Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 139 of 437

Political Concepts: Introduction and Table Of Contents

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On November 12, 2021

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I thought hard about what concepts to include in this little booklet, and how to talk about them. Broadly speaking two approaches were possible: I could draw on my reading and give a summary of how the terms are usually used in the social sciences or I could convey my understanding.

I have come down on the side of explaining how I understand and use various political concepts, first because anyone who wants to know the standard usage can find it on the Web or in sociological and political science textbooks; and second because people who read me (and who gave to the fundraiser) will mostly find my understanding more useful and interesting. While these concepts cover only a small piece of my world-view, it’s an important one, and it’s a chunk of the model I use to understand and then explain the world when I write.

The first draft of the chapters are written except for the conclusion, and I’m currently editing them.

Over the next two to three weeks I’ll intersperse these articles with other posts. I’ll update the Table Of Contents as each chapter is published, link to the Table of Contents and the previous and next chapter in each piece, and at the end I’ll delete this paragraph and the preceding one.

In general terms, we will be looking at politics thru a lens of legitimacy, ideology, identity and power: seeing what forces form the groups and coalitions which jockey for power and how the forces determine who wins and what they do, and are able to do, with the power they win. Despite how that may sound, the booklet isn’t primarily about elections because most elections change little, they elect people who will do about the same things their predecessors did. Elections that signal great change, like Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980, or FDR in 1932, are rare, and and those I do discuss.

Sadly, despite many efforts, politics is social, and no one other than Hari Seldon has managed to create an effective science of history. There are no social physics, and any set of tools requires understanding to use. That said, my goal (over more than half my lifetime) has been to understand social forces well enough so that as a race, we humans can perhaps not just understand them, but gain some control over them; creating history, rather than being its victims.

It is my hope that this little booklet will contribute to that project.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who donated to the 2020 fundraiser, which made this possible. I appreciate it more than most reads likely realize.

Table Of Contents

(As the chapters are published, I will link to them here)

Introduction and Table of Contents

Politics Itself

Legitimacy

Ideology

Identity

Groups and Coalitions

Environment

Economy

Power

Government

International Government and Relations

Conclusion

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

Open Thread

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On November 12, 2021

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Privatization Is Always A Ripoff

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On November 11, 2021

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Water edition, from the UK

Analysis in 2020 found that privatised (sic) water companies paid £57bn in dividends to shareholders since their foundation in 1991 to 2019. Now they say they need better infrastructure to stop piping sewage into rivers, lakes, and sea.

Up here in Toronto, Canada, we privatized half our trash collection, dividing the city in half. The West has private collection, the East has public. When it went into force, the arguments were strong: private was cheaper. Now, a few years later:

Oh, hey, what a surprise. It costs more and they pay workers less than the City does.

Let’s keep this simple, as free market fundamentalists who usually understand nothing about markets often say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” TANSTAAFL.

Private companies have to make a profit. Public companies do not. Private companies are not miraculously more efficient, to be cheaper than public companies, they have cut costs. Often that is wages, other times it is not paying to maintain or upgrade infrastructure required to keep sewage out of the water.

For anything where we know how to do it; where there is actually little room for innovation, and where the service provided is about the same for everyone (this includes almost all universal or near universal insurance, all utilities including water and power and internet) public provision is more efficient and private provision can only be cheaper by cutting costs you don’t want cut. That includes, of course, pushing costs into the future: the trash company in Toronto knew it’d raise prices in the future, it undercut for a few years to get its foot in the door.

Once you do privatize it can be difficult to take something back public. You’ve sold the assets, and the people you sold them to are making money and don’t want to sell back. Especially at lower levels of government you may not be able to force them to, or force them to at a reasonable price. In addition, they now have a constituency of rich people who need them to continue (investors, executives) and who can use their money to lobby and bribe officials.

As a rule, most privatizations are fraud, and the politicians who do them are corrupt, helping out friends and donors and doing well out of the process. Most politicians who do this should be treated as criminals and thrown in prison for defrauding the public, corruption and fraud.

(About half of the neoliberal agenda initiated by Thatcher and Reagan was and is just “privatize everything you can so the rich can get richer.” It’s not capitalism, it’s rentierism and corruption and makes economies weaker, not stronger.)

TANSTAAFL. There is no free lunch, if a private company can make money off a public asset, it’s been sold to them for less than its worth, and the people who will pay in the end are taxpayers.

If it is a public good, it should be provided publicly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

The EU Needs To Get Clear On Its Interests

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On November 10, 2021

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One of the more useful neoliberal writers I’ve been reading recently is Kishore Mahbubani. A point he made about US and European foreign interests really came home to me recently, seeing news of a refugee crisis at the Belarus/Poland border, where Belarus has deliberately released migrants in retaliation for EU sanctions and, this

Readers may remember that Turkey, during the last refugee crisis (still ongoing, but much reduced) used holding and releasing refugees as part of its negotiation with the EU, similar but not identical to what Belarus is doing. Those refugees, of course, came from countries like Libya and Syria which the EU had helped devastate, as well as other countries in the Middle East and Africa which could not give their residents decent lives. So the people fled to Europe.

Which brings us back to Kishore’s points. The US has no significant interests in most of Africa and none in the Middle East now that it is a net producer of oil. It should disengage from places it has no significant interests in (this includes Afghanistan.)

The EU, on the other hand, shuddered under the relatively mild recent refugee crisis. It is where refugees will go when their countries blow up, especially countries nearby, because it offers the best quality of life in Eurasia.

This means it is not in the interest of the EU to destabilize countries, to sanction them or to even to see them stagnate or fail economically. If they do, Europe is who gets the refugees, and Europe cannot handle refugees, politically or economically. (Arguably Europe might figure out how to economically, but Europe is wedded to doctrinaire technocratic neoliberalism and incapable of meaningful policy outside that framework.)

This is why the EU screamed so loudly when the US unilaterally left Afghanistan: they knew they would get the refugees.

The EU is the world’s second or third largest economy, depending on how you measure it. They could have provided sufficient aid to Afghanistan to reduce the refugee flow. They didn’t. They couldn’t continue occupying Afghanistan themselves, because their militaries are set up as auxiliaries for US troops: they aren’t capable of long term, long distance, large scale operations though France manages some in its old African possessions.

After World War II Western Europe was a US satrapy, and Eastern Europe belonged to the USSR. This was simply a fact: huge numbers of US and Russian troops were stationed in Europe.

The Europeans have never recovered from this: they still act as if the US rules them; they act as if satrapies, expecting the US to take the lead.

But the US does not have the same interests as Europe any more. Not only is Europe far more subject to refugee issues, as already noted, but it’s far more integrated into the Eurasian (and Chinese) economy, and its future is within that economy, not with the US.

So Europe needs to get off its knees, and stop pretending it isn’t a great power. It needs to stop damaging countries that will send refugees to it; it needs to support countries so that they don’t shed refugees, including helping them develop; and it needs to build a reasonable military, capable of operating where it has interests and certainly big enough to credibly deter Russia without American help. (That the EU is scared of Russia, a country with a much smaller population and economy, is ludicrous and pathetic.)

It may be that for its own reasons (its commitment to technocratic rules) the EU will come to oppose the rise of China, or it may be that the EU will decide to cooperate with China in developing countries whose undevelopment is a threat to the EU, but whatever Europe decides should be based on a clear-eyed look at its own interests.

If Europe continues acting weak, putting its defense off on the US (which no longer has the same interests) and refuses to look after its unique interests, there’s a good chance the EU will eventually collapse or be reduced back to its western core (German, France, hangers on). It already lost the UK, the eastern provinces are restive, and its prestige is weak compared to 20 years ago.

It’s time for the EU to either decide to be a great power, or to simply buckle under to whoever offers the best combination of threats and blandishments: the US or China.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The ACA (Obamacare) Has Performed As Predicted

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On November 8, 2021

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So, Tony linked to a the abstract of a study of ACA cost:

As a measure of affordability, we calculated potential Marketplace premiums as a percentage of family income among families with incomes of 401–600 percent of poverty. In 2015 half of this middle-class population would have paid at least 7.7 percent of their income for the lowest-cost bronze plan; in 2019 they would have paid at least 11.3 percent of their income. By 2019 half of the near-elderly ages 55–64 would have paid at least 18.9 percent of their income for the lowest-cost bronze plan in their area.

Back in 2009 I wrote:

My current belief is that what will be passed will mandate everyone buy insurance but because of inadequate cost controls and subsidies will leave ordinary people forced to buy insurance which will increase in price faster than wages.

I also wrote:

..get ready to pay out for insurance you can’t afford, with co-pays so high you can’t afford to use it even after you’ve been forced to cough up for it.

This only half a “I told you so” because it was obvious. Anyone who didn’t know, who was paying attention, was an idiot, but most of those who said otherwise were liars.

Obamacare was always intended primarily as an insurance company bailout. The expectation was always that it would look OK for a few years, then prices would spiral.

There are a few ways to do healthcare that make sense, they all involve universal healthcare. The simplest is single payer. Cleaning up US healthcare requires more than that, since there are a lot of bad actors using oligopoly power to jack prices up artificially, but a single payer can force-set prices and drive companies out of business who won’t play.

The majority of Americans want universal health care, it’s not at all contentious. The reason Americans don’t have it is that part of the rich don’t want it, because it makes some of them wealthy, and they can afford to pay the inflated prices, so it isn’t a personal problem to them.

What the majority of Americans want is irrelevant, and as the Princeton study found, has zero impact on whether anything becomes government policy. This is as true when Democrats are in charge as when Republicans are.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Open Thread

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On November 5, 2021

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A Basic Meditation Plan Which Can Take You Far

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On November 3, 2021

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One of the reasons many meditators run into problems or limits is that they do only one type of meditation.

Vipassana alone can be dangerous, leading to de-realization or de-personalization. Even in good cases “dark nights” are common, and can mess people up. Vipassana is intended to make you realize you aren’t any sense objects, but without a buffer, that can turn into pathology.

There are other meditation types which are less dangerous, in particular concentration meditation and Metta (designed to create compassion), but even in such cases there can be dangers, and without insight meditation you’re also less likely to make real progress, especially as Metta and concentration, if you get good at them, both feel great and thus can be addictive without leading to awakenings or enlightenment.

Think of meditation as exercise for your mind: you wouldn’t do only deadlifts and no other exercise, and if you did you’d wind up hurting  yourself.

As with physical exercise, if you find it is causing problems the first thing to do is STOP.

All that said, I’m going to suggest a simple, effective and relatively safe mediation program for those who want it.

The program involves three elements: concentration, love and insight.

You will ALWAYS do concentration and love meditation before doing insight unless instructed otherwise by a teacher you trust. You will do at least twice as much concentration and love meditation as insight: so if you were doing a 30 minute session you would do 10 minutes of concentration, 10 minutes of love, then 10 minutes of insight. If you don’t have enough time to do all three,  you will skip insight.

Just do these three meditations, in order, for at least a few months.

Concentration

Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell).

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

  • “Roots” (an emotionally neutral word)
  • Om Mani Padme Hum
  • Om Nama Shivaya
  • Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it–when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: Intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: Put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: At some point, you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

  • Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important,” or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.
  • Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Love Meditation

Imagine that you are hugging a puppy. (Kitten if you prefer.) Imagine your arms holding it against your chest, it’s warmth, it licking your face, and its tail wagging.

Now, just keep imagining holding the puppy, and intend to notice when you are doing something else: when you start thinking or feeling something other than puppy holding.

When you do, pat yourself on the back, pet the puppy, and go back to holding the puppy.

After You Get Good.

Once you can reliably bring up love, expand this. Start with other people or things you love (I’ve often used trees.) Then go to people you feel neither good nor bad about, perhaps imagine the people you met on the street today or yesterday.

Reverse Engineer

You’ve also been doing insight meditation, so when you can generate love for both those you love and those you are neutral about, you will do this exercise and as you do it, you will observe the feelings in your body, watching how they arise and fall away. The idea here is to learn how to generate loving feelings directly, without intermediate steps. Don’t worry if you can’t at first, for most people it’s hard. But if you stick to it, you’ll see that emotions don’t require objects and you’ll learn how to create them out of what seems like almost nothing.

Insight Meditation

There are a lot of different types of insight meditation. What you’re going to do, to start, is simply notice a feeling in your body, place your attention on it without judgment (as best you can) then simply ask yourself “if this sensation was not here, would I still be me?”

Do this for a few months, at least three. When you’re comfortable with it, and when you find that you can be detached from most sensations, move on to—

Microscope attention

Most people can’t feel their bodies very well. They may only be able to feel the general area of a perception: feeling only a finger, or hand, or upper right back, and so on. What you’re going to do is linger on feelings. Move to the edge of a feeling and try and reduce the size of your attention: focus on the smallest bit of the feeling you can perceive. Do this for 30 seconds to a minute or so, then move on after asking “would I still be me if this feeling wasn’t there?”

Hard Feelings

Insight meditation can be dangerous, both because of the possibility of de-realization and de-personalization and because if something traumatic comes up, you can re-traumatize yourself. This is why you will always do concentration and love meditation first: they create a buffer. However, if a feeling is too much, STOP. Immediately go back to your object of concentration, and meditate on that till  you feel somewhat calmer, then move on to your love meditation.

Last Words

This program can take you far. Remember the warnings and if something seems alarming, stop and consult a teacher. As with any other type of exercise, consistency is the key. Try to do it as often as possible. For most people results will take time, but many will find it beneficial after only a few weeks.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

India Is Not The Next China

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On November 2, 2021

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One of the main reasons I took some time to read the smarter members of our international elite was to learn what their assumptions are. The smart ones disagree on the consensus in some places, but what is most interesting to me is where they don’t.

India is one of those places: almost all assume that since China modernized, India’s modernization is inevitable and it will be the next great power.

I don’t see it. India still doesn’t have the necessary government capacity to run the country. Despite the attempt to clean up corruption with demonitization, the civil service is still immensely corrupt, but it is also incompetent. Whatever one thinks of the CCP, they had state capacity; they could make things happen and discipline local elites. The central government in Delhi still mostly lacks the ability to carry out complicated actions in the regions; heck, often enough they can’t even manage the capital region well.

Next, the Indians haven’t taken the right lessons from China. They see that China was involved in global value chains, but they haven’t understood how China used dual currencies and currency restrictions, along with currency purchases to control subsidize exports. They don’t understand, that is, that China’s rise was Mercantalist and not Neo-liberal. Certainly China liberalized certain sectors, but they didn’t neo-liberalize monetary policy and they kept government firms in charge of large amounts of the economy, including much of the banking sector, which they used to direct loans where they wanted. Despite criticisms and problems, this worked.

Chinese liberalization was always within the context of a centrally controlled monetary and fiscal policy, ntended to create the necessary conditions for international competitiveness and to direct capital towards sector the government prioritized. Regional governments were allowed vast latitude to purse centrally chosen goals, but the center did determine the goals and keep an eye on what regional officials were doing.

Third, even if India modernizes faster than I expect, they aren’t beating climate change. India is one of the major countries which will be hit hardest. Crude effects like pure heat increases, potential problems with rainfall, increased extreme weather events, and loss of water from the Himalayas can all be expected to harm India. Since the Indians have also vastly overused their groundwater, they will be hit by serious water issues very early compared to much of the rest of the world.

Then there is Bangladesh, one of the lowest lying countries in the world: it will be one of the first nations to collapse under climate change, and it will send literally tens of millions of mostly Muslim refugees into India.

India isn’t making it. They still only have a small middle class, they regularly have food problems, their government is corrupt and incompetent and they don’t understand how modernization actually happens so they aren’t pursuing the right policies. Ironically they really should sit down with the Chinese and cut a deal through the Belt and Road initiative to be the nation which primarily receives industry China is offshoring but is suitable for India’s stage of development, but tense Chinese/Indian relationships are preventing making an arrangement which would benefit them.

(The Chinese cut deals with America, who they have many historical grievances with, and overlooked America’s primary support for Taiwan, when they needed what America offered. They weren’t over-proud, they did what they had to to get strong first.)

Unless climate change effects happen far slower than I expect (and so far my predictions have been far closer to what’s happening than consensus forecasts, but still slightly optimistic) and the Indian government gets a clue about how the world actually works and manages to actually fix their civil service, there’s no way India makes it before global value chains start collapsing under climate change and having to be re-engineered. At that point India will have so many problems that industrialization will be off the board, and only an extraordinary government and leadership would be able to take advantage of changed circumstances to build up India. Much more likely is government collapse and loss of effective control of huge swathes of the subcontinent as mass famines killing at least 10s of millions of people (and quite possible hundreds of millions) and mass migrations occur.

I wish my analysis indicated otherwise. I’ve spent time in India, I have family who stayed after independence, and I like the Indian people.

But I’m just not seeing it.

 

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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