Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 26 of 36

Socially how the next 20 odd years will play out

By

On August 13, 2011

Comments

Ok, let’s get down to brass tacks.  The riots in Britain are an important event, and combined with the decision to double down on austerity they tell us a lot.  This is my baseline, loose model for the next generation.

The decision has been made by Cameron and society in general that the way to respond to the riots is to crack down, hard.  They are sentencing people to long sentences for minor crimes (a year for stealing a bottle of water) and they are extending the punishment to families, kicking people out of housing if a member of their family was arrested.  They are discussing cutting people off from social networks, and in Calfornia today the powers that be cut off cell phone service during an entirely non-violent protest.

The decision has been made to double down on repression.  To extend repression to families, a logical extension of our socieity’s obsession with family as above all else, and a very aristocratic thing to do, which reeks on the 17th century.  In terms of social media, Wikileaks was the bleeding edge of this, when Paypal, VISA and Mastercard cut off Wikileaks, despite them having been convicted of no crimes, it was clear that access to the modern economy would be held hostage for those who didn’t play the way the oligarchs wanted them to play.

Repression of this sort always spirals.  Cut-offs from the internet, from cell phone use, from specific sites, will continue to spread.  Sometimes they will be temporary and blanket.  Sometimes they will hit individuals.  Sometimes they will hit specific sites in specific areas.  Access to the modern credit economy will continue to be used as a weapon.  There will also be continued removal of the right to travel, with no-fly lists moving to trains, and later to bus stations and eventually there will be a ramp up of stops of automobiles.

This sort of stuff is easy to get around, right now, by anyone relatively bright and even slightly technologically savvy.  So there will be a renewed, and successful push towards what might be called the biometric surveillance state.   You will carry ID, your biometric data will be centrally located as well as stored on ID, and this data will be used to control what privileges you have access to (you have no rights.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, throwing youngsters into prison for very minor crimes is a mistake.  It will harden them, and connect them.  This is especially true in British prisons, because British prisoners are a hardened bunch of criminals.  But it is a mistake no matter where, because in America and Britain, having ever be thrown in jail means your life is over.  Every decent job does a criminal record check, and if you have a criminal record, you will never ever have a good job again.  At that point you might as well become a criminal, and why not a revolutionary?

Which leads to the crackdown on hackers.  Throwing young, bright, technically savvy young adults in with the criminal element is, again, a mistake.  The rise of the surveillance state means that tech savvy is going to become very important to anyone who doesn’t want to live by what might be called “Society’s new rules”.  And  the young hackers have a revolutionary mindset.  The combination of men with nothing to lose, with men who have tech skills and believe society is corrupt and needs to be brought down, will be explosive.  And since the biometric security state will be done on the cheap, by the sort of incompetents who run the current wars and the current security apparatus, there will be plenty of cracks in the system to exploit.

Likewise the increase in punitive sentences is a mistake, pure and simple, because it means people have less to lose.  If a relatively minor crime gets you in for years, and destroys your life, many will make the calculation that they might as well fight, might as well use violent force, rather than be taken.

Meanwhile the ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell.  At this point companies simply don’t want to hire anyone who has been unemployed for longer than about 3 months, and have a strong preference for the currently employed. If you don’t find a new job in 3 months, you are probably never going to have a good job again.  The data is clear on this, what is also clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come.  A decade is modestly optimistic.

This will increase social disorder, of course, and our lords and masters and the remnants of the middle and working class who scream “they’re criminals, pure and simple”, will double down on repression, again and again.

This is, of course, a big mistake.  It may turn into a relatively stable solution set in some countries, but they won’t be places you want to live unless you have the morals of totalitarian, and in others it will lead to revolutions, while in others it will lead to outright failed states.  We can hope that a few will turn aside from this path.  So far in Europe only one country has, Iceland.

As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on.  But this is just social mechanics played out over time.  This is the glide path, it can be stopped, but it is unlikely to be.

Innocents were already being hurt in Britain

By

On August 10, 2011

Comments

So a guy gets hurt in the riots.  He lives in the most unequal city in the developed world. He is a part of the society which condemned these people to hopeless lives, to the point where they rioted, after 333 of them died in police custody over 13 years with not one cop being convicted of anything.  They rioted after a black man was shot and the police lied about it.  They rioted when there is one job for ever 58 applicants where they live, where right out of high school most of them will never hold a job.

Riots aren’t pretty, if you don’t want them to happen, make sure your society doesn’t abandon a racial minority to squalor and hopelessness.

You should all know better. Yes, it’d be nice if they were more targeted against the people who have fucked them the most, but y’know, that’s the way riots go. Hell, even clearly political riots like the Greek ones started out with the rioters fucking up their own neighbourhoods.

This is why you don’t let things get to the point where people riot, don’t let their lives be completely intolerable. As Stirling noted, even soulless technocrats from the liberal era understood that.

I have sympathy for the victims, but so what? I have more sympathy for the 333 people who died in police custody. They lost a lot more. And it may not be that shopkeeper’s fault, but that’s how these things go. When you treat people like sub-humans, they eventually show you what that means.

I am not going to play the gutless liberal game of condemning people who have been treated like animals for lashing out in pain. Is Britain a democracy, or not? If it is, then everyone is complicit, if it isn’t then a revolution is needed and anyone who isn’t working towards one is complicit. And in the meantime, a lot of innocents are going to get hurt, that’s what happens in unjust societies.

If people won’t help those in pain, then those in pain will share the pain. That’s what happens, especially when you’re talking young men who never had a chance, who were born with no future, and society just doesn’t care.

British bankers were making millions, billions, and British government couldn’t find enough money to help these people? To give them jobs?

And British society tolerated those priorities?

London Riots #3: Context

By

On August 9, 2011

Comments

Wow, just wow:

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

Yeah.  Ok.  Go read the rest.  What is surprising is that they hadn’t already rioted.

No war but class war, folks.  The rich understand this, and they have been practicing it.

Comments on the S&P Downgrade

By

On August 6, 2011

Comments

Aside from hysterical laughter, here are the key points:

  1. Obviously the US isn’t even close to insolvent.  The gold in Fort Knox is held on the books at $37/ounce, for example.  Most Federal lands are held on the books at 19th century valuations.  Not to mention that the US’s debt is denominated in its own currency, which means it could simply be printed, and that the US government has a lot of unused room to tax, should it ever deign to use that on people with money, as opposed to those without.
  2. As everyone is pointing out, the idea that S&P, who rated all the subprime trash as AAA, has any credibility, is a joke.
  3. However, Obama and Democrats refused to destroy S&P when they had the opportunity and every reason to do so.  The submprime crisis could not have been nearly as bad without S&P and the other rating’s agencies rating trash AAA so that investors who must buy AAA by law could do so.  To put it simply, S&P engaged in systematic fraud.  They, like everyone on Wall Street and in the major banks, have not been indicted for this.  The choice to not indict is policy.  Obama’s policy.
  4. If Obama did not want this to happen, it would not happen.  Could you imagine what LBJ, Nixon or Truman (or, hell, Bush Jr.) would have done if a rating’s agency tried this?  The President has the necessary tools to utterly destroy S&P and every senior analyst working for them.  You could use terrorism statutes or RICO, just as two examples.  Send the FBI into their offices, seize all the assets of both the company and everyone working for it, and then got through their records.   I guarantee, as absolutely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that there is enough evidence of fraud in those records to put them away for life.  In the meantime, RICO laws are used to seize all the assets of everyone involved, meaning they will be using public defenders (don’t like a bad law? Use it against real people.)  When S&P informed the White House they were going to downgrade, the White House could have quietly let them know what the consequences would be.
  5. The US has effectively unlimited drawing rights from the IMF.  Those drawing rights mean that if any of the core economies have an AAA rating, in effect, so does the US.  (ie. if Germany is AAA, so is America.)
  6. S&P knows all this.  They are doing this because they know the President and Congress and the real people in the oligarchy want it done.  Remember, a downgrade increases rates, and that is a direct increase to their income.  And they know the US can pay, they aren’t fooled by idiotic talk about a default.  The US may default at some point, but that will be a political decision.
  7. This is another manufactured crisis, on top of the original manufactured debt ceiling crisis.  The oligarchy wants the opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. They believe they don’t need the poor or middle class anymore, so they are good with getting rid of SS and Medicare.  And Obama is, as he always has been, onside with this.

These people, are, however, playing with fire.  Just because it’s a crisis that didn’t have to happen, a crisis, that is manufactured as another looting opportunity, doesn’t mean that it won’t have real consequences.

What the Debt Limit Crisis Should Have Taught You

By

On July 31, 2011

Comments

This is not primarily about the Tea Party

It is about what rich donors want.  The Tea Party does not even have the amount of muscle progressives do.  Progressives can bring tens of thousands of people out, the Tea Party can rarely even get above 1,000.  They are a convenient excuse to do what the Beltway and the oligarchs already want to do.

Where are you going to go?

Both Dems and Republicans are onside with cutting Social Security and Medicare. They are only third rails if there is someone else to vote for.

The deals being offered will cause a second downleg of the Depression and a worse one

We’re in a Depression.  This is fact.  Anyone who doesn’t call it that is gutless, stupid or uninformed.  This will make it worse, not just for the US, but for the entire developed world.

Representatives work for the people who pay them

That isn’t really you.  They don’t become multi-millionaires on their salaries, you know.  It’s their donors, the people who hire their wives and children, the people who fund their campaigns, the people who give them good jobs when they leave government.  If you want Reps and Senators to work for you, you must pay them better, you must fund their campaigns (and sharply limit outside funding) and you must make it illegal for them to EVER make more money in a year than their government salary (index it to an average of the median wage, the minimum wage, and CPI).  You should do what Canada used to do and give them a good pension after 6 years.  You DON’T want them worrying about their next job, or what they’ll do if they’ll lose.

Point being, they don’t work for you.

This is a representative plutocracy

I believe Stirling Newberry, in the early 90s, pointed this out first.  Politicians are paid by people other than you.  You are the product.  Think of this as the Facebook rule, if you aren’t paying for something, then you are the product.  The rich pay politicians to rangle you.  The amount of salary and public funding most Reps get is trivial compared to how much money they get from donors, even during their time in elected office, let alone after they leave.  You are the product, not the customer, of DC politicians.  They do not represent you, and you should not expect your interests to be looked after except as an afterthought.  When the oligarchs all agree that something needs to be done (like cut entitlements), it will be done, no matter how unpopular it is.

This “Crisis” is what Obama wanted

Again, if he didn’t, he would have raised the debt ceiling in the lame duck.  Nancy Pelosi was always very good at getting those sort of basic housekeeping bills through. It would have passed.  Period.  Obama wanted to cut SS and Medicare, and he needed a “crisis” in order to do it.  He also needed a Republican House, which he had, because his policies during 2009 and 2010 didn’t fix the economy.

You should have been working on nothing but primarying Obama since the day after the midterms

If you don’t understand why, I can’t help you.

There is no war but class war

Break the rich, or they will finish institutionalizing aristocracy.  Period.

Thank God for our enemies

By

On July 20, 2011

Comments

though it’s a pity about our leaders.

I feel bad for the Anonymous hackers who were arrested today, but it’s also a good thing, in that it will radicalize the hacker community even further and force them to adapt and change their tactics.  They are the bleeding edge of real resistance, and they have moved far from their libertarian roots and become left wing in their sympathies (targeting a city for refusing to allow the homeless to be fed is as left wing as you can get.)

Since, of course, the DOJ has shown no interest in pursuing those who did DDOS attacks against Wikileaks, it is yet another confirmation that the law, as it exists now, is used as a bludgeon against people the government doesn’t like, while those who the government does like are left alone, and crimes against the government’s “enemies” aren’t investigated.  Laws which do not have at least the appearance of being evenly applied are not just, are not perceived as just, and become legitimate targets for breaking.

Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives.  This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.

What is interesting about both of these things, and many others recently, such as the austerity bills and various legal rulings from the Supreme Court which don’t even pretend to follow precedent, is how the velvet glove has come off the iron fist of state and corporate repression.  The elites think that there is nothing ordinary people can do. Whatever the elites do, no matter how harsh, the hoi polloi can only submit.  And if they don’t, well, so much the worse for them.

And yet the system is cracking up. A large part of why all of this is being done is to create ever bigger corporations and ever richer western billionaires, so they can compete with the oilarchies.  But recently Russia been minting billionaires faster than US.  It’s really hard to state how startling that is.  America’s rich have done everything they can to rig the game so they will get richer, they have a bigger base economy to work off of, and they’re still losing the Red Queen’s race.  No matter how much they repress their own population, they can’t keep up with the folks who have the real gold of the modern economy: black gold.

Unfortunately, as stupid, venal and brutal as our enemies are (and if they aren’t your enemies you’re a fool or getting a pay check, or I hope you are), our leadership is even more stupid, venal and cowardly.  This entire generation of leadership on what passes for the left is beyond contemptible.  If they are not outright sell outs of the interests of those they claim to champion, then they are willing to betray anyone but their members, and if with rare exceptions (in the US, basically, the gay leadership) they are cowards, unwilling to risk themselves in any way, unwilling to actually fight.  They cavill and moan and condemn anyone who actually fights back. Watching fools demanding that the man who threw a pie at Murdoch be condemned for violence was beyond sad, it was a farce.  Violence?  It reminded me of all the hand wringing when an Iraqi threw a shoe at George Bush, a war criminal and mass murderer.  Oh dear.

And so, while the young are being radicalized, the leaders of the left are unable to provide leadership.  They have been selected to be weak and cowardly, to be unwilling to fight, to be compromisers trying to get the best deal possible as long as that deal doesn’t upset the status quo in any real way.

This varies by country.  I have more hope, say, for Greece (after they set the finance ministry alight) than I do for the US.  But the first job of the left in most countries is not to fight the right, it is to destroy the leadership of the left.  To drive them out of power and into the wilderness and either to replace them or to create new forms of organization.  And it is to understand that class war is like war, there will be casualties.  People will be beaten, people will be killed, people will go to jail.  That is what will happen.  It can be avoided in only one way, surrender.  Suffer exactly what the oligarchs want you to suffer and you will be allowed to live and die in what passes for peace.  It will be a peace filled with suffering, hunger, deprivation, and violence not primarily from the authorities but from each other, but if that’s what you want, it’s available.  Always understanding, of course, that anyone who won’t fight will have to accept anything the oligarchs do.  Anything.  When you won’t fight, you only get even scraps if it is someone else’s interest.

There’s an old saying about living on your knees or fighting on your feet.  The problem with that is that once you’ve said you’re willing to live on your knees the next question is “will you crawl on your belly?”

And so, in this, not the twilight of the post-war era, for that has passed, but in the dawn of what the oligarchs hope is a new conservative order, that is the question you must answer, “will I crawl on my belly, will I fight, or will I try to make a separate peace?”

The cost of a separate peace, of course, is a sliver of your soul.

One a day.

I think the oligarchs are overplaying their hand

By

On July 2, 2011

Comments

In particular the Greek “bailout” was a mistake.  A horribly punitive measure, with virtually the entire “Socialist” party voting for it, it wasn’t a bailout of Greece, but a bailout of investors.  As part of the response, the Greek ministry of finance was set alight.

The oligarchs, by making peaceful revolution impossible, have, as Kennedy pointed out, made violent revolution inevitable.  Since democratically elected representatives are more concerned with doing the will of the rich, rather than the public, and since there is no party willing to do the will of the population (or even live up to their own principles, a socialist party voting for an investor bailout is not socialist), my expectation is that during the next bailout (and another one will be needed), that what representatives will be killed, to get through to them the message that no matter what the rich are offering, or threatening, there is a price for voting against the interests of the majority of the population.

Oh, and I notice that the prosecutors admitted the case against Strauss-Kahn was falling apart after his successor as IMF president was appointed and the Greek bailout passed.  Immediately after, even though the prosecutors knew it was weak before then.

Word is he was opposed to the Greek bailout, by the way.

What a remarkable coincidence.

They may have just elected him President of France.

Less Cuomo Fellation please

By

On June 26, 2011

Comments

Como’s still busy destroying unions and crushing standards of living in New York. I’m so pro-gay marriage I once didn’t talk to my father for 6 months because of an argument over it, but it is not the only issue, and it does not make Cuomo a good governor any more than any other single issue does.  He is still the enemy of anyone who believes economic justice, a fair wage or a good economy.

This, by the way, is another example of the shiny and how “progressives” get distracted by it.  The corporate financial interests, aka. the people who are destroying your standard of living and denying you universal health care, are cool with gay marriage and other socially progressive issues.  They don’t care whether you’re black, red, white, brown, pink with purple polka dots, or married to a man, woman, or someone in between, all they care is that you’re a debt slave or wage slave, squished firmly under their feet.  Cuomo firmly follows the policies of that class of people, he has nothing against gays, he has everything against making bankers and rich people pay for destroying the economy and intends to force the poor and middle class to pay the entire freight.

But hey, you’ll be married to the man or woman of your choice when you get kicked out of your house or apartment after you lose your job.

Shiny!

Page 26 of 36

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén