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

Month: September 2014

Looks like Scottish Independence is a “No”

The calls are coming in.

Assuming they are correct, I think this vote is a mistake, and I note that having been given a clean vote to leave and a chance to live their own values, but having given in to fear; for me, at least, Scottish complaints about privatization of the NHS and other cuts to the social state will now ring rather hollow.

However, as with Greece voting to have its economy destroyed by refusing to take a chance on Syriza, people are voting their fear and for the status quo.  Older folks seem to want to just hang on, and are unwilling to take chances for a better future and they can’t really believe that their own elites are intent on impoverishing them, and, effectively, in many cases, killing them. (Because that’s what deliberate austerity policies do.)

The Great Complacency will come to and end; but people aren’t going to like how that happens.  Oh well.


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Scotland, England and Hegemonic States

When you’re on your way up, everyone wants to join or be your friend.  When you’re on your way down, well, it’s the opposite.

Scotland, with free education and a belief in social welfare that England has lost, is on the edge of voting to leave in a referendum vote. It probably doesn’t hurt that they stand to gain a lot of money from North Sea oil, but the bottom line is “why stay with England?”

The reasons offered by England are essentially “on your own, you’ll be screwed”, with an ugly undertone of “we’ll make sure of it.”  There have been some efforts to offer more money and more independence within the UK framework so they can maintain social spending, but are those offers believable from Cameron, or from Millibrand, who has said that he won’t undo most of the austerity and destruction of social policies (including piecemeal NHS privatization) under the Conservate/Lib-Dem government.

Even if they are, it isn’t credible that some future PM, and by future we mean “less than a decade” will decide that Westminster needs the money more than Scotland.

We see in Spain, the Catalonians are trying to leave as well, with as many as 2 million on the streets.

This is simple enough: under an elite consensus of austerity, why stay?

The best argument for not breaking up the United Kingdom is that local elites won’t really be better: they still want to be part of the EU, they’ll still get on the austerity train, and if they don’t, the various threats by England and other elites will, in fact, materialize, and Scotland will be destroyed so it can’t afford to give benefits to its citizens.  After all, if Scotland leaves, who’s next?

The West, with a few exceptions like Norway and Finland (even Sweden is slipping) just doesn’t offer that bright shiny future to its residents any more. There is no real narrative of “this is just going to keep getting better”. To be sure, you may get a smartphone, but it’s used to tie you to your job 24/7 and spy on you, and your job is shittier than the one your parents had, which was shittier than the one your grandparents had, at least if you’re young.

There’s still a bit of narrative power left in Europe, as we can see by how some Ukrainians so desperately want to join, thinking they’re going to get the deal Poland got. (You’re not, you’re going to be destroyed by the IMF and Europe, with the full collusion of your own oligarchs, who are what you need to deal with first.)  But there isn’t much.  The WTO can’t get new rounds through, and the new, truly terrible bilateral deals which are going through are vastly unpopular, and designed to reduce the bargaining power of workers so that even more money flows to elites.

And so the decline in legitimacy of the West will continue: the narratives are broken because the reality is broken.  Not everyone has got the message yet, and there are still many countries even worse off, but the West, for over 90% of its population, is in decline.

Devolution will only work if the people who devolve don’t assume it’s a solution by itself and stay right on top of their local politicians. Otherwise those pols will turn around and betray them as well.  If those pols don’t betray, assume international elites will want any new counter-examples to the inevitability of austerity crushed, and will make sincere efforts to do so.

Scots who think they can devolve and stay on the British pound are, thus, making a mistake.  Likewise it is unclear to me that they should stay in the EU, after how the EU has treated the PIIGS.  There is no “us” in the EU, only elites with interests: if they perceive it is in their interest for Scotland to prosper (they might, if it can be sold as a poke in England’s eye), then they will. If not, they will have no hesitation in crushing Scotland’s economy.

Best of luck to the Scot… and to the Catalonians.  The West has failed, and must be reborn.  Let us hope independence for smaller states is part of that rebirth.


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Obama’s Speech on War with the Islamic State

Let’s just quickly point out the obvious: air power only works if you have effective ground troops backing it up, or your enemy is easily dissuaded from war by losses of infrastructure. Otherwise it wrecks great destruction, and does little more.

To put it simply, this strategy will certainly help those fighting the IS, but it won’t make that big a difference, and it isn’t new, it’s what the US has been doing for some time.  Failure to coordinate with Syria is a mistake, and the only people in the region who have significant numbers of troops capable of defeating the IS are Iran and Hezbollah.  Hezbollah is unlikely to move large numbers of troops into Syria out of fear of Israel attacking them, and there is no assurance Obama can give them of that not happening, because America answers to Israel, not Israel to America.

Meanwhile the US is still giving arms to so-called moderates like the FSA, which wind up in the hands of ISIL.  The Peshmerga have proved largely incapable, though they are more willing to fight than the pathetic Iraqi army, and the IS is filling up with ex-Baathists: very capable soldiers.

The alliance is also laughable: Turkey has been funneling weapons to the Syrian opposition for some time and Saudi Arabia is the spiritual home of the form of Wahhabism the IS believes in.  That said, I do believe that the Saudi royal family is soiling themselves over the IS, because their ideology requires them to overthrow the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia and conquer Mecca as part of their caliphate.  The Saudi royal family deserves nothing more, this is an exact result of their pushing Wahabbism as the ideology of Jihad for decades.

And so it goes.  Obama hasn’t managed to fight a war yet that didn’t destabilize multiple countries.  I wouldn’t expect this to be any different.


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On Truth and Burning Bridges

Over the last few years, I burned a lot of bridges: first on private e-mail lists and second on twitter (and a little bit with unwelcome posts here.)

After Obama got into office and made it clear that he was going to ramp up drones (which I knew and could not publish); and that he was going to drive the West into permanent depression (which I knew and wrote repeatedly); and my compatriots, by and large, fell to their knees and lauded him, even in places which later turned on him, I became, not angry, but enraged.

There were three camps on this:

1) Those who knew Obama was going to be a disaster and would not say it, because he was popular and speaking against a popular president who had just bought the Netroots and who most netroots citizens believed in, seemed like a way to lose readership or followers.

2) Those who believed that Obama was the Panglossian choice: this is the best we can get, the best of all possible worlds.  That didn’t mean good, that meant bad, but better than terrible, so suck it up.  Billmon falls into this camp on economic policy (the bailouts were the only politically possible policy and this is the best of all actually possible worlds), and I had a huge blowout with him last year about on twitter.  He’s brilliant, but…

3) Those who believed and many of whom still believe that Obama was just swell; FDR reborn, who would (and has) accomplished more than FDR every did!

We all have our own truths and determining truth is a problem. I thought then that Obama might well be a one term president, and was wrong.  But on the economics I was exactly right; and on foreign policy I was generally right: I knew that foreign policy was going to be a fiasco when he put Hilary Clinton in charge, because the one major area Hilary was to his right on was foreign policy.  (Plus the whole drone thing.  The only major candidate to say he didn’t believe in the war on Terror was Edwards, but when the unions decided not to back him (largely from gutlessness, in my opinion) he was done.)

I also predicted, following Stirling Newberry, that on civil liberties and constitutional issues he would institutionalize Bush.  He was not the anti-Bush people imagined, but Bush’s heir, despite being a Democrat.

I got into blogging to, as the terrible cliche goes, change the world. I did not get into blogging to be a courtier to power, kissing the feet of those in power when I knew they were doing or going to do terrible things.

Add to this significant undiagnosed health problems, and I spent years angry.

I’m not someone who thinks that anger is always bad: often it gets people up off their asses.  In the same way that hating your job means you should change jobs, and being unhappy may be a sign that something is wrong with your situation not with you, and you shouldn’t self medicate (you cannot explain the massive increase in depression and many other mental illnesses over the past century using individual factors, it is clearly a social problem, with social causes).

And so, for years, I cut people dead, and cut myself off from much of my old network (though certainly not all.)  I look back now, calmer, and wonder “were these fights I needed to engage in?”  I think—probably not, and yet, and yet: we lost and too many people just wouldn’t admit and made excuses for terrible policy.

We got a president who is worse on civil liberties than George Bush, who is still destroying countries, whose policies in combination with the Fed have lead to more than 100% of all gains going to the top 10% (and really about the top 3%); with a decrease in wealth and income for the majority of Americans and a ton of Europeans.

Obama may have given Americans a shitty version of universal health care (sort of), but in virtually every other way he is an unmitigated disaster.

And it was obvious way back, or it should have been.  And people didn’t say who knew it; or didn’t know who should have because, let us be frank, they wanted the first African American president, no matter what, even if he was a right authoritarian and they wanted to live in a fantasy land where just electing a Democrat, any Democrat would fix things.

The simple truth is that the baby boomers are done.  Their positive legacy is the improvement of women’s rights and gay rights (African American rights were won by the Silent and the GI generations.)  Their negative legacy is an erosion of every other type of civil liberties that matters, right back to the Magna Carta; the vast erosion of America’s real economic power; the end of American egalitarianism and huge numbers of needless wars and deaths that have made America hated in large parts of the world.

As usual, some of my readers will object to this broad brush, but take it another way: old and middle aged people (Gen Xers too, a noxious generation politically); have had their days at bat, and those of us on the left have failed and failed and failed.

So it’s going to be another generation’s job to fix the huge mess that has been created: politically, economically and environmentally.   That doesn’t mean there’s no job for older folks: but the young people will choose which older folks to learn from, follow and emulate.  The job of those of us who are older, who lost, is to prepare the ground for the next war; the next battles.

If we do so, maybe we can keep the death toll from what is coming as low as a billion people.

Maybe.

So be it.


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Rumors of the Ukrainian Rebels demise

were exaggerated.  Or rather, the information in the Western press was essentially propaganda.

I think it’s worth acknowledging that I swallowed it, only to be corrected by a number of readers.  The Ukrainian rebels were tougher than I expected, Russian support seems to have been more significant and the Ukrainian military was simply not up to the task.  They couldn’t win the street fighting.

This means that Russia still has a strong negotiating position with regards to Ukraine’s future: their preferred option, of course, is federalization and forbidding NATO expansion into the Ukraine.

Meanwhile we must continue to keep an eye on sanctions.  The risk here is real sanctions being imposed on Russia, Russia retaliating with a gas shut off and an economic collapse in Europe.  Note that the key player here is actually China, who can easily keep Russia afloat if they choose to (China is printing far more money than the Fed was at the height of its unconventional monetary policy.)  The West keeps assuming it is the only game, and that it controls the money spigots: shut them off and they can crush anyone.  That is no longer true.  The question will be “what does China want to keep Russia afloat, or alternately, from the West, to cut them off.”

In my opinion, while China and Russia have some differing interests, those pale compared to their need for each as allies against the West.  The American Foreign Affairs and security establishment has been clear that they want to pivot against China, whom they see (correctly) as the largest threat to American hegemony.  For China to allow the West to crush Russia would be a colossal mistake, especially when the cost of keeping them alive is not that significant a world awash with printed money.

As for Europe, they are being fools and they will pay the price for it.  Satraps of a self-interested and cruel hegemonic power are never treated well, and Europe does not need to be a satrap, yet chooses that path against their own self-interest.

So be it.


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Rumors of my demise

Sorry for the hiatus, regular posting will resume soon—I was both moving and traveling at the same time.

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