Ian Welsh

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

Category: Power Page 7 of 14

Wage Slavery on Labor Day

By

On September 7, 2020

Comments

One of the simplest ways to evaluate a society is by the common denominators of the lives most people have to live. For a lot of history that was farming. Sure, there were people who weren’t farmers, but 80% to 95% of the population farmed.

Most people in the modern world are wage laborers. They work for someone else, and without the money they earn from their employment they would be homeless, go hungry and after a few years of misery, likely die.

We have a weird idea of freedom “I am free to sell my labor,” that many people who lived would consider essentially slavery, which is, in fact, why the term wage slavery was coined. Most of us are not free to not take orders, only (maybe) to choose our boss.

Most of the time we don’t even really get to choose who gives us orders: there aren’t a lot of options and we need a job now. If the labor market is bad, and it’s been bad in most places for most of my life (there have been a few exceptions), bosses get to choose workers, not workers bosses. You take what you can get, put up with what you must, because the alternative is worse.

Some of us get good labor jobs, some of us bad labor jobs, but most of us ultimately take orders, often daily, hourly or even as often as every few minutes (if you’ve never had a job like that be grateful).

We are wage slaves. It’s not as bad as traditional slavery, but you’re still spending your entire working life doing what other people tell you (after spending your childhood obeying teachers.)

We’re a society of order-takers, who MUST take orders or die (with few exceptions and the exceptions cannot scale to the majority, there aren’t enough slots). Yet, somehow, we think we’re free.

That’s the sign of a very good indoctrination and propaganda system.

Anyway, enjoy Labor Day, but remember, wage-slaves treated better are still wage-slaves. The idea is to change who gives the orders from them to ourselves.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Principle of Elite Consequences

By

On September 3, 2020

Comments

Sometimes the comments on an article, like my recent post on reforming the justice system, reveal a deep misunderstanding of how the world works.

People with money and power run our societies. The Princeton/Northwestern oligarchy study found that what they want is what matters, and that the opinions of the rest of us don’t matter.

If they are not subject to how a part of society operates, they don’t care if it runs well, and it will run badly (or, in a way that profits them, which is generally the same thing).

The justice system, for the rich and powerful, works well. They have good counsel, because they can afford it. They can afford bail. They generally go to minimum security prison if they happen to be indicted, and they are never actually charged with most of their crimes — as was the case in widespread fraud leading up to the financial crisis or the robo-signing fraud used to steal people’s houses afterwards. (At most, they pay fines, which are less than the value of what they stole.)

The security systems in airports are hell. But rich people don’t go through it, they fly in private jets.

The medical system in the US is bad and overpriced for most people. But it’s very very good if you’re rich or powerful.

The US has been at war for almost 20 years now, but US elites don’t care, because they and their children don’t fight in it.

The US education system is bad, and worse in places which are poorer. US elites don’t care, because they either go to private schools or cluster in rich neighbourhoods where the schools are good, because they are funded through property taxes.

Covid-19 is not a problem, because it mostly kills poor people and minorities, and it’s making the rich much much richer, getting rid of their competition among small business-owners.

If you want something to work well, powerful and rich people must be forced to use it. They must have the same experience as ordinary people.

It takes an especially bad dose of capitalist ideology (or aristocratic or oligarchic ideology) to not perceive this point. If the powerful aren’t affected by how they run society (except to get richer and more powerful), if they don’t experience how the society runs for ordinary people, then society will be shit, AND, if you want society to be good, you can’t allow rich and powerful people to opt out of ordinary experiences.

They must have the same health care as everyone else, including the same odds of not receiving care, being bankrupted by it or getting bad care. They must go through the security lines at airports and be groped. Their kids must have the same odds of having shitty schools. They must have the same odds of dying of Covid-19. They must be given rifles after voting for a war in the Senate and sent to the front lines (or at the least their kids must be, though I see no reason why they shouldn’t be, and if they’re too physically weak to fight, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote on a war they won’t be involved in).

All of this is the most basic of common sense, a level of reasoning that a ten year old would be able to follow easily.

If you cannot follow this reasoning you are suffering from a very bad case of ideological poisoning or you identify with the rich and powerful class. Perhaps you belong to it, or perhaps you’ve just lost a sense of your own position.

I can hear many people now, “rich and powerful people deserve to be treated better, and everyone else deserves shit.”

You can have a good society when you are willing to do what it takes, and the most important rule of a good society is that important people don’t get to opt out of the world their class creates for everyone else.

9/3-20: article edited to reflect oligarchy study authors being at Princeton/Northwestern, not Harvard.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why QAnon Resonates

By

On August 25, 2020

Comments

QAnon posits that there is a conspiracy of pedophiles in the deep state, including celebrities, politicians, and bureaucrats who oppose Donald Trump. Supposedly, Trump is in a struggle with them.

The specific QAnon allegations have, so far, turned out to be false.

But it still resonates, and the reason why isn’t complicated.

It’s because, while it’s wrong in the specifics, it’s right in the generality.

Jeffrey Epstein ran an island where underage girls (not pre-pubescent, but below the age of consent) were procured for important men. I haven’t been able to find a full list of visitors, but a partial list includes Trump himself, Bill Clinton, Thomas Pritzker (the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels), Kevin Spacey (unlikely to have slept with underage girls, I’d think), comedian Chris Tucker, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner (ex CEO of LBrands, worth over $7 billion), modeling executive Jean-Luc Brunel (a modeling exec, not a customer, but claimed to be a procurer), ex-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former Maine Senator George Mitchel, Harvard physicist Lawrence Krause, Woody Allen, Kenneth Star (attorney), and Alan Dershowitz. (Source one, Source 2.)

The current US attorney general represented Epstein in 2007 and got him a plea deal.

What’s interesting about that plea deal is that it happened because Jim Acosta, the prosecutor was told he belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.

Sounds pretty deep state to me.

There are also strong claims that Epstein also worked for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

What’s shocking about Epstein isn’t that he got away with it so long, but that with a blackmail list like the one he must have had, that he was ever taken down.

It is clear is that some of the most powerful people in the world (and the full list must be much, much longer) were in Epstein and his handlers’ power; he had the goods on them.

What also seems almost certain is that at least a part of the deep state was running Epstein and using him to blackmail important people.

Now, the idea that Donald J. “Grab Them by the Pussy” Trump is crusading against pedophiles is ludicrous. But is it far-fetched to think that many of his opponents in the deep state (and many of his supporters) are deeply dirty, and are involved in blackmailing powerful people after setting them up with underage girls?

Close to a sure thing.

QAnon is wrong on the details, wrong on the “sides,” but right that the state is deeply corrupt, deeply evil, and involved in deeply disturbing acts. And, of course intelligence agencies are blackmailing politicians–including politicians in their own countries.

As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies, and yes, Virginia, the deep state was, in at least one case we know of, apparently protecting a ring for providing men with underage women and then (almost certainly) blackmailing them.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Understanding Leadership Responsibility For Death, Harm & Welfare

By

On August 5, 2020

Comments

In the law there is a crime known as criminal negligence.

Criminal negligence is the failure on the part of a person on whom a duty is placed to take reasonable steps to prevent a certain bad outcome from happening. Duties may or may not be specifically known to you. For instance, as a driver, you have a duty not to hurt others with your vehicle. You may or may not have known that.

Other examples of people who have duties to others include: parents owing a protective duty to their children, or employers/supervisors at work owing a duty to their workers.

Let’s extend this. When you have authority, if you do something a reasonable person should know would cause harm, you are responsible for that harm.

All positions of power come with duties. American Presidents like to whinge on about how they have a duty to protect Americans, but the actual sworn duty is to uphold the Constitution. All leaders in any sane system are broadly responsible for the welfare of the people they rule and for the consequences of the actions they take, even on non-citizens.

If you go to war, like George W. Bush did, you know that a lot of bad things will happen: deaths, injuries, rapes, property destruction and so on. So you are responsible for all of those deaths. Therefore if you go to war without sufficient reason, you are a criminal. This is true for Obama (Libya, Yemen) and Trump as well (all the ongoing wars he could stop but hasn’t.) It is true of drone murders, both because they kill innocents and because they violate any reasonable reading of the Constitution (due process of law.)

It is also true of creating a medical system that kills tens of thousands of people a year. If you raise the price of drugs so that people can’t afford them without sufficient justification (aka. production and distribution costs have gone up that much), you know people will die. You are guilty of negligent mass murder.

Politicians and bureaucrats have positive duties: to see to the welfare of the people they oversee.

The same is true of corporate officers, or should be. Corporations are bundles of very valuable rights, given to corporations by the people, in the expectation that corporations will increase public welfare. A corporation which does not increase public welfare has broken that bargain and the officers have failed in their positive duty. Likewise the expectation is that the corporation will not actively do harm, certainly not harm that outweighs the good it does.

When you analyze various leaders in society thru this lens it becomes quickly clear who is doing their job and who isn’t. The Federal Reserve deliberately crushed wages for decades. That was deliberate harm, and they knew it. They deliberately made sure that full employment was not reached, which is in direct violation of the explicit aims of their institution.

Trump swore to uphold the constitution and repeatedly violated the prohibitions against profitting from public office. All Presidents of the past decades have supported laws that violate the first and fourth amendments, and do so very clearly.

And so on and so forth.

If a reasonable person, with the knowledge expected of someone in the role (aka. a drug executive should know the result of price increases of drugs, that’s a basic competency of the job) are responsible for the affects of their decisions. Since all of them exist to increase, at the least, the welfare of society, if they do things they know will decrease that welfare, then they have, at best, been negligent, and probably criminally negligent.

This the floor for how leaders in society, whether private or public, should be judged. This doesn’t mean they can never do anything to hurt anyone, many public decisions involve trade-offs, and sometimes harming a few is required to aid the many. A simple example would be a wealth tax. Bezos and Gates would squeal and feel badly done by, but many people would be better off as a result.

If a result of an action or policy is what a reasonable person in that role would expect to happen, leaders can be judged by it. Going to war has obvious consequences. Drone murders with big explosions have obvious consequences. Helping Saudi Arabia keep food out of Yemen has obvious consequences. Keeping life-saving drugs from Iran and Iraq has obvious consequences. Dropping progressive taxes thru the floor and taxing capital gains lower than earned income has obvious consequences. Massively raising insulin prices has obvious consequences. Treating warehouse workers like automata has obvious consequences (acknowledged in at least one case by keeping an ambulance outside an Amazon warehouse.)

When we fail to hold our leadership to “you are responsible for the obvious consequences of your decisions” our leadership no longer serves the people or their welfare, but only the welfare of the very few they decide to care about. At that point they become not leaders, but rulers, and we their subject and in all but name: serfs. Disposable assets to be used up as they see fit, for their benefit, not ours.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Understanding American Elites Means Understanding Predators

By

On July 30, 2020

Comments

American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

  1. There is no such thing as society.
  2. Greed is good.
  3. There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Feeling and Acting Powerful in Catastrophic Times

By

On July 15, 2020

Comments

The United States is moving into a time of catastrophe. Thirty-two percent of people were unable to make either their rent or mortgage payments in July. Twenty-two percent of small businesses seem likely to go bankrupt. One-third of small independent farms are on the verge of bankruptcy. When these people lose their homes and wind up on the street, there will be tens of millions of homeless Americans, with widespread hunger.

All this and the pandemic is reaching new highs.

It is natural to feel powerless in times like these. Indeed it is natural to feel powerless in most times.

As I wrote on Monday, “being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.”

Compared to the system, as an individual, you are weak. There are a few exceptions, but I doubt any of my readers are in that .0001 percent bucket.

But that assumes you act directly against the system, to change it.

You can’t fight a hurricane, but you can prepare for it. You can build your house in ways that mean it will hardly be damaged. You can flee before it arrives, perhaps, or at least take shelter. You can store food, make friends, and be ready.

In the 1930s, many people in Germany tried to stop the Nazis from taking power. They failed. Some stuck around, they wound up in camps and dead (and it wasn’t just Jews, they killed left-wingers, their direct opponents, first). Others said, “Woah, we lost that fight,” and left.

Those people survived, and they have descendants.

Now, I am not telling you to leave the United States. Right now, only about 20 countries will even let Americans in. I’ve been telling you for years, over a decade, to get the fuck out if you could (I know many people can’t). You either did that, or didn’t, and it’s too late now–at least for this catastrophe cycle.

What I am saying, instead, is this:

You can’t always stop history, but you can always decide how you act and react to history, and to catastrophe.

Martial arts instructors, the good ones, tell their students that the best thing to do in a fight is often to run or de-escalate. Fights are risky, and if you can run faster than the other guy, you don’t get hurt. Now, of course, there are times when you have to fight, but the point is, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes fighting is really, really stupid.

This is not counsel to not do what you can to change large forces. By all means demonstrate, organize, vote, and so on. But recognize that as one person, while you must contribute, you cannot determine the end result. You can only do your part, hope others do their part, and that it is enough. If it isn’t, it isn’t on you, unless perhaps you are leading the movement or are very senior in it.

When it comes to opposing large historical events, you should not put your ego or happiness on the line. You are not the determining factor, and feeling as if you are is foolishness.

The key to feeling powerful in bad times is determining what you control, and doing that. Perhaps you can stock up food. Perhaps you can move. Perhaps you can make friends with your neighbours so there is mutual aid right next door. Perhaps you can start a garden. Perhaps you can stockpile food and other essentials. Perhaps you have enough resources to go partially or full off grid. Perhaps you can create a bug-out bag and practice the route you intend to use if you need to leave. Perhaps you can get a new job in another part of the country. Perhaps you and some friends can live together and be safer and stronger and better prepared together. Perhaps you can learn practical skills which will help when things go bad.

Perhaps you can come up with many actions, unique to  your situation, which I will never think of.

When you concentrate on what you can do, and what you can control, instead of what you can’t control, you increase your odds of survival, prosperity, and happiness, and you cut away hard at the feeling of powerlessness.

The great forces of history are not yours to control, but if you understand them (or listen to those who do, and that may not be me, but others) then you can prepare. You can outwit them and prosper or at least survive well despite them.

In WWII, there were places which were untouched. During the Bubonic plagues, there were places that lost no one or very few people. There were people who looked at the circumstances and used them to not only prosper but to take care of others.

Look at your current situation and ask yourself, “What can I do to prepare?” Make a list. Do something on the list.

Measure yourself and your power against what you do that you can do, not in fighting history.

And remember, those who survive and prosper in a crisis are those who have power afterwards and can support a better world.

With rare exceptions (and they do exist), you don’t need to feel powerless, or be powerless.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

Truly, Truly Good News as Americans Get Serious

By

On June 9, 2020

Comments

The first really good news of the uprising was the burning of an entire police station.

This is the second really good news:

Now this has been done, fairly often, in other countries, but to see Americans do it? This is all good. This shows people getting serious, “We don’t want cops and we will keep them out.”

The assholes who like driving cars into protestors (which Republican lawmakers want to make legal) are partially responsible, but this is a big deal because it shows planning, and forethought, and a rejection of police legitimacy.

One main piece of why cops have been rioting is that they believe that because they are guys who “protect” everyone else, and because they feel the job is dangerous (it’s less dangerous than many other jobs, but that’s now how they feel), that they have the right to go anywhere, tell anyone what to do, and be obeyed, and to hurt or kill anyone at their discretion.

They feel they’re the people doing the hard work, the “sheepdogs,” and that the sheep just don’t understand. They make the hard decisions, and the sheep should just obey.

And most of American discourse around cops is, “Don’t resist, obey any order, and pray they don’t hurt you too bad.”  That’s reasonable when it’s just you and a bunch of cops, but it’s not reasonable as a group, or a society.

So giving cops the finger, saying, “We don’t need you, or want you, and we are going to keep you out,” is a psychological break.

I’m very pleased to see this. For decades, I’ve wondered if Americans would just take anything, no matter what, lying down. The last couple weeks have begun an answer in the negative.

Keep it up. You don’t need cops who run like the ones you have.

And, the next step? You don’t need politicians or executives like the ones you have now, either.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Credible Threat: Riots Work Edition

By

On June 8, 2020

Comments

So…

… a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department

This doesn’t mean “no police” it means get rid of the current bunch, and create a new police department. This was done by Camden, New Jersey, for example…

By the department’s account, reports of excessive force complaints in Camden have dropped 95 percent since 2014.

There’s some stuff about how they did it that I don’t like, but the point that it can be done matters.

More important is something which wasn’t going to happen, disbanding Minneapolis’s police department, is now probably going to happen. Without riots, it wouldn’t have.

Riots are, actually, one of the most effective ways to create change. Politely worded letters don’t work. Completely non-violent protest only works if it shuts things down. Voting doesn’t work if the political system is entrenched, because entrenched political systems know how to co-opt or marginalize actual radicals.

If you want something from powerful people, you have to show you have power of your own. If you don’t have enough power to at least scare them, to show them the limits of their power, why should they give you anything?

Americans are showing the rich and powerful the limits of their power; of what their violent lackeys can do, and the powerful are making concessions. (And they are just that–concessions. They wouldn’t have done these things without the riots. They didn’t want to do them.)

This is also a result of the weakness the US’s current elites; in-touch, wise elites would have given much more to the poor and middle class during the Covid-19 bailouts, instead of letting tens of millions lose their jobs and worry about their rent.

Elites thought Americans were completely whipped. They had reason to believe that, admittedly, but they overplayed their hand.

Always boil the frog slowly, smart evil elites know that.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Page 7 of 14

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén