I think the US will take longer, but a man-on-horseback can still happen in the US. Remember that virtually the only trusted institution in America is the military. The difference in America, as opposed to Europe, that the left isn’t going to get its chance, if at all, for quite some time. Obama trashed the left’s reputation since the hoi polloi think he’s left, and since the left refused to primary him, which I and a few others, told them they needed to do.
This generation of left leadership, with almost no exceptions, needs to be retired. They are almost always willing to sell out, and when not willing to, they are ineffectual twits who won’t do what’s necessary and worse, will make sure that no one else can.
So for the US, there is no “left gets its chance and IF it fails”, because the left already failed.
Also in the US there’s going to be one more (shitty) boom, based on fracking. The US will be a post-apocalyptic wasteland when it’s over, but in the meantime, enough people will be kept employed, and thinking they might make it, to keep the game together. How long that’ll go on, I don’t know. Stirling Newberry thinks its good for as much as 20 years. I think it’ll be less, just because these elites are so frickin’ incompetent. More on that in a post soon.
So, in France Hollande has won, and in Greece, left wing parties have more of the vote than the center or the right (we’ll see if they can form a government, however.) They will now have their chance. If they fail, however, the right will sweep back in, and it will be the harder right, the neo-nazi, fascist right. If the left, or what passes for the left cannot do the job and turn things around, the right will offer its “solution”.
The elites, if they make it impossible for the left to do their work (or if the left just fails, quite possible), will, in many cases, be signing their own death warrant. If the neo-nazis in Greece or France take charge, be sure that they will liquidate much of the old order, the old elites. Since those elites are, in fact, corrupt and treasonous (selling out the interests of their own countries), they will be able to do so to cheers and by simply enforcing the law.
The right’s solution won’t work, of course, but it can be made to look like it works for a few years at least. And that it won’t work, won’t mean anything to dead oligarchs.
The elites aren’t going to keep getting financial oligarchy, where they force the government to borrow money from them, pay it back with interest and sell off the crown jewels at fire-sale prices. That game is NOT going to continue for much longer, in the grand scheme of things (at least not in Europe, the US is a different matter).
If they want to save their own necks, and yes, it will come to that, they’d best cut a deal now. The longer they wait, the worse the deal is going to get for them.
Of course, some part of the elites will make a deal, and will survive. But some won’t.
As for the left, remember that the rich are, as a class, your enemies. Treat them as such, or they will make sure you fail.
and whether the public approves or disapproves is irrelevant. Black letter law, on the books, makes most of what the banks did leading up to the subprime crisis illegal. It was fraud. Black letter law makes the war on Iraq a war crime, and no one went to jail for that. Black letter law does not allow freestanding resisting arrest charges, and those happen all the time. Basic law states that an accused has a right to face their accuser and see the evidence against them, that no longer occurs in many cases. Basic justice says that you can’t punish someone without a trial, and the “no-fly list” indicates that is no longer true (along with being unable to face your accusers and see the evidence against you.) The US Congress retroactively made wiretapping without a warrant “legal” and if I have to explain why retroactive immunity is wrong I give up. Basic justice says that secret laws and secret courts are unjust, yet the US has plenty of both.
This is not just an issue with the US. During the G20 up here in Toronto the Ontario government used a SECRET LAW to strip civil liberties from anyone in the downtown Toronto core. Of course, it must be said that the public couldn’t give a shit, it was not an issue in the next election.
In Britain, after the riots, family members of those convicted of crimes were evicted from public housing. Collective punishment of family members is unjust
And, in most countries today, the rich and powerful are not even charged with crimes that their “lessers” regularly do jail time for.
It is done. It is over. The US is not a nation of laws, it is a nation of men, and the law does not treat everyone equally. You do not even have the right to a trial before punishment, to see the evidence against you or to face your accusers. And virtually every other nation in the so-called developed world is walking down the same road.
forget the problems of spy agencies, this is the stuff of pure police states. The Stasi only wished they had it so good.
When the revolution comes, if it comes, the first job is going to have to be to destroy all of this stuff, and to inculcate a visceral understanding that this and all types of constant surveillance are, simply, the hallmarks of evil regimes.
Of course, in time, the descendants of the revolution will forget. The hallmark of evil regimes for our forefathers was torture, after all.
Really?
The individual mandate is lousy policy. It always was. It is especially lousy policy without a large (100 million +) public option. The health care plan is, for all intents and purposes, a 90’s Heritage plan.
This? This is what progressives want to fight for?
BMaz has a good article up on whether the bill is Constitutional. Me, I don’t know if it’s Constitutional. But what I do know is that if I were a conservative Justice, I’d want to just strike down the individual mandate and leave the rest in place, because I would laugh myself sick every night watching Obama have to kill the bill himself, getting rid of guaranteed issue, community ratings, and so on. Because Obama would have to, and would. He made a deal with the health insurance companies. In exchange for some concessions, what they received in exchange was every American being forced to buy their shitty product. And while Obama doesn’t keep promises to left wingers, he does keep promises to people like the CEOs of health insurance companies.
Still, watching “progressives” defending the individual mandate is just another reminder of why I don’t call myself a progressive.
Go and die on a hill, for forcing Americans to buy shitty insurance from evil companies which aren’t properly regulated.
I’ll just sit here on the sidelines laughing myself sick. With progressives like these, who needs right wingers?
Last weekend, the federal New Democratic Party (NDP) elected a new leader: Thomas Mulcair, an MP from Quebec, who was a minister in the provincial Liberal government there, before he resigned rather than open a park for development.
Mulcair was the front runner, and his victory was hardly a surprise. Many NDPers thought that he would move to the center and would abandon left-wing principles in pursuit of power, and a number of key members of the prior leader’s team have left.
I had my doubts, but Mulcair has gone a long way to assuage them in just a week. First, this, in his first day in Parliament:
Speaking to reporters afterward, he laid out his concerns for the state of the Canadian economy and accused the federal government of neglecting workers as it promotes the extraction of natural resources, mainly in Western Canada.
“That’s driven up the value of the Canadian dollar, made it more difficult to export our own goods. We’re killing our manufacturing sector,” he said. “The way the Conservatives are acting has had a devastating impact on good jobs with pensions.”
There was a lot of whining from Alberta about this statement, but it’s just a fact. The classic Canadian economy was a mixed one, which combined resource extraction and manufacturing. When manufacturing does well, resources generally don’t. When resources do, manufacturing doesn’t. In the old model this was considered a strength, since it meant that part of the economy was doing well, no matter what resource prices were. And when one sector was up, it was meant to subsidize the other sector.
Resource booms always end. Every single one. The oil boom will end, the question is when. If Canada doesn’t have a manufacturing sector left when the boom ends, we will become a basket case South American country. And Alberta will become the new Maritimes (remember, the Maritimes was originally a resource boom area.)
Politically speaking, this is also smart, because the NDP just isn’t going to get a lot of MPS out of Alberta in specific or the Prairies in general. If attacking the tar sands, and calling for Canada to add value to resources before shipping them out of the country costs votes there, so be it. The battleground is not Alberta. Alberta went all in with the Conservatives, and they have to live with that. There’s no point in pandering to Albertans, it would take a huge shift in voting to gain many more seats.
The places in play are the Maritimes and Ontario, and it is there that the election will be won or lost. It is Ontario which has been losing its manufacturing due to the high dollar, and the Maritimes has been treated shoddily by the Conservatives as well. So on both politics and economics Mulcair’s stance is a good one, which appeals to the regions where the NDP can make gains and pisses of people who would never vote NDP anyway.
Then there was this, yesterday, when the Tory austerity budget was unveiled:
“The Conservatives have caused the problem by gutting the fiscal capacity of the government,” Thomas Mulcair, the newly crowned NDP leader, said Wednesday.
“Now they’re saying, oh, gee whiz, no more fiscal capacity in the government, we know what we’ll do, we’ll start cutting the services of the government.”
Oh my, pointing out the obvious. Conservative tax cuts and reckless spending caused the defict. But tax cuts for rich people are sacrosanct, so old folks will have to wait till 67 to retire.
And this:
“Everything indicates the Conservative budget will be synonymous with cutbacks and job losses. A few months ago, the Prime Minister promised textually, in this House, that he would not touch pensions, would not cut health transfers to the provinces, would not touch services to the population?” Mr. Mulcair said. “Will the Prime Minister live up to his word, or will he break his promise?”
And then, Harper cut pensions and cut health transfer to the provinces.
Ouch. That had to smart.
Yeah, I’m liking Mulcair.
One of the things which has distressed me most about the West is that no one on the left has really been willing to hammer the politics of class. Mulcair, who has also hit inequality, shows some signs of doing so. It is conventional wisdom that tax increases won’t fly, but the polling data doesn’t support that, at least not if you want to tax the rich and make that clear. Heck, if even Globe and Mail readers (the primary business newspaper in Canada) want tax increases and more spending, I think we can conclude that it’ll fly (yes, I’m aware of the limitations of that particular poll). But even the upper middle and lower upper class think that the true rich should pay their share. Coming out of Quebec, which is somewhat insulated from the political culture of the rest of North America, Mulcair seems willing to play class politics, and seems to know how to do so.
So far, so good. And as for the budget, Prime Minister Harper isn’t going to get the cuts he wants from the public service without causing great pain. Nor is cutting other forms of spending going to help the economy. Harper better get down on his knees and pray to God that there isn’t a major downturn in China, because he’s betting everything on resource prices. If they crumble, the Canadian economy will go with them. And so will Harper’s job.
This is opposition politics 101: whatever the government does, you oppose. If Harper’s bet on the resource economy works, then the Conservatives will get another term. If it doesn’t, the NDP needs to be seen as the party which opposed his policies. Mulcair is positioning them for that, and doing so in a way which allow him, if he gets in power, to put in place policies which will reward the constituencies he needs to win—everyone not attached to the oil teat.
It is in blood that empires, like humans, are born, it is in blood that they die (reprint)
Photo by Chris Hondros, RIP
I think we all remember the year before the Iraq war, the drumbeat of propaganda, the horrible certainty that nothing we could do would stop George Bush’s messianic belief that he must have a war with Iraq because he was ordained by God, and all the great presidents were war presidents. We argued at the time that there is no decision a politician can make which he or she should think on harder than going to war.
The reason should be obvious. In war bad things happen. Wars are always sold as if they are going to be brief, as if only the “bad guys” will be killed, as if “precision munitions” have made horrors a thing of the past. They are sold as easy, and glorious. And they almost never are. War is the archetype of “rubber hits the road”, of a situation you can’t control. They have a way of turning into messes we never intended.
World War I was supposed to be brief. So was the Iraq war. A quick march in, lots of flowers, rework Iraq into a libertarian paradise by applying Republican economic and social dogma, then on to Tehran!
We could run through the numbers of dead, of maimed, of orphaned, but I think this story from the San Antonio Express-News speaks more directly to what happens in war. Some time ago some US soldiers raped an Iraqi girl repeatedly, then tried to conceal the crime by burning the corpse and killing her family.
Iraqis were outraged, and later some soldiers were captured. And for four months they were tortured. The antiseptic language in the article is somehow worse than saying it outright: “foot bones detached from commingled remains of Fouty and Jimenez, and finger bones wrapped in a blanket. Part of a pair of handcuffs was found.” And a broken nose that had healed.
The men were kept alive, in other words, and tortured. They were probably cut up while still alive.
You can’t control war. Even the best disciplined army in the world (and the American is not even close to being that) will kill people it shouldn’t. Rapes will occur, they do in every war. Brutality and torture are almost certain to occur, even if the army tries to avoid it, rather than institutionalizing it. War, by its nature, requires making the enemy into something less than human, so you don’t mind shooting them. It almost always spills over onto the locals, who likewise are viewed as animals by occupiers or invaders and treated as such by many of them.
War, then, is hell. This isn’t news, everyone knows it. But as with most of what everyone “knows” they don’t really get it, because most people don’t get things that have never effected them or people they love. And if you’re in Congress, well, with very few exceptions, no one you care about is going to fight, no one you know is going to risk their life and maybe even get captured and tortured. The same is true of most people serving in the administration.
That boy being tortured, that girl being raped. All the deaths, murder, rapes, torture, were inevitable. You go to war with the army you have, and the president you have, but even if Jimmy Carter had been in charge there would have been murder, rapes, torture—just less of them. But “less” doesn’t matter much when it’s your daughter who was raped repeatedly at gunpoint; your son who was cut into pieces over a period of months.
And so we come back to the heart of the war. We rarely talk about it anymore, but it’s simple enough. All those people who supported the war, and most especially all those who voted for it, bear the moral responsibility for the results of the war. At least 100,000 dead Iraqis (and probably closer to a million). 4,000 and rising dead US soldiers. Rape. Murder. Torture. Orphans who got to watch their parents being killed. Husbands who saw their wives die, or wives who watched their husbands gunned down or blown into bloody carrion. Families who have buried multiple children.
All because members of Congress didn’t care and because they were gutless. Because they though to themselves “I might have to face attack ads if I vote against this war.” Can you think of anything more weak, anything more pathetically evil, than to care more about your reelection than about thousands dying? Than about the certainty that from your vote will come rape and torture and murder?
And can you think of anything more pathetic, more redolent of bad judgment than to say “but I didn’t know. I trusted George Bush?”
As far as I am concerned most of Congress doesn’t just have blood on their hands, they are in it up to their chins. Their gutlessness, cupidity and selfishness is such that most of them, in a just world, would be preparing their defenses for a Nuremburg trial. They attacked a country which had not attacked the US, based on lies that were debunked at the time, for petty personal reasons of political ambition or cowardice.
We all know that won’t happen, but what I will tell you is this. Without the Iraq war, the financial crisis happening right now either wouldn’t be, or would be much less harsh. It is quite likely that Iraq is the last mistake of the American century and marks the end of America as a superpower.
This is only fitting. Those who have proven they cannot be trusted with power must have that power taken away. America had its chance, in 2004, to take that power away from the worst of its elites. It didn’t. For an outsider, whether the election was stolen in 2004 or not is irrelevant, all that matters was the lesson of the result—that Americans are no longer capable of disciplining their own elites.
American hegemony rose out of the ashes of WWII. World War II was an unprovoked war. Germany attacked those that did not threaten it. At Nuremburg Americans hung Nazis who had not been involved in the Holocaust, for no crime other than unprovoked war, declaring that it was a capital offense. Out of that war, and out of Nuremburg, America was born as the leader of the free world. Not just the mightiest, but the nation that said “never again”.
It is fitting then that an unprovoked war is what is bringing an end to America’s leadership of the free world, to its economic and military hegemony. Having done what it once condemned, having proven unwilling or unable to correct itself, America has reaped what it sowed.
Alas that a young man had to be chopped into bits; a young girl raped repeatedly, as part of the process—that hundreds of thousands had to be killed.
It is in blood that empires, like humans, are born.
It is in blood that they die.
Wikileaks has dumped a bunch of internal Stratfor documents, which they presumably received from Anonymous. Years ago I used to read Stratfor’s briefs. After a while I stopped, because their economic analysis was absolutely awful, straight up cookie cutter consensus macro, which missed the important events. Since Stratfor’s briefs were supposed to give insight into what was going to happen, and since they were wrong about something so important, I decided they weren’t worth reading except as a gloss on what a certain part of the foreign policy establishment was thinking (the guys who think they’re cowboys.)
I think that Michael Brenner’a appraisal of Stratfor themselves, that they’re a immature, unprofessional and hustlers is true. The incredulity, reading them, is “people pay for this?”
Which leads to the question of how much of worth there is in the files. The main problem isn’t whether the files are really from Stratfor, I believe they are, the problem is that Stratfor seems somewhat clueless. So, for example, if true, that Russia and Israel sold out those who bought military equipment from them is fascinating and important:
According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the “data link codes” for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran.
I’m inclined to believe it, but really, who knows. I should add that countries who are serious about their defence, really should make their own equipment if they can.
is not, in fact, pressimism. It is realism.
I find the “be happy” crowd odd. We have, in the past few years, seen millions of Americans and Europeans impoverished and lose their homes. We are seeing a wave of austerity in the 1st world which has and will impoverish many millions more. In the last quarter of 2011, Greece was on track for -7% annualized GDP growth. Civil liberties are under assault throughout the world, and the surveillance state is tightening its grasp. In the forseeable future, and one which is, now, almost unstoppable, we can expect to lose hundreds of millions of lives to climate change, and that, frankly, is the optimistic scenario, one which is almost certain not to occur. A billion is a good middling number, and it could easily go much higher. Many climate scientists believe we are beyond the point of no return.
None of what has happened, or which will happen, couldn’t have been stopped. For decades, with increasing stridency, prophets have warned of what would happen. Those prophets, in the grand Cassandric tradition, were ignored.
The left, virtually the world around, with the exception of Latin America, is in disarray and retreat, suffering defeat after defeat, from economic populist issues to civil liberties issues (other than gay rights). The forces of reaction, once aiming only at the edifices of mid 20th century liberalism, are now aiming to roll back the twentieth century en-masse, getting rid of socialized medicine (under assault even in England), child labor laws, reinstituting debtors prisons and celebrating inequality which exceeds even that of the gilded age. Gays may gain the right to marry, women may keep the franchise (and be allowed to vote between parties who will do the same thing at varying paces), but we will all be impoverished, largely powerless and watched 24 hours a day together.
Dystopian? Apocalyptic? Perhaps. But also the current trendline. Now, trendlines can always change. Indeed, trendlines do always change. This will not last, this era will come to an end. The questions are when, how, and what will replace it.
Living, then, in a period where many are still prosperous, but with the first storm clouds scudding over the horizon, and the first casualties falling, I find it odd to continually have to deal with the “be happy”, “optimism is superior” crowd. I find neither optimism nor pessimism interesting. What is interesting and what is needed is realism.
Realistically, what is going to happen? Why has what happened, happened? Why are events unfolding as they have? Part of the reason is the corruption of discourse: part of the reason is the happy talk. Hey, your life is good, everything’s fine, so be happy. Go about your life oblivious to what has happened, is happening and will happen.
I’m not interested in happy talk. Never have been. I am not interested in “reasons to be optimistic” or “reasons to be pessimistic”. I am interested in the most likely scenarios and questions of what can be done to change the likely course of event so fewer people suffer and die.
I will note another thing. My failures of prediction, and I now have years of data, have almost all been on the upside. I make mistakes when I pull my punches. People who think I’m a pessimist are fools. My record indicates the opposite, if I have a bias, it is towards optimism, to things not becoming as bad as they have. I think this is because I keep expecting people to protect their own future interests (not very future, often just a couple years) better than they do. I forget just how completely depraved our elites are, and how weak and debased the populations have become by the great complacency. Most who came of age in the post-war period in the developed world, who did not have to fight for every scrap, simply are not capable of truly believing in disaster or catastrophe, or of forestalling it even if they do.
Finally, I have nothing but contempt for most of the current generation of intellectuals, thinkers, and members of any elite. They have demonstrably failed their job, if their job is conceived as serving the truth and looking after the common weal: of telling people what they need to hear and finding a way to make them understand. Some have fought the yeoman’s good fight, and lost and there is honor in that, but most did not even fight. Instead the spewed lies and reaped the rewards. They were complicit with the political and economic elites, they took their share of the loot, a petty pence, and wrote what would please their masters. They will be exorciated by history, but in the current day, they have their silver gripped firmly in their hands, as they lope behind and before their masters, making the world safe for oligarchy, poverty and the new despotism of the modern security state.
They deserve no respect, and I will give them none. Their reward is the false flattery of their peers and the tarnished silver of their masters, the true gold of intellectual integrity or the gold of compassion and care for their fellows, these will be denied them.
And I watch the scudding storm clouds, and I feel the wind whip around me and it is to these signs and others I attend, not the fools crying “life is good! It’ll be ok!”
No, it will not be ok.
Why is Francis Fukuyama considered an intellectual? Why is he considered an intellectual worth of praise, his opinion important?
I ask this not because I don’t know the answer, I do, and I’ll get to it, but because so many people seem to believe he is an intellectual.
Let me quote Francis Fukuyama himself, from “The End of History” for no words I could write could condemn him as well as his own:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Have more stupid words every been written? Probably, but these are certainly in contention. The stupidity was evident at the time (I heard the title, in my twenties, and knew immediately the author was a high functioning liar or a high functioning moron), and the piece should have been published only as a way of letting him drive a stake through his own heart, at which point he would slink of into well deserved obscurity, being sure to never show his face in learned society ever again, to spare himself the titters, coughs and awkward “oh, umm, hello”s.
Our system actively promotes people who will lie in the right way without even having to be told to and actively gets rid of anyone who is not a useful idiot – by which I mean anyone who does not tell the lies useful to the powers that be. (Well, they can tell the occasional truth, on the rare occasion when it is useful).
Still, Fukuyama at least made it look good. The newer generation, on both “left” and right barely even goes through the motions.
