Category: Age of War and Revolution

(NB: post by Mandos.)

Recent events suggest that, whatever they may have originally thought, the Trump administration is in the process of being pulled back into the overall historical attractor of US policy regarding Russia. The Russian establishment had made no secret of its preference for Trump and its belief that Trump was a person with which they could deal on a more even footing, a politician in a mold they understood, etc.

I’m not here to argue whether or not Trump (or Flynn) is some kind of Russian plant, an issue that seems to be occupying many others. I gather that conclusive evidence on this matter has yet to be produced and that it so far lies in the realm of (negative) wishful thinking. However, Russian policy-makers are already voicing disappointment that Russia-favorable entities in the Trump administration are increasingly weakened. The US state, particularly its intelligence community, are deeply set up for conflict with Russia, for better or for worse, and it turns out that the White House is only part of a large infrastructure, and any fantasies of an election resulting in a vast purge and house-cleaning were just that: fantasies. The intelligence community still believes to its core in the necessity of containing Russia.

However, one thing that is different now is the position of Western social liberals. Unfortunately, Russia had decided to back in spirit, if not always materially, movements that are identified with various strains of nationalist conservatism that are hostile to the goals and beliefs of social liberals. This is not only in the USA, but especially so in Europe, with the on-going rise of the Le Pens, the Wilders, and other groups in the world. Once upon a time, social liberal groups were principally parochial movements which were relatively indifferent on foreign policy questions regarding Russia, and to a very large extent also overlapped with anti-war movements — and so were once at odds with the intelligence community.

However, the apparent desire of Russia to return to a world of ordinary nation-state politics, and therefore its willing appearance (at minimum) of siding with conservative nationalist movements, have led to many social liberals now viewing Russia as mortal threat to their projects, and therefore, having a plausible motive to try to subvert political movements like that of Trumpism to their aims. In this situation, social liberals (or “identity politics” movements, or whatever you want to call them) will quite rationally stake out a position that the devil you know (American intelligence forces) are better than the devil you don’t (Vladimir Putin). This is not helped by the appearance of things like Russia loosening its laws on domestic violence.

While social liberals have not lately been winning elections on their platforms (most notably, in the USA due to the Electoral College structure), it would be a mistake to assume that these groups have no power whatsoever. In fact, they have broad and deep bases of popular support (merely electorally inefficient), and those bases are being pushed into the arms of forces hostile to Russian interests. The combination of Cold War-style intelligence community conservatism with popular social liberalism is one that is likely to lead to an even more hostile neo-Cold War posture on the part of the Western establishment in the medium-term, unless in the short term Trumpism can generate the political competence required to coerce the establishment in the other direction.

For its part, Russia has been attempting to play, in the “further abroad”, a soft power role given that its other options are not effective. It is attempting to play the part of a rival global hegemon without actually being a hegemon. It does not currently have the cultural or technological reach to do so. While it operates a technologically advanced, developed economy, it is still highly dependent on natural resource development and export. That means that the risks accruing from a strategy of using cultural divisions in the currently hegemonic Western social order are high: should social liberals gain the upper hand due to the inability of nationalist populism to operate the levers of state effectively, they will be confirmed in a resolve for further containment and suppression of a Russia that took sides against them.

Trump Is the Next Stage of the Disease

By Ian Welsh

On December 22, 2016

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One of the more common mistakes regarding Trump is to see him as something that came out of the blue; unheralded and strange.

Trump is a kleptocrat. The US is a kleptocracy. It “formally” became a kleptocracy when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizen’s United that money was speech. (It is ironic that Trump won with less money, but it doesn’t change this fact.)

America was pragmatically a kleptocracy in 2009, when Obama entered office and continued his predecessor’s policy of bailing out bankers, taking houses away from little people and not prosecuting bankers for clear crimes.

Punish the people without money; let the people with money walk.

Trump is a walkimg emoluments violation: He should be impeached month two of his term for his refusal to sell his company.

But he won’t be (though he may eventually be impeached if Republicans decide they’d rather have Pence as President, and that they don’t think Trump’s followers will personally visit their houses to discuss the issue).

Kleptocracies are run for the benefit of the rich. It is that simple. A monarchical kleptocracy like Putin runs, and like Trump seems interested in running, makes sure the peasants get something, which means it may feel slightly better than what came before it. (Putin is very, very popular and was so even before the recent wars for the simple reason that Yeltsin was far, far worse.)

But they are still kleptocracies. Trump’s first order of business is tax cuts, mostly for the rich. There is a report that his team has asked for information on funding of environmental groups, and Trump plans on shutting down NASA’s climate change group.

These things get in the way of making money; and because environmentalism was pushed during a period in which the economy was, for too many people, a negative sum game, it is also unpopular with his base.

But these things are extensions of the already-existing Republican party orthodoxy. Tax cuts and fuck-environmentalism is where Trump stands in solid agreement with the kleptocracy that already ran the country. These things are not what make Trump interesting, or unique, they are what make him simply another stage of the disease.

Understand that what we had in 2016 was a crisis point. There were three options. Clinton was for the status quo kleptocracy. More or less the same, with a bit more help for those hurting the most, like students.

Trump was for monarchical kleptocracy, minus globalism: add tariffs and one-to-one trade deals to the mix, change up the foreign policy, make sure some more people get jobs, while gutting worker rights in general.

Sanders was an opportunity to actually change some of the key domestic policies away from kleptocracy: While not ideal, he was clearly a change from the status quo in a kinder direction, and he came fairly close to winning the Democratic primary, despite an active conspiracy by the DNC to stop him (no, no, it meets the actual definition of conspiracy).

Of those three options, Americans chose Trump: a new stage of the kleptocratic disease. Double down on transfers to the rich, but let’s give more scraps to the poor and fuck over some foreigners to get those scraps while burning up the world even faster. (Obama was not good on the environment; he was bad, but Trump will be much, much worse.)

I am not panicking, or running around screaming. I regarded something like Trump as nearly inevitable, with a small, but real, chance to avoid him by embracing the populist left (in this case, championed by Sanders).

In fact, Trump is not as bad as what I expected. His victory, a squeaker, may wind up precluding Trump 2.0, that is, the guy who would run next time, having learned from Trump what was possible, but far more disciplined, focused, and ideological than Trump.

Trump has the support of some powerful ideologues (most notably Bannon), and he has a world view, inchoate as it is, but he’s a very flawed man. Despite being very good at getting what he wants, it is undeniable that he lacks discipline, focus, and a broad base of understanding. Nor does he self-identify as being ideologically driven. Bannon may want to be the Lenin of the right, Trump does not.

More to the point, because the actions of US elites (and the world’s), along with the repeated votes of US voters, kept pushing America down this path, for decades, I regard running around screaming as pathetic. It’s like running full speed at an oncoming train for five minutes, with plenty of opportunities to veer off, then complaining when you get hit.

Many Americans, and the vast majority of their elites, affirmatively chose, repeatedly, to take actions and institute policies which were most likely to lead to Trump. Those who opposed those policies lost, and a huge chunk of the population sat on the sidelines doing nothing.

There were many, many opportunities to turn away from this path; the largest was to NOT bail out bankers in 2009.

In 2009, I wrote the US off. I knew that Obama had affirmatively made the choice to save oligarchy from itself (quite different from FDR saving capitalism, but not oligarchy). I knew then that something like Trump was the most likely outcome, but I expected worse than Trump, so far, seems to be.

So running around screaming is ridiculous. This was a choice, made affirmatively, repeatedly. If Trump had lost to Clinton, Trump 2.0 would have tried in 2020 and almost certainly won. The US is a kleptocracy, and eventually the disease would move to the next stage, if not reversed.

What I seek to do now, with regards to Trump, is two things. The first is simply to understand him and his movement. We’re going to be living in his America; it’s his world, for some time, so we’d best figure it out.

The second is to poke people who didn’t and still don’t get it, because until enough people do, we will keep losing to kleptocrats (whose number includes both Clintons) and people like Trump.

These two things are meant to support realistic assessment of Trump, the US, and the world so that effective action can be taken.

I have a friend who, as a result of Trump, is leaving the US with his two children. He has carefully looked at Trump, made his assessment of the US’s future and chosen a course of action. That is effective.

Make your assessment, take your action. Stop the hysterics. I strongly recommend that many people, who are most worked up, take two weeks off the internet, except for unavoidable work related tasks. Calm down, think, and decide what you need to do for yourself and your dependents. Heck, depending on who you are, you might even be one of the winners from Trump (they will exist).

Then decide what you’re going to do. Understand the consequences of your actions. Make your assessment. If you really think Trump = Hitler you should be getting the fuck out or preparing to fight, and I do mean fight. If you don’t, what do you think he is?

Get real.

In the meantime, I will continue to keep an eye on Trump and his team and try to provide analysis without hysterics or panic. Fear may be appropriate (it is for some people, for sure), panic is not.

But it will be vastly harder to fix this if people keep pretending it wasn’t affirmatively chosen, and not just by people who voted for Trump this time, but by everyone who supported the previous status quo, starting around 1980. Kleptocracy is neoliberalism’s child, its logical end-result, and Trump is just a new stage in kleptocracy, and yes, many people worked hard for this including most people who voted against Trump.

Understanding how and why you got here is necessary to get out of here–not in one piece (it’s too late for that), but without losing any body parts you’ll really miss (always choose to lose a leg–the prosthetics are great).

Trump: Just another stage in the disease of kleptocracy, made inevitable by neoliberalism and affirmatively chosen by modern “liberal” hero, Barack Obama.

Own it.

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The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order

By Ian Welsh

On December 16, 2016

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One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media, and politicians.

It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: Promises were made that turned out to be lies, those promises were not kept.

Soviet Communism was supposed to lead to a cornucopia and a withering away of the state. Instead it lead to a police state and a huge drought of consumer goods, and often enough, even food. Communism failed to meet its core promises.

The world order we live in was born in 1979 or 1980, with Thatcher and Reagan. It made a few core promises:

If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs.
Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity.
Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone.
Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.

The above core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For the last 40-odd years, most of the population experienced either stagnation or decline.

Understand clearly: By 1979, people had lost faith in the post-WWII order. They were willing to try something new.
That “new” order has now betrayed too many people, and it is falling. It will continue to fail. We are in the twilight of neoliberalism (a longer article on that topic is forthcoming).

This is the reason why people are going for “fake news.” This is why people are willing to listen to demagogues. This is why people don’t trust the press–and why should they? The press has lied to them repeatedly, it is the original fake news. This is why people don’t listen when hundreds of economists say Brexit is bad–why should they? Most economists missed the housing bubble.

Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it. Who didn’t buy into it? Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right.”

So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right. Because people are ideologically and identity driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.

Trump does not talk like those people. Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and, to a large extent, neither did Sanders.

And so, people are turning to people who don’t parse like the “typical” elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right). To a lot of people, however, that doesn’t matter: They can’t take the pain any more. They are assured a long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.

Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, or even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. Lying is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal), and their experts have done to themselves and they destroyed both their own power and legitimacy and that of the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: If you trust these people, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says, “But 90 percent of economists think X is bad.”
FAIL. They also missed the housing bubble. They lied or were “mistaken” about trade deals. Their opinion means nothing.

All this screaming about fake news is something I will take seriously when the New York Times, who helped sell the Iraq war based on “fake news,” is listed as fake.
The current order has very little credibility left, and they are losing more and more. Look at all the poll failures: Somehow, the polls almost always get it wrong against insurgents, not for them.
No, neoliberalism is dying, and its defenders are discredited, and both things deserve to be the case. That does not mean its death-throes will be pleasant (they won’t be) or that what replaces it will be better, just that it has run its course.

Those who supported it took their rewards: The top tier got filthy, stinking rich, their courtiers received good jobs and money, even as both disappeared for their victims. They will have to be satisfied with that, because posterity will be absolutely scathing to them, as it is to the generation leading up to World War I.
Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will be the result. It is that simple.

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.

Why I Write

By Ian Welsh

On December 10, 2016

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Once upon a time, I wrote for very political reasons. Bush had invaded Iraq, I was upset about it, and I saw that if the US and the world in general did not change the path they were on, we were going to wind up in an era of war and revolution. Combined with climate and other environmental issues like aquifer depletion and ecosystem collapse, we were going to have a huge human die-off and massive suffering.

At first, I went all wonky. I assumed people couldn’t possibly want such a catastrophe, so I explained why it was likely to happen and I explained how to stop it in terms of plans. I used to do VERY detailed policy posts.

That didn’t work. Didn’t get any significant traction at all.

I examined the situation, and realized that people couldn’t reason morally and ethically. A few incidents convinced me that people didn’t understand really basic things like: “Killing civilians is worse than killing military,” and “Killing more people is worse than killing less people.”

So I spent a couple years trying to explain basic morals and ethics to people.

That didn’t work. They either already understood, or they were incapable of learning, no matter how simply I put the propositions. Oh, they might agree with no context (although often not even then), but the moment their tribe was involved, they became evil again.

So, I looked at that feedback, and realized that most people can’t reason, can’t separate morals from their own interests, can’t separate ethics from identity, and so on. Worse, many couldn’t even separate their own interests in terms of health, money, and staying alive from their tribal identity.

To put it simply, they were living in completely delusional fantasy worlds, so separate from any even vaguely objective reality that they might as well be living in a TV show (and, in effect, many are).

Yes, they were incapable of basic ethical and moral reasoning. Yes, many were incapable of thinking a few years into the future, or evaluating opportunity cost (look it up). Yes, if they identified with a politician or a group, they were largely incapable of applying ethical rules or even assessing their own self interest in relation to the actions of that politician.

I then moved onto issues of ideology and identity (though I’ve written less about the second), trying to dig into why people are how they are, how and when that changes, and so on.

Short answer: They have to die. The generations who are that afflicted cannot be taught, they simply have to age out of power and shuffle off the mortal coil. At a very fundamental level, they never intend to do the right thing if it conflicts with anything else of importance to them. And if that means a billion or two billion people die with whom they are not personally identified, and/or there is a great-die-off of non-human life, they’re fundamentally okay with that.

They can’t even understand “kill less people.” It is genuinely beyond them in practice. The majority will certainly never vote for a genuinely good candidate, and those candidates have been offered to Democrats during their primaries regularly.

They don’t want to do the right thing. (Yes, not everyone in those generations is so afflicted, there are large minorities who aren’t. They are minorities.)

So, I do not write, any more, to convince people to do the right thing. I know that doing so is beyond most people, certainly most Americans over the age of 30. And that is not about Trump, or Clinton: A population who wanted to do the right thing would not have had an election between two such monstrous individuals.

I write, today, to tell truths which are I believe are ignored by many people–especially on the center-left (the right-wing does not read me). Truths such as: Clinton’s hatred of Russia was extremely dangerous; Trump is not incompetent by any useful definition of the word; racism grows stronger when times are bad; under the EU, some people in England have been plunged into hopelessnes, and; while it may not be the EU’s fault, they are the status quo and will be blamed (though it isn’t not their fault).

This is shit people don’t want to hear.

As such, I suppose, I shouldn’t complain when people scream because I’ve hit a pain point. After all, by telling them truths that are not generally accepted in their group, I’m aiming for pain points.

Yet, I still am flabbergasted by the inability of people to understand simple points like “good and competent are not the same thing,” or “don’t underestimate your enemy.”

So, I write here to explore subjects which interest me, and, quite often, to tell truths that are not widely accepted. I see little point in writing articles which simply parrot views you can already read in the NYTimes or hear on CNN.

As such, I am likely to say things which challenge your world view. Things which, yes, may hurt.

But the reason the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the reason we are actively riding that handbasket all the way down, is that we were given warnings that we were in the hand basket and we ignored them for decades. Trump isn’t the cause, he is the symptom. And frankly, though most can’t understand it, so were Clinton and Obama (who, if you want to blame someone, is the man most proximately responsible for Trump’s victory, but most people can’t admit that, either).

People wanted to live in fantasyland, and so we are going deeper and deeper into hell.

And so I will speak the truth, as I understand it (I may be wrong, though if you think I am mostly wrong, you should not read me). That is, more than any other reason, why I write.

We are here because people wanted to both believe and act on lies, because they could not stand to live in the real world, fantasyland being much more congenial to their self-image (based on their group-based identity), and to what they perceived (often–but not always–incorrectly) as their self-interest.

The problem does not lie at not being able to fix the problem. Leaving aside the whole “it’s too late now” argument, we have no significant problems we couldn’t start fixing or substantially mitigating tomorrow if we so desired. We could easily have avoided the worst of climate change, ecological collapse, and the rise of racism/stagnant economies if we had acted decisively 20 years ago.

The problem lies with people not wanting to do the right thing, and with them willfully living in a world that contains no more than a remote resemblance to the real world.

People who cannot understand simple things like “kill less people,” or “don’t underestimate your enemies,” have problems that are far deeper than whether Trump or Clinton rules them, but many who read this won’t even understand that.

The truth won’t set you free by itself, but lies will keep you in hell more surely than chains made of iron ever could.

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 Insanity of India and the Future of Humanity

By Ian Welsh

On December 9, 2016

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You’ve probably all heard that Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered two of the most common high denomination bills (500 and 1,000 rupee) out of circulation and that they would no longer be legal tender after only a few days.

India’s economy is, well, not modern. Most people do not have or use credit cards. Only 53 percent have a bank account, and cash is still preferred for transactions. 43 percent of those who have a bank hadn’t used their bank account in the last year.

India also has a vast corruption problem and huge black and grey markets. The corruption makes it very difficult to fix problems, whether they be removing pollution from the Ganges, building enough toilets so people stop shitting in the streets, or anything else.

The black money (money never taxed or declared) market is supposed to comprise about 23 to 26 percent of the Indian economy. I don’t know if that’s a low estimate (I doubt it’s high).

Black money and corruption go hand-in-hand, for obvious reasons: You can’t declare the bribes you receive or gave, at least not with some way of laundering them first.

So cleaning up black money should help clean up corruption.

But many Indians live in the black money economy. It’s just that simple. Someone gives them money, they spend it, no one is declaring it.

De-monetization isn’t just about a couple of bills, it’s about pushing people towards electronic money, which can be easily tracked. There have even been suggestions of forcing beggars to use electronic money.

I regard this push to de-monetization as fundamentally insane in an economy like India’s, and it screams rentism. Yeah, black money can’t be taxed, but it also isn’t “bank-fee’d” away. When everything is electronic through banks (this isn’t bitcoin), then transaction fees and so on eat away at it. Every hand it goes through can make a little stick, and only very strict law can make it not happen.

It’s free money from the point of intermediaries; they have to do very little to get it once the system is set up.

It’s leeching. Nearly pure rentism.

I do not support universal e-cash for this reason. It is to easy to do rentism, and rentism (transaction taxes and fees) kills monetary velocity and kills economies. The move to transaction taxes (GST) is one of the things that took the oomph out of Western economies, and it was designed to do so, to reduce inflation by reducing spending.

Despite our era’s absolutely crazed fixation with inflation, there is NO evidence that inflation from about 10 percent a year on down does ANY harm to the economy in and of itself and there is plenty of evidence that moderate levels of inflation have a myriad of good effects on the economy.

Yes, people who earned their money in the past hate inflation. Too bad, past contributions should be discounted, and proper government policy can easily ensure that people are still taken care of and have enough. Crippling the economy so that people who earned their money years and years ago retain power long past their period of productive contribution is economic malpractice.

Give people who can’t/shouldn’t/don’t work a decent income through a pension/welfare plan or even a basic income system and get rid of all transaction taxes except for those where you deliberately want to slow down a particular type of economic activity, rather than all activity altogether. If it’s carbon you don’t want to see too much of, tax it. If oil inflation is the problem, figure out how to tax that, and so on.

Demonetization without very strict anti-rentism is a bad idea. India is a shitty country to try to demonetize due to its lack of technological infrastructure. It’s also not ideal, ironically, because of it is weak rule of law, vast corruption and huge inequality in both money and power.

India, in general, is far more of a clusterfuck than most understand, including many middle class Indians. Calories per capita are lower than they were 30 years ago, and most people are worse off than they were before neoliberal dogma took over.

Meanwhile, much Indian agriculture runs off of aquifers, and they are being depleted, leading to farmer suicides. Climate change is making the monsoons erratic, and it is causing problems with runoff from the Himalayas, which is to say, where northern India gets most of its water. Earlier this year, one of the source rivers for the Ganges was dry for weeks.

India is going to go pear-shaped. The question is when, but when it does, I expect hundreds of millions to die. The issue will be water, pure and simple, but India’s inability to deal with even basic problems like open defecation and pollution of the Ganges, means it literally cannot deal with longer term issues.

Reforms, which have, yes, created a robust middle class, have not improved the situation of most Indians. Yes, many stats say they have, but when I find out that calories/capita is down, I start thinking that GDP/capita is not measuring real welfare. It’s not like Indians were overfed 30 years ago.

I simply DO NOT believe many of the Panglossian statistics that people are using to say the world is the greatest ever. In many cases, I can’t prove it (and no, unless you have a 100k you want to give me, I’m not going to prove it), but I know, for example, that proverty stats in America are absolute bullshit: The poverty level has not kept up with increases in cost of living, especially in food, rent, and medicine. Not even close–and that’s using formal inflation statistics, which systematically understate price rises in various categories.

So, when the US stats are shit, and knowing what I know about how places like India and most sub-Saharan African countries run, and how incentives to show progress work for the people who measure this shit, I just do not believe a lot of the stats.

I think the world is in worse condition than many make out. I know India is. I’m now receiving information that China is as well (more on that at a later date, maybe).

So, shit is going to hit the fan, we are in worse shape than we think we are, we are strangling all growth rather than merely counterproductive growth, and we are lying to ourselves about the real shape of our countries and our world, and when we’re not lying about it, we’re ignoring it.

This is going to get ugly. Hundreds of millions in India. And the same in many other places.

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

Fools Russians Where Angels Fear to Tread

Trump Is the Next Stage of the Disease

The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order

Why I Write

The Insanity of India and the Future of Humanity