Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 2 of 34

Britain Stops Making Vaccine Available (But the Rich Will Still Get It)

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On February 1, 2023

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So, here we go:

Now, I want to point out again, that at Davos, where the rich and powerful meet to decide the fate of the world, everyone has to be vaccinated, and has to be tested and if they aren’t or they test positive, their badges are deactivated.

In other words, the rich get vaccinated. Current vaccines are pretty shitty, because they haven’t been keeping up with the mutation speed, but they’re still better than nothing, and do reduce the seriousness of cases.

But that’s not really the point: the point is that for the rich the cost of vaccine (Modern is raising it from $26 to $110 to $130 in the US) is meaningless to our lords and masters: they don’t even notice $120: they spend more, much more, for lunch. But to ordinary people such a price can be the difference between eating or paying the rent. If it has to go, it goes.

One policy for the rich, who can afford bespoke medicine, and another for the plebes.

This is also terrible public health policy. While the vaccines don’t prevent spread, they do reduce viral load in infected individuals, and thus reduce the odds people around them will get infected. Mass vaccination (note that it is voluntary) is a good thing.

Leaving aside the whole “death” thing, there has been so much disabling due to Covid that the Bank of England, hardly touchy-feely compassionate sorts have noticed it with alarm, so even if you, like our lords and masters, are functionally a psychopath, this is going to continue to cause disaster in the economy.

But then labor shortages and supply chain problems have been used as an excuse to raise prices much higher than cost increases, so from the point of view of the ruling class, who is this their problem? They’re getting richer; they make sure the people around them are tested and vaccinated and most of them can work from home and even before Covid lived inside carefully vetted bubbles. And if they do get sick, they’ll get the best care, far better than you will.

So, really, Covid continues to be win-win-win for the ruling class and who cares if it’s a mass death, mass disabling event of the sheep they rule over?

WIN! From WIN to WIN. That’s what it’s like to be in the ruling class. Even a pandemic that kills millions is just another profit opportunity.

Too bad you aren’t a member.

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.

Know Thine Enemy

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On January 27, 2023

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I want you to ask yourself this question: what makes someone your enemy? Really think about it for a bit before continuing. Have an answer.

An enemy is someone who is doing you you harm, or intends to do you harm. If they have the ability to do you harm, they will act on it.

Note what this definition does not include. It says nothing about hate or anger or emotional state. It does not matter why someone is or wants or intends to harm you, all that matters is that they do.

It does also not matter if you are collateral damage: if they don’t even know you personally exist. If they’re willing to harm you to get what they want, without caring one way or another about you, they’re your enemy.

If a political leader passes a law or regulation which takes away your health care or your house or your food or your life, it doesn’t matter that they weren’t thinking about you, specifically, when they made that decision. They deliberately harmed you, and they were OK with it. They certainly knew, if they thought about it all, that it would harm some people, and that wasn’t a problem for them.

When healthcare execs raise the prices of medicines like insulin or care, they know that means some people who need that medicine or care will do without, and they know some people will die. If they don’t need to make the decision “If we don’t do this, we’ll go bankrupt and no one will get care” then they’re good with a bunch of people suffering or dying. They are, therefore, those people’s enemies, and they are a potential enemy for anyone who might one day not be able to afford care.

Your greatest enemies, that is the people who are most likely to make decisions which harm you, are almost always your politicians and corporate leaders. These are also the people who could be your greatest allies, if they chose, as FDR did for most Americans (though he was an enemy of the rich, and both he and they understood that.)

If you are thinking about politics this is the most fundamental concept you need to understand and emotionally internalize. People with power are your greatest enemies or your greatest allies, and your job is to make them your allies. If they are your enemies, and almost all of them in the current world are, then you must treat them as an enemy, and never think of them as a friend or ally.

For about 50 years, politicians and private wealthy individuals have deliberately pursued policies which have impoverished you. If your income had increased at the same rate as productivity, you’d have about twice as much income. Think about that. The reason you don’t is they took all of that (and more) and made sure it went to people who were already rich.

People who intend to or do harm you are your enemies.

This means, by the way, that unless you are a Ukrainian, Putin is not much of an enemy to you. Your own politicians and rich people are almost always the greatest threat to you if you live in a developed country, and if you live in an undeveloped country it’s sometimes leaders of foreign nations, the IMF, foreign corporations and so on.

It isn’t any more complicated than that. At the World Economic Forum at Davos, everyone gets a Covid test and all rooms have HEPA filters and UV light to destroy viruses. That’s how they treat themselves. Our societies could afford to do that for everyone, but our leaders, and the media they control pretend that Covid is “over”, while protecting themselves.

Your enemies. (Well unless you’re reading this and in the charmed circle, in which case they’re your allies. Just remember, in 50 years your class will be reviled and hated more than we revile and hate Hitler today.)

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.

 

A Story About How Health Care Privatization Happens

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On January 25, 2023

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So, as many readers know, I got cancer. (I’m fine. It’s treated, I won’t die of it (3% chance some years out), though I’m on hormone blockers (moderately nasty as an adult) for as much as another year.)

Anyway, I got cancer while Covid was on, so a lot of my visits were virtual, or just phone calls, unless they really required my physical presence. Three month followups: usually by phone. Faster for the doctor; faster for me, all good. But the last time I went in the waiting room was packed. I waited for hours, and the nurse apologized “the government won’t let us do followups by phone (or virtually) any more.”

Oh. Weird. Made no sense to me, but governments do stupid things all the time, and despite how I make my living I didn’t think about it much. (Doctor’s visits tend to focus my mind elsewhere.)

Ontario’s been in a deepening health care crisis for a couple decades at least. In a lot of cities, if you don’t have a family doctor, it’s essentially impossible to find one. If your current doc retires, too bad. Toronto, the largest city, is the worst. So lots of clinics sprung up, and you’d go to one of them when you got sick. They started offering virtual visits even before the pandemic.

All of this was covered by public health: you never paid for any of it. The provincial plan is called OHIP, and it’s still a sacred cow.

A spokesperson for the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, told CTV News Toronto, “It is against the law to charge for OHIP-covered services. If the ministry finds that a person has paid for an insured service or some component of an insured service, there is a mechanism in place for the ministry to ensure that the full amount of the payment is returned to that person. Ontarians who believe they have been charged for an insured service should contact the ministry by e-mail at protectpublichealthcare@ontario.ca or by phone (toll-free) at 1-888-662-6613.”

On Wednesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he doesn’t want patients paying out of pocket for medical expenses.

“We also need to be clear, Ontarians will always access the healthcare they need with their OHIP card, never their credit card,” said Ford.

Sounds great, eh? The principle is that if it’s covered under the government plan physicians who take any money from the plan at all can’t charge: you’re either fully private or in the system. This is supposed to be true across Canada, and for a long time it almost always was. (Except in Quebec, where they use ethnic pride to allow extra lots of corruption. See “Brexit” for a recent high profile Anglo version of this.)

But about the same time I was sitting on my ass needlessly the Ford government in Ontario also changed another regulation: OHIP would no longer pay for virtual visits to clinics (or in a clinic with a telepresence doctor) if there hadn’t been a physical examination by that clinic or doctor in the last year.

THUD. People go to clinics because they don’t have a relationship with a family doctor. If they had a physical exam every year there’d be a relationship: that’s what family doctors do. Those “regular checkups”.

Have you seen the kicker?

If OHIP doesn’t cover it, then you can charge for it. Since virtual visits with doctors and clinics who haven’t phsycally examined you are not covered, they can be charged for.

Meanwhile, Galen Weston, probably the most influential and powerful Billionaire in Ontario, who owns both the most supermarkets (where he has clinics) and the biggest drug store chain (Shopper’s Drug Store, which he was allowed to buy a few years ago), had rolled out a virtual visit service. Don’t know how well it was doing, but I do know that the public health care line you call to be told what to do is now referring people to services like it.

It’s called Maple. Here’s the current pricing.

In my entire life I have literally never paid for a doctor’s visit. Not once. Not ever. Not even a virtual visit with an online clinic last year before this new regulation so I could renew some meds.

But this isn’t covered any more, so it’s legal.

And that’s one of the mechanics of stealth-privatizing healthcare.

Note that while it’s hard to get a family doctor, it’s a growing problem and most people still have them, so this is a boiling frog issue: a majority of people won’t be affected. Yet. And most people can afford $80. But this is how you do it, step by step.

And in a certain way, it’s a BIG step, because as I say, I’ve never paid. Neither have most Canadians. If I need healthcare I may have to wait sometimes (though usually not more than a couple hours), but it’s free.

This is a strike against that. You get people used to paying for some services and slowly expand which ones and pretty soon you’re paying for a lot more. Another similar step was to allow pharmacists to renew most prescriptions: but it isn’t a covered service and they can charge for it. Only $15, but I’ve never paid for a prescription in my life either. And phone renewals of prescriptions with doctors aren’t covered either, so most of them are now charging for them, though that’s been true for a while.

Step, by step. Meanwhile, under-fund the system, overwork doctors and nurses and technicians and make the quality of care worse and worse. Over decades don’t train enough doctors or nurses to start with, then use Covid to decrease supply even more and push doctors and nurses out of the public system into the private system where they don’t have to work 12 hour+ shifts over and over and aren’t expected to get Covid over and over. (In one previous visit three of the four radiation oncologists were out with Covid, another longer wait, because we refuse to ventilate, HEPA filter, use UV light and mandate N95 masks rather than cloth ones.)

I have quipped before that I’m very glad I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d be able to get care. The system now is creaking, but it still more or less works if you’re really sick. But the real money in privatization is market pricing for the truly desperate, like people who have cancer.

One final point: these people make their fortunes, literally, by making you sick and making it more likely you die. That’s what they do. They are your enemies, wherever they are because anyone who is taking active steps which make it more likely for you to die, to not get healthcare you need or to become impoverished or homeless is your enemy if anyone is. We just pretend they aren’t our enemies, mortal enemies, in fact, because they operate through the system by the rules; rules they made.

More on that later.

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 Red Queen’s Race, Neoliberalism & Why Healthcare Is Being Privatized

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On January 23, 2023

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Back in the early 2000s I remember reading an interview with Ted Turner, who founded CNN and later sold it. He wasn’t happy with how it was being run so the reporter asked him why he didn’t buy it back.

He explained that he had only a few billion dollars, which meant he wasn’t “in the game” anymore. People mocked him for it, since to a normal person that’s more money than they could ever use, but he was right. He had sold, and now he couldn’t re-buy; prices for key assets like CNN had gone up.

This the basic issue the real players, the mega-rich and the CEOs who run the big companies face. The amount of money that was enough last year isn’t enough this year, let alone in five years. Fall behind and soon you’re out of the game. This doesn’t have to be personal money, just money you control, so if you have effective management control of a company you don’t have ownership control of, you’re in the game, though such people generally reward themselves massively, so they at least aren’t embarassed in front of their peers.

Different oligarchs are competing against each other and so are different groups: tech, finance, manufacturing, military-industrial, etc…  If one gets enough of an advantage, then they buy out the others, and even if you’re still filthy rich, you’re out of the game and nowhere near as powerful as those still in the game.

As everyone knows now, the rich have been taking more and more of pie. The most famous chart is the labor productivity vs. wages one:

Furthermore, the real players have been narrowing: there are fewer and fewer people who are really in the game. Vast waves of consolidation in almost every industry have created oligopolies and monopolies, because those sorts of businesses can squeeze customers. Some games are easier to squeeze than others: healthcare is a famous example as people will pay almost anything to live. There’s a reason Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland he can get, too, with environmental disaster onrushing, he knows that those who control food will (with enough political cover) also clean up.

But at the end of the day, everyone is taking from the same pool: any increase in wealth that doesn’t come from productivity increases has to come from someone else. The rich do take from each other, though they play by the rule that unless you’ve betrayed other elites  you get to stay wealthy, but most of what they take still has to come from the masses.

Unfortunately they’ve been squeezing the masses for 40 to 50 years, maybe a little more. So they have to keep finding new places to squeeze. This is why power has been privatized and de-regulated; why water and sewage is privatized in the UK (and sewage is in the rivers again), and so on.

But in those countries with public health systems (aka. not the US) like Canada and the UK, well, that’s a place where the full squeeze hasn’t been put on. Prices can easily be raised, by moving to the profit maximizing price (insulin at $800, like in the US, and so on), though it means a lot of people will suffer and die.

There’s one last big public heifer to be taken down and consumed, in other words. And if you don’t get in on it, well, your rivals will and they’ll be richer than you, and you stand a good chance of being forced out of the game.

So, with a few exceptions (manufacturing used to be one of them), the elite consensus is to privatize health care. It’s a big cow, sitting there waiting to be chopped up, and if you get a big enough chunk you may be able to buy our some rivals or at least stay in the game.

And in some cases it’s pretty much the last one. In the UK, it’s the only thing of worth the government owns which it hasn’t privatized. So, as everyone understands by now, you deliberately underfund and sabotage it, then call in the private sector because it isn’t working well. The same thing is happening in multiple Canadian provinces, including where I live in Ontario.

And the real players will become fewer and fewer, and if it means that you die or suffer, well, that’s a price the players are willing to pay so they can stay in the game.

As the game narrows, the players will also turn even more on each other. This has already happened with the TransAtlantic elite, who used to more or less cooperate: the US is now feasting on Europe. But then the Germans had been feeding on much of the rest of Europe already. And it’s obvious that Chinese and US elites are moving to a confrontation, and this is driven in great part by the refusal of the CCP to allow anything important in their economy to be controlled by foreigners.

Sadly, there is a real economy, and it is being fantastically mismanaged, not least by allowing the real carrying capacity of the world to collapse. Elites had such a huge pie (to change metaphors) that it usually made more sense to fight over it than to cooperate to grow it more. So we’re at the beginning stages of collapse. There will come a time when the pie starts to shrink in ways no one can deny.

The silver lining, such as it is, is that so much will have been privatized and screwed up that when we finally do get serious about change, assuming we avoid a Dark Age (not a sure thing) we will be able to do things differently, since there will be so little legacy left.

It’s not much of a silver lining, but destruction does make change possible.

 

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.

Imagine A World Where Violence Or Need Are Impossible

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On December 16, 2022

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There are two main types of coercion in the world.

The first is violence. If you don’t do what someone else wants, they will do something physical to you.

So, imagine if that was impossible. Imagine that if you chose no physical object could affect you. Bullets don’t work, fists don’t work, no one can grab you or put you in handcuffs, and that’s true of everyone.

What would change about society if this were true? What would change about how individuals act?

The second is need. What if you didn’t need to eat or drink and you cold and heat didn’t bother you or harm you and you didn’t get sick? You might still want shelter or a home or objects like books or computers, and objects like cosmetics would exist, but not medicine. But you would need nothing.

(This is half the conception of a pagan God: they can be harmed, even killed, but they don’t need anything. Except they can also, usually, create what they need without other Gods or people.)

Banquet of the Gods by Jacques de Gheyn II

What would you be like, and what would the world be like if you; if people, didn’t need anything?

These are serious questions. Think about them.

Now, question 3 is what if both of these things were true?

These questions matter because they tell you what you put up with because of need and fear. They tell you what other people; what society does that it couldn’t do if people weren’t, in effect, vulnerable.

(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. Alas, I’m neither God nor Beast.)

It’s also important to do them separately. The first is about violence, in effect, and that’s not the same as the human need for cooperation, which is much (but not all) of what the second question is about.

This is what what Donne was getting at with “no man is an island.” It is also what is related to Aristotle’s observation “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god…”

There are things I want to say about these questions, but I’m not going to do so in this article. Instead I want you to think about them. Think about them in general and in particular: think about what you would and wouldn’t do in these three cases.

 

US House Passes Bill Forcing Railway Workers Not to Strike

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On November 30, 2022

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Update: as expected, the Senate did not pass increased sick days. The House broke it out to say that they had included it, while making sure it wouldn’t be passed and the blame would be on the Senate. BUT if the main bill had included 7 days, it might have passed, since if the Senate voted it down, a strike would still be legally possible.

The bill makes them take a deal they had rejected before. Of particular note is that the bill gives them one sick day a year. Democrats voting against were:

Chu-CA, DeSaulnier-CA, Golden-ME, Norcross-NJ, Peltola-AK, Pocan-WI, Tlaib-MI & Torres-CA.

I note that AOC did not vote against it. I was initially hopeful, but I think it’s now undeniable that she’s performatively left-wing only; she cannot be counted on.

The House then passed a separate bill which would give the railway workers seven sick days and Democratic defenders are claiming this makes it all good.

But if the House had the votes to pass the second bill, they could have included it in the initial bill. It was clearly done so that the union was forced to send their members back to work: They are sure the “force back” bill will pass the Senate, but not if it includes sick days, but want to say they voted for sick days.

Recently in Ontario, the government passed a bill which forbade education workers (non-teachers) to strike. It included a $4k fine a day for each striker, and $50k a day for the union. The union struck anyway; other unions stated they would strike as well, and the bill was rescinded.

In the US, general strikes are illegal, made so in the 50s by Taft-Hartley (which also made it so that supervisors can’t join unions — a huge problem).

If a law is unjust, you must break the law. To be successful, you must do it en-masse. I know it won’t happen soon, but US unions need to buckle down and do a wide strike, with the goal of repealing Taft-Hartley and making “back to work” bills illegal. Without that, the right to join unions and their right to call strikes means little.

I do see some hope. I wasn’t sure if Ontario unions would have the guts to do the right thing, but they saw an existential threat, and they acted with solidarity. In the US, the ongoing Amazon and Starbucks unionization efforts are very hopeful because the people doing it are tough — in the face of repeated firings and closures they have simply continued.

People’s backs are to the wall. Since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.

But now a lot of people are up against the wall. Many full-time workers, especially at places like Amazon, live in their cars or tents, for example. There is nothing left to give.

People with nothing to lose are dangerous.

One of the reasons, I think, that the Ontario government lost is that they chose the wrong union to intimidate. Custodial staff and low-ranked clerical workers don’t have anything: 4K a day isn’t so frightening to them. Most of them don’t have homes or any real assets. If they’d tried this tactic with the teachers, who do still have fat and meat to trim off the bones, the teachers might have been too scared.

The custodial staff? No. They didn’t even hesitate.

Backs to the wall. If the US labor movement wishes to survive and become strong again, they need to recognize how bad a shape they, and most of those they represent, are in.

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The Inflationary Consequences of Friendzoning and Decoupling

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On October 24, 2022

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During the rise of China and the “One World/Free Trade” period, one good thing which can be said for offshoring is that it helped reduce inflation.

It, indeed, drove much of the inflation reduction, with most of the rest of the inflation reduction being concerted efforts to keep wages low, with a strong assist from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to use methods like hedonics to pretend that inflation was lower than it actually was.

The new mantra is “friendzoning” — not so much bringing industry back to the US but moving it to friendly countries. Vietnam and Bangladesh are mentioned often, and Mexico will benefit as well. But friendzoning has limits, these countries don’t have the capacity to quickly take on all the production done for the US and Europe, nor do they really have the technological ability in the medium run.

This means that the determination to have a new cold war, and possibly a hot war with China will drive inflation higher for years to come.

The solution would be to, more than friendzone, re-shore: bring production back to core nations. But that would require reducing the cost structure: and I don’t mean wages so much as I do predatory finance and driving rent and housing prices down massively — about two-thirds at a minimum, along with no longer health-care predation. Do those things and wages don’t have to rise nearly as much, and the US (and Europe to a lesser extent) become much more competitive.

But to re-shore, you have to, in effect, give ordinary people a decent deal and not treat them as assets to shorn, but rather as productive assets to be cared for. (Note you don’t have to do this out of the goodness of your heart, our elites don’t have any of that.)

For the time being, this seems unlikely, so don’t expect inflation to go away. All the Federal Reserve can really do to stop it is push the economy into the dirt, but that’s not going to be a long term solution unless it stabilizes at “you’re a third world nation”, which, actually, probably won’t solve it either.

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Most Zero Sum Games Are Negative Sum & So Are Most Positive-Sum Games

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On August 24, 2022

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In economics there’s the idea of how much a “game” nets, where a game is any economic activity. The ideal is to have positive sum games, where more good comes from the game than bad, and ideally all players of the game win. A classic zero-sum game is if you and I bet $10 on a coin flip: any win is precisely mirrored by loss. And a negative sum game is where people come out worse: a lot of wars are like this, no matter how much plunder, both sides are worse off at the end.

Just because a game is negative sum doesn’t mean it can’t be positive sum for a few people. War, again, is often like this. Masses of people may be killed, huge amounts of wealth destroyed and certain war profiteers may come out much richer and some politicians or generals much more powerful. Some soldiers may loot enough that war was better for them than peace.

The fundamental environmental critique of capitalism and industrialization is that it only looks like a positive sum game: that the damage we are doing to the environment (which includes climate change, but not just that) and to our health, makes it a negative sum game if one uses the proper time horizon (aka. if you won’t die before the bill becomes due) or if you include everyone (aka. being conquered by Britain was not good for Indians; being conquered mostly Europeans was not good for native North Americans, almost all of whom died) and capitalism has not been a marvel for most of the third world. Which is why, by the way, there are all those “best time to be alive ever” books which try to use dubious extreme poverty statistics to claim this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to utopia: they want to argue that capitalism and industrialization are positive sum games, at least for now.

These folks have no real argument against climate change and environmental collapse and tend to hand wave it with “technology will fix it” as if technology can un-extinct half the world’s species.

So in the big picture we’ve been playing a negative sum game for a long time. The destruction of the native civilizations of North America was a negative sum game. The impoverishment of India under the British East India company was a negative sum game (India started out with more industry than England, by a fairly wide margin.) Africa’s exploitation, from the slave trade to colonization was a negative sum game, which is not to deny they didn’t get some railroads and whatnot out of it. (The Belgians were the worst, but the French who are still making African nations pay them for having been conquered are mighty bad. England’s evils are well known.)

But we’re in a lot of local negative sum games. Wall Street types like to brag they “eat what they kill” and it’s accurate in all sorts of way. The entire run-up to 2008 was negative-sum: that’s why it took trillions to bail them out. All their profits came from creating much larger losses than their profits, then having other people pay them off and suffer a long light depression. And Central banks didn’t then go on to print trillions more because value was being produced after 2008, they had to print to keep covering the fact that real economic value was being destroyed.

Your average Wall Street executive is a sort of super-optimized human locust, getting fat by destroying real value. Private Equity as a whole is so clearly massively negative sum that if you try to deny it you live so far in a fantasy world there’s no point in talking. The entire neoliberal movement, with its poster-child policy of austerity was and is about damaging the real economy to make a small number of people richer.

A lot like those war profiteers we discussed earlier: they cause widespread misery, illness and death but they get very rich doing so.

(The military industrial complex is obviously negative sum, which, again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people.)

The job of governments is to create positive sum games and to stop negative sum games. In some ways that’s almost their only legitimate function. (Any crime system with high recidivism, or large numbers incarcerated is negative sum, by the way, but boy, a lot of people get rich locking other people up.)

A society with a lot of negative sum games running can be compared to an animal with a lot of ticks attached, a tapeworm, and some nasty diseases. It’s supporting a lot of parasites, but one day it falls over dead after a great deal of suffering, and then the parasite have to try to find a new host. If they can’t, because they’ve infected the entire herd (or destroyed the grazing land), well, then they too die.

Welcome to the fin de siecle of capitalist society.

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