Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 21 of 24

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Sometimes it is necessary to re-post older articles. We’ve been in the Fall Of Neoliberlism period for some time, but a larger era is that of War and Revolution. The failures and the end of neoliberalism are part of this era, but it is more than their sum, because it also the end of an ecological era and the beginning of a new technological era (telecom and autonomous robots.)

With the eruption of riots due to the failures of neoliberalism and US imperialism (Covid-19 was mostly a given, the response was not), I think it’s worth revisiting this article to set the scene.

This is the age you will live in for most of your life if you are young. If you are old, it is your permanent fate. Originally posted April 26th, 2017.

I have labelled the next era “the age of war and revolution,” in fact, I’ve even made a blog category for it.

I expect this for economic, geopolitical, technological, and environmental reasons.

Economic

The developed world has soaring inequality and is stagnated. Real value is not being created, instead it is being cannibalized through financial games by rentiers; they take all the profits and download all the risk on to others, as the 2008/9 bailouts illustrated (the bankers are fine, no one else is).

Deliberate austerity through political decisions has damaged the economy. Demand has been insufficient for decades, but we are now extremely sclerotic after the response to the financial crisis was “bail out the people who caused it, make everyone else pay.” Even by the logic of capitalism, this is crazed: Capitalism says, “If you lose your money, you weren’t allocating it properly.” Capitalism works, to the extent that it works, because people who make good allocation decisions get more money, and thus, get to make more allocation decisions, while those who allocate money (really, resources) badly, lose it, and no longer get to make as many decisions.

Bankers, who are the primary resource allocators in our society (it is not even close, they create the vast majority of all money, not governments), made such bad decisions, on aggregate, that they lost all their money. Under capitalism, that’s how it would have stayed, and other people would have taken over their function, having learned from their loss.

Because we refused to do this, the opposite lesson was learned, which was: ‘Do more of this.’ And so, the policies which drove us into the ground continue.

Now, like the old-fashioned white male CIS blah, blah, that I am, I am lumping a lot of the social issues under the umbrella of economics. That isn’t because they are entirely caused by economics, but because economics is the independent variable which is driving the rise of the “alt right” and so on. As the economy has become worse, people have fallen back on whatever identity they already have, and found enemies. That is what people do.

Back in the mid 70s, I said to my father “I don’t see a lot of racism.” (I lived in Vancouver, flush with Chinese.) He shook his head and said, “No, because times are good. Wait ’til times are bad, you’ll see plenty then.” My father was a child of the Great Depression.

‘Nough said.

Alternatives to neoliberalism will continue to rise. Neoliberalism is now a zombie. It still shuffles along, eating brains, but it’s dead and the only question is how many people it will impoverish and kill before it dies. Well, and what will replace it.

I want to emphasize something here: almost all social welfare statistics track economic inequality, not absolute access to goods. People are happy, or sick, or whatever, based on how unequal their society is, and almost nothing else, provided the society is beyond the bare subsistence level.

Inequality matters, it drives almost everything. People who feel unequal are unhappier, stressed and sick. The data on this is conclusive, those who wish to read it, may look it up in the book “The Spirit Level”.

So it doesn’t matter if Thelma has a TV and a smartphone, what matters is that she’s scared all the time because if she loses her job she’s screwed, and as a result she has to do whatever her boss says. She has little real freedom, save the right to become homeless. And that fear is constantly there, even if it is subconscious.

This fear goes right through the economy, including in many who would be considered upper class (not rich, but the professionals who make 150K+/year). Anecdotally, almost all upper class and upper middle class women seem to be on psychoactive prescription drugs, for example.

Economic problems take time to ripple thru political system because after 30 most people don’t tend to change their views. They believe what they believe, they are who they are, and while age produces real changes, it doesn’t tend to change their politics, absent absolute catastrophe.

But we are now moving to the other side of that. For decades people put up with decline, but now the youngsters, some of whom are in their early 30s, have never known anything but a failed system and a bad economy. This political world has never worked for them, ever: they have no emotional investment in it, no habit of supporting it.

So, as we continue our economic decline; as inequality gets worse and worse, and as the coming generations move to the age where they are politically viable, the current time ends.

The next set of rulers and their supporters will try new things; new systems. They will be willing to revolt. The age of neoliberalism is all but over.

Geopolitical

The United States is in decline. China is now the world’s largest manufacturer, with a larger population.

Historically, declining empires (and if you don’t believe that the US is an empire, please search for a map showing all American overseas military bases and consider that the US routinely bombs countries it doesn’t like, without a declaration of war), always spawn wars and crises. The decline of England spawned two world wars, fighting against the rising power, Germany. (America won that.) Spain’s decline caused great convulsions, and so on.

America arrogates a great deal of power to itself. China building islands in what is, after all, their near sea, is China saying “we are the power here, not you. You cannot use your fleet here freely any more.” (Well, the US still can, but not for much longer, if China doesn’t like it.)

In pre-industrial societies military power did not always (or even often) track economic capacity. (The Chinese, twice conquered by horse nomads, are well aware of this.) But in industrial and post-industrial societies it does. He who can make the most weapons that are good enough and match to soldiers, wins, with limited exceptions.

Which is to say, while China does not have the military the US has, yet, it now has the potential to have a bigger, stronger one. More industry, more people.

Though people are becoming less important, which leads us to…

Technology

The technology of warfare and production are both changing. I am not convinced automation has reached the tipping point people make it out as having done, the industrial revolution did the same and was handled, but rising automation into sclerotic demand and an insistence of distributing money thru jobs is one of the factors driving the economic problems we already discussed. The more capitalists think they don’t need workers, combined with refusing to do something akin to a basic income or employ less people for more money or radically decrease the work week without decreasing wages, the greater the problem.

The change in warfare is more interesting, and deeply problematic. As many people have observed, Orwell among them, violent technology underwrites constitutions. Mass armies full of riflemen, where women must work in the factories lead very directly first male then universal sufferage. Ancient Greek City states and Swiss cantons enfranchised exactly the fighting population.

Iraq saw the rise of area denial warfare, where the state could not be defeated on the field, but could not rule. Now we are moving to a world of drones and autonomous robots. People will be less and less needed to fight wars. This is not a good thing, but—

—drone and autonomous robot technology is not necessarily a tech for the powerful. In fact, I suspect this is a technology of the weak. They aren’t that hard to make and will become increasingly easier to make. Any idiot who wants to make them will eventually be able to do so.

So you wind up either with police states (which we are moving towards, with our extreme surveillance societies) or societies where anyone can be killed. There is no way most leaders can be defended, it cannot be done.

I will not cry for this. The ridiculous ramparts in world capitals, which did not exist 60 years ago, exist exactly because politicians no longer work for their populations. Ages of assassination also tend to be ages where the population is better taken care of, because the best way to keep someone from committing political violence is to keep them happy. A man who is happily married, who is relatively equal, who looks forward to his life and feels he can do things that are meaningful does not build drones in his basement.

Happy people who are in loving relationships and/or enmeshed in supportive communities may commit horrific communal violence, but they don’t tend to become terrorists.

However, the point is that the tech will become more and more available, and another age of terror and assassination will arise in its wake. To avoid that we will have reorganize our societies: we can do so either by making them surveillance police states or by making people happy.

Environmental

We are facing a triple or quadruple threat. Climate change, environmental collapse, population increase and water shortages. Severe water shortages. These factors are going to make the crises much, much worse. Whole regions of India, China and the US will stop being agriculturally productive, due to aquifer depletion, for example. Swathes of land will become uninhabitable without air conditioning for months at a time. Changing rainfall patterns will make other, formerly productive land, unproductive.

Environmental collapse is harder to figure in, exactly, but as ecosystems collapse we can expect that to have unexpected and often catastrophic effects. Will the seas be taken over by jellyfish? What happens when all the alpha African predators are gone? Will honeybees wind up extinct? What happens to Japan when global fish stocks take their final swan dive (possibly recovering 25 years later)?

Meanwhile, while most developed countries have stable or declining populations, many developing countries have seen increases of a thousand percent or more, and will increase even further. This is especially the case in Africa, large swathes of which will be hit hardest by climate change.

All of this means that we will be undergoing a cyclical change (collapsing hegemonic power, new technology of violence, new technology of production) at the same time as we are facing environmental catastrophe with an unprecedentedly large population.

The so-called refugee crisis right now is nothing compared to those coming. Populations in the tens of millions will move within periods of just a few years. Countries which run out of water and thus ability to feed their population are very likely to go to war (if they don’t, their own populations will likely kill the leadership). Governments will collapse just based on environmental issues; wars will be fought over them, especially over water and arable land (this is one reason I am scared for Canada. When the US wants our water and land…)

Concluding Remarks

It is quite hard to predict history in the short term, where the short term means years, or even a decade or two. It is very hard to predict history in the long term of centuries or millennia. But between that it is quite easy. Each ideology, each empire, each economic system has a best by date. Some last longer than others, but all end, and they do so in fairly standard order.

We are near the end of an ideological order: neoliberalism. We are near the end of war-making technological era, with the rise of robots. We are near the end of a production technological era, with the rise of AI and bots.

Combined with environmental catastrophe (and nukes), this makes what is coming down the line much worse than the normal cyclical change. Much, much worse. We can create a better world, or a few better societies, out of it, to be sure, but there is probably no avoiding the Age of War and Revolution which is soon to be upon us.

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Why Read or Write About the Grand Affairs of Humanity?

By Ian Welsh

On May 27, 2020

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I’ve been thinking hard about why I write. It started as an attempt to fix the big things, by explaining what was wrong and how to fix them.

That didn’t work.

Really didn’t work. Almost 100 percent failure.

Unfortunately, much of my writing has continued in this mode: Explain the big wrong things. Didn’t work in the 00’s. Didn’t work in the 10’s. Unlikely to work in the 20s.

I’ve lost a lot of my heart for it. Explaining the world to people makes very little difference to the world, at least when I do it. Predicting trends and events years in advance, same.

So I’m going to change the emphasis of my writing. Oh, there’ll still be grand explainers, but I’m going to write them less with the hope that they’ll change the world, and more so that they help individuals and small groups navigate the world better. That way at least I’m more likely to help people

The big stuff is pretty much locked in now: We’ll see really bad climate change, we’re moving to a two-polar or multi-polar world, surveillance societies will be the norm until collapse, inequality will keep increasing in most countries, etc. Some is more locked in than other stuff; we could, in theory, reverse inequality (and we will, the question is when), but climate change is here to stay, and the international trade order is falling apart.

Back in 2000, when Bush v. Gore happened, my friend Stirling Newberry said, “We’re going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

He was right.

But, as I emphasized yesterday, even in very bad times, some people are doing well, and others are doing better than they might have. Perhaps we’re unlikely to change the big picture, but more of us can change our picture and those of smaller groups.

Knowing how the world works, how governments, large corporations, and billionaires work, and knowing how non-human systems like the environment work, will be useful to those people. You may not be able to change the world (though keep trying if you want, someone will), but you can adapt better or worse to it.

This doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing the bigger pieces. I’ve spent most of my adult life building a world model of which I’m proud. It’s different in some ways from anyone else’s (this doesn’t mean better, though I hope it is better than most), and I want to get it out into the wild. My book “The Construction of Reality” is part of that (and stuck at the editor who is overwhelmed thanks to Covid-19), and there will be other books, long essays, and so on.

Maybe that world view will find an audience in the future or be useful to the future, maybe it won’t, but I want to give it a try.

But on the blog, I’m going to shift the emphasis in articles to not just what’s going to happen but why and try and pull out more of the reasoning so that readers can learn to do the analysis themselves, and can use it plan for and react to the world’s changes over the next few decades.

Things are going to be bad–really bad–for a lot of people. The time is past where most of that can be stopped, and the odds of stopping that which can still be stopped are, in most cases, small, and beyond the reach of individuals.

What is not beyond our reach is helping ourselves, those we care about, and–hopefully–some people beyond that circle.

And it’s in hope of that, and of a future where people and their leaders are willing to do the right things, the good things, that I am going to reorient my writing.

Be well.

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Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2020

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One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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It’s Impossible to Overstate How Broken America Is

By Ian Welsh

On May 1, 2020

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I know I’ve been pounding this issue, but…

New: The Capitol physician told Republican staffers today the Senate lacks the capacity to test all 100 senators when it comes back Monday. Instead the Senate will test people who are sick. Test will take 2+ days.

Come on!!

They can’t even manage proper testing for 100 Senators!?

This is genuine failed state stuff.

As best I can see, the US has been coasting on institutions and infrastructure built primarily by the Lost, GI and Silent generations. Every generation after that has been drawing down the American patrimony. Almost nothing works properly that wasn’t built or at least started by those generations.

Modern elites, with a few exceptions, are simply rent extractors, financial elites competing to eat as much of the pie as possible.

Even most of the stuff that Boomers and later generations take credit for wasn’t actually created by them: Texas Instruments invented the modern GUI, not Gates or Jobs. The internet was invented by pre-Boomers, excepting Tim Berners-Lee (who created the world wide web which sits upon it.) Microchips were invented by the GI generation and improved by Silents.

But when the elites can’t even protect themselves? When they can’t even put together 100 tests for some of the most powerful people in the country? That’s insane. That’s straight failed state stuff.

The only reason the US merely a failing state, as opposed to a failed state, is because of the work put in by people who are mostly dead now. This is a straight “living off the principle” problem.

Meanwhile, the Covid crisis is being used as an opportunity to increase the top .1 percent’s control of the population, even at the cost of reducing the size of the economy (and not in smart ways, but in ad-hoc “fuck small business owners and workers” ways.)

The Sheer Awe-inspiring American Clusterfuck

By Ian Welsh

On April 21, 2020

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This is not exaggeration for effect.

I am awed by the American handling of Coronavirus. Truly awed. I’ve been writing about the slow-motion American collapse for ages. Heck, last year I wrote an article about how the US is a failing state:

The US is a gold-flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.

Yee-hah!

So, right now we have five states in the US that never bothered to self-isolate.

We have the Governor of Georgia announcing he will allow gyms, barbers, and fitness clubs, among others, to reopen on the 24th.

We have the Governor of Florida reopening Florida’s beaches. Good thing Florida doesn’t have a lot of old people!

There are astroturf protests asking for an end to isolation. “Let us die, let us die, let us DIE!” (Also, let us kill others.)

Virtually all the relief money has flowed to the top, not the bottom. Landlords and tenants are in crisis. Unemployment is going over 30 percent and in many places higher. A vast swathe of US small business will be destroyed, and they are unlikely to recover in a generation. Firms which borrowed money to do stock buy backs, or to give money to their private equity purchasers are slopping at the trough, but many of the actual businesses on the ground (like Neiman Marcus) will go under.

PPE can’t be found for hospital or logistics workers. Important pieces of the logistics hub, like meat packing plants, are shutting down. Warehouse workers are protesting, truckers are scared, etc.

The US is unable to make or procure an adequate number of masks or prioritize who gets them (though, really, everyone should be). The ventilators made by GM are inadequate, because Trump wanted to keep the price down.

Hospitals not only don’t have enough PPE, they’re going bankrupt because they haven’t been given enough money.

And so on.

Failing state. Cannot actually do really basic things. New Zealand did everything right, the US has done almost nothing right, and when it has, it is undone by some drooling, incompetent, ideological stooge or corrupt businessman or politician: “Get them back to work! I’m losing money!”

Here’s one simple issue: New York and other states are turning the corner. Stats are difficult, but it can be seen in the reduction of new cases in the hospitals. It will take some time to really get the curve down, but it’s being done.

Meanwhile, there are still accelerating pockets of infection in states that never shut down and other states are re-opening too soon.

How do you handle this? Well, what I would do if I were governor is get together with other governors who aren’t completely evil and corrupt and close the borders between states. Shipped goods from lunatic states gets put in depots on the border and is picked up by local shippers, everyone from a state which hasn’t isolated correctly doesn’t get in unless they go into quarantine.

To do this, the Governors will likely have to call up the National Guard. The US will be divided into groups of states which have shut off almost all travel between themselves.

All assuming Trump doesn’t get in the way and make it impossible, in which case, reinfection! More isolation, etc.

A complete clusterfuck.

Iceland, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things. Jane Jacobs, in her book “Dark Age Ahead,” said that the key sign of the oncoming Dark Age was old knowledge being lost; that things which we could once do, we no longer could. She actually used the CDC as an example, and that was decades ago.

This is genuinely awe-inspiring to watch. I am truly amazed. I imagine it’s like watching the late Roman Empire, muttering to oneself, “We were never as great as they say, but we we could get things done.”

But the American elite reaction to anything these days is to see it as a looting opportunity. Pump up the stock market, let the peons starve and run out of rent money, shovel money to the rich, and buy up distressed assets. That’s what both DC Republicans and Democrats are doing and okay with. Yes, yes, Democrats are okay with it. They could actually play hardball and have not, and instead have capitulated after token protests.

There are clusters of competence, of course, but they are overwhelmed by incompetence, corruption, and callous disregard for anyone who doesn’t make at least seven figures a year. The elites are inbred, out of touch with actual production and only capable of playing political games. They get money by manipulating politics, not by genuine production.

The masses are little better. If New York Governor Cuomo had put New York on isolation even two weeks earlier, he could have saved thousands of lives. He has been behind the ball on everything all the way down the line. Of course, his approval numbers are soaring. (He’s an inbred incompetent, but less incompetent than Trump, so I guess he’s graded on a scale.)

It’s impossible to keep up with this, but the bottom line is that the US is broken. You’ve off-shored too much production capacity, your elites are incompetent, out of touch, corrupt, and trained to make their money by hurting other people. Your population refuses to vote for anyone who does the right thing, and instead keeps choosing (with the aid of the media, yes) people who are evil and so impaired that a sensible person would be aghast at the thought of even hiring them to walk their dog or babysit their kids. (Tell me that you would tolerate either Biden or Trump doing either job. But those are the people you want to be the most important person in the country.)

All empires and great nations end. With almost no exceptions, they rot from the inside, and any outside push is secondary–such as from threats they could easily have defeated in their prime (as Rome was able to keep the Germans on the other side of the Rhine for centuries).

America is a failing state. It can’t even handle problems for which the solution is well-defined. It can’t resist turning every crisis into an opportunity to make its elites richer. Its population prefers incompetent and depraved leaders who have spent their entire lives demonstrating contempt for the people who vote for them.

Failing state.

But awe inspiring to watch. Surreal. Amazing.

edit (April 23, 2020): Replaced “New Zealand” with Iceland for the quote about who they learned from. Both countries have handled Covid far better than the US to date.

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Geopolitics and the Economy After Covid-19

By Ian Welsh

On April 7, 2020

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Nope, not yet

First the good/bad news. Covid-19 isn’t going to bring down the “system.” It’s not a hard enough shock.

There are things we should learn from it, about what work is actually needed, about the fact that more people will not die because of reduced pollution during isolation periods than from the virus, and so on.

Mostly, we won’t learn those lessons.

One lesson which will be, not exactly learned, but used, is that if you don’t make it in your country, you can’t be sure of having it when it matters. Physical manufacturing matters: It can be designed in the US, but if it’s made in China, well…Trump almost stopped 3m from selling masks to Canada, be sure that the fact that he can has also been noticed.

There were already powerful forces, and not just in the Trump administration, who were unhappy with the current world trade and offshoring system. The more intelligent parts of the American permanent ruling class have noticed that the actual threat to American hegemony is China, and that when China makes things the US needs, China has the US by the balls.

They’ve been wanting to bring as much production back to the US as possible and they’ve been wanting to force the world into two trading blocs. These are the sort people who become livid when a European country chooses Huawei 5G, and start making threats about NATO.

They are, of course, right to be worried. The offshoring of production had catastrophic effects for Britain, when they off-shored to the US in the 19th century. They said the same sort of things Americans say now, “We still design, they just make the stuff.” That didn’t last: Manufacturing produces designers in time, there are things learned best when you’re right next to the plants. It took about three decades, but the design moved to the US, and Britain never recovered, eventually surviving through financialization, a weak shadow of itself, sustained on rents which the rest of the world can easily, one day, decide not to pay.

So Covid-19, which is putting shocks through the trade system anyway, is going to be used to justify bringing production back to various countries, to re-shoring. Trade will go down, not up, the supply chain will be less broken into pieces, and there will be a push towards a new cold war with two trade blocs. There may wind up being three depending on what Europe does, but the plan is to force Europeans into the US bloc.

In general economic terms in the US and UK, what will happen is just what happened after 2008—the big boys will be bailed out, those who have money (or are given trillions by the Fed and Treasury) will then buy up distressed assets. There will be fewer, bigger players again, the general economy will be worse for ordinary people, blah, blah. You know the play.

This won’t lead to revolution or revolutionary change yet, I suspect. I think it’ll take at least one more big shock before people become desperate enough. And, of course, the right play is to pick some part of the poor and have them oppress the other half of the poor in exchange for not-too-shitty a life. Poor white sharecroppers who get to call the equivalent of African Americans “boy.”

That play, given the weakness of the left in America and the UK, may well work. We shall see.

But be sure of this, there will be more shocks. This is a system which has no “give.” It has no surplus capacity to handle shocks, not at the real economy level: All our elites know is politics and printing digital money and giving it to their friends, without insisting on real production. Oh, they’ll try to re-shore production, but they are fundamentally incompetent and will run it badly. Be sure of that.

So this isn’t the big one. But climate change is rumbling, resource shortages are onrushing, and our sclerotic society and incompetent elites will turn what should be shocks that are easily handled into crisis after crisis.

The future is going to be interesting. Be prepared. The old world is dying, the new world has not yet been born, and there will be a great deal of pain and screaming in both the death and birth.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Should NATO Exist? Will It?

By Ian Welsh

On September 20, 2019

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One of Trump’s constant cries is that American allies aren’t spending enough on their militaries and that the US is, thus, carrying them.

While there is a temptation to scorn this argument because it was made by Trump, it has a fair bit of truth to it, as Matt Stoller suggested today:

The American military umbrella is a bad deal for America and a good deal for our “allies.” Japan gets protected channels to Middle Eastern oil, for free. Germany gets protection from Russia, for free. They all export to us at terms unfavorable to our own industries/middle class.

The problem with this is that it is, well, true.

And that Europe “needs” America for defense against Russia is absurd:

Let us be clear, the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.

Russia’s population is 143 million.

The EU minus Britain has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.

If Europe “needs” the US, it’s because it can’t be bothered to raise a proper army. That’s all. It is genuinely free-riding.

Chinese and American flags flying together

But then NATO is a large part of why Russia is a “threat”. The expansion of NATO, which Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev would not happen, is a large part of why Russia has armed up.

It’s not clear that NATO should even exist. Its purpose was to resist the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, neither of which exist. Russia has a lot of nukes, and is relatively strong militarily, but it is no USSR and has no grand alliance facing NATO. It is not a threat unless terribly mismanaged. (Which, I suppose, it has been.)

Disband NATO. Let the Europeans take care of their own defense, or lay prostate before the Russians as they choose.

Japan is a trickier proposition. What American military presence there does is simple enough: It prevents Japan from needing its own nuclear weapons. The same is true of American bases in South Korea. Leave and those two countries have to nuclearize or become Chinese satrapies (and Japan will need a much larger navy).

It’s also worth noting that the US didn’t start protecting “Japan’s oil.” The US needed foreign oil too; it is only recently, under Obama, that the US has again reached petrocarbon self-sufficiency and is able to say, “We’re protecting other people’s oil.”

WWII was won by the powers who had access to more oil. Generals and admirals at the time understood the war was, to a large extent, about oil.

America may not need foreign oil now, but it did for decades and that is why it protected maritime oil trade.

In general, however, a US withdrawal from its forward bases will be a good thing. A rebalancing of trade will also be a good thing, though it will hurt as it happens (Trump is not doing it well). Deliberately offshoring and outsourcing the US (and Britain’s) industrial base led, more or less directly, to Trump and other social ills. It created a group of people who have lost for 40 to 50 years. Their parents had better lives. They had better lives. They know it. You cannot lie to them with BS statistics and pretend otherwise.

So they are willing to vote for and support anyone who seems like they will wreck a system which doesn’t serve them. Maybe what happens will be worse, but what’s happening right now is shit.

This is not contradicted by Trump’s support from red-state elites. They are also scared, because they also know their situation is precarious and that power and wealth has flowed away from them. And they rule over Hell. It isn’t always better to reign in Hell.

So the world is changing. It was changing before Trump: The Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to be a trade bloc AGAINST China.

Note carefully Stoller’s hostility to China. It is constant. The American elite is finally reorienting. They don’t see Russia as a primary threat. They’re moving away from caring about the Middle East as they now have enough oil of their own and see a post-oil future coming. They know the rising great/super power is China.

They want to reorient their alliances against China. The price of keeping NATO will be keeping China OUT. When Germany said they wanted to do more business with China, Stoller was angry and said it was an argument against NATO. No Huawei, no China.

The world is very likely to divide into trade blocs–probably two, maybe three.

China rises. The US moves to protect its position.

Great power politics continue, as they ever have.

There is no end to history, save an end to humans. Only fools ever thought so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

And the Seas Turned to Blood: 20 Years to Biblical Apocalypse?

By Ian Welsh

On January 4, 2019

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And the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it turned to blood like that of the dead, and every living thing in the sea died.

— Revelation, 16:3

And so the wise men did proclaim…

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause? The disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

…

Already, 29 percent of edible fish and seafood species have declined by 90 percent–a drop that means the collapse of these fisheries.

But the issue isn’t just having seafood on our plates. Ocean species filter toxins from the water. They protect shorelines. And they reduce the risks of algae blooms such as the red tide.

And yet the children of man did not listen. From the Seas they took all they could. From the land they reaped all nature had, and more.

Deliberately, yea, they chose that all that they built should soon break, that it must be replaced. By this “planned obsolescence” they made of the world a desert.

One-third of all food, they threw out, while criminalizing feeding the hungry.

In the great Hegemon of the age, bloated America, there were five empty homes for every homeless person, and the rich feasted, then threw the food away, denying it to the hungry.

Houses were bought, while people died on the street, and deliberately kept empty.

The law of the day was greed. Selfishness was exalted as the greatest virtue. The sophists of the era said that all good things came from the rich. The word of the Son of God was used to promote the idea that God made those he loved wealthy and the eye of the needle was forgotten.

Truly, not even seven men still followed the Son.

Just then, a man came up to Jesus and inquired, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to obtain eternal life?”

“Why do you ask Me about what is good?” Jesus replied, “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

“Which ones?” the man asked.

Jesus answered, “‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, 19honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.’d ”

“All these I have kept,” said the young man. “What do I still lack?”

Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

These men and women had chosen hell. Hell now, hell in the future, hell for their children. All of them had forgotten the most fundamental of the Son’s teachings:

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

I don’t follow the Son of God, and I think that a Christian religion worth following would not include the Old Testament, or any part of the Bible that is not about Jesus’s words (including Revelations).

But I respect Jesus, just not most Christians.

And The Bible was right: Humanity shall reap as we have sowed.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 21 of 24

The Age of War and Revolution

Why Read or Write About the Grand Affairs of Humanity?

Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

It’s Impossible to Overstate How Broken America Is

The Sheer Awe-inspiring American Clusterfuck

Geopolitics and the Economy After Covid-19

Should NATO Exist? Will It?

And the Seas Turned to Blood: 20 Years to Biblical Apocalypse?