Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 1 of 35

Scratch A CEO, Find A Fascist

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On July 19, 2024

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Not that they require fascism, but they’re OK with it:

David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company, at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday:

Asked about the upcoming Presidential election, Zaslav said it mattered less to him which party wins, so long as the next president was friendly to business.

“We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to be even better.”

One of the few things Biden has been good on is anti-trust, so this means Trump.

In a similar vein:

The pull quote:

“France’s corporate bosses are racing to build contacts with Marine Le Pen’s far right after recoiling from the radical tax-and-spend agenda of the rival leftwing alliance in the country’s snap parliamentary elections”.

The left, and real left, not the so-called “Center Left” will always be opposed by corporations, just as most of them opposed FDR. They want to get bigger and richer, whether that’s good for the country or not. High marginal tax rates, vigorous anti-trust and high corporate tax rates with laws forbidding stock options and other nonsense produced America and Western Europe’s best economy in history—the post-war states from 45 on.

Of course, during that time period the CEO/Worker pay ratio tended towards 30/1 or so.

But, as we all know, workers made enough so that a single wage-earner could support a family, and as for GDP growth rates, well:

These charts are pretty clear. Consolidation and deregulation do not lead to higher GDP growth, and that’s leaving aside redistribution.

This is important because the argument for deregulation and allowing consolidation was that it would make growth better and that there would be a “trickle down” which would leave everyone better off even if inequality soared.

Well, we did get trickled on, I suppose

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The UK’s Housing And Immigration Crisis In Charts

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On July 2, 2024

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Here’s the TLDR: the UK has a housing crisis because it is bringing in way more immigrants than usual and not building way more housing.

(Most of the charts from Simulcrax.)

For a long time Britain was building more housing than it had population increase. This was good, because as anyone who visited England in the 50s or 60s will tell you, it didn’t start with an excess.But starting around 2000AD it increased immigration and didn’t increase how much housing it was building, and after a while that caught up.

The chart only goes till 2019, though. Let’s see what happened afterwards.

 

Wow. That’s pretty ugly, and hey, it happened under the anti-immigrant Conservative party, and after Brexit, which was supposed to reduce immigration. Anyone wonder why Reform is challenging the Conservatives for second party status?

Now let’s be clear: immigration can be good, bad or mixed. If your economy is doing really well, you have low inequality and high wages and not enough workers and an economy which makes most of what you need domestically, then immigration is going to be good: the immigrants will get good jobs, increase demand and the economy will expand. But if you’ve gotten rid of your industry, have high inequality and an economy which is sucking wind then immigration is going to take jobs from natives and keep wages lower. And if you aren’t building enough housing and don’t do something about that, it’s going to raise housing prices, especially at the bottom and middle, which is going to hurt people.

The people it will hurt most, of course, are:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself. Let’s look at one more chart:
Ouch. I mean, it’s not like the situation is good in the US, is it?

Let’s be clear about what’s happening: it’s not that the UK can’t reduce immigration, it can, especially post-Brexit. Like Canada, however, it wants to increase GDP and keep wages low, so it’s bringing in as many people as it can, as deliberate government policy and doing so, without a booming economy, is hurting people who already live in Britain.

You don’t have to be racist or xenophobic to believe, accurately, that too much immigration is bad if there isn’t enough housing and jobs to absorb the immigrants. Problem is, given how people are, they will blame the immigrants and become racist and xenophobic, when the correct response is to hate the government and ruling class.

Britain, having deliberately de-industrialized, especially since Thatcher, can’t absorb this many people without causing extreme harm to people already living in Britain, especially if the government doesn’t move, massively, to social housing. People who want less immigration are correct, the only way to absorb this sort of influx without harm would be an entirely different set of government policies, even then, the immigration surge wouldn’t make sense until the policies take effect.

Unfortunately the only chance of pursuing anything like those policies was to elect Corbyn, and that chance has passed.

The sun always sets, and now it sets on Britain.

Addendum: Stumbled on this after writing the article.

He continues: “According to the Government’s own methodology, we needed to expand the housing stock by around 3.4 million homes over the last decade: 2.2 million to meet existing housing pressures, and 1.2 million to cope with net migration. We increased the number of homes by only 2.1 million.”

So, without immigration, they’d only be down 100,000 over the last twent years, rather than 1.3 million.

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Remembering the Good Job Market Of the 70s

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On June 13, 2024

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If you’re under 68 or so, and weren’t involved in regional boom or something like the internet bubble, you probably have never experienced a good job market. At age 56, I remember the 70s, and I even remember the job market after a sense: I was an only child and around my parents adult friends a lot. I had no uncles or Aunts by blood where I lived, but half a dozen Uncles and Aunts by friendship. And I do remember that just getting a job wasn’t a problem, at least not till the late 70s and the early 80s recession.

But better the words be from someone who was actually there. I think this is important, so I’ve elevated a comment from Marku52:

My wife points this out to me often “Back then (mid 70’s) I had tons of jobs. I’d lose one one day and have another one in a couple of days. It wasn’t a problem. And what a breadth of experience. She was a waitress (terrible at it, got fired), a photographers assistant, a computer data input person for an auto parts chain that was digitizing (She told the other workers “you know, they are only doing this so they can get rid of you”), and finally a paginator at a news paper using a brand new digital pagination system. All kinds of opportunities out there.

And for me, I got hired at a cabinet shop with nothing but some very basic woodworking skills, eventually became shop foreman, left to do electronic tech work at a sound company, boss even paid for another tech to come in once a week and train me. I went back to school and got my EE degree. (for $85 per quarter!)

Sure was a different time, and a way way better one.

This is what was lost because of neoliberalism and the decision to handle the oil shocks by crushing employment to crush wages. It’s a world hardly anyone even remembers any more.

But it did happen, and a world like it, but good for the environment and fair to women and minorities, is possible.

 

Continued Privatization

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On May 28, 2024

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Last year I wrote a fairly long article on why everything was being privatized: Western elites are in a duel where those who lose are squeezed out of the actual elite. They may still be rich, but they don’t have power. This duel is particularly dire in the US and the UK, but affects all Western countries to some extent and Anglo countries severely.

Since the real economy isn’t growing as much as it used to (and certainly less than measured), they have to steal from the commons and from government.

Consider the British Mail privatization of 2015, done by the Conservatives and the Liberals: the mail service had been owned by the Crown for five hundred years. Britain has privatized all its railways. Service has gone to shit. More literally gone to shit is the water system, where millions of tons of raw sewage are being dumped into Britain’s rivers and coast, while the water utilities pay massive dividends.

In Ontario, where I live, alcohol sales were, for generations, restricted to the “Liquor Control Board of Ontario” and the “Beer Store.” Are most recent Prime Minister, ex-drug dealer (this isn’t a slur, it’s a fact) Doug Ford, has reduced the duopoly,  and continues to do so. The most recent step is to allow corner stores to sell beer. Thing is, the LCBO and Beer store routinely make billions for the government.

(The Beer Store is run by Ontario’s brewers, they had a contract that ended in 2025 and the 225 million is buying out that contract early)

So this is going to cost Ontario a low estimate of 800 million or so a year. There’s also the fact that the LCBO and Beer Store are very good at checking IDs, so there’ll be a lot more under-age drinking, though I personally don’t care all that much. But social conservative types, one would think, would.

Ontario, since Covid, has a huge problem with hospital waiting times, both for emergency and regular services. Perhaps instead of giving away government money, Ford should spend it on that?

But the point is simple: this is privatization of profits, and ordinary people will pay for it: it has to result in increased taxes, reduced spending or increased public debt.

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Out Of Control Anglo Immigration

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On February 7, 2024

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It takes some deep work to make me anti-immigration. I figure people should have the ability to change countries: my mother did and so did all my ancestors, often multiple times.

But Canada’s managed it, and if I lived in Australia or Britain I’d feel the same way.

Let’s start with Canada

Yowsa! Something happened there, didn’t it?

A lot of people died during Covid. A lot of people were disabled due to Covid. That put upward pressure on wages and in a neoliberal economy, we can’t have that.

So Canada’s government decided to let in a flood of immigrants.

Result? Well, lower wages than otherwise, and…

Yeeha! One of Canada’s dirty secrets is that we have more homeless people per capita than California, with a lot worse climate.

And it isn’t just immigration:

Temporary workers, because we sure wouldn’t want to use Canadians or train them.

And hey, let’s pile on the pain with even more international students, who compete for housing too!

This is, obviously, deliberate policy. It’s bad for people who are already here, and immigrants are less thrilled than you might think, leading to record numbers of reverse immigration (immigrants going back home after finding out Canada isn’t the promised land.)

Australia’s the same:

Same student issues:

And yeah, same effect on the housing market, though it’s in a better place than Canada, which has probably the world’s worst housing bubble.

So then, Britain:

And, though it hasn’t had the same effect on housing in the US:

The difference in the US, which probably leaps out, is that it’s just a trend not a spike. it isn’t a clear deliberate policy choice, despite the squeals of Republicans. But it contributes to some of the same problems:

According to a Jan. 25 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, roughly 653,000 people reported experiencing homelessness in January of 2023, up roughly 12% from the same time a year prior and 48% from 2015. That marks the largest single-year increase in the country’s unhoused population on record, Harvard researchers said…

…That alarming jump in people struggling to keep a roof over their head came amid blistering inflation in 2021 and 2022 and as surging rental prices across the U.S. outpaced worker wage gains.

Now there’s nothing wrong with immigrants, per se and no one who isn’t a native has any leg to stand on when screaming about immigrants to North America, Australia or New Zealand as intrinsically bad.

But when you have a homeless crisis and very tight and expensive rental and housing markets, obviously bringing in lots of new people is going to hurt the people who are already there who aren’t real-estate speculators and so on, and it’s obviously going to hit the poor, the working class and the middle class where it hurts, both on rent, housing prices and wages.

That means you’re going to increase racism, because people who can’t get an affordable place (and I can tell you that in Toronto, say, every low-end place has multiple applicants, and what is low end costs hundreds of dollars more than it did a few years ago) start blaming immigrants instead of hating their own ruling class, which is where the real blame belongs.

If you want racism, increase immigration without increasing housing. And that’s what Canada, the UK and Australia are doing.

And, of course, massive immigration’s primary purpose is to hold down wages, and you can’t expect people to be happy about making less than they would have otherwise. People know, because they see how many people apply for jobs they apply for,  they hear stories from their friends, and when immigrants are from visible groups, they can see it and hear it in the accents.

When all boats are rising, only true bigots mind immigration. But when people are struggling to find good jobs and a place to live, spiking immigration is an evil act.

Politically, its a hard place. In Canada, for example, immigration is up under the Liberal party. The Conservatives talk about cutting it back but look at that UK chart: that’s under a Conservative government. Will Canada be any different?

This is a ruling class issue: they aren’t hurt by a rising housing market and the more potential workers there are, the lower wages they have to pay. Older folks who own houses win, as housing prices go up. Immigration is good for elites and people who made it into asset markets. It’s good for insiders, that is, and bad for anyone out in the cold.

Since the people with power are insulated from the pain their decisions cause, my guess is that these policies will continue until there’s enough pain inflicted on elites to change their calculus.

A few riots where the mansions are might help with that, but Brits, Australians and Canadians aren’t the type.

Yet

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CEO Honesty About Wanting High Unemployment

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On September 12, 2023

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I really appreciate CEO developer Tim Gurney’s honesty here:

A lot of people are focusing on the idea that Gurney is a terrible person.

Which he is.

But there are two important facts he makes very clear here. The first is that most bosses like being able to push people around. Money is good, yes, but the real motivation is power and power over other people is what a lot of bosses get off on. Unless you inherited, you rarely get to the top without enjoying making other people do what you want: that’s most of the job of “leaders” and “managers” after all.

The good ones focus on motivating teams in positive ways, but the bad ones, well, they use fear and greed.

The second bit is the honesty about governments trying to increase unemployment. This is something a lot ofpeople won’t believe when a leftist or a Marxist tells them it, but perhaps when a CEO does, they will.

It should be emphasized that this isn’t an “always” situation: for most of the period from 1933-79 US government policy was intended to decrease unemployment. That sub-era of capitalism wanted high wages, in part because everyone’s workers are someone else’s customers. China’s big goal right now is to figure out how to increase wages across the economy, and thus escape the middle income trap. (They’re doing it wrong, because their economy came of age during a global neoliberal age, but they know it’s what they should do.)

But since 79 deliberate policy in most developed countries has been to keep unemployment high to crush wages. That’s how the current capitalism.

This is also a pure example of “job creator” ideology. “We the big bosses create the jobs. All the good things come from us. Without us people wouldn’t have jobs. They should be grateful and obedient and subservient because they are worth something only when being used by us.”

This is specific example of what’s common in almost all eras: the people who have the most power believe that means they are also the best people. “The GodKing makes the rains the flow and the sun rise. All bow to the GodKing.”

From the capitalists come all that is good, therefore government and ordinary people should revere and obey them and do what they say.

So I really do appreciate Tim Gurney’s honesty here: he’s saying the quiet part out loud. He’s not being a hypocrite, like most of his peers. This is who he is and they are. Good for him for being authentic and telling the truth.

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The Good & The Bad In The Future of Labor

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On September 4, 2023

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On this Labor day it seems like a good time to discuss what labor in general and unions in specific have to look forward to.

There’s been some very good labor news recently, for example, the UPS strike:

UPS Teamsters have won their biggest wage boost in decades: at least $7.50 an hour over five years for every current UPSer, and more for the lowest-paid. Even the 1997 strike only boosted part-time wages 50 cents (equivalent to 95 cents today) over five years.

The agreement would also end the forced sixth workday for drivers, create seventy-five hundred new full-time inside jobs, and eliminate the second tier of drivers — reversing the infamous concession in the 2018 contract.

UPS drivers could make as much as $170K in pay and benefits (which sounds better than it is, full time wages are about $120K, but is still good.)

There is also a desperation effect: there has been a lot of inflation, often higher than reported (I’d judge food inflation at the check-out where I live to have been about 66% over the last 3 years and rent inflation c.40% or so.)

A lot of unions have been having successful strikes and many non-union businesses have had to raise wages to attract workers. Anti-worker forces are fighting back, with variable success. In Britain striking is likely to be near-illegal soon, and this is something Labor agrees with the Conservatives on. Laws in some US states allowing younger teenagers to work in food processing plants and so on are also an attempt to break the power of workers.

This power is based on Covid. Covid killed a lot of “essential” workers (with restaurant workers in particular taking it on the chin) and Long Covid has moved a pile more workers off the table and will move more workers over time.

This leaves those who remain in a stronger position: in a market economy without strong pro-worker laws wages are almost entirely based on the supply of workers versus demand. This can be specific, where particular types of skilled workers are short, but for non-skilled workers its mostly aggregate.

From about 1979 Federal Reserve and ECB policy has been to raise interest rates to crush the economy any time workers began to make wage gains, but this time it isn’t working: both because the shortage is real and because the West is, though marginally, trying to decouple from China, meaning China’s mitigating effect on goods inflation is decreased. There aren’t a lot of truly cheap places left where you can easily move production because most remaining cheap places aren’t politically stable and pro-US.

In Europe the news is more mixed because Europe is shedding industry due to anti-Russia sanctions. England, having de-industrialized is now losing its developed nation status.

The pressure on the workforce will continue: Covid is still around, Long Covid and sub-perceptual organ damage will continue to increase and will continue to have an effect on the labour force, not just reducing it from what it would have been, but making a lot of people, while not disabled, less able and worse at their jobs.

There are, of course, things the ruling class can do about this. In Canada we’re bringing in about a half-million new immigrants a year (which has caused a housing crisis), in a nation of 40 million. There’s the child labor law changes and the anti-union laws.

The right is going to make some hay on this, because immigration does increase the work force and thus put downward pressure on wages. If the right were simply to stop being anti-union and anti-worker in other ways, they’d clean up. Up here in Canada, I despise the conservatives, but I have friends who are now homeless because of the housing crisis caused by the Liberals immigration policies.

In the further future, immigration will continue to be the big issue. Climate change refugees will be massive in number and hard to stop (I full expect so many machine-gunning refugees stories by 2035 that it’s “dog bites man.) Elites will want to let enough in to crush local efforts to raise wages.

So we have a window to do the best we can to improve wages. After that, things will become more difficult. Inflation will continue to be an issue (there’s a small chance of deflationary depression) because climate change will lead to real shortages of raw materials, especially food and water.

Of course, if climate change were treated as the emergency it is, there would be a ton of work available, a WWII style mobilization. And that’s the best possible future at this point: a mobilization to deal with climate change properly.

We’ll see if we do, and do it while we still can, before too much civilization collapse.

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How To Reduce Inflation And Create A Good Economy

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On July 25, 2023

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Right now we have central banks attempting to control inflation by crushing wages. But wage-push demand isn’t the primary driver of inflation, it is corporate profit taking (increasing prices much faster than their costs) and some genuine supply bottlenecks.

This cannot be fixed by central banks except by smashing ordinary people flat, and in certain senses not even then, since it will lead to long term maldistribution of resources which will lead to real economic problems in the future: problems not based on distribution or finance, but on lack of physical ability to create what we need.

If we want to fix this we have to make it so that those who control economic decision making can only do well if the population as a whole does well. That means politicians who want to help the population (not 90% of European or American pols) and corporate leaders who need the population to do well.

We’ll concentrate on the corporate/private side.

Take public all natural monopolies. Monopolies and oligpolies can charge more because people have to buy what they have. Private enterprise is only better than government at providing differentiated goods. If everything is the same (and a joule is a joule and a liter of safe water is a liter of safe water and a cheap, fast train trip is a cheap, fast train trip) then government can do it cheaper and better than private enterprise, since it doesn’t have to make a profit.

Excess Profits Tax or Max Profits Tax. You can only make 5% profit + inflation. Anything more is taxed away. Money invested, is not taxed, however.

No Stock Buybacks, No Stock Options. If a company has excess money, it can only increase profits and stock prices by producing more or better.

Executive and Board Salaries Linked to General Welfare. All compensation is treated as wages. Wages above 10x median are taxed at 95%. They are only allowed to increase by the average of the median individual income, and the median income of the bottom 5%.

No Capital Flows To Other Except For Resource Extraction: Comparative advantage does not work with free capital flows. This was noted by Ricardo when he created the comparative advantage. Companies need to reinvest at home. They also need to not be able to run away with capital because they don’t like being only 10X as rich as the rest of the population.

No Free Central Bank Money: The central bank doesn’t get to just give people money, like it has been since 2008. That’s a legislative decision and one which the legislature should not be allowed to give away to other bodies except in relatively small amounts (perhaps a max of 1% of GDP.)

Break Up the Banks and Regulate Them Properly: Banks decide who gets to do what. If you want the advantages of a free market you need lots of them: easy enough, create them by breaking up the big banks. As for regulation, go back to an equivalent of Glass-Steagall.

Break up Monopolies and Oligopolies in General: either it’s a natural monopoly, in which case the government should run it, or it isn’t, in which case it’s broken up. Go back to prices rising in unison being enough evidence by itself of an oligopoly.

Retailers Either Sell Only Their Own Stuff Or Only Other People’s. No store brands, no Amazon basics, none of that. It’s vastly anti-competitive. Nor can retailers mandate that they must get the lowest price or any other such thing.

***

The general principles here are just to move the market back towards a free market and to “align” incentives so that rich people can’t get richer without everyone prospering.

There’s much more required, of course: these policies require politicians to want to implement them, and for them to last for any length of time, changes need to be made to politics to also make sure politicians self-interest is aligned with the general population. (The other method, which might better is to remove self-interest from these decisions entirely. You don’t always need skin in the game in a material sense—doctors with no financial stake make better decisions for patients than those with and endless measurement aligned with incentives warps measurements.)

None of this is really complicated in the broad strokes. We know what creates good economies and societies, we just rarely do it and those with the most power, whether people or countries, try to keep other countries or people down.

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