Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 135 of 437
Omicron is VERY contagious. Where I am, we have doubling of cases every three days, and that seems typical.
No matter how much politicians don’t want more closures, this is going to overwhelm ICUs and force closures — unless politicians are willing to see people dying in the streets (which some may be).
So, expect new closures, soon. I would suspect that most governments will try to hold off until after Christmas, but even that may not be possible.
You can read our full analysis here:https://t.co/5Yh8tNNwM6
— Bharat Ramamurti (@BharatRamamurti) December 10, 2021
This isn’t caused by supply chain shortages, it’s caused by pure greed operating through an oligopoly which is sure that governments won’t stop them.
When we let insulin prices go up to hundreds of dollars for a vial that costs under $4 to produce, something we knew would kill a ton of people, when we let them raise prices on a bevy of drugs which cost almost nothing to produce, we let every businessman know that, no matter what the consequences, price-gouging was A-OK. If it’s okay to kill sick people with price gouging, what’s off the table?
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The solution to this is to break up the oligopolies and to charge executives with conspiracies under RICO, which allows all their money to be removed as the product of a crime and forces them to use public defenders. (If it’s okay to do this to serial killers, who kill a lot less people than most oligopolists, then I don’t see why the real criminals should be spared).
As I’ve written in the past, modern capitalism is simply predators feasting on herd animals.
Our era is built on three ideological assertions:
- There is no such thing as society.
- Greed is good.
- There is no alternative (TINA).
Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and, therefore, no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society; there is no alternative.
Your lords and masters, for that is how they see themselves, hurt, impoverish, and kill you for money they don’t even need. You are the sheep, and they are the herders, and the cops are the sheepdogs, just like the cops say.
They have even less regard for you than most farmers, though, since they figure there are more of you than they need, and thus, they see no need to care for you the way a good farmer cares for his animals until he kills them for food.
Remember, everything evil they do and are rewarded for simply leads to the question, “What else can we do to make even more money?”
Until the consequence of them hurting and killing “sheep” is that they start dying, or have something worse than dying happen to them (time in ultra-max’s counts), they’re going to kill and hurt more and more, because they are rewarded for it, and most of them get off on it.
(Introduction and Table of Contents)
The economy turns the ideology of who should have a good or bad life and what sort of life that is into reality.
An economy is a way of deciding who is allowed to use resources and in what ways they can use them.
In modern capitalism, money is power: It lets you determine what other people do. You can do that directly by hiring them, or you can do it indirectly by buying what they offer. Either way, your money directs their efforts.
Not all economies are like this. In feudalism, money was not the most important thing, land and serfs were. You controlled land and serfs by being part of a web of feudal obligations such that other members of the feudal nobility would send you knights and men-at-arms. Military force and feudal ties determined who had the power to control what the peasant majority did.
There are always limits on what you are allowed to do. In an economy, these are political limits. In the modern developed world, slavery is usually illegal and children don’t work. You may not be allowed to work people more than a certain number of hours a day. Some areas won’t let you own water rights or restrict access to beaches; some separate “above ground” land rights from mineral rights (to the ruin of many farmers).
Children are forced to go to school by government, thus claiming the right to choose what children do away when they’re away from their parents (and the right was taken away from parents who did choose what their children did previously). There may be environmental regulation, there are certainly taxes which change costs, and there are subsidies as well. Railroads are far more efficient in physical terms than roads for transport, for example, but roads are far more subsidized and, thus, often cheaper.
How an economy works: What can be sold or earned. Through regulation and taxation, what the cost structure is, and thus what types of people and businesses make how much profit are political decisions. This is why businesses spend so much time and money lobbying government: Government is the ultimate determinant of their success.
Modern stockholder capitalism would be impossible without a vast array of legal rights and their enforcement. The limited liability corporation is a political creation (and was opposed by many businessmen when it was created). Corporate person-hood is not obvious, and many would argue, it is obviously incorrect (corporations aren’t people) but it is legal reality.
Property itself, is entirely a political creation and requires vast enforcement by the state. Owning ideas is something you couldn’t do for most of history, but so-called “intellectual property” is core to modern capitalism. Indeed, for much of history most societies didn’t even allow the ownership of land, and personal possessions were often freely shared. It takes immense amounts of force and huge institutions to keep our complex property systems going; accountants, bookkeepers, and banks are best viewed as keeping track of complex ownership relationships.
You will remember that, in the legitimacy and ideology chapters, we discussed the idea of the “good life” and of who the “good people” were. Economies are designed to translate that into reality. So, for example, the US has had vast subsidies for suburbs for about a century, because suburbs represent the “good life.”
While governments set the rules of economies, decisions within that rule-set are made by people who control a lot of money, whether personally or through companies. When those people do something bad, even often something which is illegal, we often don’t punish them at all (as in the 2008 financial crisis), or we fine them for less than they made. This is because rich people who make decisions are acting legitimately; they are the people who are supposed to make decisions.
If drug companies make insulin so expensive that many people die, that isn’t murder, even though far more people are killed than even by the most prolific serial killer. As with politicians declaring war, rich people are considered to have the right to kill or harm others, so long as it is done through markets.
Where the line on this is varies by time, with much more permitted before 1933 and after 1980 in the US, but because basic legitimacy, in a capitalist system, resides in markets, those who control markets are “good” and have the legitimate right to hurt people.
Capitalists use the state to obtain the resources they need for business: road and railroads, employees trained by schools and universities, basic and advanced research, the court system and the police. All of these resources are used far more by capitalists than ordinary people; they benefit more than they pay. Likewise they often have the right to pollute, injured workers have only limited ability to sue them, and so on. Direct subsidies of billions to trillions are common.
All of this is so because capitalism is legitimate, so doing what is required to make business profitable is legitimate.
The word profitable is important here: It is usually government which decides which businesses make money and which don’t. The combination of property rights, enforcement, and subsidies, along with letting businesses pollute or not, pay other damages they inflict, determines not just whether money is made, but how much.
The best business to be in is generally the financial business, as banks and most financial institutions can create money literally out of nothing, which is what happens when a bank makes a loan or a brokerage extends credit or leverage. It’s hard not to be profitable when you can just change a computer legerd and, “Voila, money!”
Joseph Schumpeter regarded banks as the command centres of capitalism because of this ability to create money and because lending a business money to do something is deciding if that something should be done. and In general, financial institutions plus the state determine who can do what, and who makes a profit. Because financial institutions are, or can be, regulated by the state, and because just anyone isn’t allowed to create money, this is all, ultimately, a creation of the state or at least allowed by it.
The economy, then, is how the ideology of legitimacy, of what the good life is and who should enjoy it, is brought into being. The right activities are made profitable, the wrong ones are made less profitable or unprofitable, or are made illegal. Taxes are arranged to distribute money from the rich to the rest of society, as from 1932 to 1979 in the US, or they are arranged to distribute money from the majority to the rich, as from 1980 to the present.
Money and power thus move to the chosen and legitimate groups of people, and those people use it that money to create society in the image of their ideologies.
The economy then, is not a result of inevitable economic laws, but of choices made by those in power, who are in power because enough people identify with them and agree with the ideology they claim to champion.
Economies result from power and confer power, and power is what we will discuss next.
So, read this recently:
We got $1800 under Trump, additional unemployment, temporarily ended student loan payments and an eviction moratorium.
Biden promised $2000 and only gave $1400, ended additional unemployment, eviction moratorium ended and in Feb student loan payments will restart.
— Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) December 14, 2021
Makes the point pretty clearly, I’d say. Even people I know who hate Trump admit he did more for them than any other President of their life. People who got the additional unemployment, in particular, often had the longest good period of their lives — where they didn’t have to work and had enough money.
Whatever you think of the policy, Trump gave people money or helped with their student loans, and Biden is taking money away from them and leaving them vulnerable to eviction.
I can’t see how there is any way, absent some big surprises, that the Democrats don’t get wiped out in 2022, and it won’t just be “off years, we lose.”
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
The problem is that Republicans now feel more populist than Democrats; they appear more willing to just give money or help. It may be true that Republicans and a couple Democratic senators de-railed a lot of the good Biden wanted to do, but that doesn’t matter on the ground. If Biden can’t do good things or doesn’t want to (the truth is both), who cares? The end result is the same if your student loans re-start, your unemployment checks stop, and you get evicted.
Not only isn’t Biden FDR, he isn’t even going to look as helpful as Trump.
We are currently seeing a fair bit of inflation, driven by supply chain issues. A recent comment by commenter Che Pasa is instructive.
Already, our local grocery store is charging $4.00 for a pound of broccoli, $3.00 for a head of lettuce, and 10 percent more for everything that hasn’t increased in price by 30-50 percent or more already. On the other side, they’ve lost literally half of their staff — who quit because their pay was too low. It was costing some of them more to work (what with transportation, child care, basic living expenses, etc.) than they were being paid.
The entire comment is worth reading.
Inflation happens all the time. During the New Deal and post-war eras, and up through the late 60s to mid- seventies, what happened is that wage inflation was stronger than the inflation of most things people needed to buy, and especially including important things like houses, cars, and tuition.
When stagflation hit, elites decided that the core problem was “ordinary people are buying too much,” so ever since 1979 (42+ years), the Federal Reserve and other central banks have had a policy that whenever people’s wages rise faster than the inflation of basic necessities, they strangle wages, which they call “wage push inflation.” I’ve written about strangling wages a bunch of times, a longer version is available for those who want the whips and chains version.
There were, in the 70s, basically two choices: Strangle demand, or fix the supply issues by transitioning off carbon based fuels. They chose to strangle demand, and make the rich richer, because it seemed easier and it had the side-effect of making everyone the decision makers cared about filthy rich.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
What we have right now are supply chain disruptions caused by Covid. Ports in China get shut down when Covid strikes, there aren’t enough truckers, there isn’t enough production of many goods due to health-related disruptions (people being sick, dying, or under quarantines, and so on). Once that begins, folks begin to hoard, and in a “just in time” production and shipping system, there is no slack. Small disruptions cascade across the system as a result and warehouses have no inventory to make up for even slight disruptions in supply.
Most “value chains” to use management and trade speak, are spread out over multiple countries: parts are manufactured in many places, then gathered to be assembled. A snarl at any of a number of locations, or in shipping between them, causes delays all down the line.
In other words, we have a structural logistical problem caused by our systems being over-engineered for efficiency as measured by profits, without any built-in slack or even being designed to make sense. The people I talk to who are familiar with the system tell me that no one understands it; it’s too complicated and dispersed.
But for 42 years, we’ve relied, almost completely, on financial solutions to economic problems, run primarily through central banks, with finance and treasury departments occasionally assisting. The solution to every problem has been to give rich people and corporations more money and assume that will create “supply,” while crippling everyone else to manage “demand.”
That methodology won’t work for this. Giving rich people more money won’t fix things, because the people who run the logistics system are making a lot of money off of these shortages; their profits are up. They’ll take money if the Fed wants to give it to them, but they have no reason to fix anything.
In principle, I suppose one can cut even more money off to ordinary people, and that’s what is being done, in stages, and as pandemic support is removed. However, the shortages are so severe that this may lead to even Americans and Britons, some of the most supine people in the world, deciding that rioting is better than starvation.
Or maybe it won’t. Maybe they are so beaten down, that unlike Indian farmers (who recently forced their leader Modi to back down), they will simply sit and take it.
But this isn’t a problem which can be fixed by the usual, “If we just give more money to rich people and privatize some more, the market will sort it out” solution that has been essentially the only policy method modern elites have ever known.
It requires, instead, actually restructuring logistics and manufacturing, actually forcing ports, shipping, trucking, railroad companies to change how they operate — including probably busting up various oligopolies, (many of which aren’t just dragging their feet, but are using this as an excuse to raise prices even when supply isn’t short). It requires forcing merchant marines to stop flagging in countries of convenience and to re-flag with major countries, rather than be, effectively, controlled by those countries.
It requires nuts and bolts understanding of how the system works, the re-engineering of it, and — if it’s too complicated to understand– making it simple enough to fix.
Elites, in other words, would have to understand how the actual economy works and not just assume that printing more money or changing interest rates or selling public facilities will make everything okay.
This comes back to what I wrote after 2008, that by refusing to let incompetent losers like the entire financial industry go out of out of business, by saying “we will print as much money as is required to keep current elites in power,” the central banks of the world had made real economic collapse, not just financial, inevitable, because they had made it impossible to change who was making the decisions, and the people making the decisions were incompetent fools.
Because, darling Virginia, there exists a real economy, not just numbers in a ledger. Food must be grown, processed, and sent to shelves. Ores must be mined and refined. Products must be made, shipped, and sold. People must eat and have power and water.
Every time our elites fail to manage the actual economy, as for example when Texas lost power this past year due to the power companies’ failure to repair and maintain their infrastructures, what happened? Instead of being punished for it, instead of losing power, they were rewarded either by windfall profits or — if somehow they would have lost money — they were bailed out. So, after the bailout they became even more rich and powerful.
The people who are in charge of the world logistics system are getting rich because of their failures. Central banks cannot fix that. The people who are in charge of the world health system are getting rich because of their failure to handle Covid. Central banks cannot fix that.
Your rulers are impoverishing and killing you, because it benefits them.
Incompetent or evil? Why not both?
So, for a couple years now, almost, I’ve been warning about schools and Covid.
https://twitter.com/Billius27/status/1467528981754826755
In Ontario, teenagers can be vaccinated and children under 12 only became eligible November 24th.
Vaccines do reduce cases; children are not immune, and they do spread it to others.
Ontario’s overall policy has been deranged. Currently, large sporting events and casinos are operating. Before they were, R wasn’t over 1, now it is.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
In any case, if you reside somewhere where children aren’t vaccinated and can reasonably, and you can legally keep your kids home, I’d do so unless the schools are properly ventilated (almost none of them are). Remember, again, that long-Covid is a thing, and could fuck you or someone you care about up for life, even if you don’t die from Covid.
Generally speaking, the most important thing is that Covid is airborne. Proper ventilation is a must. Buildings which just centrally recirculate air are delivering Covid directly to you, which is why most hotels aren’t a good place to quarantine people.
Personally, I’ve been keeping outside air circulation going where I live since Covid started, since otherwise I live in a central air building. Insufficient, but better than nothing.
Be well and be safe.