Their families take them for granted at best, nag them at worst. Their bosses pay them attention only when something goes wrong. Their coworkers are concerned only with themselves. All of this is natural– people’s first and second concern tends to be themselves, and they are interested in others only as those people reflect them.

But it’s not hard to find something to admire or like in most people. Maybe they work hard, maybe they’re reliable, maybe they’re really precise, maybe they’re insightful. Find something and genuinely admire it. Don’t be a flatterer, your admiration and appreciation must be real. Faking it is endless work, and unless you’re really great at being fake, you’ll screw it up.

Remember, you don’t need everyone, you just need enough people.

People can tell when you actually like and admire them. And they want to keep that admiration, so they’ll be generous with their time, advice, and help. This isn’t enough by itself, but it is the essential foundation.

Next, treat them right.

I had a few rules I followed at work.

1) If I ask someone to stay late to do something for me, I don’t leave until the job is done, either. It’s my job to be there to help them if they need it. In seven years at that job, I only left work once before someone who was doing me a favor. I apologized and she forgave me, but if I had made a habit of it, she wouldn’t have stayed late for me.

2) If someone helped me, I cleared the way for them. If I asked them to do something, I ran all the interference I could; I got their bosses permission if necessary, if anyone else was needed to help, I was the one who ran them down. If they needed anything else to get it done, I got it.

3) If they were doing me a favor and something went wrong, I took the blame, even if I could have shifted it onto them, even if they made a mistake. They would never lose from helping me if I could make it so they didn’t.

4) If something went right, I made sure they got the credit, and that meant to their boss, to their face, and publicly to others. They got praise, and that praise went where it would make their lives better. Including in writing when appropriate (usually) and in terms of my nominating them for workplace prizes and whatnot.

5) In general, I acted like they were great people, and I meant it. My gratitude was not fake or bombastic, it was real. I was glad to see them, I smiled at them. I thought they were great people. (Note, I did not socialize with my co-workers, with very few exceptions.  This is not based on being their out-of-work friends.)

Did everyone like me? Hell no, some people hated my guts. But enough people liked me. I was able to get many people to do favors for me they would not do for actual management. I was able to get people to stay late, for example, who would simply not stay late for their actual bosses. (It was the sort of workplace at which the boss could not just order someone to work extra hours.)

I was also always on very good terms with my immediate boss, which has been the case in almost all my jobs, simply because I delivered.

Unfortunately, I can’t give any advice on managing up beyond the immediate boss level. As a rule, I’ve always been terrible at dealing with upper-upper-management. Perhaps because they’re used to people saying what they want to hear, and I don’t do that.  Remember, my admiration was real. But I don’t blow smoke up people’s asses: If something can’t be done, I say so. If something is illegal (I handled the compliance for the area), I say so. If there will be negative effects from a decision, I say what they are. And if more resources are needed to get something done properly and in time, I let them know.

Or, perhaps, I was just kind of a jerk.

But the jerkiness was, in most cases, predicated on protecting my people. I can’t override management, especially senior management, but I can put my body in the way, and I can say, “If you do that, it’s going to go wrong in the following ways.”

A few senior management types appreciated that, my direct managers almost always did (a couple exceptions aside), but the more senior the management was, the less I found they were interested in the real world consequences of their decisions, and the more they wanted to be told “we can do that,” even if their ideas were terrible.

So, that’s the Ian Prescription for getting shit done at work, and being liked by enough people, but pissing off the wrong people. Will you be loved? I can’t say I was. Not really my personality at the time. But when I asked for help or favors, I got them.

The same general strategy worked when I was in leadership positions, if combined with strict fairness. When I was a dispatcher, for example, I did not play favorites. The person who could do the delivery fastest got the delivery, even if it was an easy, well-paying one; I didn’t give it to my “favorites.” You only got sidelined for important deliveries if you’d proved, again and again, that you were unreliable. Most dispatchers I dealt with had favorites. I, being human, did too. But I didn’t let that affect my dispatching.

In leadership: fairness. People are treated in accordance with their demonstrated abilities and are given chances to show what they can do. Their successes are celebrated, publicly, their failures discussed in private unless an example needs to be made (which, on occasion they did; justice must be seen to be done).

All of this, in my opinion, is just an extended example of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; combined with some common sense (no, I’m not going to let you do shoddy work).

Treat people right, and they’ll treat you right. There are some people with whom “right” treatment doesn’t work. If I’m a manager, I get rid of those people. If I’m in a position, as I was in my corporate gig where I didn’t have the power to do so, I’d sideline them to the extent that I could; nothing “mission critical” or “Ian critical” went through them if I could avoid it.

Treat people right. It isn’t hard.

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The Enforcer Class

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On June 10, 2015

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If you are a left-winger who wants to, in effect, overthrow a racist oligarchical system, the police are not your friends. Nor, need I point out, are corrections officers. Nor is most of the court system.

These people belong to the enforcer class. Police and corrections officers are paid not just in money but in license to brutalize. In most cases, they can get away with beating people up and even killing them. To stop a police officer from skating on murder requires riots, as a rule, and even that doesn’t usually work. The FBI has cleared themselves of every killing an FBI officer has performed for decades.

This is not incidental, this is not an accident; this is how our lords and rulers want the enforcement system to run.

Police are selected and trained and socialized to either become thugs or to cover up thuggery. Imbeciles will say things like “not all cops,” but it is virtually unheard of for the “good cops” to inform on the bad cops–they keep their mouths shut. This is wise on their part, of course, because the vast majority of police would turn on them in seconds if they were to betray the blue wall of silence.

America, per capita, imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Many of these people are non-violent drug offenders who used a drug which is less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. Solitary confinement is widespread, prison rape and battery are widespread, and there is plenty of evidence of prison guard collusion in said rape and battery.

If you are an African American male, you are far more likely to have spent time in prison than in university.

And police lie routinely about those they arrest. How many people are in prison who didn’t commit the crime of which they are accused? How many would have been convicted if police hadn’t concealed exculpatory evidence? The answers to these questions are unknown for obvious reasons, but I would stake a great deal that it is a non-trivial number.

All of this assumes the accused even had a trial–most people in prison have never had one: They plead out. That’s absolutely not an indication of guilt, it is an indication that they couldn’t afford to fight the system. Justice is very expensive, and prosecuting attorneys advise defendants against going to trial. If people lose (which, again, doesn’t  necessarily indicate guilt), they’ll get book thrown at them.

The American “justice” system cannot operate without plea bargains. The state arrests too many people for that. Hardly anybody gets justice, people get railroaded to prison without a trial, based on the word of police who are willing to lie, and once they are felons, their lives are permanently destroyed.

The people who run this system are not your friends. They do not like you. They enjoy the authority they have, and if you “disrespect a cop,” even if you’re firmly within your rights, if they think they can get away with it, they will fuck you up, enjoy it, and firmly believe that you deserve it. Then they’ll lie about it.

Not your friends. Not your allies. The hard fist of the oligarchy, the boot stamping on your face over and over again.

If you do not understand this you are living in a fantasy land and delusional in the face of real, hard power.

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The Three Types of People Who Wind Up Rich and How They Destroy the Wealth of Others

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On April 22, 2015

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Models of economics which don’t handle power are marginal at best. They serve only to describe what happens in situations where no one has enough power to set the rules or where there is a central authority which acts to keep any other actor from having enough power to set the rules.

The Standard Model of Power in Markets

Assume that people want two things: They want stuff and they want security. That is to say, they want to know they can keep what they have.

People who become rich usually fall into one of three categories:

1) People who lucked out by being in the right place at the right time (many people who became rich in the internet bubble, for instance, just happened to be working at the right place at the right time);

2)People who are obsessed with something that other people value highly. Like many musicians in the era of mass-produced music before the rise of the internet. Or like J.K. Rowling. These people are also lucky, in the sense that the products of their obsessions are highly marketable at the time of  output;

3) People who are obsessed with making money. They think of little else and have devoted their life to it.

In all three cases, once you’re rich, the needs that drove you there don’t go away. Wealth effects people, but it rarely changes either the obsessive need that drove them, nor the human need for security.

The second group is the least dangerous because their primary motivation was never money and their obsession drives them away from thinking too much about money.

The first group, those who got lucky, are the rank and file of the “I’ve got mine, screw you. Jack” brigade. This includes people far beyond those who became truly rich, like those who worked at startups by luck or those who won the genetic jackpot and inherited; it also includes those who won the generational jackpot: the GI Generation, for example, or older Boomers.

The GIs may have been born during the Great Depression, but they spent their prime working years during the greatest general wage increase of the last few centuries. They bought houses when they were cheap, then they benefited from the massive appreciation of housing values from a multi-generational period in which house prices increased faster than wages, capped by an actual housing bubble for those who lived long enough.

In generational terms, they were born on second (though not third). They had the GI Bill, great jobs, great job security, great pensions, great health care, and so on.

They lucked out. It’s not that they didn’t work hard for what they got, but the same amount of work in a different time or place wouldn’t have reaped the same rewards.

People like this become conservative. The GIs start off as the footsoldiers of post-war liberalism, but they wind up Reagan Democrats. They have theirs and they vote for politicians and policies which make sure that what they have is secure. The net result of those policies has been to pull the ladder up after them–to make their children and grandchildren less prosperous.

If you got lucky, then preservation of capital is the first rule. People who got lucky are against high taxes, because they can’t expect to make more money.  They are especially against high taxation of unearned income, because their advantage is unearned income–their houses, stock portfolios, bonds, and so on. Their money makes money.

These are their interests. Most people act on their interests as filtered through their beliefs.

Thus, we come to group . The people who made a ton of money and who did so because that was their goal; they were always obsessed with money. This group also includes those people who came into a lot of power because they were obsessed with power, though the dynamic is a bit different.

These people still have the need for security. The best security is the legal protection of no one else being able to join your business. Some businesses have this quality innately. For instance, suppose you are the cable or phone provider to an area. You have the phone lines, you have the cable; it’s unlikely anyone else can drive those lines.

But the government, in the 90s, forced phone providers to lease their phone lines to internet providers (dial up, for ancients). So even having a physical monopoly isn’t security if the government acts against you.

High speed internet, over phone or cable, is not something those companies in the US (or Canada) are forced to allow other companies to sell.

The first concern for someone who is wealthy is getting protection from whoever is politically powerful. Government, if you wish, though it can be warlords or Kings or the local tribe, depending on the culture. They need sanction to keep what they have.

This is especially true of businesses which aren’t natural monopolies: selling weapons to the government, for obvious reasons, or; selling music, which could be copied by anyone (say hello to copyright laws); being a lawyer and not wanting too many other people to act as lawyers (say hello to bar exams and law schools); selling genetically modified food of which people are scared (make GMO labeling illegal). Creating money out of thin air, which is what banks, brokers and so on do, might be considered the ultimate monopoly. They sure don’t want Joe Blow to be able to say “I have one hundred thousand dollars, and if Goldman Sachs (in the 00’s) can create money through leverage at 41/1, I can too.”

Creating and lending money is a valuable perogative, one worth defending.

And what if everything goes wrong? What if, despite all your money, and all the defenses you’ve bought, you lose everything anyway?

Be clear: This is what happened in 2007 and 2008. If you take into account counterparty risk and you mark assets to market (value them at what they could be sold for), every bank and major brokerage in the United States, and probably all of those in Europe, was bankrupt.

Bankrupt. Even the ones who made the right bets, like Goldman Sachs: because if all their counterparties go under, so do they.

This sort of risk, the kind that is backed up by the full credit of the United States, requires owning government. It requires knowing the central bank is yours and will act to save you.

The first thing a capitalist does when he or she gets rich enough, is buy the system.

They do this for three reasons: 1) to secure their current privileges; 2) to provide a backstop in case of disaster; 3) to create new opportunities.

The consequence of these actions is to drive up prices and keep out competition. It is explicitly to reduce competition, because competition is a danger. The fewer entities controlling more of a market, or controlling politicians, the more money is made and the more secure the current (and future) fortune is.

What this does is destroy the future.  To those who are currently in power, the future cannot be allowed to happen until they control it: until they are the ones who will make a profit from it.This doesn’t mean all distruptive change is impossible. There are, even today, many factions amongst the rich: Wall Street, Oil, Silicon Valley, etc.. They have interests in common, and cooperate around those interests, but they are competing to see who will control the future.

This doesn’t mean all disruptive change is impossible. There are, even today, many factions amongst the rich: Wall Street, Oil, Silicon Valley, etc.. They have interests in common, and cooperate around those interests, but they are competing to see who will control the future. Largely, they agree on the basics–things like continually extending copyrights, for example, or free movement of capital, or making regulations so that government can’t enact laws which would make their business go away. They agree about low taxes on capital and low wages (Apple and other Silicon Valley companies conspired to keep engineer wages low by not bidding against each other). They agree about unions not being too powerful.

Anywhere Capital has consensus, if they have been able to buy the system, it is virtually impossible to do anything against their consensus.

Gays have rights because it’s not important to most rich and powerful people that they don’t; and it is important to some of them (say, Tim Cook) that they do.

Effective wages have stagnated or dropped for over 40 years now because it is important to most rich and powerful people that they do; your wages are their costs.

Unions have lost massive power because rich and powerful people find that in their interest–even those in industries without unions want them kept weak so they will never have unions.

Concentrated wealth quickly turns into concentrated power and concentrated wealth will always be inimical to widespread prosperity. Wealth is power when it is concentrated. Wealth that is not disproportionate is not power. If it is not power, it cannot protect wealth.

If you allow any group, especially any small group, to obtain disproportionate wealth, they will always use it to protect their wealth.

Part II will discuss how the drive for further wealth leads to the vast impoverishment of everyone outside the wealthy and a small retainer class. Part III will discuss how moderate concentration of wealth can lead to general progress for everyone.

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