Use for discussion unrelated to recent posts. No conversation primarily about Covid.
Month: January 2022
One of the most clarifying things about the Covid epidemic has been which countries have been able to handle it and which haven’t.
To oversimplify, China and a few other nations have handled it well. None of the major Western powers have; certainly not the US.
In biology, there’s a distinction between natural selection and sexual selection. In sexual selection, you compete against other members of your species. In natural selection, you compete against your environment.
In nations, societies, and civilizations there is something similar: internal vs. external competition. You compete against fellow members of your society for status, wealth, and power within your society, but your society as a whole competes against other societies. There are always top dogs, hegemonic powers, and so on, and losing an inter-society culture can, at worst, lead to you being genocided and, at best, lead to long periods of poverty and subjugation. (The Irish to the English, say, for hundreds of years. Native Americans to the Europeans. Indeed, almost everyone to the Europeans, but before that there have been various hegemonic powers — including China.)
In the West, with some minor exceptions, Covid was treated as a profit event. It was a way for the richest and most powerful to become even more rich and powerful. That millions would die and millions more would be crippled (Long Covid rates seem somewhere between 10 to 20 percent depending on definitions) was secondary to the possibility of funneling more power and wealth to those who already had the most. Billionaires, just one group among elites, have seen their wealth double during the pandemic.
China, or more accurately, the Chinese Communist Party did not treat the pandemic primarily as being about internal competition. To them it was important that large numbers of citizens did not die and were not disabled.
This means that China will come out of this stronger than the West, because the economy, fundamentally and always, is people, and there’s aren’t mass-disabled and/or dead. Plus the legitimacy of the ruling class, rather than being reduced by their pandemic response, has been increased.
To the CCP, the health of their citizens is integral to maintaining their power. To the West’s elites, it is an asset to be burned down to make more money and improve their internal position.
The irony of this is that by taking care of their citizens, the CCP has both improved their external and internal positions, while the West’s elites, who can be best characterized as incompetent psychopaths capable of nothing but accumulating more internal power and wealth, have been weakened despite their gains in wealth. This is because, as a group, their power is dependent on the health of their population and on their legitimacy.
As far as I can see, Covid pretty much proves that, barring outside shocks, China has already won the hegemonic competition between itself and the US. Oh, it’ll have to play out, but the CCP governs its country basically competently, and US elites are fools who let their society’s power run down.
US military superiority, in the face of nukes and the Russia/China alliance, is insufficient to alter this fact. China has the industry, it has more competent government, and its government’s legitimacy is riding high while the legitimacy of the West is in tatters.
Given these facts, and that China has a much larger population, it’s hard to see how the US can remain in its position. Just as the end of Britain as world ruler took generations after the US actually surpassed it economically, so this will take time to be seen. However, just as, by 1900, it was essentially inevitable that the US would take over from Britain, so it now seems that the hand-off to China is inevitable, or would be in a world without climate change and ecological collapse, those being the likely external shocks that even a functioning society may not be able to overcome.
I take little pleasure in this. I dedicated a decent chunk of my life to trying to help fix the US, as a Canadian-American collapse is likely to be ugly. But it is what it is, and it must be faced squarely.
The Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper had a great article on why there’s reason for Canada to be worried about US collapse or fascist takeover or both. It runs through various scenarios and is excellent, you should read it.
What I want to talk about is…related. Let’s start with the conclusion, after the case is very well made (if late, since the actually-prescient people noticed this a long time ago.)
But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
Can you think of anything more pathetic? A committee!
Here’s what I was arguing back in the 90s: To start with, we need a deterrent. It doesn’t have to be nuclear, if that gets our heinies in a twist; there are conventional explosives almost as dangerous, and we manufacture missiles.
We make lots of them — Canada is a big country. Put them on trucks, in grain silos, on trains, and move the mobile ones around a lot. Done properly there’s no way to take them out with a first strike before a lot of them launch (Israel couldn’t find Hezbollah’s launchers in a much smaller country).
Warn that, if the US invades, we take out not just their cities but hit some nice exurban/suburban spaces so the sort of people who want war know that they’ll get hit no matter what.
Canadians have spent a lot of time pretending Americans, who routinely invade, bomb, and assassinate in other countries, would somehow never do it to us. This is delusional — and always has been.
Next: We have a long border, and it has to be hardened. I’m willing to take American refugees, but I want control over it and I don’t want militia yahoos. We need more boots and surveillance, and that takes some time.
Finally, change economic policy and start doing everything possible to build our industry back up and to diversify our trade ties, while making and growing as much of what we need here. That’s eminently possible.
Of course, the US will not want us to do any of this. Having a compliant defenseless nation on their northern border is obviously in their interest. Indeed, the Chinese dream for Russia is to make it into their Canada (but less defenseless); an entire border that is completely safe.
We have no reason to take the safety away from the US; war with the US will never be in our interest. But we, have plenty of reason to get rid of being defenselessness — especially since we don’t know who will be in power in the US in the future.
Back in the 80s, the USSR ambassador to Pakistan is said to have said something like, “I do not know who will be in charge of Moscow in the future, but I know that Russia’s interests are always the same, and therefore we can be trusted. With America, what they want changes with the wind: they don’t seem to have a consistent set of interests, and so they cannot be trusted.”
The US is not a trustworthy country, even by the admittedly sleazy standards of international relations. It is becoming less and less trustworthy. Canada is rich with resources — especially water. This means we could easily re-industrialize if we simply accepted that it is in our interest to do so, rather than be a completely dependent and defenseless satrapy.
Oh, and finally, finally, we need to do everything we can to remove US cultural and political influence. As American politics has become more and more right-wing and crazy, so have ours. We have one-tenth the population of the US and a smaller economy. It is easy for US influences to swamp our politics and radicalize our population in Tea-Party-esque ways, and they have done so already, just not to the same extent as in the US heartland.
We were fools not to resist this with all our force, and if we don’t start now, it won’t matter. Like Austria when the Germans went bad, we’ll just go bad briefly afterwards.
It’s up to us. We can remain supine in the victim’s posture of, “Please don’t hurt us, we’re harmless and will do almost anything you ask!” or we can act to defend ourselves. Even if we do so, the US will remain to us what Russia has often been to Finland, and we will both have to make clear that invading or overly bullying us will HURT, but that we are no threat.
That’s just realpolitik, and we need to stop living in la-la-land and engage in it.
Start with this:
96 Michigan children hospitalized with COVID, breaking pandemic record. The sudden rise in pediatric hospitalizations from the virus surpassed the previous pandemic peak of 71 set on April 20 https://t.co/z6AFg5T5cp pic.twitter.com/Zm8ubd085x
— Cleavon MD 💉 (@Cleavon_MD) January 4, 2022
Omicron is more infectious than Delta. Its symptoms are concentrated more in the upper respiratory tract, which is one reason it is substantially less deadly, but upper respiratory tract infections are worse for children and better for adults.
Though it’s unclear how much less deadly Omicron is than Delta (because there are too many confounding variables like previous infection and vaccination), let’s do some clarifying math, as if you were back in school.
If Omicron is half as deadly as Delta, and four times as many people get it, how many people will die compared to Delta?
If five times as many people get it will more people die or less?
This is before we get into the question of hospitals being overwhelmed, meaning some people don’t get care, including people with problems other than Covid.
Then we have the multiplication of re-infection. Omicron appears to be optimized for re-infection. It’s not a case of “everyone gets it.” It’s a question of “How many times will you get it and does each time increase the chance of organ damage/Long Covid and/or death?” You can get the flu multiple times, then die from the last time, happened to one of my friends in his 30s.
Finally, a variant this widespread has many, many more chances to mutate. It might mutate towards even more mildness, but there’s no guarantee of that. Delta certainly wasn’t more mild.
Sending children back to schools during the Omicron surge is insanity.
I notice, also, that at least two nations are handling Omicron: China and Japan, so it isn’t a case of, “It can’t be done,” and gnashing, weeping, and pretending that we would do something — if something was possible. Something has always been possible and most nations have always refused to do what needed to be done.
That something has always been a mix of policies; not just vaccines, but track-and-trace, quarantines, lockdown, and improved ventilation. (Indeed it may be that one reason Japan is doing so well is that they acknolwedged Covid was airborne early and have taken that into account in their response.) US schools keeping doors and windows locked out of fear of shooters is an amazing case of statistical innumeracy, and every country which hasn’t been changing ventilation systems to deal with Covid is a country which is not serious about saving lives and avoiding a mass crippling of their population.
Covid has been a mass-crippling event. Millions of people will be disabled, for who knows who long, with affects on our societies and our sacred economies which will, themselves, be disabled.
Nor is there any particular reason to think that “herd immunity” from natural immunity will work, as Covid is good at re-infecting and immunity drops fast.
This is a brilliant and wonderful scenario for anyone who owns shares in vaccine manufacturers, with their boosters every few months (more often than every six, as we are seeing it), but bad for everyone else.
Covid is and always was a worldwide phenomena, which required a worldwide response. That could have happened if the major powers had agreed and done not only the right things themselves, but also assisted everyone else in doing the right thing. Instead, vaccine chauvinism, profit opportunities, and so on took precedence.
China’s leaders, totalitarian tyrants, apparently cared enough about their population to stop Covid, even at economic cost. Our leaders, seeing that Covid was a huge profit opportunity (billionaire wealth has about doubled), decided that mass death and disabling was a cost they were happy for their “free” subjects to pay.
Who are the barbarians?
And now it’s killing and crippling our children.
Your leaders kill and hurt you for money and power. That is how they have acted since Reagan and Thatcher took power.
They’re killing you. They’re killing your children. They’re crippling you. They’re crippling your children.
You make excuses for them, but the Chinese and Japanese leaders made other choices and so far, at least, they have avoided mass death among adults, elders, and children. Perhaps they’ll be overwhelmed eventually, I don’t know, but so far they’ve held the line.
Your leaders kill, cripple, hurt, and impoverish you for money. They’re doing it to your children now.
Is there anything they can and will do that will cause revolution?
Because removing them, en-masse, and trying them for their crimes is the only thing that will ever make the world better, or give you even the faintest chance of dealing with climate change and environmental collapse in a humane manner.
Covid has been a practice run for when climate change starts really hitting. It shows which societies are able to respond to a collective challenge.
Most of our societies have failed and because climate change, like Covid, is a world problem, that a few societies haven’t failed is unlikely to matter much, even to them. They’ll just stay together under pressure longer than we will.
We reached all four goals, and I’m very grateful.
THANK YOU to all who donated or subscribed.
Those goals were:
1 – A longer article on the collapse of the USSR, putting everything I’m aware of together. In particular, I want to discuss the steps Gorbachev took which seem like either gross stupidity or intentional destruction. The fall of the Soviet Union was studied in great detail by the Chinese Communist Party, and has informed their actions since
2 – A summary of world system analysis as practiced mainly by Immanuel Wallerstein, with a look at what it means for the future. World system analysis takes capitalism as a world system, and looks at how it has re-ordered the entire relationship of nations, subordinating them to its needs, through about five centuries. We can see clearly that most countries today are not sovereign, but subject to the system as a whole, this is true to some extent even of the hegemonic power, the US. Wallerstein thinks this world system is played out, and we’ll look at why. (Wallerstein, like Randall Collins predicted the collapse of the USSR in advance, using his model, when almost all specialists in the USSR did not see it coming.)
3 – A longish look at the theory of revolutions: When do revolutions happen and why? This will draw on people like Randall Collins and Michael Mann. Most of what they have is based on the experience of agrarian empires, so I’ll try and extend it a bit to industrial nations, and also look at what it means for a world system to collapse. World systems prior to capitalism didn’t include the entire world (and capitalism didn’t till the mid-19th century), so we can see what happened, for example, when the Roman Empire collapsed.
4 – An essay on the effect of computer and telecom technology on humanity. Neil Postman, in Technopoly, back in the 1990s predicted it would be bad for most people, and I would argue it has or will be, but we’ll take a look at the ups and downs, the affects on economics, geopolitics, and daily life. As with writing, printing, and firearms, the early results may not be the same as those in the longer term, so we’ll try and figure out some of those.
by Tony Wikrent
[Youtube,
Happy new year!
Now do lobbyists. Though the results will probably be about the same.
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Strategic Political Economy
Heather Cox Richardson, December 26, 2021 [Letters from an American]
…the collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”
In the 1990s, they turned their firepower on those they considered insufficiently committed to free enterprise, including traditional Republicans who agreed with Democrats that the government should regulate the economy, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. Movement Conservatives called these traditional Republicans “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs and said that, along with Democrats, such RINOs were bringing “socialism” to America.
With the “evil empire,” as President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union, no longer a viable enemy, Movement Conservatives, aided by new talk radio hosts, increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. As they strengthened their hold on the Republican Party, Movement Conservatives cut taxes, slashed the social safety net, and deregulated the economy.
In the 1990s, as well-connected businessmen began to gather wealth and power in the former Soviet republics, that deregulation made the US and the UK attractive places for these oligarchs to place their illicit money. According to a fascinating new study from Chatham House about the UK, that investment ultimately weakened the rule of law. The study concerns the UK alone, but since the UK and US are by far the world’s top exporters of financial services, many of the report’s findings are suggestive for the US as well….
The financial deregulation that made the US a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, after the September 11 attacks on the US, Congress in 2001 passed the PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.
In the years since, the United States has become one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Experts say that hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the US every year. As Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted last year, “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns, but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”
….
In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995.
That demonization has also helped to justify the deregulation of our economy and then the illicit money from the rising oligarchs it attracted, money that has corrupted our democratic system.
“Academic research is falling apart in slow motion over the last two years”
Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism 12-28-2021]
For discussion of topics unrelated to recent posts. No direct discussion of Covid will be approved. (Indirect, like on shortages, etc…) is fine.