Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 122 of 437
Generally about the second thing people do when they start getting worried about supply chains and the effects of climate change and economic issues, is start a garden, if they can.
This is good, but…
“The report found that drought frequency and duration has already increased by 29 percent since 2000.” https://t.co/WeOJjkAhQe
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) May 17, 2022
For a long time my primary concern has been water, though there are places, like India right now, where you’ll simply drop from the heat. Rainfall is becoming intermittent, perhaps even heavier but less reliable. Glaciers are getting smaller, but increased melt will increase river flows at times, and again, on average there’ll be more water, until the flow starts falling off a cliff. In the Western Rockies that’ll apparently start in about 20 years.
Heat itself is a problem for gardening: too hot or too cold are both bad.
Rainwater reservoirs used to be common in houses. They were dug out, and underground, which had the advantage of keeping the water cool. These days they’re above ground. In some places they are illegal. I’m going to strongly suggest that if you can, you should get one (or more of the modern ones), and spread your water collection as wide as you can. You’ll need a filtration system so you can use it personally as well as for gardening.
As for the gardens, for those who can figure out how, something that has some measure of climate control seems necessary, or heat waves or even cold snaps can wreck you. While the main concern in heat waves, climate change has lead to more wild and variable weather, including cold weather at times. Doing this in a way that also gets sunlight is the trick, of course, and the rain collection system you set up for the reservoir(s) should help you keep using rainwater.
For temperature control, if you’re building something new, build into hills or dig into the ground. The earth moderates both hot and cold temperatures. Many years ago I looked into “earthships” but there are many models, including traditional ones, and ones that go deeper, including natural and artificial cave homes.
Obviously this may be beyond many people’s means, though there may be low-tech, low-cost, labor intensive solutions as well as more expensive ones.
For people, like myself, for whom this is all pie-in-the-sky, well, just bear in the mind that climate change means old patterns don’t hold and variability increases. Try and stock up enough food to last months and do what you can about water and staying cool. That may mean figuring out some sort of communal solution with other people, or just doing what little you can.
Updated to include earthships and dug in homes.
Starting in 2020, an increase of 320K long term sick people. We tend to do percentages off the population, but the UK Labor Force is 34.7 million people. That means, in 2 years, what is probably most Long Covid, caused about a .92% decrease in the labor force just due to long Covid. Another .38% of the population left the UK Labor force for other reasons.
Where’d I get this from? The Bank of England!
Since end of 2019- we’ve seen a fall of 450,000 (1.3% of labour force- a very large decrease in labour force … The persistence & scale in this drop has been a surprise to us. We’ve seen an increase in long-term sickness in that number – around 320,000 people…
…Falling participation in the labour market is not a lack of job opportunities, but a rise in long term sickness linked to the pandemic. The issue of Long Covid is very serious.
Last week I wrote that a big part of rising labor costs was a tight labor market and…
much of why the labor market is tight is because they let a million people die and probably millions be disabled by not handling Covid
I’ve been emphasizing for a long time that Long Covid was going to be the real problem. .92% may not seem like much, but remember:
- You can get Covid over and over again;
- There is no long lasting or complete immunity from Covid either from vaccines or natural immunity;
- New variants are being born all the time and the ones which survive and thirve are generally optimized against whatever is the biggest barrier to current spread;
- Each time you get Covid you can get long term damage. It may not be sympomatic, but it’s there.
- So the next time you get Covid, you’re more likely to get symptomatic Long Covid.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that UK and US reductions in the labor force are about the same, in percentage terms. (Death rates in the UK are slightly lower than the US, but I don’t trust either country’s stats all that much.)
The US Labor force in 2021 was about 161.2 million. Multiply that by .0092 and we have a reduction of approximately 1 million, four hundred and eight-three thousand people (1.483 million). Now, imagine the US loses that number of people from the workforce every two years?
Doesn’t take long from those numbers to be catastrophic, does it?
Understand that marginal rates control the capitalist market.
The good side of this is that taking so many people out of the workforce absolutely will increase wages without wage controls. And it will keep doing so for as long as we refuse to control Long Covid and have no effective AND widely deployed cure. Problem is, while we do way too much bullshit labor and could get by with less workers, I doubt it’s going to be Wall Street parasites whose jobs we don’t fill, it’ll be people who actually make, grow, mine or distribute goods that matter, and people like nurses and orderlies and teachers and so on who are actually productive, rather than parasites at best.
Meanwhile, China, who supposedly wrecked their economy with Zero-Covid, will not be suffering under this reduction. (The Shanghai outbreak is now almost completely under control, much to the dismay of pro-death and disabling neoliberals.)
And this is before the fact that we will need to take care of all those sick people, though I suppose the American solution will be to let them use up all their savings, get thrown off any private healthcare, perhaps manage to get on Medicaid and eventually wind up on the street and die.
Blah, blah, blah.
The point is that our civilization CANNOT survive this sort of disabling if it just keeps going on and on. Multiply by all the problems we’re going to have with climate change, and stir in a mix of nuclear-armed Great Power competition and the results are catastrophic.
It’s Long Covid or a real cure or a miracle where Covid dies out by itself (not seeing how that happens when natural immunity is limited), or we are in for a world of hurt.
Take precautions. It’s not death you should worry about, it’s disabling. I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know that a lot of very bad things can happen to you while you’re still alive.
I’m basing this on current trends and what I see as the most likely outcome.
Russia will take about 30% to 40% of Ukraine: the East and the coast along the Black Sea, areas that are generally Russian ethnic or speaking. While they were pushed back from Kharkiv, I think they’ll take the Oblast by the end of the war. Basically, see where Russians are the majority and that’s the land that Russia will feel it can keep and not fight an endless guerilla war.
They make have to take more land than that to force a peace on terms they can stand, but they won’t want to keep it because everyone knows the West is trying to draw them into a long term guerilla war. (Such a war could be won in Ukraine because of the terrain, but doing so would require a lot of killing, deportatons and camps and many years. It’s not worth it for Russia.)
The Russians original goals will not be met, and Finland and Sweden will joint NATO (although they were already quite integrated), so in one sense it can be said that Russia has “lost”. In certain other senses it can be said to win.
But let’s look at the major players, one by one.
Ukraine: the big loser. Unless this war goes far different than I expect (possible and I’ll admit it if it does) they’re going to come out of it a smaller country with no coast, who has lost their industrial heartland and even if the gas is turned back on, they will lose most of the transit fees in a couple years max as the EU transitions away. They will find that the “rebuilding” they were promised is IMF style neoliberalism and the average person will wind up worse off.
Verdict: Disastrous Loss.
The EU: In the win column, the EU should have built up a larger military long ago and will now do so. They will be more unified, at least initially, feeling they have all supported a war and with fear of Russia acting as unifying glue.
In the lost column they have firmly moved into the US satrapy column. In order to move out they would have to create their own army that is not dependent on US built military equipment and that’s the opposite of what they’re doing. (Foolish, because the US is losing its ability to build either ships or combat planes. The F-35 was a boondogle, Boeing has lost its engineering chops, and they recently decided to decommission built ships because they are so bad.)
The increase in price of fuel (US gas is about 50% more expensive than Russian), commodities and food as well as the general inflation shock from the Ukraine war will lead to a poorer Europe. Spending more money on the military will make ordinary people feel worse off and so will inflation. Industry will be badly damaged by increased fuel and mineral prices. All of this will lead to increased political instability and is likely to help the fascist right and possible the more radical left (if the left ever gets its act together.)
Joining the US in such huge sanctions and seizing Russia’s reserves (“frozen”) means that they are choosing to join the US side of the new cold war world rather than being a third pole, and this will eventually limit their trade options, as they, like the US, cannot be trusted with money.
The EU is, overall, likely to come out of this war poorer, more isolated and with increased political instability, but with a much larger military and feeling more unified at the elite and country to country level (at least until and if political instability changes that.)
Veridict: Slight Loss.
The US: The US has gotten Europe firmly back as a satrapy. NATO expands, the Europeans will spend more more on US military goods and buy expensive US gas and oil. The possibility of Europe becoming independent and forming a third pole in the upcoming cold war between the US and China is now minimal, and essentially zero for at least a decade or two.
On the negative side, Russia is now firmly in the Chinese sphere. Because the US’s strategy in the case of a war with China would be to strangle China with a military enforced trade embargo, this is a big problem. Russia can supply China with massive amounts of food, fuel and commodities, making the “choke them out” strategy against China unlikely to succeed. Likewise a friendly Russia means China has a relatively secure flank to the Northwest. There are even signs of Chinese-Indian rapprochement, and though I’ll believe it when I see it, India not joining against China would be a huge boon to China.
Since China is the “real” threat, not Russia, the one country that can replace the US as the world’s most powerful nation, strengthening China’s position is a loss.
The US also will suffer due to inflation from knock on effects of the Ukraine war, and that will cause increased domestic instability. Elites continue to funnel massive money to the domestic security apparatus (police of various varieties, spies who target US residents), however, and elites feel fairly secure, though I think they’re wrong as they’re funneling resources to police who stand a good chance of joining a right wing uprising.
The final major effect for the US is that freezing Russian reserves and encouraging the massive level of sanctions, is seen by most of the world as evidence it’s not safe to keep money in the US lead banking system, or even to trade with them. This has accelerated de-dollarization and I suspect will be seen as the precipitating event of losing reserve status for the American dollar. The world will split into two financial blocs, one centered around China-Russia, the other around the US-EU. The US receives huge benefits from reserve status and from being at the center of the world financial system, and as with Britain after WWI, it will suffer mightily when it loses this position.
My evaluation is that what the US will likely gain from the Ukraine war is less than it has or will lose: dollar hegemony and being the financial center of the world are a big deal, and confirming Russia as a junior Chinese ally makes their main geopolitical rival far stronger.
Verdict: Loss
Russia: Russia has weathered the initial economic storm well, but most EU countries will move off Russian gas and oil. Some of that gas and oil cannot be brought to market anywhere else for a few years (probably 3) until new pipelines are built and while there are customers, they will pay less than the Europeans did.
Sanctions will not cripple Russia, but there are goods like advanced semiconductors and, more importantly, some tech needed for gas and oil extraction, that they will be cut off from. China cannot immediately replace those oil and gas related goods, and they are at least ten years behind in semiconductors (and themselves cut off from some key capital equipment they can’t yet build). That said the oil and gas tech is probably within quicker reach, and Russia doesn’t need the most advanced semiconductors in large quantities so far as I know.
In most economic terms Russia will be OK: they have a big food surplus; they have more than enough fuel, of course, and they can buy almost everything they don’t make from China, who is not going to cut them off; indeed, rather the reverse. India is also rushing to cut deals with Russian businesses. Sanctions will force more import substitution and help overcome the “resource curse”, making it cost-effective to make more things in Russia (if they aren’t overwhelmed by cheap Chinese goods.)
Sanctions will not cripple Russia the way they have many other countries, though they will be felt. Nor will they cause a revolution and if there is a coup it will be because Putin is old now and may be ill with Parkinsons or something else.
In territorial terms Russia likely to wind up larger. They get the industrial part of Ukraine and the coast, they can send water to Crimea (which has been cut off from years, and whose agriculture was devastated as a result) and while many will say they didn’t win the war, etc… people who want to stand up to them will not be keen on “winning and losing 30% of our country.” If that’s victory, it looks pretty bad.
A unified Europe with more countries in NATO and a bigger military is a loss for Russia, and one can expect that NATO will move more missiles and ABMS close to the Russian border, including hypersonic missiles as soon as they have them. In that sense the war is a clear loss: Russia wanted those weapons removed from near its border, and there will probably be even more of them.
In the end Russia will be able to credibly claim it won the war as a war: it took territory and kept it and it’s hard to say that a country which took its enemy’s territory lost a war. That said, there will be a case that it is a Pyrrhic victory, in that there is an economic hit, NATO has expanded, Europe will have a bigger military and so on.
The counter-case is simple: Ukraine was talking about getting nukes and had started shelling Donetsk in what looked like a prelude to invasion. Russia didn’t get its maximal goals, but it did gut Ukraine as a threat and did secure Ukrainian land in what is likely to be a semi-permanent fashion absent an all out NATO/Russia war.
The maximal goals didn’t happen, but in a bad situation Russia may reasonably claim it got quite a bit. As for sanctions, every year there had been more of them, none had ever been rescinded and all the war did was move them up.
Verdict: Marginal victory.
China: Yes, strictly speaking China isn’t involved in the war, but the war affects China greatly. China needs about 10 years to get to a reasonable parity with the US in semiconductors and aviation, the golden technologies of US hegemonic rule. The Ukraine war has made it clear they probably have less time than that, and that the world economic order is likely to split sooner because China is stuck between US demands to support sanctions and its own strategic needs, which require Russia as an ally, or at least a reliable supplier. Russia being decisively defeated or economically crushed would be catastrophic for China, so they must keep it alive and viable.
Still, all in all having Russia unable to sell to or buy from the West is unbelievably good for China: there is no alternative for Russia. If they can’t go to the West they must go to China. India may be willing to trade, but India’s economy is tiny compared to China’s and its industry scarce. China can make almost everything Russia needs and everything it can’t make it’s working on learning how to make. And, as previously discussed, Russia as an ally makes it impossible for the US to choke China out in a war.
Verdict: Victory
Concluding Remarks: Of course all of this based on a model of how they war will go which may not be the case. Perhaps the maximalists in the West are right, and the Russian military is fundamentally incompetent, can’t do logistics to a disastrous degree, and is on the verge of collapse. If you think Russia can’t even win the conventional war, all of this is is nonsense because a definite loss is likely to lead to regime change and possibly even collapse.
Likewise if you think that sanctions will have much more effect than I do, or that China will not integrate with Russia economically, then this is all wrong.
But overall, this war looks like a case where Russia gets a marginal victory; the US and the EU get some wins but their victories are effectively Pyrrhic, and China is the big winner.
There are multiple sources of inflation. As a friend once said, one man’s inflation, is another man’s pricing power.
Right now we have a situation where inflation is caused by (non exhaustively):
- Disruptions to the supply chain.
- Lots of dead and disabled workers (over a million dead in the US, who knows how many disabled) leading to a tight labor market in some countries.
- Sanctions on Russia (food, fuel, minerals, which feeds into other things, plus disruption of the dollar hegemony system.)
- Massive price increases by corporations above their costs, to increase their profits.
I’ve seen estimates of about 50% for corporations simply increasing prices because they can, even though their costs haven’t risen that high.
What does the Fed think should be done about inflation?
Chair Powell keeps mentioning the relationship between the high level of job openings and wage/price inflation,” Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek, wrote in a newsletter on Tuesday. “He’s not talking to investors. He’s talking to corporate America, and his goal is to have companies essentially institute a hiring freeze and end the cycle of paying up for new hires.”…
…“The Fed’s goal is to convince corporate America to enact a short-term hiring freeze, and it will keep raising rates and talking about aggressive monetary policy until that happens,” Colas wrote. “Lower stock prices are his way of convincing C-suites and boards to do that.”
“Chair Powell mentioned the ratio several times at last Wednesday’s press conference,” said Colas, who said job postings need to drop from 11.5 million to around 8 million to get to normalcy.
The only way to get there would be some sort of freeze from companies.
Since 1979 the only type of inflation pressure either the Federal Reserve or legislatures have been willing to recognize is wage-push inflation. (See HERE for a long explanation of how the Federal reserve crushed wages with wage push inflation measures.)
This is why, for going on 43 years now, workers wages have not kept up with GDP, most people can’t afford to buy a house, rent is thru the roof, and people die due to medical care costs.
But the way to deal with companies increasing prices faster than their costs isn’t to stop employers from hiring, it’s to institute an excess-profits tax, where companies that are making a lot more than they did before the pandemic simply have it taxed away. Granted, that would take legislative action, but the Fed isn’t even calling for it, and the Fed has a powerful bully pulpit.
You could also aggressively act on anti-trust concerns and break companies up so that they have competition: they can raise prices in large part because they are unregulated oligopolies who raise prices in lockstep.
Those are legislative actions, but the Fed is the main regulator of banks and brokerages and could stop loans from being given to firms buying up the housing and rental supply and jacking up prices. It could encourage the government entities which guarantee housing loans to put conditions which disallow rent increases beyond a few percentage points, and not allow large numbers of homes to be owned by corporations.
There are certainly other steps which could be taken, but the point is that the Fed isn’t pushing anything but “don’t hire and don’t give raises”.
In tight labor markets wages should rise. That’s good. If every time there is a tight labor market you squeal about inflation then hammer the economy into the ground to kill wages, of course people’s wages will fall behind, and if that’s substantially the only thing you ever do to deal with inflation for over 40 years, of course wages will be hammered.
If, at the same time you run policies which cause massive inflation in housing, rent, and medical care (and now food), well then, ordinary people will be screwed because those are things they must have, no matter the cost, so if they can pay they have to.
What the Fed is doing, in other words, is class warfare, the same as everything of significance it has done since 1979. People will die because of this and become homeless.
As for Congress, well, increasing taxes on corporations is unthinkable to them, so I guess people dying and becoming homeless and so on is their preferred outcome.
Might want to go demonstrate at the houses of key Congress members and Fed Reserve members too.
And remember, much of why the labor market is tight is because they let a million people die and probably millions be disabled by not handling Covid, It was noted near the beginning that the Black Death caused an increase in wages and that Covid might do the same.
It has. Now, on top of letting you die, they want you to not get wage increases, so that corporations can make huge profits and the rich can get even richer.
The Problem With Aristocrats Is That They Inflict What They Can Never Suffer
— (someone else, can’t find the original)
The democratic bargain, or really, the bargain of all civilization that is worthy of existing, is based on the idea of resolution of conflict by means other than violence. Band level hunter gatherers are much more egalitarian than we are, and are generally better off on most metrics than anyone except industrial age humans (who they are still better off than in terms of free time, equality, dental health and female hip width) but they usually have higher levels of violence than we do.
Early civilizations were also shockingly violent and extremely cruel, both to their own residents (not citizens, residents) and to those nearby. “An eye for an eye” wasn’t even the law: punishments for crimes were often excessive, feuds were common and often lead to far more death and suffering than the original crime being avenged.
In civilizations and especially in democracy, at least in theory, the idea is that we give up our private right to determine what is right and wrong and especially our private right to take justice into our own hands. In exchange we avoid the evils of vengeance and feuds and reduce the amount of internal violence. (Native Americans might not think that British democracy reduced violence, though, note, nor did Rome’s neighbours think Republican Rome reduced violence towards them.)
In Democracy we elect people to make and enforce our laws, and to implement policy. This is based on the idea that people we elect will act largely in the interests of society as a whole, and thus that more people will be better off. Because it is impossible to make policy or laws without harming at least a few people, those who run society are supposed to be disciplined not by violence but by legal means and thru the ballot box.
However, representative democracy (not direct democracy, which has other failure modes), especially when combined with capitalism, tends to fall into oligarchy. There are multiple forms of oligarchy, an oligarchy isn’t always rich, but under capitalism those with the most money tend to form the core of any oligarchy, even if it has some sort of base in the population. There would be no right wing in America of the current sort, or the world, without the massive financial support of the Koch brothers and other extremely rich individuals.
The end result of this is governments which act against the interests and desires of the majority. The Princeton oligarchy study found that, for all intents and purposes, the opinions of most of the American population have no effect on legislation.
Oligarchies are a form of aristocracy, and aristocracies have three fundamental principles:
- Aristocrats are the best people and deserve their wealth, power and privileges.
- Aristocrats as a class should never lose their power; and,
- Individual aristocrats should never be held responsible for their actions unless they harm other aristocrats or their interests;
There are two issues here.
First, democracies which become aristocratic oligarchies stop acting in the interests of the majority.
Second, the members of an aristocratic oligarchy don’t suffer what they inflict.
For well over 40 years now productivity and wages have not risen together, for example, where before they did. This is a direct result of policy, both legislative (massive tax cuts and regulatory changes) and monetary, central banks acting to “control inflation” by suppressing wages on theory that “wage push inflation” is the only important type of inflation, while also acting to increase asset prices held by the rich, like stocks, bonds and real estate.
Likewise, starting in the 70s many types of drugs were made illegal, but the rich don’t tend to be arrested for doing them, either because their drugs are legal, or by simple lack of enforcement, as with the widespread use of cocaine amongst elites in the 80s and 90s.
I recently read someone claiming that Federal Reserve members had “skin in the game” because they had to live in America, which is a massive misuse of the idea, akin to saying that Jeff Bezos and workers in his warehouses both have interests in common. Well, sort of. Or that just because they are Americans Bill Gates and homeless person both have skin in the game.
Yeah, OK. And the Queen and Boris Johnson have skin in the British game, just like food bank users and people who die from NHS cuts.
In 2008 there was a huge financial crisis, starting in the US, but spreading thru much of the world.
It was caused by the actions of executives in the financial sector and as a result, essentially every brokerage and most banks were, had they taken their losses, bankrupt. If the normal course had been allowed, they would have lost all their money, and thus their power
Aristocrats, as a class, must never lose their money or power. (Money is power, in our societies.)
The Federal Reserve and the Treasury department stepped in, with some legislative help, and saved them. The cost for saving them was, at the time, for America alone, something like 20 trillion dollars.
Some ordinary people were bailed out, but the vast majority weren’t.
Later, when banks foreclosed homes because of the financial crisis’s fallout, they fraudulently signed legal documents, en-masse, stating that they had title to the properties they were foreclosing. They were allowed to foreclose anyway, and they were not prosecuted for this clear crime.
Democracies which become aristocratic oligarchies stop acting in the interests of the majority.
As for the crimes which lead up to the crisis, of which there were many, most of the bubble, especially in the last two years, they were not prosecuted, but instead they were fined for amounts less than they had made, thus immunizing them from criminal penalties.
Aristocrats should never be held responsible for their actions, unless they hurt other aristocrats.
The one major prosecution was of Bernie Madoff. Madoff had victimized out members of the elite, not the general public.
So, the system operated to save the rich and powerful and when saving them was in opposition to saving regular people it not only didn’t save them, it allowed the rich and powerful to victimize them further.
Much of this was illegal by the law at the time, but a lot of it was legal. Aristocracies make laws that favor those in power. They create policies which favor the already powerful and rich.
And, as the Princeton study showed, they ignore majority opinion if it contradicts elite preference.
Let us now move to abortion, the issue of the day. A majority of the population wanted to keep Roe vs. Wade, by about a 2:1 margin.
Some years ago I asked my father, a very conservative guy, his position on abortion. He said he didn’t like it but believed it should be legal. I asked why. “Because I saw what happened when it was illegal. Rich women got abortions, and poor women didn’t.”
Let us say that abortion becomes effectively illegal. Do you think that the wives, sisters and daughters of the rich and powerful will still have access to them?
We all know the answer.
Aristocrats inflict what they never must suffer.
An example given by, I think, Nassim Taleb, used the Roman Republic. When Hannibal wiped out a huge Roman army at Cannae, one-third of the Roman Senate’s members were killed. They fought in battles.
What important politician or rich person of the last two generations died in any of America’s wars? Most didn’t even fight, including Bush Jr., Trump and Clinton all of whom weaseled out of the Vietnam war using dubious means.
Now let’s bring this back. One of the benefits of civilization is the reduction of violence which comes from prohibiting people from taking vengeance or justice (not the law) into their own hands. The benefit of Democracy is supposed to be that the government acts in the interests of the majority of the population, and liberal democracy it is supposed to also protect the rights of minorites against the majority.
This is what the legitimacy of civilization and democracy rest on. In exchange for these benefits, people don’t make life unpleasant for people with power, they don’t get vengeance themselves and so on.
I’ve seen the argument that protesting outside the houses of Supreme Court justices is illegal. It is. Hiding slaves was illegal. Blacks riding at the front buses was illegal. Strikes were illegal. Almost nothing that the Nazis did was illegal when they did it, because they were in power and made the laws.
What the French aristocracy did before the revolution was legal, and so was what the Russian aristocracy did.
Legality isn’t justice, even in good societies, though sometimes it approximates it.
But when legitimacy is broken: when civilization or democracy or liberalism doesn’t provide what it’s supposed to do, people stop caring so much about what is legal.
Nobody on the supreme court is going to be affected negatively by the loss of Roe. They and their friends and families, all of whom are rich, powerful or both, will still be able to get abortion when needed or when they want them. They, their daughters, wives and sisters will not die of untreated ectopic pregnancies or bleed out from back alley abortions.
And, as a commenter pointed out, the supreme court did rule that protests outside the houses of abortion doctors were constitutionally protected free speech, but protests outside their houses aren’t.
The evil of aristocracy is that aristocrats inflict what they never suffer.
If you are a member of the American elite life has never been better. You are the richest rich the world has ever known, even richer than in the Gilded Age. For over 40 years salaries, stock options, stocks and other assets like real-estate have just gone up and up and up, and when they haven’t the government, often in the form of the Fed, has stepped into to make sure they do.
Meanwhile ordinary people increasingly can’t afford houses, rent or medical care and where one salary could support a 4 person family, now 2 often can’t. (Ignore the official inflation and wage adjusted stats, and focus on reality, the stats don’t tell the picture and everyone knows it.)
Life gets better and better for the elite; the aristocrats and some of their retainer class, and shittier for almost everyone else.
There isn’t really a social contract, but there is legitimacy, and our elites have broken it. Since they have broken it, I will gently suggest that expecting those will die or suffer in large numbers due to their decisions to respect them or their laws is unreasonable.
When Jared Diamond tried to figure out why societies collapse, he dug into many civilization collapses and found out they almost all had one thing in common: the decision makers were cut off from the consequences of their decisions. Things were getting worse for almost everyone else, but everything was good for them, and often even improving, so they did nothing.
Eventually that broke. Sometimes due to environmental collapse; sometimes economic collapse; sometimes invasion; sometimes rebellion; and sometimes a combination or all of them at once.
Our aristocratic oligarchy is inflicting on others what they won’t suffer, even as they enrich themselves and pat themselves on the back about how they deserve everything they have.
That is leading where it always does, and it starts with the loss of legitimacy.
Those who protest rudely when those who will never suffer what they inflict hurt them or kill them, are minor in this context, but they are a sign of what is to come.
And that will be far worse than some judges being made uncomfortable or scared. It will be an age of war and revolution, throughout the world, and it will also be an age where some of their victims decide that if they are to suffer, their victimizers will suffer too.
This means either full on dystopian police states or an age of assassination and rebellion, and probably both.
This is what our aristocrats have sowed, and they will reap it. Alas, so will the rest of us. In the meantime, those who try and intrude on their bubbles and make their displeasure known are actually doing them a favor, offering them one last (and it is very close to last) chance to course correct.
History suggest they won’t, but occasionally it does happen, and we must hope for that occasionally.
So, Roe is to be overturned. This has been coming for a long time. Democrats were worthless and didn’t fight, RBG betrayed those who worship her when she refused to resign when she got a cancer with a 90% death rate and Obama had a supermajority. (In the end Roe would have been lost anyway, but she moved up the clock.)
What needs to be understood about the loss of Roe is that states with anti-abortion laws are going to make them extra-territorial: they’re going to make it illegal to go to another state for an abortion. They will try and extradite people who do, and if they return to the state they live in, well, they’ll be arrested. Given surveillance abilities today, many women who thought no one knew will find out someone did: if you track your periods on your phone, or if you are foolish enough to carry your phone to a clinic. Perhaps even if you use your phone to call a clinic.
Phones are bugs and taps we carry with us voluntarily, after all.
Roe is, of course, only the start. Conservatives have a 5/4 majority for horrid things, and they will go after gay marriage, school integration, teaching evolution in schools and eventually (given Thomas is unlikely to annul his own marriage) mixed raced marriages.
I would also expect an assault on the decisions which allowed the New Deal: which is to say the right to regulate banks, to provide social security and medicare, and, of course, a further gutting of Obamacare.
Voting and demonstrations which bother no one will not fix this. If you want it fixed you’re going to have to let politicians and judges know, personally, in ways they can’t ignore, that this is unacceptable. That will entail risk to you, and may not be worth it to enough people.
There are no such thing as innate rights: all rights are political, and all of politics is a matter of force and power. Sometimes that fact is kept out of sight so as not to offend the delicate, but power is the only thing that ever matters.
Do people who want abortion rights and other civil liberties have enough power to keep them? Remember that you don’t have power you won’t use.
I hope we find out they do.
(And don’t count on fleeing to Canada or Mexico. If a Republican government puts the pressure on, there’s a good chance our government will fold. Canadian and Mexicans understand what American governments do to those who cross them.)