Ian Welsh

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

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 23 of 24

When People and Societies Change

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On November 1, 2017

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Machiavelli famously noted that men do not change.  Whatever they are like, whatever their normal personality and way of doing things, they stick to it. Fabius Maximus, faced with Hannibal, retreated to fortified fastnesses and refused to engage. This was the right thing to do, but when he once again had enough men, he still refused to engage. This is how Scipio Africanus wound up being the general to defeat Hannibal.

Gentle men who abhor violence rarely become violent when violence is necessary; violent men do not become peaceful when the times call for it, and so on.

In our own times, we see that politicians raised under neoliberalism are unwilling and unable to effectively use real Keynesian policies: They can’t “do” stimulus. When they try, they give the money primarily to the rich.

They grew to power by being neoliberals and faced with a new landscape, they cannot change. In France, we saw the main center-left party (really a neoliberal party) implode because it just would just change. Throughout the West, center-left neoliberal parties are dying for just this reason. The world has changed, but the people who run those parties cannot change.

In Britain, Labour may buck this trend, but if so it will only be because of luck: Those who gave Corbyn his chance to be leader say that had they known he would win the leadership, they would never have nominated him.

And Corbyn is a man who did not change, though there was a moment when he could have, when many others did.

People change when young or in the face of extended catastrophe.

This is as true of the large masses of people as it is of individual leaders.

By the time men and women are thirty, and often by their mid 20s, they are set. They have their personality, it has more or less worked for them. There is a world around them, run in a certain way, and they want it to keep running that way because that is the world they know how to navigate.

This is true even if their lives are bad, but stagger on. A bad adaptation to the world is preferable to most people to a radical change in either themselves or their world.

Most people, including most radicals, are innately conservative in the sense that once set, they don’t like to change.

People change or support real change when their lives or their world are truly intolerable, and generally when their lives or worlds are intolerable for a long time–years, often as much as a decade or more.

Or they change when something that is actually catastrophic occurs: The most recognizable caricature being the drunk who has no couches or friends left and wakes up in a ditch. The society, like Germany or Japan after WWII, which has lost everything and is prostrate.

Intolerable means truly intolerable: “Cannot tolerate this, will chew leg off to escape trap.”

This is one reason why I warned that Trump could win: Because there are many people who consider their lives or worlds intolerable. It is why Brexit won.

The unthinkable becomes thinkable when the status quo becomes intolerable.

In politics and economics, this happens when the status quo way of running the world, the ruling ideology (and there is ALWAYS a ruling ideology), fails to deal with an intolerable problem over an extended period.

I remember, in the seventies, the price of chocolate bars and comic books going from 25 cents to a dollar in less than two years. Vroom!

The post-war liberal era was entrenched and successful. It produced the best economy the West had ever seen. Ever. But it could not handle the oil shocks, and those oil shocks turned into stagflation (high inflation and high unemployment at the same time) and enough people who had been committed to post-war Liberalism (New Dealism) flipped over to the new Neoliberal consensus, though it wasn’t called that at the time, to give the election to Reagan.

This is because post-war Liberalism failed–for over a decade–to deal with the oil shocks. People got fed up, could not take it any more, so they went for Reagan.

The so-called Reagan Democrats.

And the most successful economic regime the world had ever seen at giving Europeans and Americans a good life (and which produced better growth in the 3rd world than our current system, putting China aside for good reasons), ended.

As conservatives noted, people picked up the ideas lying on the ground. Those ideas were stupid ideas, like the Laffer curve (the less you tax people the more you will receive in taxes), but they were the ideas available and they are the ideas people picked up.

People changed. Not everyone, but enough people.

The other way people change is just by being young. Neoliberalism, shit that it is, worked for a lot of people. A lot of people got reasonably wealthy off it because it raised asset prices massively, both in the stock market and in housing, and if you were in place or able to take advantage of those things, you got a lot of money doing basically nothing.

This is what old style economists referred to as “unearned income” and rentierism: Money you got for basically just being in the right place at the right time, without adding any real value.

So, even today, a lot of older people are for the status quo economically, because at some point in their life it worked for them.

And young people are not. They flocked to Sanders, they flocked to Corbyn, because that system has never worked for them. They are willing to change (if it can be called that) because they have not yet found a combination of personal strategy and world system that works for them.

On the other hand, youngsters were against Brexit, because their experience of the EU is positive: It lets them move around easily and get jobs anywhere in the EU, and that makes their lives better.

On the other hand, old left-wingers, like Corbyn, witnessed how the EU enshrined neoliberalism. Having been alive for the before-and-after, they tend to be leery of the EU. Their lived experience is that the EU helped destroy the old post-war liberal/socialist state.

The bottom line then is that the vast majority of people can only be brought to beliefs other than those held by their society and peers either when they are young, or after prolonged and catastrophic failure–either of their personal method for living life or of their society’s way of running the world.

We are now at the stage where these two forces are coming together. Our societies have failed to run themselves acceptably since 2008, and the youngs have no attachment to the status quo since it has never, ever worked for them.

Change is thus not only possible, it is now inevitable.

But what sort of change it will be depends on the ideas lying on the ground.

More on that another day.

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China’s Economy, Freedom and the Threat of War

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On October 18, 2017

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This article from NPR is useful for context.

The 2008 financial crisis hit Chinese exports. Approximately 20 million people lost their jobs, and had to go back to their villages, so the Communist party did a huge stimulus, but since China is vastly corrupt, that lead to vast corruption.

The Communist party, and Xi in particular, saw that the economy was unstable, and that scared them, so they started suppressing dissent even more fiercely.

For a long time my analysis of China has been simple, the Communist party stays in power as long as they keep the economic growth going.  If they don’t, the members of the party (and remember, it is a family affair, with high officials passing power to their incompetent children), are at risk of death.

The Chinese are very violent. There are riots all the time. Villages confront police and even the army, by which I mean, fight them, regularly. I recall one ethnic riot in a factory, where the workers ripped apart the beds in the dorms to get iron bars to beat each other with.

These people are on the edge, and they are still used to hard manual labor. They are not particularly scared of violence.

This is is also a great danger to everyone else. If China’s economy goes truly south, and the Chinese Communist party leadership is scared, they will use jingoistic nationalism even more than they do already, which is a lot.

And if blaming foreigners and going to war is required to keep Chinese minds from blaming who’s really at fault (their own leadership), well, they’ll do that. Millions of ordinary citizens dying, to the leadership of almost all countries in history beats the leadership dying.

This is exacerbated by two things: that Chinese leadership is about to run out of people who didn’t grow up powerful and comfortable, meaning truly competent people, and that China will be hit massively hard by aquifer depletion and climate change.

(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.)

For quite a while China has basically, despite rampant local corruption, been run more or less competently. But as the old leaders aged out, that became less true. It’s soon going to be almost completely true (as it is in the US and most of Western Europe.)

Russia is probably the country which needs to worry most. Yes, they have nukes, but they also have a vast amount of land right north of China which is virtually unpopulated, and when the Chinese think they might start to starve, nukes, exactly because it is mutually assured destruction if they are used, may not be a deterrent.

But other Chinese neighbours should worry as well, especially those that don’t have nukes.

It’s going to be an interesting time.

Note that China will be hitting incompetence about 5 to 10 years before Western demographic and political trends will give the West a chance to replace its incompetent leadership.

Not healthy for China, or for anyone else, really.

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Will Capitalism and Democracy Survive?

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On September 28, 2017

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Image by TW Collins

Systems of governance, and both capitalism and democracy are such systems, can run cycles of success, failure, and renewal for a long time. Consider Imperial Confucian China, with dynasties failing, sometimes with interregnums, then new dynasties arising. Dynasties would tend to be vigorous to start, corrupt and sclerotic at the end.

Or the Dark Ages and Medieval Europe, with forms of feudalism and monarchy surviving crises over many centuries.

Let’s consider the dynamic in a bit of detail.

A system survives when it gives power to those who support it AND are capable of continuing it.

This seems obvious, but it’s a little more tricky than it seems.

(Speaking of money, 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.)

Take capitalism: Capitalism runs through greed. It gives power to those who do whatever it takes to make the most money The more money you have, the more power you have. Money is the ability to decide what other people do, not just the ones you hire directly, but through purchasing power. Apple decides what Foxconn does, and heck of a lot of other people it doesn’t hire directly.

Capitalism’s prime directive is: “Do whatever makes the most money.” Whoever does that successfully also receives the most power.

In a capitalist society, people who do not respond to capitalism’s prime direct, do whatever makes the most money, do not get power. Since they have no power, they cannot challenge capitalism.

The catch here is part two of the prime directive, “and are capable of continuing it.”

Capitalism must also run the actual real economy, which consists of people and things: houses, food, sewer systems, airports, and so on.

If capitalism fails to run that system effectively, that has real effects which having more money cannot manage.

You see this in the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany. You see this in the Great Depression. You see this now, in America, where parts of the population are seeing absolute declines in life expectancy.

In Capitalism, there is supposed to be a transmission between the real economy and how much money powerful people have: you should get your vast wealth by giving people what they want, and that should be good for the economy, and if it isn’t, you should go bankrupt.

People who pursue money but cannot actually manage the real economy should lose that money, and therefore their power.

This happened in the Great Depression. The rich took their losses, and lost their power (though not all of them).  Those who remained were the smarter or luckier–more capable.

Still, the magnitude of the disaster was such that capitalism was in some danger. As many have observed, FDR rescued capitalism.

What happened in 2008 is that a large portion of capitalists lost all their money (and more than all their money). If the capitalist transmission system had been allowed to work, there would not have been a single solvent major bank or brokerage in the United States.

They had fucked up.

BUT, they had also bought the politicians and regulators, and thus, were bailed out.

The real economy, which is not GDP, then shifted into a lower state of activity.

This process has been going on for a long time now, since 1980 really. The rich have been getting richer and worse at managing the actual economy.

What should have happened in 2008 was that the rich took their losses and power moved to democratically-elected officials, as it did in the 30s. But democratically-elected officials, handed said power on a platter, refused to take it. (Yes, the Fed, but the Fed can be brought to heel any time either Congress of the President chooses to.)

Democracy, thus, also failed.

A system must give power to those who want to continue it. It must also run the actual society well enough to avoid being overthrown.

Democracy failed in 2008, but it has not failed, completely–yet. In Britain, we see the rise of Corbyn, who wants to take back vast swathes of the economy from private business; for instance, things like the train system, where private owners have made train travel cost more but less reliable.

In the US, the Democratic Party is moving towards single payer health care, because the private industry has failed to run health care effectively and efficiently for the majority of the population.

These are healthy movements. Capitalism has failed to do what it is supposed to do: Run the economy properly. They said, in the 70s and 80s, “We’re better than the public. Privatize and de-regulate, and we’ll do a great job.”

Instead, we’ve experienced a progressive decline, which has been leading to catastrophe.

If democracy succeeds in removing from the private sector what it cannot run effectively, and in removing the power from the wealthy whom have proven they cannot manage–as with Corbyn’s maximum salary proposal (though more comprehensive anti-trust actions are needed), then democracy will survive.

If democracy cannot manage what capitalism cannot, then democracy, too, is on the line. It will have failed to run society effectively, and will be seen to have failed.

Either democracy tames capitalism, or democracy and capitalism may both die.

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Saudi Arabian Collapse Continues

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On September 6, 2017

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Saudi Arabia is engaging in, in the words of the Guardian, a privatization so comprehensive it dwarfs Thatcher or even the great post-Communist Russian fire sale.

That’s…large.

It is also a consequence of the price of oil. Saudi Arabia isn’t making enough money from oil to support its government expenses.

They could directly tax or charge their population for the difference, of course, but privatization allows them to sluff off the blame. Sell assets that can charge more and cost more than they make right now, let private actors do the charging.

This kicks the problem down the line a bit, and distances the Saudi Royal family from some of the blame, but it doesn’t make much difference in the long run.

Saudi Arabia needs much more from the outside world than Saudi Arabia now produces. That’s what has to be changed, and the situation is only going to get worse. (When electric cars become the norm, Saudi is cooked, as I have noted before).

The assets the Saudis are selling are also that which make them legitimate to their population. The House of Saud bought a lot of peace from their subjects by spending a lot of money on their subjects.

When they aren’t able to do any more, their legitimacy will take a huge hit. If they aren’t doing anything for people, why keep them around?

I stand by my prediction of revolution in Saudi Arabia. Timing is always hard to predict, but 10 to 20 years seems likely.

This is exacerbated by incompetence at the top. The war in Yemen was supposed to be over in months, and isn’t; it’s a fiasco. The blockade of Qatar was supposed to bring them to heel, and hasn’t, but has pushed them into the orbit of Iran and Turkey.

The current generation of Saudi rulers are spectacularly incompetent. This isn’t surprising, it happens to all wealthy or powerful families in time when their scions are protected from the real world, which the Sauds always have been.

Buying Saudia assets located in Saudi Arabia may work out very well for some people. But it will be a political and possibly military game as much as a financial game. As such, it is only for sharks. A lot of people got hurt trying to make money after the USSR fell, and while some won big, they were a minority.

The prelude to the Age of War and Revolution chugs on.

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The World Is Going to Hell Because

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On August 26, 2017

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Globe on FireYou get the behaviour you reward.

Politicians in the US, with the Iraq war and the vote to have it, committed the exact same war crime most Nazis were hung for: aggressive war.

They, including the most responsible politician, George W. Bush, were not punished for it. Indeed, Bush was re-elected and so were most of the others.

In 2008, there was a vast financial crisis, caused by bankers and Wall Street brokers and so on–financial executives. It included a widespread amount of fraud, aided and abetted by ratings agencies, financial regulators, and central banks.

No one was held responsible and sent to jail. Instead, they were bailed out and allowed to keep their illicit profits, and the same games that caused the crisis were reinstituted alongside aggressive money printing targeted at the class of people who caused the crisis.

In other words, the people who caused the financial crisis, as a class, were rewarded for that their behavior.

We have an ongoing problem, due to turn into a worldwide catastrophe causing over a billion human deaths and so many non-human deaths it will show up clearly in the geological record. It is called climate change.

Oil companies knew that climate change was real, based on their own research, back in the 80s. Not only did they not make that research public, they spent large amounts of money to fund propaganda saying that what they knew was true wasn’t.

Put more simply, for their own personal and financial gain, major corporate executives did their best to make sure that information known to be true, which might have helped stop a billion or more deaths, was not acted upon.

They have not been punished for that, but they have, indeed, retired wealthy and happy.

If people who knowingly do very very bad things (like causing the death and suffering of millions of people in wars, economic downturns, and forseeable environmental catastrophes) are not only not punished but rewarded, then more of the same behaviour will occur.

During his term in office, Obama increased drone murders significantly and destroyed Libya, in a war of aggression (the same war crime that for which Nazis were hung, and Obama also should be in a war crimes dock along with every other Western leader involved in Libya). He was then re-elected.

None of this stuff should be hard to understand. If leaders who do monstrous things are rewarded, as opposed to punished, for doing those things, more leaders will do even more monstrous things. They have been shown that is what is rewarded.

Welcome to a world tottering towards hell, because that is what too many people want–as measured by what they reward.

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Why There Is More Reason to Hope Today than in Decades

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On July 12, 2017

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Somewhere between the late 80s and the early 90s, with Clinton’s election, hope died.

The post-war era had serious issues, but the post-war era–as the civil rights movement and 70s feminism showed–was handling those issues. It was moving in the right direction. Until it didn’t, until it couldn’t handle the cascade of problems from the rise of oil prices.

In Britain, Thatcher got into power; America got Reagan. They were opposed by people who preferred to try and fix the older world, and those people lost. So there came the third way, which said: “If you can’t beat them, join them!” Clinton, Blair, and all the various folks like them wanted to do Thacherism and Reaganism but with less cruelty.

That couldn’t, and wouldn’t, work. Clinton set the stage for large chunks of the financial crisis: He gutted welfare, set up truly cruel standards for incarceration which gutted poor black communities especially, and hurt everyone else who was poor, even if less.

Blair, his British counterpart, was onside with Iraq, and blah, blah, blah.

None of them did anything about climate change worth speaking of. Their solution to pollution in the developed world was to ship the most polluting industries to developing countries, mostly notably China, and pollution there is as bad as it ever was in the first world.

Meanwhile, as we all know, they pursued a raft of policies whose effect was to funnel money to the rich, gutting the middle class over time (though the middle class benefited at first) and impoverishing many. This created oligarchical power structures throughout the west, abetted by technocrats insulated from control by elected politicians.

The point here is that the trends were mostly bad. Those few good trends, such as improvements in parts of the developing world were not a result of neoliberalism (China used mercantile policies to industrialize), and in fact, as Ha Joon shows in Bad Samaritans, growth in the developing world was slower in the neoliberal era than in the post-war era.

We have been driving ourselves towards, not disaster, but catastrophe, and not one catastrophe, but many.

So, people thought I was pessimistic. I wasn’t. I never was. I was realistic. Because it’s government and corporate policy, it’s the policy of all of our elites, to do things which would have forseeable bad consequences. That’s been policy and they’ve been very determined to stick with it.

So, there has been no room for what some people mistake as optimism. Hope. The only hope was that at some point this would change. As long as we kept electing people like Clinton or Obama, there could be no hope because those in power haven’t wanted to change the way the world is run. They don’t intend to do anything which would avoid catastrophe.

That is just how it’s been.

So now everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and I’m the calm one.

Because there is now reason for hope. Large masses of people are now willing to vote for politicians who want to do the right thing. It is too late to avoid much of the consequences of what we have done. It is simply too late. We have methane release in the arctic, we have a great species die-off, and it’s too late.

But it is not too late to mitigate. As the first rule of holes states, “When you find yourself in a hole, first, stop digging.”

We haven’t even done that yet, really. There’s a small amount as solar becomes cheaper than coal, something which should have happened 20 years ago through government intervention, but it’s too late.

However, with Sanders and Corbyn’s near successes, with the fact that so many would consider voting for them, with Melenchon in France coming so close, there is now reason to hope that we finally have an electorate willing to consider actual change to do the necessary things.

This was not true in the past. People like Sanders and Corbyn were not taken seriously as national candidates. The idea was laughable.

So this is hope; a bright, shining, slender thing.

We have it now. And yet people are running around like the sky is falling. The only reason they are doing so is that most of them didn’t understand that the decisions which caused all the problems we’re having today were taken and reaffirmed for decades. If you knew where they were going (and it wasn’t hard to), you just had to look and not flinch. If you were able to do this, nothing that is happening today, nothing, is surprising–in general terms.

The only thing that is interesting is that a large number of people, and especially young people, are turning away from doing the wrong thing, and showing openness to change. This creates a crossroads: They may choose something worse, or something better. I think they’ll take something better when offered; we saw that with Corbyn, and polls now show he’d win an election held today.

Of course, they’ll also take something worse if it means change from the status quo. We’ve seen that.

But they are willing to Change, and that means there is Hope.

So, the sky is creaking, but that’s already been predetermined and running around screaming about in affected surprise is pathetic.

Meanwhile, we may be able to begin reducing the worst of what is to come, rather than continually trying to make it worse.

And that, my friends, is reason for hope.

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.

A Time of Hope

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On June 12, 2017

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I have been writing a long time. For most of that time, people said I was “pessimistic” and I replied that what they saw as pessimism was realism.

What I foretold, in broad strokes, has come to pass. Climate change is past the point of no return, the housing bubble burst, austerity was a disaster, and it emboldened the far right.

When I first started writing, I tried to push the Democrats to go left, to try to mobilize people who don’t vote to vote by offering them policies that worked for them. I advised them to engage in intensive outreach, because I, as many others, noted that people who don’t vote are a lot more left-wing than people who do vote. People don’t vote because they feel disenfranchised; none of the major parties represent them.

After the election of Donald Trump, I had an interview with Jay Ackroyd, and he said that as long as he’d known me, I’d been more pessimistic than others, but now I was optimistic, and what gives?

Simple, the trends had turned.

Sanders happened and he did better than any self-avowed socialist in the US in my lifetime. He came very close to winning the nomination, despite the Democratic party fixing it against him.

Corbyn happened, in that he won the leadership of the Labour party and then fought off an attempted coup.

The trends had changed.

The time of neoliberalism was clearly ending, which I had noted repeatedly. That meant that we were moving into a time of change. Now, I had expected, following Stirling Newberry, that this period of decline in neoliberalism would first hit in 2020/24, but these are the pre-shocks.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of danger. It is not guaranteed that the left wins in every country, as it did not in the 30s. The far right and the populist left both have an opportunity in this era: The old verities are dead, and people are looking for a different way to run societies. They can go authoritarian, indeed totalitarian, or they can go populist left and no, there really aren’t any other options, though far right and populist left have variations: all types of populist left aren’t the same and shouldn’t be seen as the same.

But neoliberalism was a shit ideology: Its project was impoverishing millions to make as many billionaires as possible. Ignore the bullshit about the third world; during the post-war era, the third world was improving faster than during the neo-liberal era, but without cramming down first world middle and working classes.

Neoliberalism, with its market worship, was completely incapable of dealing with climate change. Proper government intervention to goose markets would have had us where we are today with renewables (cheaper than coal) 20 years ago– which is what we needed, and would have moved up the timeline for electric cars as well as the essentially, wholly undone project of energy-neutral and carbon-neutral building, while not allowing the oceans to be destroyed.

Markets work best when government intervenes in the correct ways. Neoliberalism intervened, in essence, only to reduce regulation and push money towards rich people: This did not make markets more competitive, it made them more prone to monopoly and oligopoly. (This is not even close to being in question, it shows up in all the data. Anyone arguing otherwise is a liar or a fool.)

So, neoliberalism failed to deal with climate change or ecological collapse and, by vastly increasing inequality and failing to regulate markets, caused both political and economic instability. Asset prices should not rise faster than median wages over long periods. If they do so, something is wrong. That most economists and policy makers could not recognize this shows their corruption and foolishness, as well as the uselessness of mainstream economics to understand its own subject matter.

I am, therefore, not optimistic, but realistic: I say that we are moving out of an era where problems could only be solved if they made someone a billionaire and are moving to an era where we will be able to start actually fixing problems that matter.

This is a high-risk period, and I, as have many, have tried to reform neoliberalism, to fix problems without having to enter an era of war and revolution, to fix them before it was too late (as it is now for catastrophic climate change).

That didn’t work. So be it. This is where we are.

But unlike in 2009, with the co-opted and corrupt Barack Obama taking the throne and throwing away the last chance to avoid the worst of what is now baked-in, we now have some real reasons to hope along with all the baked-in catastrophes we’ve had handed to us.

Oh, yes, Trump.

Yeah, he’s bad, and he’ll be bad for a lot of people, but I am not worried when it comes to the big picture because he’s incompetent. I never thought he’d be Hitler and the idea that he will launch a successful coup is now completely risible: He is far too incompetent. He’s supposed to launch a coup and he hasn’t even filled over 90 percent of all senior administrative posts at the Pentagon?

Get a grip.

In fact, as I thought at the time (and at that time I thought he was more competent than he’s proved to be), Trump may well be an innoculation against someone worse. Someone competent, running on actual right-wing populism, say, Bannon with charisma, could well have turned America into a fascist state for two generations.

Trump? No. And his failure provides a clear warning of the danger and may discredit those policies. (It is amusing that liberals are obsessed with getting rid of him. Pence will be far worse, because he will be competent and agrees with every bad part of Trump’s platform and none of the good parts (which, granted, aren’t happening anyway).)

Chin up. We failed to reform the system, and now we are in an era of great instability. Lots of countries are still being staggeringly stupid, like France electing Macron to destroy their entire labor code and impoverish themselves, when Melenchon was available.

But the left–the populist left–is rising. We saw it with Sanders, and we are seeing it with Corbyn, who may actually be the first world leader of the new era and the new era’s ideology–just as Thatcher was the first great neoliberal leader (even if she was not called that at the time).

It will be ugly. There will be wars and revolutions. There will be periods where the old order does horrible things (Macron, Merkel’s destruction of Greece and impoverishment of the South) and where the new order of the right does terrible things.

But it is now, also, possible to do many of the right things, like re-nationalizing natural monopolies, ending the student loan bubble and the exploitation of the young, repairing universal healthcare in the UK, creating it in the US, and so on.

There are no guarantees. We got lucky in the 30s, though it may not seem like it. Imagine if, instead of FDR, the US had wound up with some fascist? Many Americans at the time thought it possible.

Still, we now have the chance to be lucky, which was simply not possible when we were societies under neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, some individuals could get lucky and obscenely rich, but generally the whole population could not benefit.

Now we can. And that is reason for hope. So hope. Don’t be optimistic, just be realistic about the opportunities as well as the dangers opening up.

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.

Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution

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On March 10, 2017

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Globe on FireFor well over a decade, I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere, or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbon and methane releases.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a five-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a five year period, and four times greater over a 100 year period.

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama…

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia

There is no way we are avoiding near-worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated. These increases will make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. Changes in rainfall patterns will large current agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas.

Later on, we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on a seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some of them a lot sooner.

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively and politically unavoidable for quite some time now.

Do not expect the political, economic, and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still while they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes.

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc…any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, they will not go gently into that long dark night. No, they and those they leave behind will look for people, ideologies, and organizations to blame, and they will plenty of them, because everyone and everything who had any power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster.

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction.

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be immensely damaging.

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty.

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something.

So be it.

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