Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 16 of 36

Corbyn Wants to Destroy the Current Economic System

By

On October 15, 2017

Comments

Take it right to them:

Responding to Hammond’s warning in his speech at this month’s Conservative conference, Corbyn will say the chancellor is “absolutely right” to say that Labour is threatening to destroy the current economic model, adding that the current system “allows homelessness to double, 4 million children to live in poverty and over a million older people not getting the care they need”.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn

The reason the establishment hates him is that he threatens them. He will re-nationalize power and railways, institute rent controls and ownership limits on multiple homes and overseas owners, and build new council housing.

And there’s this:

Corbyn will say Labour is not opposed to technological advancement, but digital giants such as Uber and Deliveroo have built their success not on their technological advantage, but by “establishing a monopoly in their marketplaces and using that to drive wages and conditions down.”

“Imagine an Uber run co-operatively by their drivers, collectively controlling their futures, agreeing their own pay and conditions, with profits shared or re-invested,” he will say.

“The biggest obstacle to this is not technological, but a rigged economic system that favours wealth extractors, not wealth creators.”

This, by the way, is basic economic theory. Markets work for the benefit of most when they are competitive, and bounded by safety nets and regulations. They do not work for the benefit of all when they form monopolies or oligopolies. The latter have to be regulated to the max, broken up, or turned into public utilities.

(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.)

Or, perhaps, to change who owns them.

The current economic system is not good capitalism: It is not competitive or regulated or bounded by proper safety nets and guaranteed minimums, let alone proper high-end taxation.

To make capitalism, or rather, markets, work, requires strong government intervention and always has. Thatcher and Reagan were just wrong, and it shows up in virtually all the numbers.

Corbyn is the actual realist here, not those who celebrate the current mode of “capitalism.”

And this is going to be fun to watch.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Further Tragedy of Hurricane Harvey

By

On August 28, 2017

Comments

All right, this is bad, and yes, climate change is almost certainly a factor because hotter temperatures allow air to hold more water and increase the likelihood of higher winds, but I want to talk about what will happen afterwards.

When Sandy hit New York and New Jersey, it sucked, but the real damage happened afterwards. Poor people couldn’t afford to fix their homes and were forced out. In New Jersey, beach front properties owned by poor people, which had been in their families for generations, wound up on the market to be bought up by rich people.

Aid was systematically diverted from poor people to their “betters” and the poor parts of town were allowed to rot.

Every disaster like this is an opportunity. When New Orleans was hit, the aftermath was used to destroy public education and bring in charter schools, for another example.

When disaster strikes, the vultures are ready. Harvey will be used to buy up poor people’s property for cents on the dollar and force them out.

That, in America, is what disasters are for.

It is nice to see everyone getting together to help, but the real co-operative action we’ll needed when the government fails (as it will) will be that of people helping each other survive and keep their homes against the efforts of those who want to take advantage of their misery.

And, American civil society being as weakened as it is, except for some efforts on crowd-funding sites and a few overwhelmed community orgs, that cooperative action will not occur on nearly a wide enough scale.

And the rich will get richer, and the poor, poorer.

This is a long-term dynamic. It has been de-facto government and social policy since Reagan.

And it will only change when neoliberalism falls, and only IF it is replaced by something better.

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.

Book Review: The Spirit Level

By

On August 21, 2017

Comments

Given all the controversy around inequality, this is a must read book.

About three-quarters of it is what I call “proving the obvious”–that inequality is, in fact, bad in every way imaginable.

Inequality correlates to almost every bad social metric you can imagine. Health, lifespan, performance, violence, happiness, and so on. The more unequal a society, holding other stuff even, the worse the society is to live in.

It really is that simple, and The Spirit Level goes to ludicrous lengths to provide the evidence, because in our society the ludicrously obvious is disputed by people with a lot of money.

But The Spirit Level also has some non-intuitive information to share, of which the most interesting to me was that high inequality is bad for the people at the top. People in, say, the top one percent in a more equal society are better off than those in the top one percent in a more unequal society–even though those in the latter would have more money.

You’d think having more money would mean that you “win,” but, in fact, your life span is shorter, you are more unhealthy, and you are more unhappy than those in the same relative position in a more equal society.

Another interesting fact is the performance effect of being unequal: Simply being told they are lesser destroys people’s performance. This is quite robust. You can test them, then tell them they’re unequal, test them again, and see it happen.

The causes of inequality’s other effects are hard to tease out, but the most likely reason is stress: Being unequal is stressful. It’s more stressful for people on the bottom, constantly worried and being ordered around, but it’s stressful even for those on top. The more unequal the society, the more people below you are stressed and angry and the more you have to do to defend your situation.

And, of course, unhappy people just aren’t nice to be around, and if your society systematically makes people less happy, that’s going to feed back into you, because you live in the society.

I really do think everyone should read this book. It’s not that it’s earth-shattering, it’s that it makes you one hundred percent confident that, yes, inequality is just bad, whether or not the people at the bottom have a TV.

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 Cause of the Opiate Epidemic

By

On June 4, 2017

Comments

Let us introduce you to Rat Park. You’ve heard the story about how addictive drugs are. Put a rat in a cage with a lever for water and a lever for water with drugs (heroin/cocaine) and without drugs, and the rat will soon be hitting the lever for drugs as fast as it can.

Drugs are sooooo addictive.

Right.

Well, here’s Rat Park.

Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: Everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

Sigh.

Somehow the story of Rat Park doesn’t get told often. I’ve read a lot on pain policy and addiction, and I hadn’t heard of it until recently.

Why is that, I wonder?

What has changed in the US to cause the “sudden” opiate epidemic, do you think?

…

Well, we all know the answer. The US isn’t “Human Park” any more, it’s a dystopian nightmare, full of poverty, despair, and people isolated from friends and family. The social welfare stats for large parts of the country are in free fall.

When life is shit, people turn to chemical joy–or chemical anaesthesia, at least.

What the US is doing is cracking down on opiate use, as if it’s a criminal problem. OR they are pretending it’s a medical problem.

It’s neither. It’s a social and economic problem, and its to do with a society which offers shitty lives for people.

In the 1800s, Emile Durkheim, the pioneering sociologist, did a study on suicide. He did it specifically because suicide seemed like the most individual of decisions.

And he found that it wasn’t; the likelihood and number of suicides tracked social engagement almost exactly. Roman Catholics committed suicide the least and had the strongest social ties. After the Catholics were the Protestants, then then non-religious, and those categories tracked how much social contact people had.

Most of who we are is other people and our relations to them. Most of the rest is our environment. Decisions that seem like they are made by individuals are really only partially so; they are informed by the environment in which we live. They are influenced by people, economic opportunities, and beauty, or the availability of love, friendship, security, and hope.

The opiate epidemic won’t be “fixed” through criminilization or medicalization: Even if opiate overdoses go down, people will turn to other forms of self-destructive behavior. This is because the problem isn’t opiate availability, it is that their lives are objectively shit.

Want to fix the opiate epidemic? Start with a 90 percent marginal tax rate on the richest people in America and spend the money on making everyone else’s lives better. Oh, and do simple stuff like universal health care, which, well, costs less and produces better results and doesn’t lead to despair, because people know that if they get sick they’ll get the care they need and it won’t cost them everything.

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.

You Will Never Be Free of Identity Politics

By

On May 25, 2017

Comments

(MANDOS POST, people who don’t want to read things they disagree with please stop here)

I don’t normally watch horror movies, but I made an exception and recently watched the horror film Get Out. It’s a horror-satire movie that constructs its underlying trope from the concept of racist microaggressions, and it’s one of the best films I’ve seen all year, if not the best, period. It’s a Stepford Wives style of horror, in which a young black man discovers that his well-meaning-seeming white inlaws-to-be believe in human improvement by the literal supplantation of black identities with white ones and the submergence of the black identity into a spiritual void called the “Sunken Place” — a literal sort of black/white solidarity where, of course, the white opinion matters more.

The privileged white horror-family in question is conceived of as stereotypical rich politically-correct liberal Obama voters, but the main character himself is a relatively successful young photographer who had access to that kind of company through his work, starting from less privileged roots and with black friends still living the working-class life, and his working-class black best friend — who correctly names and identifies the microaggressions and where they were leading — is his only lifeline in the entire story. The illustration clearly intended by the director (well-known black comedian Jordan Peele) is that even when a black person in America manages to succeed on white terms, that in itself is not just, not sustainable, not sufficient.

That was a movie, but the point is illustrated periodically in real life — and occasionally in famous, very public rows.  Some of you may remember that a few years ago, there was a row over Oprah Winfrey’s attempted purchase of a very expensive handbag, worth twice or more than what some of her viewers make in a year, from a shop in Switzerland, wherein Oprah believed that she had been discriminated against by the saleswoman for being a black buyer in a fancy store. Many could easily view this as a rich woman publicly bullying an innocent, ordinary-income shop attendant for a social faux pas, possibly based on ignorance of the American media landscape. A class analysis. But for people of colour, the incident is instead evidence that, even if one is doing well economically, one is still one of them, that the incident was no accident even if the saleswoman had no conscious intention of discriminating.

That sense that even under relatively positive overall circumstances, how one is treated in life is nevertheless conditioned on the sufferance of the majority/dominant community unless one erases one’s entire particularity (and even then) is not a trivial feeling. It is a continuous burden, a headwind in life, and one that cannot be erased by exhortations to class solidarty and and one-sided demands to put the material advantages of class solidarity as prior to the domain of conflict called “identity politics.” Class solidarity does not erase those conflicts, does not remedy them, does not alone create a long-term, sustainable basis for rectification of discrimination. Minority groups remain vulnerable even when the dream of a more just economy is realized.

The only way to proceed is to recognize that, while the working-class American black has a cause in common with the working-class American white, she or he also has a cause in common with a rich woman like Oprah Winfrey, one that can be neither ignored, denied, or erased. And the only way that class solidarity can take full precedence over that is when whites agree to disarm their own identity politics without demanding that blacks and other minority politics disarm theirs.

A Middle Class Which Aligns with the Rich Cuts Its Own Throat

By

On May 9, 2017

Comments

This was explained to me by Stirling Newberry years ago.

The middle class, can, broadly speaking, align with the rich or with the poor.

If it aligns with the rich, the policies it favors benefit the rich exponentially more than they do the middle class. Tax cuts went primarily to the rich, by magnitudes, for example. Real estate prices rising faster than wages made some middle class families rich, but benefited the rich magnitudes more than the middle class.

Money translates almost directly to power in capitalist societies and even more directly in capitalist democracies without adequate corruption controls (which is almost all of them). The rich become powerful faster than the middle class and ultimately the policies they favor do not include keeping the middle class healthy: The rich want low wages, “flexible” labour laws, bankruptcy laws that favor their interests but not that of the middle class, plenty of financialized rent streams, and so on.

The first generation to make the devil’s bargain with the rich can benefit, maybe even some of the second, mind you. A lot of “Reagan Democrats” won–they sold their houses, and they retired to some place sunny with cheap brown labor to wipe their bums in their senesence. But their kids are saddled with huge debt, make less money than their parents at every stage of their lives, and can’t afford to buy houses or even pay rent anywhere decent.

If the middle class sides with the poor, on the other hand, almost everything they do also helps the middle class. Poor people with money spend that money, and wage increases are much more useful to the middle class than capital gains because they are durable. And policies which reduce the size of the working class and poor, make the middle class bigger and stronger. The working class, absent a huge swell in their numbers, are no threat to the middle class.

Ironically, the working class and poor are a threat to the middle class precisely when the middle class aligns themselves with the rich, because that swells the number of the poor and makes them desperate. It also knocks a lot of middle and upper class down (the upper class is not the rich, they are its direct servants, plus a few others), and those people are angry and know how the system works.

The middle class not only justifies its existence ethically by helping the poor, doing so safeguards its own existence.

The right thing to do, ethically, is almost always the right thing to do in policy terms. Those who believe otherwise almost always pay a frightful price for their attempt to be clever in service to their greed and selfishness.

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 Modest Proposal to Fix the World

By

On May 1, 2017

Comments

Image by TW Collins

Fire every non-commission employee making more than seven times the median national income (all income included).

Put a 100 percent tax on all income over seven times the median, no exceptions for any type of income.

Put a 100 percent tax on on all inheritances over 50 times the median (that’s enough of a head-start on life for winning the lucky sperm contest).

Promote those who were earning less.

Secret: The people running the economy are not the best, and if they are brightest, we need stupider people. I base this on their results.

Going forward, the top income level will increase, as a percentage, equal to the average income of the bottom five percent and the median income.

This will sort out a lot of problems quickly.

First, it gets rid of the people running the economy today, who are obviously either hopeless fuck-ups or completely uninterested in results for anyone but themselves and a few cronies.

Second, it concentrates the minds of those at the top on the problems of those at the middle and bottom. They want that seven-times-the-median to be higher, so suddenly, they care about the poor and the middle class. A lot.

Third, it rather quickly deals with people with too much money now (yes, there is such a thing); if their seven-times the-median income doesn’t support their lifestyle, they will have to dip into their capital to pay for it. Because all capital gains will be treated as income, well, that should be fun.

Yes, there are all sorts of ways people can try to get around this. Plug them as fast as you find them and write the initial laws in very generous ways, like money-laundering laws. (Were you obviously trying to get around money laundering laws? If so, you’re probably going to jail. That’s how they’re written.)

Why seven times? Why not. It’s enough that no one can say they shouldn’t still feel very rich, and if they don’t, then something is deeply wrong with the median.

The general rule of policy is that policy which is good for the rich and the middle class is bad for the middle class because the rich get so much more from it. For instance, the housing bubble looked good for the middle class (and a few people won), but, really, it was so much better for the rich in that it gave them so much power along with other financial shenanigans, that they were able to gut the middle class.

Policy which is good for the middle class and the poor, or even just the poor, is good for the middle class. Poor people spend their money, and poor people who get better off become middle class people. A middle class which identifies with the poor and not the rich, will be secure, because they will support the wellspring of their own success.

There’s a bunch of moral and ethical arguments that should go into a piece like this, but it comes down to this: Every social welfare statistic worth mentioning tracks inequality, not absolute wealth, once you’re beyond the point of “enough so I’m not starving.” (See “The Spirit Level” for the nailed-down, stupidly overdetailed proving of the obvious.)

The rich are rich because society makes it possible, through aggressive enforcement of totally artificial property laws and massive infrastructure which benefits them far more than anyone else. The idea of ideas being property is completely artificial, contracts of adhesion that are standard in software are social bullshit, corporations are bundles of hugely valuable rights to avoid responsibility for losses, and all of that is before we even get to 20 trillion dollars (in the US alone) to bail out bankers who had genuinely lost everything, and that includes Goldman Sachs, because winning bets with counterparties who are bankrupt is worth ten cents on the dollar, and at that rate, Goldman is bankrupt too.

The people in charge have done a terrible job. It is a moral imperative to take that job from them and give it to people who will do it better than they do. (If they do it well, then the world and the economy won’t be so fucked.)

The people not in charge who are familiar with their jobs/businesses deserve a try.

There are bunch of things to add to this, but they all basically come down to two simple rules:

  1. Keep the rich poor.
  2. Never let money or power buy anything that matters.

A better education than normal, a jump in the healthcare queue line, avoiding airport security, flying on a private jet, avoiding traffic in a helicopter, not staying in the same hotels as anyone else. Nothing that matters. They can have nicer consumer goods, as long as they don’t matter, and that is all.

When the people running something are complete fuck-ups, you take away their power. That means their position, and as money is power, their obscene wealth. You replace them with someone else. It is that simple.

Eat the rich, or the rich will eat you.

And they have been dining well.

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.

Rentiers vs. Capitalists, Yahoo CEO Edition

By

On April 28, 2017

Comments

We tend to think of rentiers as being property owners, but a rentier is anyone who uses control of position to extract monopoly profits. CEOs appoint boards, boards determine CEO compensation, and corporations can pay obscene amounts of money, even when they aren’t making a profit. Heck, even if they’re being taken over.

Corporate America prides itself on rewarding success and punishing failure. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer does not fit comfortably into that narrative. During her five-year tenure at the once-proud tech firm, user levels stagnated, ad revenue dropped, acquisitions cratered, layoffs accelerated, product quality floundered, and hackers stole the personal information of more than one billion users.

But when Yahoo’s sale to Verizon becomes official in June, with the restructured company renamed Oath, Mayer will walk away with $186 million, according to a regulatory filing released this week. That includes shares of Yahoo stock Mayer owned, stock options, and a $23 million “golden parachute” of cash, restricted stock units, and medical benefits. Mayer did relinquish $14 million while taking responsibility for the Yahoo Mail data breach, but she’ll get 13 times that amount just to no longer remain part of the company.

I should point out that the first part–“priding itself on rewarding success and punishing failure”–is pure bullshit when it comes to executives and CEOs, pure mythology. Ordinary workers may (sort of) live in that world, though they get little reward for success, but high ranking executives are compensated irregardless of how their companies are doing. The worst performing CEOs get higher compensation.

If you want to be well paid as a CEO, perform like shit. Science backs it up!

This is not capitalism. This is rentierism. The value of all the loans taken by pbulic corporations in the 2000 run up to the 2008 crash was equal to the stock buybacks made by public corporations.

Why? Because most executive compensation is through stock options!

It’s good to be the Queen/Duke. Ahhhhh…what a life.

And this, folks, is why you don’t have nice things: Because these people run your society and make most of the important decisions. To say that they are parasites is to be generous; many parasites shade towards symbiosis, these people make the economy and their companies perform worse than it would if they did not exist. Restrict compensation to up to seven times the median, fire everyone who earns more, and promote those below them and I guarantee that in ten years the economy would be much better.

You can have lots of really rich people or a good economy; you can have lots of rich people or a democracy.

Those are the choices.

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.

Page 16 of 36

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén