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Month: March 2021 Page 2 of 3
Biden made the comment in an ABC News interview broadcast on Wednesday. When asked if he thought the Russian leader, who has been accused of ordering the poisoning of Alexey Navalny and other rivals, is a “killer”, Biden replied: “I do.”
Biden also described Putin as having no soul, and said he would pay a price for alleged Russian meddling in the November 2020 US presidential election, something the Kremlin denies.
Putin on Thursday retorted: “I remember, in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard, we used to say: ‘It takes one to know one.’ And that’s not a coincidence, not just a children’s saying or joke.
“We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And, as a result, we assess [a person’s] activities and give assessments.
Pretty much.
Now, obviously Putin is a killer. But Biden voted for Iraq and was VP to Obama, who was hardly a pacifist. He’s been a hawk all his career and has a ton of blood on his hands. He isn’t withdrawing from Afghanistan, he bombed in Syria, blah, blah, blah. He’s a red-handed mass murderer who apparently doesn’t even have the self-awareness to know that’s what he is.
Every American President, pretty much, is a mass murdering piece of human garbage. America has certainly destroyed more countries over the past 30 years than Russia, China, or both combined. This isn’t to whitewash those country’s crimes: the Chechen wars, in particular, were very nasty and Russia has targeted hospitals in Syria, among many other war crimes.
Putin’s a stone killer, sure, but the idea that Biden, or Obama, or Clinton or Trump aren’t is laughable.
I think that judging people in power by what they do is important. It is also important to be clear eyed and un-biased by our own tribal loyalties when doing so.
There has been a constant under-estimation of Putin and massive wishful thinking. Navalny is not popular, and Putin’s approval rating is at the low end of his normal range, but still good.
When Putin took over Russia, it was a shambles, after American lead “shock therapy” under the American proxy leader Boris Yeltsin.
(This is why I will always and forever laugh about Americans who whine about foreign election interference.)
Putin’s, overall, done a decent job for Russians. His major mistake was not diversifying the economy, but America’s forced him to change his mind on that with repeated sanctions. His approval ratings, over time, are better than most American Presidents ratings.
Russia continues to be a nuclear super-power, is the largest country in the world geographically, has a potent non nuclear military. They are now a solid Chinese ally, which is one of the biggest geopolitical errors in history from the US point of view (Russia didn’t want to be. They wanted to be Europeans.)
So Biden’s going to slap on more sanctions, and China and Russia are going to continue creating their own financial and trade bloc, which will include much of Africa and Asia, and Cold War 2.0 is going to continue forming.
And stone killer Biden will say nasty things about stone killer Putin and use the supposed Navalny assassination attempt as an excuse for sanctions, while not sanctioning Saudi Arabia over the murder of Kashoggi.
All of this is ridiculous. Even assuming Putin did try to have Navalny killed (why bother, he’s never been a threat), it pales compared to, oh massive Chechen (or Iraq) war crimes or bombing hospitals.
America is an evil empire. So is Russia.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this, from Navalny, the champion of the West.
Hero of western liberals Alexei Navalny comparing Muslim migrants to cockroaches (with English subtitles) pic.twitter.com/TyE6zVF7uw
— sameera khan (@SameeraKhan) February 1, 2021
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The United States punished 24 Chinese officials on Wednesday for undermining Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, acting days before the first scheduled meeting of senior Chinese and American diplomats since President Biden took office.
Imagine sanctioning all the politicians involved in undermining freedom in Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and Bolivia, among many others?
Meanwhile, the BBC helpfully explains the strategy:
The idea is to counter the Chinese perception that the United States is on the decline, says Michael Green, the senior vice-president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Chinese commentators like to say that the “winds are blowing to the East.” The financial crisis of 2008, the Capitol Hill riot of 2021 and the years of Trump’s unilateralism in between have reinforced a view in China that the US has been weakened inside and out.
“This meeting in Alaska is geared to show the Chinese are wrong on all three counts,” says Green. “The schoolyard version of this is to say: “You’re not so great…yeah you’re big, but we like hanging out with our allies, democracies, because they’re cool.”
That third paragraph. Wow.
Now, is China a good actor in all ways? Of course not. In many ways it’s a terrible actor. Then again, it hasn’t destroyed multiple foreign countries over the last 20 years in wars of aggression.
The Chinese POV is simple: the “rules based international order” was created by America and its allies when China was at its weakest point in centuries. Expecting China to simply say “what a great order” is deranged. Nor is China acting worse than America did during its rise to power: it is seeking the same sort of influence that America did with things like the Monroe doctrine, but has overthrown fewer governments along the way and launched fewer wars. Far fewer.
America, to the Chinese, wants to freeze international relations at the point of American maximum power and Chinese greatest weakness.
From the American POV, China is terrible. They haven’t obeyed a lot of the rules. They’ve screwed over a lot of American companies in China. They’re aggressively bullying their neighbours (India being the latest, and successfully, I’d say), and contesting with America for control over waters near China that has essentially been an American lake since World War II by building islands in the South China Sea.
But the real problem is simple economics. By various metrics China already has the largest economy in the world. If they continue to grow that will become unambiguously the case: they will be much larger than the American economy.
America has been able to use the current “rules based order” to slow China recently, as when it kneecapped Huawei, China’s leading smartphone manufacturer by forbidding use of US technology, and by convincing allies to not invest in Huawei 5G (where China is ahead), but that technological lead is fading. When the US passed Britain in manufacturing, it took about 3 decades for them to then surpass Britain technologically (though it didn’t matter much, the Brits invented things, the Americans made them.)
The Chinese aren’t stupid, having had a weakness used against them, they move hard to end it.
One irony of the situation is that both countries are terribly led. Xi Jingping is a genius at internal politics, but not competent at actually running the country and terrible at foreign affairs. His first instinct is always to bully, and so instead of other countries falling into China’s arms, as they should given how bad a hegemon the US is, he’s driven countries in America’s arms.
That takes special talent, and while his genius for internal politics has put him firmly in control of the country, it operated better when the oligarchy replaces the supreme leader regularly, not when there was one “great” leader whose talent is mostly to shove people around.
China likewise has a demographic bomb: their population will turn “old” in about 15 years, a consequence of the one child policy. The policy was probably necessary at the time, but the consequence will be a serious slowdown as they have to spend much more of their economy, as a percentage, caring for old folks who no longer work. This same style of demographic bomb is one of the factors that cut the legs out from under Japan’s economic miracle.
In a personal sense, however, none of this is all that important. What I want to emphasize for you is to keep in mind that the world is moving towards a cold war, where it is divided into two mutually hostile blocs. They will have different payment systems (Russia and China and Iran and many others are very tired of the US ability to hurt both individuals and countries, often disastrously, thru financial sanctions). They will have different trade areas and trade rules, and there’s a decent chance they’ll stop even pretending to obey each others IP laws (a major US complaint is that China already often doesn’t.)
It’s going to be very hard to stay “between” these two blocs unless Europe decides to be the third bloc. Being within one set of rules will put you at odds with the other set. Money won’t transfer easily. Trade will be hobbled. Favors will be done for nations inside each bloc, as they were in Cold War 1.0.
So keep this in mind: the unipolar moment is ending. There is unlikely to be “one world”, odds are it’ll be two or three worlds.
And sitting on a fence between them will be frowned on and often very dangerous.
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by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Russia turns away from NASA, says it will work with China on a Moon base
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 3-10-21]
Brazil’s High Court Invalidates Lula’s Convictions, Leaving Him Eligible to Run Against Bolsonaro
[greenwald.substack.com, via Naked Capitalism 3-10-21]
….this is increasingly becoming the playbook for neoliberal elites who are angry that the population has defied them by voting for those they oppose. Thwarted by the democratic process, elites now resort instead to subversions of democracy in the name of upholding it. The employ frivolous impeachments to remove the leader whose legitimacy they never accepted, lawfare designed to make governance impossible through endless investigations or even the unjust imprisonment of their political opponents, and a full-scale union with the corporate media which openly and shamelessly ceases to report and instead engages in tawdry political activism to destroy the leaders chosen by the disobedient population. Indeed, the oligarchical Brazilian media so openly and overwhelmingly favored Dilma’s impeachment that the steadfastly apolitical press freedom group Reporters Without Borders dropped Brazil to 104th in its annual press freedom rankings and warned that the Brazilian press’ abandonment of the journalistic function while agitating for Dilma’s removal was so severe that the Brazilian press itself endangered press freedom.
As neoliberalism destroys more and more lives around the world, leaving an endless array of social pathologies in its wake, power centers will seek out tactics to subvert the democratic will. The increasing insistence on censoring the internet and controlling the flow of information is one symptom of elite fear of popular rage and desperation. So, too, is the related attempt by corporate media outlets to regain their monopoly over news and discourse by discrediting anyone or anything which sits in opposition to them. And the playbook that resulted in Dilma’s removal from office less than eighteen months after Brazil elected her, followed by the unjust imprisonment of Lula to ensure he could not run and win again, is reflective of a pattern already emerging in the west: abusing the force of law, propaganda and state processes to destroy those whom the population was not supposed to elect.\
Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Let’s start with this little video of the geographical spread of China over time.
Looks like the Han conquered a lot of other people. They then imposed their culture, their writing, and over time, their language on those people.
Here’s the rule: Any people who get a significant military advantage, use it to conquer. They may not do so immediately, but eventually they do so.
The Mongols conquered the largest land empire in history. They were undefeated for generations; absolutely crushing military advantage.
The Russians, later, with the gunpowder advantage, conquered their large land empire.
The gunpowder advantage was big, but not that big. It worked in the Americas because of a plague that killed off over 90 percent of the population. Absent that, at worst/best you have a situation closer to India, though probably with a bit more successful colonization.
In ancient history, the Greeks had a huge military advantage. They knew they had it for a while before it was used by Alexander to conquer a huge swathe of the ancient world. (This is similar to the Mongols’ horse-archer advantage; they had to wait for a Genghis Khan to use it effectively.)
Shaka would have done something similar, had he been born a thousand years earlier, but he had the bad luck to run into the Brits, who posessed a much larger advantage.
We know nothing about the Druids because the Romans slaughtered them, colonized most of their lands, and made the Gauls into semi-Romans. The Christians later finished the job.
The Norse are gone because they lost a multi-century religious war against the Christians. We have weird ideas about the Norse: They were reacting to a hegemonic religious ideology that was already force-converting pagans. Charlemagne (a profoundly evil man) forced Saxons to convert, then killed them. Figured he was saving their souls, no doubt.
So the Norse built a wall across the south of Denmark (being outnumbered) and took to the seas, where they had an advantage. They raided and destroyed monasteries not just because that’s where the loot was, but because it was Christianity driving the forced conversions.
The Norse, despite their “terror,” lost. The last Norse pagans, in Iceland, converted because if they didn’t, they would have lost the ensuing war.
The industrial revolution probably created the greatest military advantage the world has ever known. It was used to conquer most of the world that was still agrarian, and where it didn’t conquer, it humiliated. The second the Japanese industrialized, they went on their own conquering spree. Mao, unifying China, immediately conquered Tibet (ironically using a claim based on the notion that, “The Mongols conquered you and us at the same time, so you should be ours.”)
Again, the rule here is simple. People are people. When a group gets a massive military advantage, they use it to conquer and colonize (Greek colonies in the ancient world were endemic.) The larger the advantage, the more conquests. In time, conquests that are unsustainable go away, and those that have largely eradicated the indigenous culture (sometimes through genocide, sometimes by just getting rid of the culture), remain, even if nominally independent. Canada, Mexico, and even most South American countries are NOT resurgences of the people who ruled the countries before Europeans showed up. Neither are most of the areas China conquered in its millenia long march.
What China is doing in Tibet and to the Uighurs, in that light, is simply a modern version of what the Chinese have done for ages.
None of this means that colonialism and conquest and cultural or actual genocide are good. They aren’t.
They are, however, our current pattern. We are living through a holding pattern right now, to an extent, only because of nuclear weapons. If a massive advantage is obtained which neutralized nukes, this pattern would re-emerge.
If we want this pattern to end, we need to figure out why it happens: What creates the enabling conditions, and we need to become a conscious world civilization.
Right now, if you look at the “greenhouse gas” curve or at the “species extinction curve” and compare it to the curve of a bunch of bacteria in a petri dish growing uncontrollably until they die in their own waste, you won’t see any significant difference.
At the civilization and cultural level, we are not conscious. We do not make choices, much as we think we do. Instead we act like any other animal, driven by unconscious impulses and drives we apparently cannot control.
None of the evils we inflict, as societies, on each other or on the other species of the world, will cease for any significant amount of time, if we do not become conscious and work to change these behaviours.
If we can’t, we will likely go extinct. If not this time around, then next. We will keep careening into absolutely forseeable problems and doing nothing about them until its too late, and one of these days, it will kill us.
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Niiiiice.
Unless you’re a junior banker. Or a customer.
A given means of production, combined with a resource base, will throw off some amount of surplus. That surplus is divided among the population based entirely on their power. Sometimes that power comes from scarcity, often managed scarcity as in the Medieval Guild system, or un-managed scarcity during the first decades of a technological change (hello, programmers!), but most often it comes out of the barrel of a gun, from the point of a spear, or from the edge of a sword.
In Against the Grain, about the rise of early kingdoms after agriculture, the author points out that in agricultural systems where the farmer produces a single major crop, it is really easy to take away all but the bare minimum for the farmer’s survival; you know how much land, how much rainfall, when the crop is harvested, and where the farmer lives. The farmers mostly can’t run away, and they can’t win a fight against professional warriors, so you can just take their crops. In the Middle Ages, there are accounts of knights fighting peasants who outnumbered the knights a hundred to one and the knights came out not just victorious, but with nothing but minor injuries. The peasants, well, they got massacred.
Our own society is similar. Bankers have, along with various adjacent industries and central banks (somehow given “independence”), a monopoly on creating money (which they create as debt). This monopoly, of course, is enforced by the government, and the government’s enforcement rests on men with guns (and, these days, a few women), plus prisons where they brutalize you. Opening a new bank is very, very hard.
Then, within banks, the seniors take most of the gains, as one would expect.
None of this would work without those men with guns and ugly prisons, though.
There are variations on this, of course. After WWII, when a huge percentage of the male population knew how to fight effectively in groups, why, by coincidence the deal was more even. When those men aged out, why, somehow the deal got worse. (This isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one.)
Inequality tracks with force being unequal. When a few men are superior to a huge mass of other men, then inequality soars. The feudal knight was genuinely superior to peasants. Greek Hoplites were equal to each other, but ruled over a huge mass of slaves. The same goes for the Roman legionnaires — but notice the Equites (who could afford a horse to bring to the fight) had higher legal status and rights.
Mercenary armies and police, like most armies and police in the world, are wonderful for this. They’re loyal to whomever pays them. Most revolutions happen when there is a financial crisis for a reason.
So, get control of force and use it to control money/means of production, or get control of money/means of production and use it to create force. Obviously it’s really about some of both, but you use whichever one you have more of to get control over the other one. Wall Street bought DC so that it could have control over the police and courts, which is why Obama immunized them from their crimes and bailed them out — including from really raw and obvious crimes like illegally signing a document saying the bank owned someone else’s house. Absolute fraud and straight robbery: That’s what Obama made go away for the financial industry.
Some of those people who had their houses stolen, in a society with less police and military and nasty prisons, might have taken retribution and recompense into their own hands, but in the US, well, no, that’s really not possible. You might get retribution, but then the cops will imprison or kill you, which they didn’t do to the men who stole your house and probably your job, car, and future.
In raw terms, this is the situation in the US and a lot of other countries (certainly in Britain). A small minority has control over force and money, and as they feel more and more secure in their control of those two things, they take more and more of what the society produces.
The 2008/9 Obama and the Fed was a watershed incident. The rich had lost everything. Absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they had “won” the bet like Goldman Sachs, because if I win a bet with you and you lose all your money, I’m fucked too. The Fed and other central banks bailed them out to the tune of trillions; Obama and other political leaders immunized them from their crimes (and the entire bubble was based on fraud), and our elites then KNEW, without a doubt, that they were in complete control and that they could do anything, and that the violent authorities would bail them out and protect them from their victims.
And that, my friends, is where we are now. There will be no significant downward redistribution until elites either lose control of the violent apparatus, or genuinely think they are about to, or can’t win their side of an oncoming revolution.
Or, of course, until the fact that there is a real economy and environment, and they aren’t just mismanaging it, but effectively burning it down to make money, causes an economic collapse where suddenly money can’t buy the mercenaries’ loyalty any more.
Fun time to be alive.
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This video, of Senator Sinema voting no on a bill to enact a $15/hour minimum wage caused some outrage.
Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML
— RootsAction (@Roots_Action) March 5, 2021
Do watch it, it’s short.
Perhaps it makes you angry. If you earn less than $15/hour or care about anyone who does, it probably should.
In our society we demonize negative emotions. The person who doesn’t get angry wins the debate. You’re not supposed to be scared.
And hate, well hate is the worst of all emotions, to us.
But all of these emotions have a purpose.
Fear is supposed to alert you to danger.
Anger is supposed to tell you someone has done something they shouldn’t have (which is why it often comes right on the heels of fear).
And hate, well, hate is supposed to tell you someone is a long term threat.
So, you should fear people like Sinema (she was one of eight Dems who voted no — she just got flack for taking so much joy in it) because they are a danger to you: They want you to be poor, and therefore always in danger of hunger, homelessness, and ill health.
People like Sinema should also make you angry, because they do inappropriate things. (See above).
And yes, you should hate them, because they are a long-term threat to your well-being.
Fear, anger, and hate are working when they ping the appropriate targets. When elites redirect those emotions to people who aren’t a threat to you (Saddam Hussein, say) then they are inappropriate.
They should also be graded appropriately. Even if you think, as an American, that Putin stole the 2016 election (uhmmm), he isn’t nearly the threat to you that your own politicians are. It isn’t Putin who spent 40 years dropping wages through the floor, sending young men and women to war, and destroying American civil liberties.
Likewise, it always amuses me when I talk to helicopter parents and they tell me, “But it’s so much more dangerous today than it was when you were a child.”
No, it actually isn’t. It’s much less dangerous. Moreover, almost all danger to children comes from trusted adults, including relatives, teaches, coaches, and family friends, not from strangers. But people hear on the news about exceptional cases (which are exceptional because they are very rare) where strangers hurt children and think it’s common, when, actually, it’s extraordinarily rare.
In a society where elites control the media, and media determines perception of benefit and danger, people’s fear, anger, and hate calibrations are way off. They fear people who are of little threat to them, and identify with their despoilers (Obama, Trump, Clinton, Bush, Pelosi, the list goes on).
They think spectacular bad events are common (stranger-child attacks) and discount the actual danger (Uncle Bob, or Dad.)
In this context fear, anger, and hate are bad. So are love and trust of partisan authority figures. Remember all the fools worshiping Cuomo, who has always been a vile piece of human garbage.
So one of the first tasks, for sanity, and in order to make good decisions, is to re-orient our emotions. To point hate at long term enemies (our politicians) rather than at our neighbors or foreigners who aren’t a threat. (Unless you’re Iraqi, or Yemeni, say, in which case, well….)
The world has a lot of dangers. They almost always come from the people you trust, whom you shouldn’t. Learn who’s actually trustworthy, and who is a danger.
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