Ian Welsh

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

Category: Power Page 13 of 14

The Beauty of Obama’s Clapper Appointment

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On August 13, 2013

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As you’ve probably heard, Obama has appointed James Clapper (the man who lied under oath to Congress about NSA spying) to review NSA spying.

I am in awe, few things have impressed me this deeply.

This isn’t just a middle finger to everyone to everyone who is against blanket surveillance (aka. the majority of Americans), it is Obama saying “Kiss My Ass.”

It’s really hard for most people to understand just how much contempt our lords and masters have for us.  They really don’t give a fuck what’s good for us, what we like, or what we think.  They are rich, or powerful, or famous because they deserve it, and if we aren’t any of those things then they don’t give two fucks what we think.  By not being rich, powerful or famous we have proven we don’t deserve any say.  After all, if we had any qualities that were worthwhile beyond the sort of qualities you praise in a dog, we wouldn’t be peons, would we.

In this, Obama is very similar to Bush, actually, but in general it’s a characteristic of everyone near the top of our current society.  Starting at about the Senior VP level, people decide that they deserve everything they’ve got and everyone else doesn’t.  If they did, they’d have it.

The media is full of studies showing that power decreases empathy, and I’ll bet that’s true throughout history. But I’ll also bet this, the degree to which it is true is social, and in many times and places it has been less true.  Over the last couple generations we’ve seen a significant, measurable fall in the general level of empathy in the population as a whole.  If you have an ideology which glorifies greed and which claims that society is a meritocracy when there is copious evidence to the contrary, those who win will believe they “deserve” what they have, and everyone else “deserves” what they have.  Add to that objective circumstances which amount to dog-eat-dop (there simply are not enough good jobs to go around) and people will either band together, or turn on each other.  Generally, we’ve chosen, for ideological reasons, to turn on each other.

This isn’t necessary: it isn’t what happened in the US in the Great Depression, for example.  It’s a choice, and our choice is to be bastards to each other.

 

Why Jeff Bezos Purchased the Washington Post

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On August 5, 2013

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Newspapers don’t make much money any more (though in the 90s they made returns in the teens regularly.)  What they do still have, though, is influence and power.  Even though newspapers don’t have the reach television does, they determine the stories of the day—they control the news cycle more than any other part of the media. More than that, newspapers are intelligence bureaus.  Rupert Murdoch, no fool, would spend hours on the phone with beat reporters, picking their brains.

Power leads to money.  Amazon is under what Bezos must consider attack (as in making Amazon pay sales taxes), and he needs influence, power and intelligence in DC.  The Washington Post, at 250 million, is an absolute steal, even if it loses money every day.

(Bezos letter to Washington Post staff.)

The Hidden Army: Hezbollah Teaches the World How to Fight

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On February 25, 2013

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Surveillance State notes something very, very important:

Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for some time. In an effort to stop Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters from communicating, Israel has in the past jammed the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon. Eager to make sure that didn’t happen again, Hezbollah has covertly built out a fiber-optic network throughout the areas it controls.

He then goes on to note that the last crisis between Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah was over the government trying to shut down that fiber-optic network. Hezbollah regarded that as an act of war:

(Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah) said the government’s decision to shut down Hezbollah’s fiber-optic communications network was tantamount to a declaration of war. For the (central) government, the network represented an intolerable example of Hezbollah’s efforts to set up an Iranian- and Syrian-backed state within Lebanon. Hezbollah justifies the network, which carried its communications during a 2006 war with Israel, as a vital security asset.

The interesting thing is that during the 2006 war, Hezbollah won the information war. Their communications remained secure, but Israeli soldiers carrying cell phones made calls which Hezbollah tracked. Even if they couldn’t listen in, being able to triangulate where some Israeli soldier is making a call from gives some very interesting, and useful, information.

Americans, Israelis and the West in general are used to assuming they’ll win the surveillance, electronic and information war. But Hezbollah defeated or drew Israel in all three. A network of tunnels, pre-prepared camouflage positions for missile launchers and the use of civilian clothes when troops were traveling made aerial surveillance and satellites virtually useless. The Israelis were never able to shut down the majority of Hezbollah’s missile launchers, any more than they’ve been able to find those of the Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s army is a secret one. It’s like an old fashioned spy agency.

It doesn’t exist.

If you’re enrolled in it, you don’t tell anyone. The war was rife with stories of soldiers being killed, and their families finding out for the first time that they were even in Hezbollah’s army. This, of course, is to make it impossible to use assassination, mostly aerial assassination, to take out key leaders.

Hezbollah is an almost perfect Darwinian organization. Israel uses informants and assassination? Great – we’ll keep even our membership secret. Israel uses air power? We’ll dig tunnels and set up aeriel blinds for our missile launchers. Israel doesn’t like taking heavy infantry casualties – fine then, we’ll set up overlapping bunkers which simply cannot be cleared without taking losses.

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it’s also much more: it’s an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is.

It’s an unrecognized State with a hidden army. Oh, the UN says there’s a Lebanese government with authority over Hezbollah. But everyone knows that the real government in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah. They pick up the garbage, they give out the pensions, heck, they have their own phone network. Crazy. When the Lebanese “government” picks a fight with Hezbollah, Hezbollah wins.

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies. As official governments fail, less recognized ones will pick up the pieces. And they will look to Lebanon to see how to do it, survive, and even win.

(Kicking this one to the front again – Feb 25, 2013 – originally reposted in 2009.)

(Another reprint.  This one got some hostile reaction from people who missed the point.  Hezbollah might be the most interesting and successful neo-state in the world.  Anyone who isn’t studying it is a fool. )

Public opinion is irrelevant

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On November 30, 2011

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When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it.  Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy.  In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.

I didn’t care either time.  Repeat after me:

Public opinion does not matter.

It is irrelevant.  A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill.  A small majority wanted single payor.  Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against.  There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.

In Europe every government other than Iceland has been sure to never allow a referendum on austerity.  Members of the Euro-zone like Spain and Greece and Italy have not had referendums on whether to leave the Euro.  They have had elections in some cases, but both major parties are FOR austerity (it’s not clear that citizens entirely understand this, watching Spaniards talking about how they had voted against austerity in the recent election was pathetic.  They elected a government which will go even more hardcore on austerity.)

Most countries in the developed world do not have functioning democracies in any meaningful sense.  You can vote for party A, B, or C, but they will all do substantially the same things, differing only in how fast they do them and the degree of gratuitous cruelty they engage in.

Your opinion does not matter.  Politicians are almost entirely in the thrall of a neo-liberal ideology, and are almost entirely the bought and paid servants of the very rich.  If a politician does what the oligarchy wants, he or she will be taken care of, even if thrown out of office.  If they don’t, money and influence will be used against them, and once out of office they will be on their own.

Politicians do not work for you.  Neither, just to be clear, do the police.  Nothing is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side.

Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is.

What matters is not “opinion”, but action.  So with regards to Occupy, all I cared about is how many people were being radicalized—whether a cadre was being formed; and how much of the population supported them in real terms.  People who would donate goods, would donate money, would spread the message actively, would go down during the day.

What I care about in general, is how many people are willing to impose costs on the oligarchy.  These can be financial costs (as when French protestors occupied a refinery), or they can be personal costs, such as heckling politicians and the rich, slashing the tires of their cars (the Argentines did that, by the way) or, if rioting, rioting where they live and work.

Understand, the true rich live in the bubble.  They fly on private jets, they travel by helicopter, if they stay in hotels they cost tens of thousands of dollars a night and have private entrances, check-ins, elevators and so on that you as a peon never see or use unless you are part of their direct servant class.  Being in the bubble means never having to deal with a human being who isn’t directly financially dependent.  These people do not care what you ‘think’, they only care if you can damage their interests.

Politicians live less in the bubble.  You can reach them, and let them know what you think.  Loudly and insistently.  At their homes.  Their restaurants.  Their fund raisers.  Everywhere they go.  Don’t “occupy Wall Street”.  Occupy Bloomberg.  Go everywhere he goes, and make his life living hell.  That’s a cost to him.

Until politicians fear you more than they fear the rich and covet the favors and money of the rich, they will continue to serve the rich first.  Their salaries are not that important to them, they do not work for you, and they don’t fear you enough.

But that won’t change because of “opinion”.  Opinions don’t matter in aristocracies or oligarchies, and that’s what we are creating, what we’re heading towards.  What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters.

So I no longer care about polls in almost all cases.  They don’t matter.  Likewise most elections: elect whoever you want, the policies will remain the same except on the margins as long as the politicians don’t work for you, but for the rich.

Your “opinion” is irrelevant.  The powerful do not care what you think.

Thank God for our enemies

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On July 20, 2011

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though it’s a pity about our leaders.

I feel bad for the Anonymous hackers who were arrested today, but it’s also a good thing, in that it will radicalize the hacker community even further and force them to adapt and change their tactics.  They are the bleeding edge of real resistance, and they have moved far from their libertarian roots and become left wing in their sympathies (targeting a city for refusing to allow the homeless to be fed is as left wing as you can get.)

Since, of course, the DOJ has shown no interest in pursuing those who did DDOS attacks against Wikileaks, it is yet another confirmation that the law, as it exists now, is used as a bludgeon against people the government doesn’t like, while those who the government does like are left alone, and crimes against the government’s “enemies” aren’t investigated.  Laws which do not have at least the appearance of being evenly applied are not just, are not perceived as just, and become legitimate targets for breaking.

Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives.  This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.

What is interesting about both of these things, and many others recently, such as the austerity bills and various legal rulings from the Supreme Court which don’t even pretend to follow precedent, is how the velvet glove has come off the iron fist of state and corporate repression.  The elites think that there is nothing ordinary people can do. Whatever the elites do, no matter how harsh, the hoi polloi can only submit.  And if they don’t, well, so much the worse for them.

And yet the system is cracking up. A large part of why all of this is being done is to create ever bigger corporations and ever richer western billionaires, so they can compete with the oilarchies.  But recently Russia been minting billionaires faster than US.  It’s really hard to state how startling that is.  America’s rich have done everything they can to rig the game so they will get richer, they have a bigger base economy to work off of, and they’re still losing the Red Queen’s race.  No matter how much they repress their own population, they can’t keep up with the folks who have the real gold of the modern economy: black gold.

Unfortunately, as stupid, venal and brutal as our enemies are (and if they aren’t your enemies you’re a fool or getting a pay check, or I hope you are), our leadership is even more stupid, venal and cowardly.  This entire generation of leadership on what passes for the left is beyond contemptible.  If they are not outright sell outs of the interests of those they claim to champion, then they are willing to betray anyone but their members, and if with rare exceptions (in the US, basically, the gay leadership) they are cowards, unwilling to risk themselves in any way, unwilling to actually fight.  They cavill and moan and condemn anyone who actually fights back. Watching fools demanding that the man who threw a pie at Murdoch be condemned for violence was beyond sad, it was a farce.  Violence?  It reminded me of all the hand wringing when an Iraqi threw a shoe at George Bush, a war criminal and mass murderer.  Oh dear.

And so, while the young are being radicalized, the leaders of the left are unable to provide leadership.  They have been selected to be weak and cowardly, to be unwilling to fight, to be compromisers trying to get the best deal possible as long as that deal doesn’t upset the status quo in any real way.

This varies by country.  I have more hope, say, for Greece (after they set the finance ministry alight) than I do for the US.  But the first job of the left in most countries is not to fight the right, it is to destroy the leadership of the left.  To drive them out of power and into the wilderness and either to replace them or to create new forms of organization.  And it is to understand that class war is like war, there will be casualties.  People will be beaten, people will be killed, people will go to jail.  That is what will happen.  It can be avoided in only one way, surrender.  Suffer exactly what the oligarchs want you to suffer and you will be allowed to live and die in what passes for peace.  It will be a peace filled with suffering, hunger, deprivation, and violence not primarily from the authorities but from each other, but if that’s what you want, it’s available.  Always understanding, of course, that anyone who won’t fight will have to accept anything the oligarchs do.  Anything.  When you won’t fight, you only get even scraps if it is someone else’s interest.

There’s an old saying about living on your knees or fighting on your feet.  The problem with that is that once you’ve said you’re willing to live on your knees the next question is “will you crawl on your belly?”

And so, in this, not the twilight of the post-war era, for that has passed, but in the dawn of what the oligarchs hope is a new conservative order, that is the question you must answer, “will I crawl on my belly, will I fight, or will I try to make a separate peace?”

The cost of a separate peace, of course, is a sliver of your soul.

One a day.

One more note on the New York Gay Marriage, Cuomo and the Gay Rights Movement

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On June 26, 2011

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1) The left sells each other out for either small tactical gains, or nothing at all (hello national NARAL) all the time, so why shouldn’t the gays promise to help Cuomo in his next election for giving them gay marriage, even if it screws unions and helps an austerity governor?

2) The reason gays get anything is that unlike the rest of the left, they did two things: they cut off the donations, and they got ugly in people’s faces.  They stopped playing nice.  They stopped playing by the rules.  They stopped worrying about whether people in power “liked” them (hello National NARAL) and started playing rough.

3) Given that the left doesn’t hang together, which means that the choice is “gay marriage + austerity”, or “no gay marriage + austerity”, well, why not gay marriage plus a shitty economy?

The fact still remains that the left doesn’t hang together well enough, and that that is going to cost a lot of people lives, jobs, health and so on.  More and more as time goes on.  There is only one cardinal rule to effective alliances, no separate peace.  Those who are making a separate peace with Cuomo because they got what they care about more than anything else, are not allies of the rest of the left.

But when rats are deserting the ship, when everyone would rather hang separately, because they won’t hang together, perhaps a separate peace is all that can be hoped for.  Let those few who think they can make it, do so, the rest can suck on the shitty economy, war and so on, that are coming down the line.  “Every interest for itself” can be the battle cry of the left, I guess, the ultimate repudiation of the foundational beliefs that give, er, gave, the left moral authority.

Stop treating monsters as reasonable people

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On January 17, 2011

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Over the last few years, and in particular in the last couple, I’ve noticed something about myself: I’ve become a lot more rude in my political dealings, including with many people I used to consider allies.  At first this worried me a bit, because I couldn’t quite pin down why, beyond the fact that I was angry.

Now I’m not someone who believes anger is always a bad thing.  I think certain things should make you angry, and if they don’t, something’s wrong with you.  When people are dying, being raped, being tortured, being denied basic rights, being beaten and so on, you should get angry.  You should use that anger as a weapon and as fuel for the fight.

Still, anger isn’t a strategy, or even a tactic, and one has to be careful, because anger can blind you and turn you against those who should be your allies.

And that’s the crux.  Allies.

What I’ve come to realize lately is that I’m not on the same side as a lot of people.  If you’re for the Afghan war, aka. for eternal war, I’m not on your side.  If you believe in indefinite detention or the President’s right to assassinate whoever he wants, I’m not on your side.  If you believe that Wikileaks is evil and that citizens should be kept in the dark as to what their governments are doing, then I’m not on your side.

Through the Bush years opposition to Bush made a lot of people seem like friends, who weren’t.  Sure, we all hated Bush (yes, hated.  I hate people who torture and engage in aggressive war, and I think that’s the appropriate response), but that hatred, that opposition, concealed the fact that a lot of people didn’t really object to what Bush was doing, they just objected to the fact that it was being done by a Republican, or that it was being done incompetently.  They would have been ok with the same policies if they’d worked out, as with all the “liberals” and “progressives” who were pro-Iraq war until it turned into a clusterfuck.

The Wikileas imbroglio was a real turning point for me.  At least half the “progressives” I know revealed themselves as, simply, supporters of authoritarianism; revealed themselves as mushrooms who wanted daddy to keep them in the dark and feed them shit.  Revealed themselves as fools who didn’t either understand or, worse, believe that government exists to serve its citizens, who have a right to know what it’s doing in their name.

But while the watershed, it was merely the latest in a string of horrible behavior from the “left”.  Whether it was teacher’s unions stealing food stamp money to pay for their raises, unions selling out their own members to support Barack Obama’s health care bill, which was bad for most union members or whether it was the progressive caucus promising to vote against any HCR bill without the public option, then folding like wet cardboard, it was clear that there was no spine and no solidarity on the left.  Every little interest group was always willing to sell out everyone else, sometimes for their own interests, but often not even for that: the leadership of organizations was so corrupt that they would sell out their own members interests so they could feel like members of the DC Village.

I have no time for these people.  I have no politeness or kindness for them.  They are traitors and in many cases cowards, and their actions or lack of actions are, objectively, killing or impoverishing people, both in America or abroad.

So screw politeness, and screw reasonableness.  Reasonableness in the current political environment means “willing to sell out the people whose interests she or he is supposed to care about.”

So count me out.  I’m not interested in being reasonable, if reasonable means “a spineless sell out”.  I’m not interested in being pragmatic, if pragmatic means “understands that nothing can actually be done to fix any problem”, and I’m not interested in being polite to people who make their living by destroying lives or apologizing for those who destroy lives.

America is going down, and the world is spiraling into an age of war because everyone wants to be “reasonable” rather than do the right thing for their own people.  Everyone who matters wants to pander to the rich, rather than care for the masses.  And as for the masses, they have treated politics as a spectator sport, allowed themselves to be lied to and made fools of, and have and will continue to reap the bitter harvest.

You not only have only the rights you are willing to fight for, you have only the economic livelihood you are willing to fight for.  Americans, being unwilling to fight for either, will soon have neither.

And I have nothing but contempt for those who have led them to this impasse, and with them, much of the world.

The Kabuki Congress and Presidency

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On December 15, 2010

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Ok, another edition of pointing out the painfully obvious.

Most votes in Congress are Kabuki.  There was never any chance that Bush tax cuts weren’t going to be extended, and this was obvious far before the election, for example.  Unions were never going to get the Employee Free Choice Act.

Also, stop paying attention to who votes for what.  If a Dem votes against an obnoxious bill, it is almost always because leadership has released them to vote against it.  Close votes almost never really are.

Dozens of Dems in the House promised not to vote for a health care bill without a public option.  Leave aside what you think of it, given that they broke that promise as a group, why would you trust them on anything?

Obama in specific, and the Congressional leadership in general thinks that their problem in 2010 with the base was because they didn’t have enough show votes which failed.  So they’re going to have a lot of show votes.  But virtually everything that passes is essentially what Obama wants to pass.  (For example, the stimulus bill was essentially identical to Obama’s original stimulus bill.)

If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be a “moderate” Republican.  He is not a progressive, not a liberal and neither is Harry Reid.  Pelosi would be liberal in a different world, but she will do what the President tells her to do, she’s a good soldier.  Originally she wasn’t going to pass TARP, for example, unless an equal percentage of Republicans voted for it, but when Obama came out in favor of it, she fell into line.

There is no constituency in Congress for liberal policy.  None.  Even those who prefer liberal policy, like Sanders and Pelosi, will not do anything to actually make sure it happens, or to stop conservative policy.

This is why I generally don’t write about legislative fights any more. There is no point, the outcome is usually determined long before the actual vote, and everything you see is just theater for the rubes.

We are past the point where legislative actions matter.  At this point, assuming the political system can be reformed at all, you require new leadership, capable of holding legislators to principles.  You require outside groups who will hold legislators responsible, which means not micro-politics groups.  Virtually ever micro-politics group, that is any group which looks after one interest or one constituency, will sell out liberal interests.  So you have teachers unions accepting wages paid for by cutting food stamps (ie. starving the children they teach) and you  have the auto workers endorsing the Korean-US trade deal which is bad for everyone but them.

A movement of the left made up of self-interested groups is no movement at all.  The first, second and last rule of movement politics is solidarity.  Any movement made of people or groups which will sell out the rest of the movement is not a movement, and they will be played off against each other to give cover for the worst sort of policy.  If you are interested only in your own issue, whether that is environmental, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, trade, unionization or whatever, then you are part of the problem and your willingness to betray is why the left fails over and over again.

Hang together, or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said.

The left has chosen to hang separately.

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