Category: Power Page 9 of 14

This is the second collation of articles on why our world is what it is, and how we can change it. Some of these articles are old, as I don’t write as much as I used to about economics, mostly because the decision points for avoiding a completely lousy economy are now in the past. The last decision points were passed by when Barack Obama announced his economics team and refused to try and get rid of, or bypass, Bernanke to enforce decent policy on the Federal Reserve.

However, this economy was decades in the making, and if we do not understand how it happened we will only wind up in a good economy through accident, and, having obtained a good economy, will not be able to keep it. These articles aren’t exhaustive; a better list would include almost five centuries of economic history, at least in summary, and certainly deal with the 19th century and early 20th centuries.

I was heartened that hundreds of people read the articles linked in my compendium on ideology and character so I dare hope that you will, again, read these pieces. If you do, you will walk away vastly better informed than almost anyone you know, including most formal economists, about why the economy is as it is.

The Decline and Fall of Post-war Liberalism

Pundits today natter on and on about income inequality, but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always determined by how society distributes power. As power goes, so goes income–and wealth. The last period of broad-based equality was the “Liberal Period,” which started with the Great Depression. You can locate the end of that era at various points from 1968 to 1980, but 1980 was the point at which turning back became vastly difficult. This was the moment when a new political order was born; an order conceived to crush those who were willing and able to fight effectively for their share of income and money.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Why Elites Have Pushed “Free Trade”

Those who are middle-aged or beyond remember the relentless march of free trade agreements, the creation of the WTO, and the endless drumbeat of propaganda about how FREE trade was wonderful, inevitable, and going to make us all rich. It didn’t, and it was never intended to. Fully understanding why “free trade” has only enriched a few requires understanding the circumstances required for free trade to work, the incentives for free trade, and the power dynamics which make free trade perfect for elites who want to become rich (often by destroying the prosperity of their own countries). Free trade is about power, and power is about who gets how much.

The Isolation of Elites and the Madness of the Crowd

All societies change and face new challenges. What matters is how they deal with new circumstances. The US, in specific, and most of the developed world, in general, is in decline because of simple broken feedback loops. Put simply, ordinary people live in a world of propaganda and lies, while the rich and the powerful live in a bubble, isolated from the consequences their decisions have on the majority of the population, or on the future.

The Bailouts Caused the Lousy “Recovery”

This may be the hardest thing to explain to anyone with a connection to power or money: The bailouts are WHY the world has a lousy economy, not why it isn’t even worse. If people cannot understand why this is so, if they cannot understand that other options were, and are, available, other than making the people who destroyed the world economy even richer and more powerful, we will never see a good economy, ever again.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The Rapid Destruction of Countries

You may have noticed, you probably have noticed, that most countries are becoming basketcases faster and faster. Some are destroyed by war and revolution, others by forced austerity. However it happens, the end of anything resembling a good economy through austerity in places like Greece, the Ukraine, Italy, or Ireland, or through war, in places like Lybia and Syria, is sure. Understand this: What is done to those countries, is being done to yours if you live in the developed world, just at a slower pace–and one day, you, too, will be more valuable dead than alive.

Why Countries Can’t Resist Austerity

Many of you will realize that much of the answer to this is related to the article on free trade. Weakness, national weakness, is built into the world economic system, and done so deliberately. The austerity of the past six years is simply the deliberate impoverishment of ordinary people, for the profit of elites, on steroids. But it is worth examining, in detail, why countries can’t or won’t stop it, and what is required for a country to be able to do so.

Why Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter

We live in the remnants of a mass society, but we aren’t in one any more (though we think we are). In a mass-mobilization society with relatively evenly distributed wealth and income, and something approaching competitive markets, public opinion mattered. If it was not a King, well, it was at least a Duke. Today it matters only at the margins, on decisions where the elites do not have consensus. Understand this, and understand why, or all your efforts to resist will be for nothing.

The Golden Rule

Money, my friends, is Permission, as Stirling Newberry once explained to me. It is how we determine who gets to do what. He who can create money, rules. This is more subtle than it seems, so read and weep.

It’s Not How Much Money, It’s Who We Give It to and Why

We have almost no significant problems in the world today which we could either not have fixed had we acted soon enough, or that we could not fix or mitigate today, were we to act. We don’t act because we misallocate, on a scale which would put Pyramid-building Pharoahs to shame, our social efforts.

Higher Profits Produce a Worse Society

No one ever told you that, I’m sure. Read and learn.

The Fall of the USSR

The USSR fell in large part because of constant and radical misallocation of resources. This misallocation occurred because those running the economy did not receive accurate feedback. Despite the triumphal cries of the West and the managerial class who pretend to be capitalists, a version of this exact problem is at the root of our current decline, and it would serve us well to understand how and why the USSR fell.

What Privatization Does

Of all the ideological bugaboos of our current age, one of the strongest is the idea that private enterprise is always more efficient and better. It’s not, but that belief is a very profitable to our elites, and understanding how the engine of privatization works is essential to understanding both our current economic collapse and how the fakely-bright economies of the neoliberal era–especially the early neoliberal period of Thatcher and Reagan–were generated.

What Prosperity Is and Isn’t

It is, perhaps, odd to put this article so far down the list, but it’s wonky and important and not very dramatic. Simply enough, what we define as prosperity is not prosperity, which is why we are sick, fat, and unhappy with rates of depression and mental illness and chronic disease which dwarf those of our forbears despite having so much more stuff. Fix everything else, but if we insist on continuing to produce that which makes us sick and unhappy, what we have will not be what we need or want, nor will it be, truly, prosperity worth having.

The Four Principles of Prosperity

Prosperity, at its heart, is an ethical phenomenon, as much as it is anything else. Without the right ethics, the right spirit, it will not last, nor be widespread. If we want a lasting prosperity, which is actually good for us, we will start by reforming our public ethics.

How to Create a Good Internet Economy

The internet is wonderful, but despite all the cries of “Progress, progress!” it has mostly made a few people rich, created a prosperous class of software engineers who often lose their jobs in their 50s, and has simultaneously overseen the decline of the prosperity for most people in the developed world. It has not produced the prosperity we hoped it would. Here’s why and how to fix it.

Concluding Remarks

The above is so far from comprehensive as to make me cry, but it’s a start. I do hope that you will read it and come away with a far better idea of why the economy sucks for most people, and a clearer understanding of the fact that it is intended to suck, why it is intended to suck, and how the old, better economy was lost.

(Author’s Note: This was originally published October 6, 2014. I’m putting it back up top, as I have gained many new readers since then.)

Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

By Ian Welsh

On June 3, 2019

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It’s commonplace now to note that China is a surveillance state.

But most other countries–including the UK and the US–are on their way. Cameras proliferate everywhere, virtually everyone carries a phone which is tracked constantly (and 5G networks will be so precise they can tell which room of a building you are in), and audio surveillance is increasingly being added. (That much of this surveillance is private, rather than government, changes little.)

AI + various recognition algos (face, gait, etc…) and cheap long term storage means that, increasingly, it is possible to know where people were, when, and store that information for years. Cameras and phones and other devices which listen in, plus access to all chat, phone, email, and other messaging means we know what they were doing and saying.

1984 was nothing on this. Big Brother couldn’t store information (no video tape even) and someone had to actually be watching the camera and listening in when you did something The Powers That Be didn’t like. If no one was watching, you got away with it.

The endgame, as I’ve been pointing out for years, is a society in which where you are and what you’re doing, and have done is, always known, or at least knowable. And that information is known forever, so the moment someone with power wants to take you out, they can go back through your life in minute detail. If laws or norms change so that what was okay ten or 30 years ago isn’t okay now, well, they can get you on that.

Surveillance societies are sterile societies. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do all the time, and because we become what we do, it affects our personalities. It particularly affects our creativity, and is a large part of why Communist surveillance societies were less creative than the West, particularly as their police states ramped up.

Surveillance societies also just suck to live in: paranoia, fear, little freedom.

So why create them? I mean in one sense the answer is obvious: Surveillance is control, and powerful people always want small people under their thumb, and small people can be sold on arguments like, “This stops crime!” and “Oh, think of the children!”

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

But there are three specific reasons for this upsurge in the surveillance state beyond, “We can, so why not?”

The first is that elites have become very aware that modern military technology is mostly not in their favour. Iraqis fought the US to a standstill. The US military had to pay militias to let it leave. You don’t do that if you won. The Taliban is straight up winning in Afghanistan. The biggest and arguably the most expensive military in the world has lost to opponents who don’t have one percent of its budget. Israel lost to Hezbollah the last time it invaded Lebanon, and even lost the e-lint war.

The issue is that a big military like America’s can’t be defeated on the battlefield by rabble, but technologies of area denial (most notably IEDs) mean that large parts of any sizeable country can be made into no go zones. The state can’t rule them and neither can the militias really (because air power can be used to devastate them).

Meanwhile technologies like drones, and, I suspect, in the longer run, weaponized robots, are actually technologies that will be more useful to the weak than the strong. Bombers that cost a billion bucks and can only be made by huge firms or government organizations, and then require teams of specialists to run and maintain? Those are weapons of the strong.

But drones and weaponized robots and IEDs are or will be technologies that any competent mechanic/engineer will be able to make.

What is even scarier is that, as Bush and Obama made clear, drones are weapons of assassination. Like daggers and pistols in earlier eras, they make it possible to kill important people and are really hard to stop.

That will remain true as they disperse out to non-state actors, which is already happening.

They are also excellent weapons of sabotage. A few drones shut down Heathrow Airport, Britain’s most important airport, for days, without having to do anything beyond buzz about.

So, the technological soup to which we are coming makes assassination, sabotage, and area denial easy (as does cyber warfare). A single ransomware attack can shut down an entire bureaucracy, private or public.

The only way our elites can see to stop this is to know what everyone is doing all the time. Oh, there is one other way, but they are ideologically opposed to it.

The Rise of Inequality

The other way to stop people from sabotage, assassination, and insurgency is to make life good. People who are happy, expect the future to be better than the past, and have great social ties (love/friendship) don’t commit violence except when it is socially acceptable violence.

But this requires actually letting ordinary people have stuff: money and good futures. It means not treating them badly at work. It means sharing power (because there is no shared wealth without shared power over time). It also means, in an increasingly small world, actually giving developing country inhabitants decent lives–equality within and between societies.

If you are the richest rich in the history of the world, you sure don’t want to do that. Moreover, you are aware that you have so much, and that other people want it, and you are scared. Especially because you know serious disruptions to the social order will occur as climate change and ecological collapse worsen.

So, to keep your position, and save your lives when things go bad, you need a surveillance state. People have good reason to hate you, the smarter among you realize that, and know that only real, credible fear will stop them.

Remember, the surveillance state, combined with the technologies we’ve discussed, already means the state can easily kill and capture you. If they know where you are, who all your friends are, and everything you’ve done or do, it’s just a matter of visiting some violence on you, and they have plenty of violent capability. Finding you is the important part. The rest is easy.

A Grand Experiment in Cost

Traditional surveillance societies were expensive. The East German Stasi reputedly had one-third of its population spying on the other two-thirds. That’s ludicrous. It guts productivity, making the state poor. Combined with the creativity effects of surveillance societies, you will eventually lose to healthy, non-surveillance societies.

But what if you only had to pay a few percentage points of people to spy on the others, and, if necessary, kill or capture, the rest of the population. What if most of the work was done by AI, algos, and robots? Even better, this gets rid of the need to keep a large number of internal police and spies loyal, so you need a much smaller class of people to keep your surveillance state running.

But wait! It gets better! (Worse.) What if these new technologies mean that you don’t actually need peons? What if you can do the manufacturing, delivery, and service jobs all with combinations of AI and robots. Who needs workers? Just give the peons a guaranteed annual income large enough for them to buy your shitty goods and services, stick them in sub-par housing, and run the society mostly without them!

Oh sure, the same technology could be used to create a utopia (luxury-automated communism) but why do that? That would mean you wouldn’t be the richest, most powerful elite the world has ever known.

As members of the powerful elite, the problem of peons and minions revolting has always been the thorn in your bowl of cherries.

Finally, finally, technology offers a solution. A possibility of a permanent state where you never can, or will, lose your power.

Give it a little longer and make sure that you get access to the new gene-editing technologies (and the peons don’t), and you can even give yourself another permanent advantage by making yourself and your children actually, biologically superior to the hoi polloi.

The possibilities! The possibilities! If you can just hang on and get all of this into place, this could be the greatest age of aristocracy and autocracy the world has ever seen, and one that has no reason to ever end.

Ahhhhh.

It’s always good to be rich and powerful, but potentially this is the best era ever to be rich and powerful, with the best yet to come!

The Rise of the Strongman

By Ian Welsh

On February 7, 2019

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Who does this describe?

…authoritarian leaders around the world have refined a playbook for acquiring and consolidating power. The strategy goes something like this: appeal to nationalism, stoke fear and divide people into an “us” and a “them,” use that polarization to win an election (even if it’s just an internal party vote, as in China), and systematically undermine democratic rules and other procedural safeguards.

According to Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” piece, it describes the strongman — its #1 most influential thinker.

FP lists:

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, Xi Jinping’s China, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and even Donald Trump’s America”…

And that’s fine as far as it goes.

But who is dividing America, say, into “us and them?”

Is it just Trump. Or is it a Democratic leader calling a huge chunk of the population “the deplorables?” Whether you agreed or disagreed with Clinton, is this not an internal enemy?

What about the Democratic and “Resistance” strategy of demonizing Russia and Putin? Is this different in kind from China demonizing Japan and the West? (Perhaps it is, in that those countries really did despoil China, while Russia has never despoiled America.)

Is it so different from what is happening in Britain, with Brexit, or in much of Europe, especially Eastern Europe with regard to refugees?

I think Foreign Policy magazine is correct, understand. I just think that being members of America’s elite, they have trouble seeing and naming this tendency when it is being done by leaders or movements they identify with. Trump is outside the foreign policy establishment (he actually talks about withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan!) He is easy to criticize. But Trump has not been tangoing in the US alone and US politicians have a long history of using internal and external enemies, just like strongmen, to win internal elections.

Likewise, that US democratic elections have been systematically undermined (thru gerrymandering, voter suppression and vast lakes of money) is undeniable, as is the fact that the rule of law means little in the United States after Obama’s Department of Justice immunized virtually every senior financial executive in the country.

There is a general global trend to authoritarianism. In the US it did not start with Trump, and it is already in the acute stage. It entered the acute stage not in 2016, but on September 14th 2001, with the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), when the US Senate decided to give away its war-making authority to the Presidency. (And with the Patriot Act, when the US decided to formally become a soft police state.)

It is seen in austerity, where government functions have been systematically weakened so that tax cuts and privatization can be given to the rich.

It is abetted by the destruction and hobbling of the media. It is true that Turkey’s Erdogan is terrible when it comes to jailing the media; that China’s media is censored, and so on.

But the US media is being eviscerated by market forces. Journalists are laid off in waves. What oversight they offered (generally pitiful, as the run up to the Iraq war showed, with virtually all media onside and critics deliberately silenced, fired and demoted) is withering on the vine.

The trend away from meaningful democracy, whatever forms are maintained, is not limited to a few bad apples and one rogue President, Trump. It is, instead, something with deep roots in the hegemonic power of the age, America.

It will continue so long as the general population are considered sheep. As long as the needs of the many are subordinate to the needs of the few, and as long as large groups of the many are impoverished, they will remain demagogue bait and willing to support authoritarians.

Fear, as FDR understood, is at the heart of all authoritarianism.

People are scared. They have good reason to be scared, because their leaders despise them and want to hurt them. And whenever they find someone they think is strong and on their side, they will flock to that person. They will usually be wrong to do so, but abused people usually make bad decisions.

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Rising and Falling

By Mandos

On December 21, 2018

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** MANDOS POST **

In several recent threads on this blog, we discussed (i.e., argued passionately about) the current goings on in Europe (Brexit, Greece, Italy, etc.) as signs of the impending decay and demise of the European project. I used to share this view to some extent, because I too am sometimes in the grip of a moral fallacy that haunts left-wing discourse: that things that are good, work, and things that aren’t good, don’t work. I actually think that in the bigger picture, this is true, but only in the largest temporal and spatial frames. In the medium term, lots of things that are good, are not stable enough in context to work (as in, be sustained for more than a short period of time), and lots of things that are not good, are nevertheless stable enough to last decades and even centuries.

Predicting whether, when, and how some particular set of events will cause large institutions to rise or fall cannot be done lightly or easily, and such predictions, when done in the moment, are more likely wrong than right. You should expect unexpected things to occur; there are too many variables. Some people are better at it than others, but you should take even the best track records with a grain of salt. Even two to three years ago, I would have predicted that the build-up of “bad karma” in the European system would have caused the EU to break apart by now. Even a few months ago, the rise of Euroskeptic populists in some countries suggested to me that the situation is increasingly desperate for European unity. However, over that time, and somewhat unexpectedly to me I must admit, it appears that some sort of inflection point has been reached.

The EU, as it stands now, was designed by a set of people that had different attitudes and goals over time. Therefore, it is a mixed bag, when it comes to good, not good, works, doesn’t work. A good chunk of its institutions were designed at around the peak of the neoliberal revolt against state management of the economy. In the EU, this took its expression in an approach to the economy that militated against state attempts to protect or bolster industrial employment in both public and private sectors. Because Europe does not suffer so much from the “moralized” version of libertarianism from which the US suffers (essentially, that your bank account is a virtual extension of your physical body), there is a stronger commercial regulatory apparatus developed even in the neoliberal era than what other developed “capitalist” countries tend to have. The neoliberal bits, especially the most recent ones like the Eurozone, have increasingly showed themselves to be not good and not working.

But this cannot be taken out of the context of the whole. It’s increasingly clear to me that Europe is still not that far off from the overall intended trajectory of the two generations of designers of European convergence. It is absolutely true that those who built the system had, for a number of different reasons, a deep suspicion of the public and popular sovereignty, even while they were also against outright dictatorship. I generally consider this to be overall not good and probably won’t work in the long run. (But I must note that the designers of the EU also recognized that they might need to legitimize popular sovereignty at a European level and built in provisions for systems to implement it.) However, they believed both in the necessity of European unity (in the modern world, a disunited Europe is structurally, deeply vulnerable), and the difficulty in getting a multilingual, multicultural subcontinent of fallen empires to accept the necessity of unification, so they constructed a system of what are effectively one-way traps to ensure that the cost of departure is always greater than the cost of endurance, even when the system in some matters doesn’t work. The goal is therefore for this endurance to eventually result in a crisis whose only positive-sum resolution is the Europeanization of authority.

With Italy’s effective capitulation to the Commission, and yes, with Greece’s previous compliance, and yes again, with a Brexit that is already providing the necessary object lessons, it appears that the crisis-and-trap strategy is still operating, or rather, it cannot be said to have failed at this point in time. That is, it remains that case that the strategy of making a series of systems that don’t work is working.

Considering that this game of deliberate historical manipulation has real human costs and indeed a known death toll in itself, one may well choose to designate it as not good. But, the evidence is that it still works.

So what would the decline of the European project actually look like? Well, there are, of course, phenomena that are hard to predict directly, like, sudden environmental cataclysms. If I were forced to make a prediction, however, the political coming-apart would probably have to look like one of the following options:

A situation comes to pass where it is immediately more materially beneficial to leave than to stay (this has not yet happened).
One or more countries decide to leave a major institution/treaty despite the costs, and they do economically better in the relatively short run after departure. (Brexit under the Tories is not likely to be an example of this.)
A consensus develops in several countries that long-term economic suffering is more desirable than staying in the EU, even if that suffering is greater than what they might have experienced inside the EU, and they sustain this consensus even after feeling that suffering.

All of this may lead you to consider projects like the European unification, designed explicitly around creating consequences that override popular will, to be not good. I have given you at least three possibilities for it to not work. So I would say, as before, that it is a mixed bag.

Political theodicy is dead. Long live political theodicy.

The Rule of Alienation and Stability

By Ian Welsh

On December 16, 2018

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One of my favourite sights is people complaining that marginalized people don’t understand that their support for Bad Politician-X results in fucking themselves.

“Sure,” runs the line, “their lives suck now. But they’ll suck even worse if this guy gets into power.”

This is often (but not always) true. It is also irrelevant.

The rule is simple: Alienated people are always targets for alternative political movements. Sometimes those movements are good, sometimes bad. But if you don’t want this to happen, your society has to give alienated people genuine expectations of a better future when they play within the system.

When a huge number of people, a plurality, feel that they have little hope for a better future, and a realistic expectation for a worse future, they are willing to roll the dice, even if the odds are bad. After all, they already know that the current world is shitty and the future is worse.

It does not matter if this seems irrational on cost/benefit scales; what matters is the chance, rather than what they see as a certainty.

Now, understand always, that sometimes what is offered IS better. FDR was better. So was Huey Long. Corbyn in Britain will be better than the status quo. (This is why the voting gap for youngsters disappeared for him. Young people vote when they are offered what they need.)

Sometimes it is worse, if not in the short run, then in the long run. Or, if not for you, then for other people in your society (see Hitler and Mussolini for cases of both).

People who love the status quo, who want it to continue, have to make it work for most people. If their policies, no matter how reasonable they seem to the beneficiaries of the current system, whatever it is (Ancien Regime France, for example) plunge a plurality into despair, that plurality will always be ripe for turning on the system.

It really is that simple? Love your system? Okay. Make it work for almost everyone. In excess of 90 percent. Not because you are moral or ethical, most of you probably aren’t, but out of sheer self-interest.

If you don’t, don’t whine when those you left behind decide to take almost any chance to change things.

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Of Course Ted Cruz Should Be Publicly Ostracized

By Ian Welsh

On September 25, 2018

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So, Ted Cruz and his family were surrounded in a Washington, DC restaurant and left.

Much hand wringing ensues about civility.

It’s bullshit.

If you could have only one rule for creating a good society it would be the following:

Elites must experience the consequences of their behaviour.

The simplest reason the US is a shitshow and getting worse is that, for important people, it’s been getting better since about 1980, while it’s been getting worse for everyone else since about that time.

Because it only gets better for people who matter, they keep doing more of what they are doing.

Why wouldn’t they?

Forcing people who make life worse for everyone else to at least suffer public approbation is a baby step in the right direction.

Of course, it’s not enough, and people are morons. Barack Obama made life worse for most Americans in many, many ways and he wouldn’t be shamed. (But then, he did make New York bankers’ lives better….)

Shame people who make your lives worse. When you riot, don’t riot in your neighborhood, go to theirs, then riot. And so on.

People like Cruz and Obama are responsible for a ton of deaths. Generally incremental deaths, deaths due to policies which impoverish and immiserate people, but deaths nonetheless. They are responsible for even more suffering.

Being unable to eat a meal at a restaurant is pretty minor in comparison. It’s not enough.

But don’t think public shaming like this does nothing. People forget that Obama was anti-gay marriage at first. He changed his mind because gay activists got in his face and the faces of his family. They crashed public fundraisers, they made a fuss, they made his life, and the life of people he cared, about unpleasant. They backed it up with a donor strike.

And they won.

Obama caved and became pro-gay marriage, and fools and idiots pretend he always was. But he changed only because of personal and political considerations. Obama is no more moral than most politicians; he does what serves him best.

If you want politicians and rich people to do what you want, apply pressure. Make them hurt. They don’t respond to appeals to their better nature because, even if they had one, it doesn’t apply to ordinary people because they don’t identify with ordinary people. Politicians understand that, in most cases, their personal interests are directly opposed to the interests of ordinary people.

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.

The Destruction of Latin America’s Left and Lessons for Everyone

By Ian Welsh

On June 10, 2018

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I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and this is a good place to start:

The so-called marea rosa, or ‘pink tide’, of allied leftist governments which held sway across Latin America in previous years is being rolled back. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was removed from power in a right-wing coup, co-conspirators of which have now managed to imprison the current presidential frontrunner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno has stabbed his former leader Rafael Correa in the back by barring him from seeking re-election, while seemingly purging his cabinet of remaining Correa loyalists and beginning the process of allowing the US military back into the country.

Meanwhile in Argentina, the former President is also under criminal investigation.

This all seems, well, “they did bad things, they should be prosecuted,” but somehow other politicians, often clearly more corrupt, aren’t prosecuted. The prosecution of Lula, in particular, was clearly a way to stay in power, since all polls show he would have won the election.

The norms are breaking down in many nations, including the United States. What is done to win is illegitimate, as with Republican vote manipulation and the 2000 Supreme court decision; what is done afterwards to opponents is also often illegitimate, and if the wrong person wins, they are gone after legally.

Americans will immediately think of the efforts to get Trump, and some will assume it is in the same vein. To some extent it seems to be, in others it isn’t (again, he’s clearly in violation of Emoluments.) But it didn’t start with Trump, it started with Clinton, who had clearly done nothing that affected him as President. (That said, he and Newt Gingrich had an agreement in place to gut Social Security and Medicare, which impeachment sidetracked, so I’m not crying too much. Clinton was a right-winger in every important way.)

Corruption is bad, and should be purged, but when I see corruption investigations which are clearly aimed at one side and not both (as with Xi’s anti-corruption drive in China, which was overall good but somehow took out the other major power blocs in China) I suspect that it isn’t primarily about corruption.

And in Brazil, where most seem to agree that those attacking Dilma were, in fact, more corrupt than her, it’s more than hmmm.

This is an ugly game. In Latin America it is bi-partisan with respect to the US. Having Latin America be left-wing was something neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted.

Meanwhile Argentina is inking an agreement with the IMF for 50 billion in exchange for structural adjustments and the Ecuadoran President is clearly moving towards forcing Assange out of Ecuador’s London embassy. (Yes, yes, you may hate Assange for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, but he is not being targeted because he is not a nice man, but because both Democrats and Republicans, on record, want to punish him various leaks, especially Collateral Murder.)

This is a very dirty game, and left-wingers keep treating it as if it is not; as if there are rules, and both sides play by them. Increasingly, in the US that is not the case, and it is clearly not the case many other places. If your enemies win, they will destroy you by any means. You should think long and hard about what you will do to them if you get into power, because they know what they will do to you.

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The Bleak View of the World’s Problems (Or: They’re All Going to Have to Die)

By Ian Welsh

On March 16, 2018

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

So then, the simplest gloss of humanity’s problems is that the world’s problem is humans.

We have clear threats to our existence, threats which, at the least, will credibly kill hundreds of millions to billions of people. We have known about these problems for a long time (recently, a friend told me about learning the science of climate change in 70s high school) and we have done nothing.

Well, not nothing…in most respects, we made it worse. When we did do something, we knew did what we were doing was not enough.

This is a human problem, caused by humans. It is simple to say “Well, the more powerful bear more responsibility,” and this is true, but as a whole, these are the leaders humanity has selected (this doesn’t imply most people want them).

As a race, we have proven incapable of managing the collective action problem and the leadership problem.

This is true despite what appear to be our great success: We can take massive actions, but we cannot control our actions for the common good.

Common good does occur at times; sometimes it is even intended, but we repeatedly drive ourselves off cliffs.

WWII being the easily predicted consequence of WWI is a good example. But take another example: the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia. Understand that from the invention of agriculture, to today, about 10K years, Mesopotamia was probably the most advanced region in the world. Only Egypt and India were competitors.

Mesopotomia declined because they kept chopping down trees and draining swamps, and eventually turned their land into a desert or near-desert.

They had to know they were doing it, it was obvious. But they kept doing it.

We simply have never been good at collective action with a time-span beyond a generation. Sometimes we can act for three generations. And that, essentially, is it. And those periods during which we manage to act for three generations are rare, and come out of successfully handled crises, like the Great Depression and World War II. They last as long as the generations which experienced and understood the causes of the crisis exist, and then as long as the momentum of whatever works they created last.

So the New Deal generation and the post-war liberals created institutions and infrastructure, which despite their problems, worked. When these entities started to fail in the 70s, they did not collapse and they continue to stand, buttressing against the worst. As each component has been destroyed, a crisis has ensued; the most recent example being the financial crisis, which was the result of the removal of laws that control the financial industry, put in place after the Crash of ’29 (the removal of these laws was signed by Bill Clinton).

The New Deal generation over-built: They created bridges and roads meant to last a long time. They laid down more infrastructure than needed. But they didn’t, and couldn’t, build forever-infrastructure.

Their great work has concealed the nature of the decline, the nature of the ongoing collapse.

But the accounts of work they put away is mostly gone, in many cases in deficit.

Those who replaced them, having never survived a real crisis by pulling together, do not know how to do so. They cannot run a society for the common good, nor a society for the future.

And so billions will die and there is a great die-off of non-human species.

The common good and future generations matter because they are a way of making sure that what economists call negative externalities don’t get out of control. When we think only of ourselves and a few people we care about, rather than thinking about everyone and everyone’s grandchildren, we don’t properly manage society’s real wealth: people, knowledge, and the environment.

And we haven’t.

And the problem is this keeps happening. Over and over again.

We have too much power, and we cannot control it, because as a species we cannot control ourselves.

We claim, at times, to be creatures of reason, but not only are we driven by short-sighted, selfish desires, even when we use reason, we use it as a slave to those selfish desires.

And so the only solution to our problems is going to be a lot of death. It is nature’s solution, “you have exceeded carrying capacity, now you will die.”

It is too late to stop a lot of it. But mitigation requires different leadership than we have now. That leadership must be replaced, and it must be replaced by whatever means necessary.

Meanwhile, we need to understand that we, the masses, are complicit. The leaders are worse, of course, but they are the leaders which have arisen from humanity. They are not separate, they are a symptom of our pathologies.

We must become different people, different humans, if this is to end. That is, perhaps, possible, since we do most of our adaptation socially.

It’s that or die, and possibly wiped out.

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.

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

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The Bleak View of the World’s Problems (Or: They’re All Going to Have to Die)