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

Month: April 2024 Page 2 of 3

Why I Rarely Care About The Events Of the Day

There are two forces in history.

The first is weight. Or mass. Or trajectory. The unstoppable force. The US overtaking Britain as the premier industrial power. The two continental powers, Russia and the US, dividing Europe between them, an ancient pattern. Then the US outlasting the USSR because the US’s alliance had more people and resources and better geography.

The rise of China. The inexorable march of global warming and ecological collapse. The financialization and hollowing of a hegemonic power which always follows the decision to do free trade seriously

The second is human decision making at crisis points. Think the Cuban Missile Crisis. There were powerful men in the US who wanted to strike Cuba or Russian ships. If they had done so, there would almost certainly have been a nuclear exchange.

For the first eight or so years I was a blogger, I covered a lot of the “stories of day.” I still cover some, but mostly I use them to illustrate the mass/force/trajectory category.

This is why I don’t discuss the Ukraine war much. I said, day one, that Russia would win, and it is. It was also obvious that anti-Russia sanctions wouldn’t work, because China wouldn’t let Russia be choked out, and China has almost everything Russia needs. The Chinese aren’t, mostly, stupid about such things.

Sometimes a decision by an idiot makes force stronger: Trump and Biden’s chip sanctions on China just sped up the China’s tech climb, for example. Sheer stupidity.

Right now we have a situation in the Middle East where two idiots are putting us in danger of a major regional, or even world war: Netanyahu and Biden. Netanyahu knows Israel is weak and has lost deterrence. Biden won’t restrain him, though he has the power to do so. If a regional war breaks out, even if Israel and the US “win”, they’ll lose, because the US cannot defeat Iran without catastrophic losses or the use of Israeli nukes.

That’s a “human decision at crisis points” situation. Iran is doing most of what it can to avoid a regional conflagaration, but if they hadn’t responded to the embassy attack, nowhere would be safe for them. But Israel wants to draw America in, and Biden, so far, doesn’t seem to be doing enough to stop them.

“The air is thin at the top” means that people at the pinnacle of powerful organizations actually have a lot of power and leeway to do what they want. For a long time liberals argued against this, stating that the President was powerless. No. The President was powerful, there was just a consensus about what to do and the US was powerful enough to, up to a point, “make its own reality.” Not completely: they couldn’t pacify Iraq, for example, or, heck, Vietnam. But they could make a hell of a noise and kill a ton of people and suffer very few consequences. Bush is just fine, thanks.

The key question in “humans making decision at crisis points” right now is whether there’s a great power war during this transition between lead powers. China is on the way up, and America on the way down. China will be the most powerful nation in the world. In some ways it already is. The European/American/Anglo era is ending. The Africans are kicking America and France out, for example. They don’t have to put up with AmeriEuro bullshit any more, because what they need they can get from China, and what they need militarily, they can get from Russia. The prices are better, and the political interference is a lot less.

Mass/Force/Trajectory. Someone was going to wind up ruling Rome as Emperor. Could have been Sulla. Could have been Pompey. Sort of was Caesar (Antony and Octavian used his legacy and troops in their fight, and Octavian won by a whisker. He should have lost the key naval battle.)

As the Roman Emperor hollowed out, it was clear the West would fall. Just a question of when and the specifics, but that it would happen wasn’t in question. When the Europeans hit the Industrial revolution, they conquered about 80% of the world and had the rest under their thumb. A few brilliant men kept the Eastern Roman Empire going (decisions when mass/force is not sure.)

Mass/Force/Trajectory.

Climate change is happening, will happen and will suck beyond most people’s conceptions. There will be civilization collapse. There will be real famines. There will be massive lack of water. This isn’t in question, we’re just dealing with the specifics. Some regions will do somewhat better than others, so will some groups, but the macro isn’t in doubt.

The reason I get most things right is that I’ve learned (mostly, I still mess up sometimes) to predict sure things. Ukraine cannot win against Russia if sanctions don’t work, and China won’t let sanctions work. Some people follow the war obsessively, day by day. They do good work, and I read some of it, but mostly I don’t care because it’s just the details of an inevitability.

This blog and my writing is mostly about the mass/force/trajectory side of issues. A secondary piece is trying to advise people so they can make good decisions based on knowing what’s coming. The other theme is trying to create the bones of an ideology which will allow humanity to make better decisions in the future: to become a “conscious civilization” able to make rational choices rather than simply being pawns to social forces that civilization creates but so far has been unable to control.

If you’re a regular reader it’s because your interested in those three questions: what’s going to happen, how to adapt, and how (perhaps) to do better in the future.

I feel I write too much of the first and not enough of the third, though I’ve made huge efforts on the “how to do better” issue: with the biggest flurry of articles around 2012 to 2014. I may re-post some of those, since they still stand.

Thanks for going on this journey with me. It mostly sucks, but I’ve always believed it’s better to face unpleasant truths than walk blindfolded into the future.

And while we’re past the point where we will avoid the worst scenarios (except, hopefully, nuclear war), I do still retain some hope that humanity may find better ways in the future.

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China Builds A Temporary Bridge In Seven Days: Baltimore Will Take Years To Rebuild Theirs

I know I’m a broken record on this, but it’s important. China is dynamic. They’re higher tech in general than America or Europe and they have an engineering culture and a belief in technology which we have lost.

The ability to do this sort of thing just doesn’t exist outside of China, to the best of my knowledge. They’re not just better than everyone else, they’re miles better.

It will take years for Baltimore to build a new bridge. Perhaps they should hire a Chinese company to build a temporary one in the meantime.

The Chinese have automated delivery vehicles all over the place. Robots in retail outlets and restaurants. The world’s largest high speed rail network.

The future doesn’t happen in America any more, it happens in China. According to people who visit, there’s also essentially no homelessness.

More than that China is willing to regulate: when delivery workers were abused, China stepped in and mandated better treatment. They also, publicly, built recreation and rest stations for them. During the pandemic they put up temporary hospitals in a week.

And more and more they design at home. This is similar to the switch from Britain to America in the 19th century: at first the Brits kept the design jobs, but increasingly they moved to the US. Of course in that case it was helped by the immigration of engineers and scientists, especially Scottish ones, but the Chinese are doing just fine, now, without a lot of Europeans and Americans. (Though there’s still an idealization of whites, if you’re an engineer or a scientist who wants a job in China and can speak Mandarin, you’ll have a job fast.)

It’s not our world any more. It’s the Chinese.

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The Standard Conditions Peaceful Or Violent Revolution, Collapse and Coups

We’ve discussed this before:

  1. fiscal inability;
  2. an elite faction which wants to take over;
  3. support of 20% or more of the population;

What is also very common is lost of prestige due to military defeat. This Russia in WWI (and they had also lost to the Japanese, which was particularly humiliating) or Germany, also after WWI. Getting your ass kicked makes people doubt you.

Or, if you want to put it another way: imperial overstretch, military defeat and internal strife.

America’s good, or rather, bad, on all of these. Just got its ass kicked by Yemen. Hasn’t won a war in generations. Massively ballooning deficits and debts at the same time as they’ve lost the ability to make much of what they need. Unable to build ships or advanced weapons or aircraft—aka: unable to produce the necessary military goods. Unable to recruit enough men to fill the military. Unable to keep its own ships and planes maintained properly. Police bloated but ineffective at anything but beating heads (and we’ll find out they aren’t good at that either when people start fighting back.)

Fiscal over-reach. Incompetence of the enforcer class who are also no longer loyal and many of whom don’t support the current state. (Remember, on Jan 6, the cops mostly didn’t fire. They would have against left wingers.) Massive prestige loss. Unhappy population due to generations of declining standards of living (no, don’t even, the official stats are bullshit. I was alive then. The standard of living is getting worse and worse unless you’re on of a few percent of winners.) Industry shipped overseas to main rival. Alliance of the largest major continental powers in Asia: Russia, China and Iran, with most of the third world preferring them to the West, even as African nations start kicking France and America out.

The question was always “when” not “if” since everything ends, but “when” is getting a lot closer. We could stumble on for quite a while until some event precipitates the the final cascade of events, but equally it could happen very soon because all the conditions are there for it. Once the conditions are met, it simply requires the inciting moment or person. Could be Trump, but more likely it’s the guy who learns from him who’s more competent.

I take some pleasure in this, but not a great deal. When the US collapses, my personal standard of living will collapse with it. I may wind up on the street and if I don’t I’ll be living a lot less well. Plus the US, in collapse and after, will be a danger to those countries in its immediate vicinity and I live in Canada.

But the conditions for collapse, revolution or coup are met.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 14, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

Heather Cox Richardson Politics Chat: April 9, 2024

[Youtube, April 9, 2024]

[TW: 3:00 Two major things are occurring in USA, and they are closely tied to each other. One is what Trump is doing. The other is what the Republican Party is doing, which since 1981 has operated under the ideology that the way to make the country better is to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy, so the wisest and most business savvy cam invest it most efficiently to create growth and jobs.

5:30 Why the question “Is Trump a fascist?” is not really interesting or useful.

8:00 Even though the Founders were including only white wealthy males like themselves, the Declaration of Independence was radically revolutionary because it rejected the ideology that some people are better than others and should be the rulers. Trump and the people who support him have rejected this bedrock belief of American democracy; they believe some people are better than others, and they have the right to rule. They do not believe in human equality.

Trump is not running to win the popular vote. They realize they are a minority but believe they are correct and morally superior. They believe they are opposing the causes of USA decline.

Corporate leaders are seeking to protect their positions of privilege and the preferential tax treatment they have enjoyed under the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts. They are determined to prevent Biden from upsetting their applecart.

25:30 The Republicans have only a minority of voters supporting them, and they recognize this. In 1986, they began their campaign of suppressing Democratic votes with their “ballot integrity” campaign. Then they began aggressive gerrymandering after the 2010 election which was the first election after the Citizens United decision allowed unlimited amounts of money into politics.

28:00 ? In 2007, Mitch McConnell became Senate leader, and he recognized that they did not have majority support. The clear majority of Americans liked Social Security, clean air and clear water, and business regulation. But, if Republicans could screw up Congress and prevent progressive legislation from being passed, they could pack the courts with people who believed like they did, and they could rewrite the laws by reinterpreting them, without passing any laws.

40:00 ? HCR lists Biden’s accomplishments, and concludes Biden is the most consequential President since LBJ and perhaps FDR. ]

 

If Trump Wins, the GOP Is Ready to Wage War on the Working Class

And Iran Retaliates For the Embassy Attack

It’s on!

Looks like Iran wasn’t a paper tiger wimp who wouldn’t strike back.

Waves of drones right now, as I understand it the idea is to degrade air defenses, then send in the missiles. Some suggestions this will go on for at least three days.

American naval and air assets are helping Israel defend. I wonder if Iran will hit American bases too? Or, perhaps, tell its allies in Iraqi militias to do so, and stop playing around with small drone attacks: really hit them.

To my mind this attack is 100% justified. Embassy immunity is no joke, and Iran really had no choice but to strike, or nowhere would be safe.

Hezbollah is also hitting Northern Israel hard with missile attacks.

There’s some chance of this escalating into a large regional war if Israel counter-strikes, then Iran counter-counter-strikes and so on. Israel wants to draw the US in.

Remember, though, that war games tend to show the US losing a war with Iran. And if it goes that far, they WILL lose their bases in Iraq and the Persian Gulf WILL be shut down. Wouldn’t be surprised if they lose an aircraft carrier if they get stupid and try for too close support, as far as that goes.

Stay tuned. Slight chance this will turn into WWIII–remember, Russia is a close ally of Iran, and China has good ties as well. If Iran starts losing, they will help, especially Russia, who remembers that Iran was one of the only countries to step up and help them in a big way against Ukraine. At the very least, if Israel uses nukes on Iran, Russia is likely to respond, only possibly held back by the presence of Palestinians.

Interesting times to live in!

Update: And Iran apparently also seized a ship near the Straight of Hormuz. A warning that they can, indeed, play Yemen and shut down even more maritime traffic.

Update 2: Israeli air base Nevatem being hit:

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Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

How To Know When The US Deficit Is Actually A Problem

There’s been a lot of hysteria over the ballooning US deficit lately. Is it worth worrying about? Let’s learn how you can tell for yourself, rather than relying on others to tell you.

This is the sort of chart which is going around:

Scary, eh?

So, here’s the debt long term, as a percentage of GDP:

Still pretty scary. US debt it is running higher than WWII debt.

In the short run, most of this is caused by interest payments:

So, what changed? Prime.

If you take a look at these charts you’ll see the rise in rate of increase is mostly due to interest.

Now, when governments who can print money default, it is because people don’t want their money, or the money can’t buy what what they need. US debt is entirely in US dollars. Treasury can mint as many bonds as it likes, and the Federal Reserve can buy them. It is impossible for the US federal government to run out of money, per se.

Rule: Debt is a problem for a government with the power of the printing press when money can’t buy what is needed.

Regular readers will know I am fond of Keynes maxim: “Anything we can do, we can afford.”

The corollary is “Anything we can’t do, we can’t afford.”

It doesn’t matter how much money you have. You can’t build a nuclear bomb in 1900. You can’t build a nuclear bomb if you are Nicaragua. For ages no one but the US and Europe could, effectively, build commercial airliners. You can’t buy what you can’t produce.

In 1945 the US debt did not matter. The US was half the world’s economy, and everything it needed to produce, including oil, it produced itself. It also had the power of taxation: the top marginal rate was 94%.

Rule 2: Money can’t buy what you need when you can’t produce it and those who can produce it won’t sell it to you.

Right now the US cannot produce much of what it needs. It does have a food surplus and can survive on its own domestic food production and it has a surplus of petrochemicals BUT much of the goods it genuinely needs, like basic electronics and production equipment are no longer made in America.

Let’s look at three charts. First the trade deficit in goods and services:

Now, let’s look at the trade balance in services:

So, the US has a trade surplus in services. Crap like intellectual property and management consulting. Stuff people can do without if they must or can ignore if they choose.

Now, trade balance in goods:

The trade balance in goods is what the US doesn’t make itself that it wants or needs. Some of it is crap: you don’t need summer vegetables in the winter. Nice to have, but not needed. But a lot of it is important: those basic electronic and mechanical goods, including production goods which the US no longer makes and in many cases no longer knows how to make.

The overall trade balance doesn’t look so bad, but it is made to look way better than it is by the US trade surplus in services, which are far less important than goods.

When the US can’t make or buy what it needs using US dollars the deficit matters.

That means the key point is when other countries stop taking US dollars as default. When the dollar is no longer the medium of trade. Right now almost everything can be bought in dollars, which the US can print. If and when that changes, the US is up shit creek without a paddle.

But there is another set of issues: domestic ability to pay.

Specifically, when you can’t pay the enforcer class. Cops and military and judges and prosecutors and prison guards and all that security crap.

America is a vastly unequal society, seething with latent unrest. If the people who protect the status quo won’t fire, then the government and the peace is at great risk. We say this during the January 6th insurrection: most of the capital cops were not willing to fire. This was an ideological issue: they were sympathetic to right wing protesters, just as cops tend to protect Nazis and beat down socialists and blacks.

But it can also become a financial issue. You can print as much as you want, but if people can’t buy what they need with it, it’s worthless. See Weimar Germany hyper-inflation. Or you can refuse to pay, because part of the ruling coalition wants too much of the money and won’t give it to others. Most of the policing in the country is local: it is financed by states and municipalities which do not have the power of the printing press and which do not have a great deal of effective taxation ability: people and business can leave the state or the municipality, in addition to the normal elite capture rule.

When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, most of the enforcer class was not being paid, or couldn’t buy what they needed with the money they were being paid. So when push came to shove, they didn’t fight for the government, and many (especially the navy), switched sides.

Likewise, as Lenin observed, ordinary people are genuinely willing to violently revolt when the risk of doing so is less than the risk of not doing so.

The key question, then, is inflation. Unfortunately, in the US and the West in general, actual inflation is impossible to tell thru official stats. You have to judge buy your own grocery bill; your own fuel bill and your own expenses, and those of people you know. Do you and others have excess money to spend?

Inflation spikes when there isn’t enough to go around. It’s that simple. If a country can’t produce what it needs or wants, and others start raising their prices or refusing to sell, inflation becomes a problem.

Even without inflation, decreasing surplus income is a problem. This is why inequality matters: if a large chunk of the population can’t buy what they need, well, Lenin’s maxim comes into play.

China is at risk of deflation (not significant risk, yet, but that’s their danger.) The US and Europe and the Anglosphere are at risk of inflation.

That inflation will happen when others won’t or can’t sell us what we need and we can’t make it or grow it or mine it.

It is at that point where the US deficit will matter.

If you want to know when the US deficit will matter, it’s simple: when China and other countries stop using dollars as the default trade currency. That process is early yet, but underway. It used to be unthinkable to sell oil in anything but dollars: did not happen. Now it does. China and Russia, China and India, and Iran and everyone now trade without dollars. African countries are in the midst of throwing out French and American military bases and do the majority of their trade with China, not America or Europe. They are increasingly trading with Russia, as well, and relying on it for military aid.

Everything those countries need except for some medicine they can get from Russia and China: food, goods, and fuel. China gives them better debt terms and doesn’t interfere in most countries internal politics nearly as much as America does.

This is the actual threat: the West not being able produce what it needs and other countries no longer willing to accept dollars. Track this by watching actual inflation, and observing the process of global de-dollarization.

The deficit and the debt don’t matter much, yet.

But they will.

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How To Stop Half-Assing Drug Policy & Actually Reduce Overdoses

Oregon recently ended a law which made drug possession for use a ticketed offense with a fine of no more than $100. The reason claimed is that overdoses have been soaring.

No surprise. The modern drug supply is a mess: in most cases users don’t know what they’re buying and it’s often cut with fentanyl, which is incredibly potent. It doesn’t take much to throw a user into an overdose and kill them. (Black tar heroin is often an exception, if it’s available where you are and you use, use that.)

The dirty supply, plus increasing use due to economic despair and social alienation, are behind increasing drug deaths. You can’t solve that with half-assed decriminalization.

Instead you have to offer a clean supply, which means thru government and government approved and inspected suppliers. That has its own downsides, but it’s the only way to make sure people know exactly what drugs they are taking and in what amount.

When articles are written about legalization, they’re almost never actually about legalization: they’re about de-criminalization: there is no clean supply.

The other problem is that stronger drugs replace weaker when they are criminalized. This is a well known, well studied sociological fact. Pot in the 60s and 70s was FAR less potent than it became over decades of illegality. Fentanyl, though invented legally, is so much more potent than heroin by weight that it’s far easier to smuggle: but also far easier to overdose. (And heroin is more potent than morphine, which is more potent than codeine and so on.)

Treat drug use as a medical issue. Sell it thru pharmacies, over the counter. Keep the information on drug use 100% confidential, so that people are willing to be honest about it, and make it illegal to fire someone for drug use that isn’t effecting their job performance.

If you want to keep some drugs illegal, make them the harder ones: meth and fentanyl, for example. If you offer morphine, codeine and opium, you may find that many people don’t move up the scale. And manufacture properly: I’ve never tried Meth, but I’m told by old timers that before it was made illegal and hard to buy the precursors, it was a lot less harsh: one might go back to that type of meth, or back to older forms of “uppers.”

People will have their drugs one way or the other. If you want to reduce deaths, especially in the current environment, you need to keep the supply clean or you need to go full totalitarian, Maoist style.

Since that isn’t happening, give legalization a shot. Start with simple uppers, codeine and morphine. No weird pills, just clean and simple.

If it doesn’t reduce deaths, well, you can criminalize again. But the current methods aren’t working, and we’ve been trying the “war on some drugs” for almost fifty years now: longer for opiates (which were legal throughout the 19th century.)

Oh, and if you actually want to reduce the number of addicts fix the economy so that ordinary people have good jobs they can live well on. If you insist on running the economy to make people miserable, many of the will reach for drugs.

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