Things Are Different Now

Always good to hear from Sterling, whose talent for incisiveness is “sterling.”

Welcome back Stirling!!!

Rereading the death of the liberal class by chris hedges. I see it in how much time is spent by the Rachel Maddows of the world getting the hate machine revved up against the conservatives. Though I suppose that, like always, I’m stuck trying to psychoanalyze another elite – is she forced spending half her time talking about Chris Christie’s misogyny instead of, say, the real situation in the Ukraine, just b/c it’s the only driver of ratings? Or is it a conscious decision?

But then it’s all moot, b/c it’s not like MSNBC is going to ever be a fount of truly intelligent discourse – they own too many weapons companies. Part of the plan. And it’s tough when pointing out the faults is a great, emotionally engaging way to teach values such as treating women as people, which isn’t necessarily as obvious as it should be in our world.

But it’s certainly difficult in this surveillance state age to find candidates willing to go the distance in democratic primaries who aren’t tainted in some way by the normal filters of the system. Hedges’ book opens w/ a 25 year old Tea Party nut, former marine, single father, who’s getting support to run against his not GOP enough congressperson. As long as you spout their brand of nonsense, the Tea Party borg, trained by Limbaugh + Luntz to have only the 1 minute hate in their heads, will take anyone. Jan Breuer can be as nuts as she likes, as long as she hates labor and inclusive politics. And the convenience of their system of always 1-upping each other is that as soon as 1 of them, like her, bows ever so slightly to the realities of governance, they are replaced w/ a true scotsman, and blamed fer the troubles caused by their policies.

Liberal/progressive, w/e ya call it, we’re trained to be as polite and therefore as unpersuasive as possible, which sucks when we’re the ones w/ the answers. Alan Grayson will never give any keynote speech, and like Hedges says, the corporate oligarchs have veal penned the ‘respectable’ liberal (in name only) class enough so that they use him in their establishment of Overton Windows that turn out to suck and not let us solve anything. He cites as the original sin the fascist types in the U.S., from the 30s on, committing to cut out the communist types, leaving us with a very corporate tilted acceptable public discourse matrix, and so the establishment of anti-commie, vietnam hawkish liberals who are with us today, and still never right about anything.

As to yr choice between human or not, that’s the real fear, isn’t it? That these sociopathic vampires, trained by their systems to consider themselves the smartest, most meritocratic elites ever to have lived, hire enough creatives to create a fully automated surveillance state, complete w/ Terminator robots that will roomba up the dissidents. And if their robots aren’t ready yet, they have the ole standby, the brownshirts whose main goal in political discourse is to stomp any pointy headed liberal they see, then worry about feeding their families. And thus the circle is complete.

Anyway, happy to see you back again! And I liked pondering that 11 dimensional piece on yr blog. Still haven’t quite cracked it, but it made me want to get back into popular science to see if there’s a Neil Degrasse Tyson stepping stone onto it.

It’s simple crowding, outgrowing the supporting resources, and so turning on each other.

The same reason applies to the rich turning on each other. As the amount of money grows, with $85 billion being printed every month, the number of rich increases and the degree to which wealth is an elite status diminishes. And so the wealthy turn on each other, trying to whittle down the ranks to reestablish their own elitness.

@ zot23
April 1, 2014
Even enablers get it sooner or later…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No, they don’t…

The totalitarian corporate takeover of governments and the enforced access to money and resources is now complete in NA and Europe (is Diane Feinstein still useful?). It is enabled by corporate media propaganda ever eschewing the security threat of some evil ‘other’ be it national or foreign. It owns education to dumb down the population and spit out cogs which have no capability of critical thought. It puts most people on survival footing through precarious jobs and poverty wages (also known as austerity). Put it together and you have a population too busy surviving to organize even if they happen to see through the veil of propaganda.
John McMurtry has a good analysis in his ‘The Cancer of Capitalism’.
The Russian and Chinese governments with their history of state run economies, I don’t think ever gave up full power to the ‘market forces’ although they have left the door open to persuasion through corruption and bribery. The lack of unfettered access to resources and money makes these governments enemies of the corporate elite.
The corporations march continues.

So glad to see you posting again, Stirling! Best wishes for your continued recovery.

My main takeaway from Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ was similar to this – that our history has been one largely of the elites playing various demographic slices of the non-elites off against one another. When we have made progress, it has been when the non-elites set aside these artificial divisions and focus their ire at the elites (often at great personal risk). Usually this only happens after the elites over-reach in some way.

We’re going through that phase again, now. We aren’t in danger of a new gilded age, we are in one. We aren’t in danger of losing our democracy, we have lost it in any reasonable sense already. Ian said, during the run-up to the passage of the ACA (and I am going to grossly paraphrase here), “If America can’t get health care right, then it is effectively ungovernable.”

We didn’t get it right, and it was a bit of a watershed for me. The mental anguish I felt about the lost opportunity the ACA represented had me pretty depressed. But realizing that the die was cast and that we were past the prevention phase, actually helped ease a lot of that tension. I suppose it’s fatalistic, but I believe now that we just have to go through a terrible readjustment phase. Many people will suffer. Lives will be blighted. Many of the neo-aristocrats will win the death-bet before it’s all through.

Same thing with climate change. I lived in Seattle for ten years last decade and went to a lot of climate talks at the UW (they have a good department). Without fail the presenters were always much more concerned in an informal discussion than during their presentations. Everyone knew that a huge amount of heating had been baked into the cake. We won’t be living with climate change – we already ARE. We will be living with the side effects of our attempts to geo-engineer the problem…

Great to see you back, and as perceptive as ever.
The oligarchy do not value humanity and thereby forfeit their own humanity. One day that attitude will destroy them. Unfortunately, the longer it takes, the worse for the rest of the world.

For most of human rates, real rates of return (income) were both low and unreliable. For that reason, no one bothered to invest much in anything except in weapons and men to with them (read: means to grab other people’s assets) and guard the pillage (see: aforementioned armies), and the class and commodities infrastructure to keep said army fed, horsed, armed and freed up from grunt work (farming, common labor) to train on how to be better grunts.

For a few centuries in the Western experience we had increasing real returns and those returns while cyclical were reliable over the long run. There was more, much more income as the assets of the world were captured and monetized and quite engaged in accelerating the capture and monetiziation of more. Take assets off the balance sheet. Turn them into income – some for the armed warlords, sorry, nation-state governments – some for the owners of that commercial infrastructure that kept the militaries humming along in planes, train and armored fighting vehicles, on the roads that carried them, burning the fuel that powered them, on to capture more of other people’s planes, trains, automobiles, roads and fuel….

And this all worked so famously that eventually someone realized that, you know, we could actually DO BETTER if we just took out the unnecessary step of subsidized pillage and just conducted trade relations.

Then someone realized something else: Yeah, but if we do that, the riffraff will be relatively better off and that means they won’t be quite as easy to dominate when we need to ask them to sacrifice more of what little they have, including their cute little lives, when it seems good to us to ask yet again. In point of fact, they might up and get mad and replace our regime – then where would we be? Horrors!

You are correct! Exclaims another. They might… the might even stop being riffraff. They might become some sort of powerful permanent middle class, too numerous to elevate without diluting our power and privileges.

Dear God! The hue and cry begins. You’re talking about SOCIALISM! What are we to do?

Easy, my good friends: We will quash this middle class abomination before it gets these strange notions of popular franchise and representative governance out the door!

That, of course, didn’t quite happen. And in many developed countries you saw the rise of varying flavors of socialism. Yet in no state, anywhere so-called First or Second World by the old parlance, did we see anything even faintly resembling the super-prosperous egalitarianism popularized in more than a few 1960s era science fiction serials (like, say, Star Trek). Nope, not even close.

Regardless, it was better than the distant past and the innumerable centuries of life in low-return, high-volatility economics where the only sure wealth was in the means to pillage the little that others had and safekeep the spoil in turn. And the most common form of pillage was top-down, versus one’s own subjects.

We’ve been cruising back to low real returns since the late 1970s; I could speculate on the many surface drivers but the primary one is we are running out of Earth to monetize – specifically, our current technological limits to turns unrealized planetary assets into cash without wrecking more than we take out. Framed like that, we’ve actually been surpassing that threshold for centuries … it’s only now that the overdue notices are coming in, in the form of ecological impacts, storm and chaotic climate, reduced farm yields, loss of species that (see: bees) we really don’t want to drive into extinction unless we plan on joining them… ah, I could go on.

But consider the premise: the world saw so many improvements at the microeconomic level over the past few centuries. This is true in aggregate from richest to poorest. It is of course not true in large swathes of those segments of the time-series population of humanity. Nor is it true for the landscapes we turned into moonscapes, or for the many cultures and species wiped out in the emergent Holocene Holocaust, a hollowing out of the biosphere that even in the median forecasts could match the Permian Great Dying within a few thousand years.

That’s a world of less than zero real returns. That’s a future full of scrambling to grab what’s left, to grab what others have, to buy a precious few more centuries, or decades, or years, or (if it’s water in a thirsty land) days to live and pillage again.

That’s a headlong flight to the world of the Road Warrior franchise. That’s the Zombie Civilization full of walking dead, only they will be sentient, they will be quick, well-armed and the deadliest creatures ever seen in Earth’s five billion-plus history: Human beings.

Many see in the current troubles a world of states being supplanted rapidly by a world of corporations. That is quite short sighted; corporations require sustained real returns to thrive. They will die just as swiftly as the state-based civilization they openly seek to sweep out of the way, if the world falls apart.

Or…maybe we should all contemplate why (a) none of this is inevitable and (b) maybe we out to regroup and not go headlong on the return path to pre-modern brigandage, because there’s no percentage in that for anyone, the so-called well to do most of all.

Great to see you have recovered enough to post again. Best wishes for continued improvement, but it doesn’t look like you took much of a hit to your incisiveness.