Ian Welsh

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

Month: August 2022 Page 2 of 4

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 21, 2022

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On August 21, 2022

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Kenneth Mack | The 14th amendment: its radical past (YouTube)

[Harvard Law School, Nov. 16, 2016, via YouTube]

[TW: Law Professor Kenneth Mack chronologically summarizes the terrorizing events that prompted the writing and passage of the 14th Amendment, and the reactions against it, including:

  • the Memphis riot of May 1-3, 1866, in which black Union troops being demobilized were confronted by a white mob that killed 46 local
  • the New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866, in which 34 African Americans were killed and another 119 wounded, by a white mob composed largely of former Confederate soldiers
  • the horrifying ax murder of a black family in rural Kentucky in the summer of 1868, by two white men, John Blyew and George Kennard. When officials in Kentucky refused to prosecute the two white murderers, federal officials tried and convicted them in the U.S. Court for the District of Kentucky. The state of Kentucky then appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, arguing Kentucky’s laws prohibiting African Americans from testifying against whites invalidated the convictions. The Supreme Court rejected the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and ruled that victims were not entitled to protection from violations of their rights perpetrated under the laws of the “sovereign” states.
  • The massacre of over 100 black militia men by a group of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan in Colfax, Louisiana, April 13, 1873. ]

.

Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (YouTube)

[National Constitution Center, November 19, 2019, via YouTube]

31:11
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” What are the privileges or immunities of citizens?  Nobody knows… Bingham [US Representative from Ohio John A. Bingham, who drafted the 14th Amendment] had a clear idea — he said those are the liberties protected in the Bill of Rights. Bingham said what this clause will do is require the states to respect the Bill of Rights. Before the Civil War the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights only apply to the federal government. What are the first words of the First Amendment? “Congress shall make no law…” Look at freedom of speech: try to give a speech against slavery in South Carolina — you can’t, there’s a law against it. Doesn’t that violate the First Amendment? No, because the First Amendment is about the federal government. But now Bingham says the now the states are going to have to abide by it.

33:18
There was a tradition of sharp distinctions among different kinds of rights: political rights, the right to vote, but you can be a citizen and not have that  — women were citizens but they couldn’t vote. That’s up to the states to determine who votes, at least before the Civil War. Civil rights, you mentioned a lot of them a minute ago those are the rights that really make it possible to compete in the labor market: the rights of signed contracts, to sue and be sued, to testify in court, have basic equality before the law…. Republicans by this time thought blacks orught to have all of those civil rights that  — that’s what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 says….

33:57 — The language is interesting… citizens have to enjoy these civil rights the same as enjoyed by white persons. That’s a very interesting way of putting it. Before the Civil War, the word “white” in law was a boundary, a barrier: only white people can vote… Now they use whiteness as a baseline: if white people enjoy this right, than everybody else has to enjoy it. So it’s amazing… what’s going on here is a complete rewriting of the legal structure of the United States in terms of race. One of the things I used a tell my students, “you know what they are trying to here,  if you wonder what their original intent is, it’s what we would call today “regime change.” They are trying to change a regime based on slavery into a regime based on freedom.” That’s what they are trying to do in reconstruction, with these laws and these amendments.

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Open Thread

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On August 20, 2022

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Trifecta+ Which Will Make The Next 100 Years Hell

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On August 19, 2022

26 Comments

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

We have three major challenges all coming to peak close to each other.

Or possibly four, depending on how you define your terms.

First: the end of a sub-ideological era. Neoliberalism is on its last legs, just as New Deal liberalism was in the 70s. Ends of sub-ideologies tend to be tumultuous and it’s worse when it’s the end of a fundamentally extractive sub-ideology like neoliberalism, than it is with the end of a “building” ideology like the New Deal which worked to strengthen people, regulate companies and build vast human and inanimate infrastructure.

Neoliberalism was, fundamentally, the realization that all that build-up led to a huge looting opportunity. Get rid of the regulations, stop enforcing anti-oligopoly laws, force massive asset bubbles and those on the inside could get stinking rich.

The New Deal was a reaction to the problems created by a certain type of exploitative capitalism: a “we can’t allow this sort of abuse”, where neoliberalism was “man, abusing people, and destroying/privatizing institutions makes a lot of money.”

So, the 70s sucked, but they were nothing near as bad as the great depression and WWII.

But that’s also because the transition to neoliberalsim did not coincide with—

Second: the end of a hegemonic era. 1914 to 1945 is the end of not just British but European world hegemony. At the end WWII the USSR and US divide Europe in half, with the US controlling the Western half and the USSR the eastern. That the America glove was often velvet, did not change the fact that there was a steel gauntlet underneath (look up Gladio, as an example.)

The death tolls of WWI (21m), II(50m) and the Great Depression (uncounted), plus the anti-colonial wars, famines and the Japanese conquests(14m) and colonial wars is in excess of a 100 million. At the end of WWII, the world population was about 1.33 billion people. That’s a lot dead people and we aren’t counting all the people who were maimed, impoverished, made into refugees, raped or tortured. Nor are we counting the USSR pogroms (we probably should) or the colonial famines (we probably should.)

Hegemonic powers do not go easy into the sunset, and the more powerful they were, the harder they die.

But although there were some serious environmental problems in this era (the dust bowl, for example), the simultaneous end of the hegemonic and sub-ideological cycles which occurred in the early 20th century (which includes communism), didn’t have what we have coming—

Third: a worldwide environmental crisis which will reduce the Earth’s carrying capacity semi-permanently. At best reversal will take hundreds of years and be partial, because we aren’t going to be able to un-extinct all the species we’re killing and the depth and vibrancy of the ecological web is a huge part of Earth’s biological carrying capacity.

So, we can reasonably expect that a significantly greater proportion of the Earth’s human population will die during the upcoming period and more people will be impoverished, tortured, raped, turned into refugees and so on. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that didn’t happen, but it requires human social groups to act with decisiveness, wisdom, compassion and forethought which have no precedent in human history I am aware of.

These is what I’ve partially labelled in my categories as “The Age of War and Revolution” and “The Twilight of Neoliberalism”, but they are much larger than that.

Now there is also a larger cycle coming. You’ll note that I kept calling New Deal Capitalism and Neoliberalism sub-ideologies. They’re both capitalist ideologies, and the capitalist world-system has been around since the late 15th century, blossoming with the industrial revolution into a global world-system. Previous to this, contradicting the name, most world-systems didn’t cover the entire globe, but capitalism did. Even communism was part of the system (that’s an entire other article, but the USSR was not in autarchy and was forced to play the game by capitalist world rules.)

Capitalism is ending. There are a bunch of reasons (follow the prior link), but one big part of it is simply that it’s going to have been seen to have failed and be blamed by everyone for the environmental crisis (it’s not just a climate crisis, ecological collapse is at least as important). Democracy stands a chance of getting it in the neck too.

We aren’t just going to be changing sub-ideologies and swapping hegemonic powers and dealing with an enviro-collapse; we are going to be changing how we fundamentally run our societies, because it is almost certain that you can’t be capitalist and fix the environment, and in any case, again, capitalism will totally be discredited by all the deaths and catastrophes during this era.

Likewise, we are going to have to transition from the hydrocarbon era which has run since near the start of the industrial revolution because we cannot fix our environmental issues and have hydrocarbons be our primary energy source.

So, depending on whether you count the transition from capitalism to whatever, we’ve got the end of 5 eras or so. (WWI to II also saw a sub-transition in energy, from coal and steam engines to oil and internal combustion.)

This is compounded by the fact that end of sub-ideological and ideological eras always occurs with fanatically incompetent elites in charge. The classic western example is the fall of Rome, but look at the Weimar Republic, at Hoover, at Nixon/Ford/Carter and so on. The generations who created the previous system are dead or out of power and their heirs are boobs who don’t know how to repair their system. When the Lost generation, the last generation to remember the 20s, not just the great depression) died, a subset of the GI and Silent generations then destroyed the New Deal, both negatively (unable to deal with the oil shocks) and positively (Reagan/Thatcher/Friedman, etc..)

The people in charge now are radically incompetent at everything except internal power games. They are good at accumulating money and staying in charge and bad at everything else. They cannot fix any problems, at best they mitigate, and their mitigations (such as central banks printing money in response to the 2008 financial crisis) make underlying problems worse. On top of simple mechanical incompetence, they are also unimaginative: they cannot conceive of different ways of running society. Even when there are partial exceptions (Chinese leadership handling Covid semi-competently is an example) the elites can’t see their way to ending the ideology (capitalism, and yes, China is a capitalist mixed society) which is destroying the conditions for its own existence.

So this is where we are: the end of an ideological era; the end of a hegemonic era and a huge environmental crisis, all of which can’t be handled without fundamental ideological and leadership changes and which an reasonably be expected to kill billions of people while we “figure” or “fumble” it out.

Welcome to the fin de siecle. More than one. Enjoy the fruits of decadence while they still last.

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You Don’t Have To Be Upset

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On August 18, 2022

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Terrible things are happening all time. Right now, as you read it, people are suffering in monstrous, awful ways. Many, many people.

That’s how it is. That’s how it has always been, and as long as there is life of the type there is on Earth, that’s the way it will be. Human and many animal bodies are built for pain and suffering, and not only are we often astoundingly cruel to each other, but accident, disease and the infirmities of old age will scourge us till we, perhaps, become homo-deus.

One of the wisest things I ever read was a 90+ year old who met their spouse to be at the gym, when they were both in their 90s, who said, “neither my (spouse) nor I spend one second worrying about anything we can’t control.”

And, if you can control something, there’s no reason to worry about that.

Bad things are happening all the time. But if you get upset about them, you aren’t helping: your being upset doesn’t make the situation better.

What it does do is make you suffer. All you’re doing is making the world worse, for yourself.

This is one of the most important things I’ve ever written, so re-read the above two paragraphs and think about them.

Much of our sympathetic suffering is because we think that we should be upset, or angry, or worried. Having the emotion either feels like something a good person would do (and we want to be good people) or it feels like, in itself, it is taking action.

Or both. Read that last paragraph again.

There are absolutely situations where feeling bad is wise: they are almost all where you are with someone else who is feeling bad, and your sympathetic misery lets them know you care.

But even in such situations, staying miserable is rarely helpful to the other person. Getting in sync with them, then helping lift them out sometimes works and sometimes what they need is just your misery with them.

But when you leave their presence, being miserable doesn’t help them, and it hurts you.

You also don’t need to feel bad to take action. You can do something to help people who are suffering without having to suffer yourself.

The best states to help from are usually compassion or love. Those states are good for you and good for the people  you’re helping.

But first don’t make the world worse by suffering when your suffering doesn’t help.

This is a real disease in our society and it is made worse by 24/7 global coverage of bad shit. There’s always something terrible happening and you can always find something to feel terrible about. Our sympathetic mirroring of others emotions arose when we lived in small bands, it is not adapted to an internet world where we identify with people we’ve never met and never will.

But to break this habit, to stop hurting yourself, you have to internalize the logic that not feeling bad when bad things happen, especially bad things when you’re not there, does not mean you’re a bad person and you need to split the idea of “feeling” from taking action to help. (And, after all, most of the time you aren’t going to do anything, and often you effectively can’t do anything: there’s just too much evil.)

To do this, to break these connection is the ethical and moral action, because hurting yourself is not required in most cases to help others, so all you’re doing is increasing the world’s suffering. As the Buddha supposedly said, “your compassion is not complete if it does not include yourself.”

Please stop hurting yourself needlessly.

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Spring Of A Down, Chapters XVI-XVIII

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On August 18, 2022

Королевство кривых зеркал[xcvii]

Hush. He will tell the story forwards, but it makes more sense in reverse.[xcviii]

He was at his house, leaving. He closed a red door and he thought “I must have it painted black.”[xcix]

His car was broken. It was a Mercedes Benz. It had been broken since 1969.[c]

So, he walked up the road. It was a long row to hoe and he would be walking for two solid days to get to where he was going.

And on that second day, the waters parted from the waters.[ci] The mirror crack’d from side to side as the man turned to the dirt path from the paved.[cii] There were trees crowded around the road and twigs dropped into the puddles from above. Again, he looked above at the clouded sky. There was no rain falling. Yet. But it was pregnant and foreboding. The late winter weather seemed waiting to drench him again. At least it was not snow.

He trudged along the basin. To his right, there were glimpses of a large reservoir. The reservoir was where the Dnipro and the Pripyat merged and converted. It was a Kingdom of crooked mirrors – which bank was which?[ciii] He realized he was more tired than he thought.

There was the quiver of spring, but not yet, not yet. Then ahead a yellow pickup truck was parked in the distance. Joy leapt from his heart. He ran very slowly because the trail was made of mud, and he had a long way to go. His eyes were fixed on the yellow back of the truck hoping that he could rest. Even if rest was in the back. Even if rest meant sitting in the rain. Anything was better than this. Anything.

So along he ran with drench green boots and tatter fur on the inside with brown coat draping and gray hat dropping. Then he saw, he saw… He saw nothing. The was no driver behind the wheel. It seemed as if the truck was abandoned. A crushing feeling made him feel more alone. He went walking; a sad walk at that.

Along the truck’s edge until he reached the driver’s side. There, there was a body. He could see red that exited towards the back. He did not see the face. It was a civilian – all the good that got him. Then he spied the keys still in the ignition. Never one to look at the teeth he opened the door and pulled the corpse out.[civ] For a moment he saw the wrinkled face. It had a white and black freckled beard. The man looked away, quickly. Very quickly. One should not look at a dead man. It would be irreligious and sacrilegious.

But in the driver’s seat, everything felt different. He felt a little bit in charge. He sat upright. His boots still felt wet and outside the precipitation went to ice, but these things did not matter. He checked the petrol and found it half full. He ignored the murmuring in his head that it was just too fortunate to find a truck with any amount of fuel in it. Coincidence.

The wheels slogged through the grime. It had been raining much of the time and the road showed the wear and tear of the late winter rain with a vengeance. He focused now on driving because his eyesight was not as it used to be. But he ignored glasses. Too fragile, too delicate, to easily lost, to easily forgotten.

He was a man, God damn it.[cv] Oleg was his God-given name.

Then up ahead there were men on the road. Infantry men. Green clad infantry men. Russian green clad infantry men.

There were only two choices, and he did not have time to choose either. The truck stopped.

The window was rolled down by inches which a manual window handle moved. Teeth.

The first man on the outside placed his hands over the door, and began to speak:

“What are you doing driving around here?” The face was young, the words were plastic. The young face stared blankly into his eyes with a brown surreptitious look.

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Collapse Of Water Supply For Countries Around Tibet

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On August 16, 2022

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Amu-Darya Watershed

Tibet is a water tower; its glaciers, snow packs and lakes are the source of many of the greatest rivers in the countries around it. Two of those are the Indus river in India and Pakisatan, and the Amu-Darya which flows along the border of Afghanistan.

A recent study predicts:

large declines under a mid-range carbon emissions scenario by the mid-twenty-first century. Excess water-loss projections for the Amu Darya and Indus basins present a critical water resource threat, indicating declines of 119% and 79% in water-supply capacity, respectively.

Wait? Over 100%?

Anyway, this sort of thing is why I’m so negative on prospects for India and the areas which rely on the Tibetan glaciers and snow pack for water, which includes much of China, Thailand and Vietnam (the Mekong) as well. Note that this same process is occurring elsewhere: in the European alps, in the Rockies in North America, and in the rivers fed by the great northern glaciers of Canada.

What happens here will lead to denialist stupidity: the increased heat will, in some areas, lead to some years where there are is MORE water, and floods and so on, until the glaciers, in particular, collapse. So we are likely to alternate drought with floods, until the rivers just dry up, and many of the lakes with them.

When the Tibetan water tower collapses, the countries around it will be devastated. The West of North America will suffer a similar fate, though those on the coast may be able to replace much of the water with desalinization (it’s expensive, but the numbers I’ve seen indicate it’s doable, especially if you decide to stop growing almonds and other water expensive crops), but those on the wrong side of the Rockies, or high up, are pretty much out of luck. The East is in somewhat better shape, but the Great Lakes, which are close to stasis anyway, will be put under great pressure and if we try to use very much water from them we will easily drain them.

On the other side of the equation, rain patterns will shift. Hotter air means more rain, generally speaking, but where it goes is likely to change. It’s reasonable to suppose that the Sahara might get monsoons again, for example, but we just don’t know the full effects. If the monsoon fails in any region, that region will be devastated.

Add to this the massive drainage and poisoning of aquifers, including in North America, India and China and we have a situation where it is entirely reasonable to expect an absolute collapse of food production. I suspect, as I’ve discussed in other articles, that as per the “Limits to Growth” modeling, we’re about at the per capita food production peak, though not yet the absolute peak.

This stuff appears to be me to be baked in. It would require much more radical restriction of CO2 and other climate change gasses than we are doing or likely to do to stop it, and there’s some reason to believe we may be at the point where processes are now self-reinforcing, as with methane release from permafrost and swamps and the Amazon becoming a net emitter of carbon rather than a sink. As these new sources emit, they cause climate change no longer directly driven by our current actions and in doing so cause more emissions and that loop will come to drive more and more change.

That’s the situation. If we keep deaths to a billion people, that would be an extraordinarily good result, because these processes will also drive political change, including vast amounts of violence and waves of refugees which make the puny European refugee crisis look like a pygmy.

Welcome to the future. It’s here, and it’s going to get much, much worse.

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The Espionage Act Is Bad Law Even When It Is Used Against People I Despise Like Trump

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On August 15, 2022

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Back in June 2019, the New Yorker wrote an article lambasting the Espionage Act.

The George W. Bush Administration pursued several government insiders for leaking classified information, but it was the Obama Administration that normalized the use of the Espionage Act against journalists’ sources. Among its targets were Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, who was sentenced to three and a half years for supplying the Times with classified information about U.S. efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program; Donald Sachtleben, a former F.B.I. agent who was sentenced to three and a half years for providing the Associated Press with information about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen; and Chelsea Manning, a former military-intelligence analyst who was sentenced to thirty-five years for providing Assange’s WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of pages of classified government documents…

…(about the Trump admin) Later that year, Sessions told Congress that the Justice Department was engaged in twenty-seven investigations into classified leaks — a dramatic escalation over previous years. In the two and a half years since Trump complained to Comey, the Justice Department has indicted three people under the Espionage Act for providing information of public concern to the press.

Now, the New Yorker is concentrating on people who were prosecuted for supplying information to the press, or in the case of Assange, for publishing information (acting as the press himself.) And one can easily say “This isn’t the same thing — Trump isn’t a whistleblower.”

And I agree. If Trump has taken information and given it to a foreign power, then it’s one of the few semi-legitimate uses of the Espionage Act to go after him.

But if it’s just sat in some boxes, well, the truth is that for senior people, like Clinton (yes, a junior person would have had their career destroyed and likely gone to prison for using their own private server the way she did) and General Petraeus (who avoided indictment under the act), the law is usually an empty letter.

One might then say, well, but these are nuclear secrets and much more serious.

But all of this caviling and caveats brings out the essential point: The Espionage Act is so widely written that it’s a prosecutor’s cudgel, and the choice of whether to use it or not is a political decision, not a matter of whether someone violated the letter of the law. For most of the 20th century, after the original proscriptions (used against communists and people who opposed the draft), it was rarely used, and the choice to use it was clearly a political choice.

It’s a bad law. It shouldn’t be on the books. If it is on the books, it should be applied evenly, and in all cases, for the simple reason that using it against people with power is how it would be repealed and replaced with something much less prone to abuse. If it had actually been used against Clinton, there would have been massive pressure to repeal it.

And that’s the good thing, here. If it’s used against Trump, well, perhaps the Republicans, next time they’re in a position to do so (which could be as early as 2024), will repeal it.

Or, instead, maybe they’ll go tit-for-tat and continue with its weaponization, going after Democrats and left-wingers.

That would be bad, but it would also have the potential for good. You get rules of war and politics when both or all sides have been monsters, and they finally realize that mutual monstrosity is bad.

As for Trump, I have little sympathy. He used the law badly, and for him to be hoist on it amuses. It’s a pity that Obama, who really weaponized it, is smart enough to have not laid himself open. But if I were Clinton, I’d be concerned after 2025.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 14, 2022

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On August 14, 2022

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by Tony Wikrent

The Inflation Reduction Act is Not Designed to Reduce Inflation

Benjamin Studebaker [via Naked Capitalism 8-8-2022, also Water Cooler 8-8-2022]

“If you actually look at this thing, this legislation only raises $739 billion over the next decade. This means that on average, each year, it only raises around $73.9 billion. This is not as much money as you might think. The US spends around $782 billion on defense each year. Last year alone, the federal government spent $6.8 trillion. We’re looking at less than 10% of the defense budget, 1% of the federal budget, and about 0.3% of GDP. How is the federal government meant to combat inflation with a new tax that is smaller than a third of a percentage point of the economy? The purpose of the bill is to be seen to be doing something. The Biden administration needs something to run on in the midterms…. [T]he United States suffers from a chronic lack of state capacity. It struggles to pass all but the most paltry legislation. It cannot get out in front of its problems and it cannot even solve crises as they arise. So, it papers over its dysfunction by measuring spending in decades rather than in years, by sticking that extra zero on the end of every number. Seven hundred billion sounds much better than seventy billion. It almost sounds like somebody’s doing something. But it’s the sound of silence.”

 

“A Complete Breakdown of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Inflation Reduction Act”

[Slate, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 8-11-2022]

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the Walt Whitman of federal legislation: like the great American poet, the bill contradicts itself; it is large and contains multitudes. It represents the most significant climate investment in U.S. history, but it also paves the way for a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. It includes a new minimum tax designed to ensure that large corporations pay at least 15 percent of their profits to the federal government, but it also showers corporations in tax subsidies that will push many more firms’ tax rates below 15 percent (and in some cases below zero). It is disappointingly modest in its aspirations, but it will arguably be—along with the Affordable Care Act—the most ambitious piece of legislation signed by a Democratic president in more than a half century.”

 

Digging Into the Inflation Reduction Act (podcast)

[The American Prospect, August 12, 2022]

In this episode, the hosts interview David Dayen about just what is in the monster Inflation Reduction Act: gobs of tax credits, new regulations, tax hikes, and so on. Then they discuss what its passage reveals about the state of the Democratic coalition and what it might bode for the future.

 

Climate and environmental crises

Bad News for Earth: Rainwater Is No Longer Safe to Drink, Study Says

[Popular Mechanics, via Ian Welsh 8-12-2022]

Earth is officially past its safe zone for plastic contamination. The PFAS “boundary has been exceeded,” according to a study published August 2 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. PFAS are known to be hazardous to both the environment and human health. At this point, these “forever chemicals” are all over the globe and have seeded the atmosphere. Most importantly, they don’t break down in the environment.

 

Strategic Political Economy

‘Debt bomb’ risks: More than 40 nations are at risk of default — and that’s a problem for us all 

[Grid, via The Big Picture 8-7-2022]

The world faces the possibility of a series of economic collapses that could destabilize the lives of millions of people.

 

US occupation loots most of Syria’s oil: Ministry 

[Al Mayadeen, via Mike Norman Economics 8-10-2022]

 

Global power shift as USA and west commit suicide by neoliberalism

US Military ‘Furiously’ Rewriting Nuclear Deterrence to Address Russia and China, STRATCOM Chief Says

Tara Copp, Navy Adm. Chas Richard [Defense One, via Mike Norman Economics 8-12-2022]

The US is now in uncharted territory with two peer competitors of the US allied with each other.

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