Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 4 of 34

Work & School Are Fundamentally Awful for Most People

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On February 2, 2022

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During the first year of the pandemic, there was a great deal of squealing about suicide. Turns out the squealers, as usual, were exactly wrong.

I have a friendly acquaintance who quit his job to teach the Alexander Technique online. He had a good paying consultant gig. First, for a month, he basically collapsed. Nine months later, he looks like a different person.

Daily life in our societies is essentially slavery. We spend most of the day doing what we are told, when we are told — things we would never do if we didn’t need the money, because without it we would wind up on the street.

For children, it is little different: School is training for work. Sit down, speak only when given permission, do what your’re told, the way you’re told to do it. Don’t even use the bathroom without permission.

Once the school or work day is over, we have a few hours, mostly, to do things like eat, wash, commute, and take care of family members — with perhaps a few hours of entertainment, usually something passive.

If we’re lucky, we get two days off a week, one of which most people spend on chores.

Our entire lives are oriented around doing what our masters tell us, when they tell us, in the way they want, and, if we refuse (unless we were born rich or are very lucky), we suffer.

So it’s no surprise that when we got a good period off from work or school, suicide rates dropped EVEN during a pandemic.

There was a plague, but people were still less likely to kill themselves than during ordinary work periods.

Wage slavery and school are just a description of everyday life for most people and almost any break from it, even due to a plague, is a relief.

I particularly find ridiculous all the adults who seem to have forgotten how happy most children were when school ended and summer break happened. School was and is, for most people, a lot less pleasant than “no school.” Not because of the subject matter learning (what little there is), but because the real teaching at school isn’t centered on subject matter, it’s centered on “how to be a good little slave so you’ll slave well for the bosses in the future.”

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The Psychological Difficulty of Radicalization

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On January 25, 2022

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“Radical” is a slur word in most of our discourse. “A radical” is someone who thinks society needs truly fundamental changes. If you are a democrat in a monarchy or a one-party state, you’re a radical. If you believe in equal rights in a state with rights based on rank, you’re a radical. If you believe in fascism in a democratic state, you are also a radical, and if you want to go back to women not having the vote and blacks only being able to vote in theory, you’re a radical, though we tend to call that style of radical a reactionary or sometimes a Republican.

Another kind of radical, perhaps the most common in our society, though still rare, is the type that believes that capitalism has to go away; that fundamental economic relationships shouldn’t be determined through markets controlled by capitalists. (You can be for markets, and against capitalism, weirdly, though it’s rare.)

It’s clear our societies have failed. We pretend they haven’t because the final collapse hasn’t happened, but that’s like saying that the Titanic hadn’t sunk after it hit the iceberg. Technically true, but believing it will get you hurt, bad. Might be good if other people believe it, though, while you sprint for the lifeboats.

The argument for this is tedious, and I’ve made it many times so I won’t bother here.

In the face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are okay with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you the line that everything is okay while they sprint for the lifeboats: a.k.a., New Zealand.)

For over ten years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that the US is the only developed nation heading for failed state status — for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but the US is one of the leaders in the failed-state race (Britain’s another), and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.

But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse, not in time.

We’re all in a big ship, and it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon, and the entire thing is going to sink.

And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps, have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.

But this article isn’t about how “we are fucked,” it’s about how “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”

And one of the big reasons for this is the need for “Daddy.” One of the big hurdles preventing radicalization is that becoming radicalized means you realize you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed you, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your best interest, but are your enemies.

I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple  years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.

But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family, and other groups — because at some level, you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come through and take care of things.

All your life, government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc. They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like  you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.

Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders, and those they lead.

An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.

But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change, environmental collapse, or any of our other problems (“handle” doesn’t mean “stop,” but many problems are essentially trivial, and could be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls), that means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely, and we need to get rid of our entire current leadership class, all of whom have proved their incompetence and ill will.

That’s radical. That’s a leap.

And that’s hard.

But acknowledging that there will be no real help from above until radical change happens is necessary, for the world, and if we can’t change them before they defenestrate themselves after trying to shove us all out the window first, to protect and care for yourselves in the face of a malign government and corporate class.

Corporate and government daddies and mommies aren’t going to save you. They’re the ones hurting you. They’re the ones making your life hell and destroying your world.

Accept that at your core.

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Western Australia Proves Basic Pandemic Control Methods Would Have Stopped Covid

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On January 21, 2022

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Western Australia:

Per Capita Cases, Western Australia: .11%.

Per Capita Deaths, Western Australia: practically none.

Per Capita Cases, Australia: 8.1%

Per Capita Deaths, Australia: .12%

Per Capita Cases, USA: 21%

Per Capita Deaths, USA: .26%

Australia is famous, or perhaps infamous, for its lockdowns, but Western Australia has essentially closed its borders since Covid. Australia has thus done far better than the US, with fewer cases and even fewer deaths per capita. Western Australia, on the other hand, essentially hasn’t had a pandemic, at least not in terms of deaths and cases.

Of course, all numbers will be under-counts, but I doubt the overall picture changes because of that.

What this tells you is something simple: Basic measures for dealing with a plague were required to control Covid and would have worked. If travel, except for shipping, had been shut down the way that Western Australia did (ship crews staying on ships), then Covid would be controlled, and most likely, over by now.

Simply stopping travelers (or at least forcing them into long quarantines) is probably the oldest method of plague control in history, used for thousands of years.

We didn’t even do that. Our leaders wanted us to die and get sick, and we did. Our media rains contempt on places which dare control Covid. In those cases where our leaders preferred we not die, and were willing to do what is necessary to ensure our health and well-being, we did not die.

Had we done things right, at the start, there would have been no Omicron and probably no Delta. It wasn’t hard, it would have spared the economy in the long run, and a lot of people wouldn’t be dead or have long Covid, with more to come.

Let NO ONE tell you that letting Covid run free as a plague was not a choice. It has more than doubled the wealth of billionaires, and so a choice was made: Their money was more important than your life or health, or that of your parents, grandparents, children, or friends.

People were killed so the rich could get richer. Every one of you who has Long Covid has it because that’s what the rich wanted, so they could get richer.

Had this been done properly, at the start, or even after a couple months, we also would most likely be finished with most Covid restrictions — except maybe a few travel bans to a few countries, so, ironically, clamping down hard would have made any civil liberties restrictions (the right to infect other people or force your workers to infect others) brief and not in danger of turning chronic, like Covid.

Your leaders kill you, disable you, and they do it to get richer.

Understand that at your core. They are your enemies, by any reasonable definition of enemy, with a few rare exceptions, like in Western Australia.

(Near the start of the plague I noted that if US states wanted to control Covid, those which did the right things (currently, so far as I know, none of them) would be required to close their borders to other US states. Western Australia shows the difference that makes.)

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Elevated from Comments: This comment, from GM, is important enough that I’ve partially quoted it here:

1. Over the last few days they have had one, then two, then five, then now seven local cases, and they are not in lockdown to stop it (while previously, they did lockdown for three days over even a single case). So there is a real danger that this is deliberately allowed to get out of hand and then McGowan says “Well, it is out of the bag now, we will reopen.” There have been mentions from the local government previously that if an outbreak gets out of control, they will reopen, and this would be following the script that played out already elsewhere (NSW, VIC, Vietnam, Singapore, etc.) that allows the government to both ease the population into endemic COVID and save face by putting a “Look, we tried our best, but there is nothing that can be done” facade over it.

2. There is a long-standing suspicion that the local oligarchs controlling the mining industry in Western Australia are the ones pushing for keeping COVID out. Not because of concern for the wellbeing of the general population, but because they want to keep it out of the mines. Of course, mines have been operating in the midst of devastating COVID outbreaks in Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, etc. But WA is a bit of a special case because of how remote from any significant population centers most of their mines are. So if you get all of your workers seriously sick at the same time, it will be a very problematic logistic operation to transport them from somewhere in Middleofnowhereville in Pillbara to Perth, which is the only location within a 1500 km radius that can treat them. And Perth’s hospitals are barely keeping up with their load even without COVID (due to many years of the usual neoliberal defund-and-crapify practices).

1) and 2) are mutually exclusive, unless there are, indeed, as is rumored, plans to impose intrastate borders in case Perth is lost, so that COVID does not spread to the mining regions.

Again, on Omicron & “Just Give Up and Let Everyone Get It”

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On January 4, 2022

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Start with this:

Omicron is more infectious than Delta. Its symptoms are concentrated more in the upper respiratory tract, which is one reason it is substantially less deadly, but upper respiratory tract infections are worse for children and better for adults.

Though it’s unclear how much less deadly Omicron is than Delta (because there are too many confounding variables like previous infection and vaccination), let’s do some clarifying math, as if you were back in school.

If Omicron is half as deadly as Delta, and four times as many people get it, how many people will die compared to Delta?

If five times as many people get it will more people die or less?

This is before we get into the question of hospitals being overwhelmed, meaning some people don’t get care, including people with problems other than Covid.

Then we have the multiplication of re-infection. Omicron appears to be optimized for re-infection. It’s not a case of “everyone gets it.” It’s a question of “How many times will you get it and does each time increase the chance of organ damage/Long Covid and/or death?” You can get the flu multiple times, then die from the last time, happened to one of my friends in his 30s.

Finally, a variant this widespread has many, many more chances to mutate. It might mutate towards even more mildness, but there’s no guarantee of that. Delta certainly wasn’t more mild.

Sending children back to schools during the Omicron surge is insanity.

I notice, also, that at least two nations are handling Omicron: China and Japan, so it isn’t a case of, “It can’t be done,” and gnashing, weeping, and pretending that we would do something — if something was possible. Something has always been possible and most nations have always refused to do what needed to be done.

That something has always been a mix of policies; not just vaccines, but track-and-trace, quarantines, lockdown, and improved ventilation. (Indeed it may be that one reason Japan is doing so well is that they acknolwedged Covid was airborne early and have taken that into account in their response.) US schools keeping doors and windows locked out of fear of shooters is an amazing case of statistical innumeracy, and every country which hasn’t been changing ventilation systems to deal with Covid is a country which is not serious about saving lives and avoiding a mass crippling of their population.

Covid has been a mass-crippling event. Millions of people will be disabled, for who knows who long, with affects on our societies and our sacred economies which will, themselves, be disabled.

Nor is there any particular reason to think that “herd immunity” from natural immunity will work, as Covid is good at re-infecting and immunity drops fast.

This is a brilliant and wonderful scenario for anyone who owns shares in vaccine manufacturers, with their boosters every few months (more often than every six, as we are seeing it), but bad for everyone else.

Covid is and always was a worldwide phenomena, which required a worldwide response. That could have happened if the major powers had agreed and done not only the right things themselves, but also assisted everyone else in doing the right thing. Instead, vaccine chauvinism, profit opportunities, and so on took precedence.

China’s leaders, totalitarian tyrants, apparently cared enough about their population to stop Covid, even at economic cost. Our leaders, seeing that Covid was a huge profit opportunity (billionaire wealth has about doubled), decided that mass death and disabling was a cost they were happy for their “free” subjects to pay.

Who are the barbarians?

And now it’s killing and crippling our children.

Your leaders kill and hurt you for money and power. That is how they have acted since Reagan and Thatcher took power.

They’re killing you. They’re killing your children. They’re crippling you. They’re crippling your children.

You make excuses for them, but the Chinese and Japanese leaders made other choices and so far, at least, they have avoided mass death among adults, elders, and children. Perhaps they’ll be overwhelmed eventually, I don’t know, but so far they’ve held the line.

Your leaders kill, cripple, hurt, and impoverish you for money. They’re doing it to your children now.

Is there anything they can and will do that will cause revolution?

Because removing them, en-masse, and trying them for their crimes is the only thing that will ever make the world better, or give  you even the faintest chance of dealing with climate change and environmental collapse in a humane manner.

Covid has been a practice run for when climate change starts really hitting. It shows which societies are able to respond to a collective challenge.

Most of our societies have failed and because climate change, like Covid, is a world problem, that a few societies haven’t failed is unlikely to matter much, even to them. They’ll just stay together under pressure longer than we will.

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Meat Packer Profits Up 300%

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On December 16, 2021

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Reuters:

This isn’t caused by supply chain shortages, it’s caused by pure greed operating through an oligopoly which is sure that governments won’t stop them.

When we let insulin prices go up to hundreds of dollars for a vial that costs under $4 to produce, something we knew would kill a ton of people, when we let them raise prices on a bevy of drugs which cost almost nothing to produce, we let every businessman know that, no matter what the consequences, price-gouging was A-OK. If it’s okay to kill sick people with price gouging, what’s off the table?

(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.)

The solution to this is to break up the oligopolies and to charge executives with conspiracies under RICO, which allows all their money to be removed as the product of a crime and forces them to use public defenders. (If it’s okay to do this to serial killers, who kill a lot less people than most oligopolists, then I don’t see why the real criminals should be spared).

As I’ve written in the past, modern capitalism is simply predators feasting on herd animals.

Our era is built on three ideological assertions:

  1. There is no such thing as society.
  2. Greed is good.
  3. There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and, therefore, no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society; there is no alternative.

Your lords and masters, for that is how they see themselves, hurt, impoverish, and kill you for money they don’t even need. You are the sheep, and they are the herders, and the cops are the sheepdogs, just like the cops say.

They have even less regard for you than most farmers, though, since they figure there are more of you than they need, and thus, they see no need to care for you the way a good farmer cares for his animals until he kills them for food.

Remember, everything evil they do and are rewarded for simply leads to the question, “What else can we do to make even more money?”

Until the consequence of them hurting and killing “sheep” is that they start dying, or have something worse than dying happen to them (time in ultra-max’s counts), they’re going to kill and hurt more and more, because they are rewarded for it, and most of them get off on it.

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Privatization Is Always A Ripoff

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On November 11, 2021

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Water edition, from the UK

Analysis in 2020 found that privatised (sic) water companies paid £57bn in dividends to shareholders since their foundation in 1991 to 2019. Now they say they need better infrastructure to stop piping sewage into rivers, lakes, and sea.

Up here in Toronto, Canada, we privatized half our trash collection, dividing the city in half. The West has private collection, the East has public. When it went into force, the arguments were strong: private was cheaper. Now, a few years later:

Oh, hey, what a surprise. It costs more and they pay workers less than the City does.

Let’s keep this simple, as free market fundamentalists who usually understand nothing about markets often say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” TANSTAAFL.

Private companies have to make a profit. Public companies do not. Private companies are not miraculously more efficient, to be cheaper than public companies, they have cut costs. Often that is wages, other times it is not paying to maintain or upgrade infrastructure required to keep sewage out of the water.

For anything where we know how to do it; where there is actually little room for innovation, and where the service provided is about the same for everyone (this includes almost all universal or near universal insurance, all utilities including water and power and internet) public provision is more efficient and private provision can only be cheaper by cutting costs you don’t want cut. That includes, of course, pushing costs into the future: the trash company in Toronto knew it’d raise prices in the future, it undercut for a few years to get its foot in the door.

Once you do privatize it can be difficult to take something back public. You’ve sold the assets, and the people you sold them to are making money and don’t want to sell back. Especially at lower levels of government you may not be able to force them to, or force them to at a reasonable price. In addition, they now have a constituency of rich people who need them to continue (investors, executives) and who can use their money to lobby and bribe officials.

As a rule, most privatizations are fraud, and the politicians who do them are corrupt, helping out friends and donors and doing well out of the process. Most politicians who do this should be treated as criminals and thrown in prison for defrauding the public, corruption and fraud.

(About half of the neoliberal agenda initiated by Thatcher and Reagan was and is just “privatize everything you can so the rich can get richer.” It’s not capitalism, it’s rentierism and corruption and makes economies weaker, not stronger.)

TANSTAAFL. There is no free lunch, if a private company can make money off a public asset, it’s been sold to them for less than its worth, and the people who will pay in the end are taxpayers.

If it is a public good, it should be provided publicly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

I Was Shocked To Find Out How Many People The Terror Killed

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On October 29, 2021

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Twenty-seven thousand. Seventeen thousand executed, ten thousand died in prison.

This is slightly less than 1/1000th of the French population.

This was the Terror? A higher percentage of Americans died in WWII, the Civil War, this pandemic (1 in 500) and nothing compared to, say, the Great Irish famine or hell, tons of other geopolitical events.

Now I’m not saying it was good, but the shadow it throws over our imagination is HUGE and I genuinely thought far more people had died because of it.

Perhaps it’s who mostly died: first aristocrats then various radicals (largely bourgeois) as they fought among themselves. Mostly somewhat important people. That must have terrified everyone of importance in every other European country: if it spread, they were for the chop. They wrote the first edition of history, and their personal terror has come down to us.

Napoleon, now his wars killed a vast number of people, somewhere between 3,250,000 to 6,500,000, but the Terror itself? No.

Mark Twain probably said it best in his “The Other Terror”, which I’ve quoted before and will quote again today.

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

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The Perceived Self-Interest Of The Rich And Powerful

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On October 28, 2021

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Yesterday I had a brief article, which noted a general rule, “only things the rich and powerful believe will benefit them will be done” and applied it to shortages, suggesting that if the rich and powerful are benefiting from them, no serious action will be taken to end the crisis in countries where that is true.

I wanted to note that this is a general rule. It applied to Covid (70% increase in the wealth of billionaires) and it applies to climate change: most powerful people are old, they’re going to die before climate change gets bad, or that’s their bet, and for those who aren’t, they seem to assume their money will protect them. In Britain there’s a debate over forcing private water companies to stop spewing sewage, but so far, the government is resisting making them do so: after all, because dividends and stock option are more important.

Without a change in who runs government, who’s rich, and who runs the big firms, this sort of calculus, “does it affect we few powerful and rich?” will continue and I’d suggest using it as a heuristic for if something will be done. Sometimes it’ll be wrong, but the vast majority of the time it will work out.

It’s not impossible for this rule to get you something you might like. For example, there’s a push in some corporate circles towards a guaranteed income, simply because they need customers and are aware that too many people are becoming poor. Those businesses which want to sell mass quantities of goods without extreme markups thus need the working and middle class not to be completely impoverished.

But, overall, the rich and powerful are different, in the sense that they don’t see their interests as the same as those of ordinary people, and they have the ability to act on those perceived interests.

Take it into account. Build it into your worldview.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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