Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 8 of 36

Way Past Time to Leave America

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On June 10, 2021

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I wrote this article in January of 2010. I’m re-posting it because, alas, it is STILL important. I had some hope Biden could at least put through a good economic package; I was wrong.

My errors are far more often on the side of “hope” and optimism than pessimism, which is something people who consider me a pessimist get wrong.

I have updated commentary after the piece.

The Unvarnished Truth About the US

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products, the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all, if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are available anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have ten months to do something and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology, or anything else, and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, along with ologopolistic markets, and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed.”

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before -— and even then, it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough, and corporations weak enough, for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this:

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US, places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to to the US understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than the US, and they came to a place where they thought freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now -— it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure, if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.

I understand that not everyone can leave the US. Look within the US for places that will be least affected. I don’t know what those are. I suggest being willing to adopt “protective” coloring; if you aren’t, and things go really south, understand that the right (and a big chunk of what passes for the center in the US) is itching to do a purge of left-wingers and, indeed, of a lot of centrists (the Clintons, for example).

Next, I’m Canadian, and despite our image, things aren’t going great in Canada. We are badly infected by US-style politics, but even if we happen to win against them (not a sure bet at all — and remember my comment about my errors being errors of optimism), we are a US satrapy which the US may decide to take direct control of. Even if they don’t, Canada cannot realistically resist most US demands if the US is serious; well, not without steps Canada has refused to take, like getting a credible deterrent.

Smart Jews fled Germany to other European nations, and wound up in the camps anyway.

Canada and Mexico (a completely failing state) may well not be far enough away.

Next: Understand that the world IS moving towards a new cold war. It looks like China/Russia + allies vs. America/Europe plus allies, at least so far. There is some chance that Europe will try to go third-path, but so far it is choosing to go with the US, despite misgivings. You can see this in its rejection of Huawei 5G, after a great deal of wavering. Some countries even started to deploy 5G, and are now dismantling it.

There are some other considerations, like China now competing with Germany more than being a customer, but overall Europe seems to be choosing the current hegemon over the new rising one. This is a startling failure on the part of Jingping (who is incompetent at almost everything except controlling the Party). Other countries should be falling into China’s arms, but China now wants to be a bully, too; to reap the rights of being powerful.

So, where you settle will have a lot to do with your future mobility; which part of the walled internet you’re in and so on. Look at countries and consider which side they’ll be on, or if or how they might manage the neutrality dance. This will matter for extradition, visiting the relatives, what technology you use and much more (Russia, for example, is where people in the US really want go, not because Russia is great (it’s a mafia state) but because Russia won’t extradite).

It is, of course, possible that I am wrong, and the US will pull it out. Every great nation (“great” is not a synonym for “good”) pulls it out over and over again until they don’t. England lost an empire then created another, for example, but Britain seems unlikely to exist soon: Both Northern Ireland and Scotland will likely go, and it’ll just be England and Wales again (and even Wales may go in 20 to 30 years, which would be losing a possession conquered 800 years ago).

So, it’s always possible that the US will pull it out. History goes in waves: There was a Gilded Age before, and it ended. That may happen again this time, either by force or luck of disaster.

That said, I don’t think that’s where the smart money is, and you’ll be gambling with more than your life.

If you do stay, remember that you have two defenses: (1) Other people who care for you and will fight with you (fight is not entirely a metaphor here), and; (2) Anonymity: Sliding along with no one really knowing anything about you and your beliefs (far harder than it once was).

All of this is complicated by climate change and environmental collapse putting pressure on systems never designed to withstand shocks.

Be well and be safe, whatever you do.

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CDC Decides to Just Not Count All Covid Cases

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On May 25, 2021

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If you’re vaccinated, you can still get Covid, but… (courtesy of my favorite Dalek.)

Now, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped investigating breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people unless they become so sick that they are hospitalized or die.

Now, this may seem reasonable, but people with breakthrough Covid can give it to other people, and they can get Long Covid from it.

And, yeah, you can still die.

Earlier this year, the agency was monitoring all cases. Through the end of April, when some 101 million Americans had been vaccinated, the CDC had received 10,262 reports of breakthrough infections from 46 states and territories, a number that was very likely “a substantial undercount,” according to a CDC report issued on Tuesday….(my emphasis)

Some 995 people were known to have been hospitalized, and 160 had died, though not always because of Covid-19, the new study said. The median age of those who died was 82.

So, we’re not going to count cases unless they wind up in the hospital, but the people with Covid are still infectious and can still die (looks like about a 1.5 percent chance, based on the numbers above).

This, along with the decision to stop recommending masks for people who are fully vaccinated (which, yeah, people who don’t believe in vaccination will lie about) smacks of “the pandemic is all but over, nothing to see here.”

“If we don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist!”

Neither the CDC, nor the WHO have covered themselves in glory during this pandemic. In fact, they have burned credibility like it’s ten cent oil, and they want to set the world on fire. They said masks didn’t help, then they changed their minds. They resisted evidence that the virus was airborne vigorously, and as a result, didn’t emphasize proper ventilation. They were wrong about schools, where, yes, children and teachers do get infected and pass it on.

What should have be a disease we stomped into the ground is now likely to become chronic (also because of refusal to share vaccine manufacturing information), which will, it must be admitted, earn Pharma tens of billions of dollars every year, so I guess that’s a win. And who really needed old people, or people who are immune-compromised? Think of all the saved money on pensions and healthcare for people who are mostly worth more dead than alive to governments and corporations. (Especially since the kids of old people can spend their money. It doesn’t require mom or dad or grandpa or grandma to be alive.)

Back in the Bush era, a joke I liked was: “Stupid or evil?”

“Why not both?”

It sure is fun to be ruled by incompetent psychopaths.

Over in Britain, the government is now trying to deny that they started off with a herd immunity strategy: “Let almost everyone get it and who cares if grandma dies?” But anyone with a memory span of more than year remembers that they did.

Psychopaths. The rich get richer if Covid isn’t stopped. The richest people in the world have seen massive increases in their wealth and income because of Covid. Life is fucking marvelous and Covid has been a blessing.

Understand this in your bones. The people making decisions not only don’t care if you die, if you dying will make them richer or more powerful, they’ll go with the decision path that leads to you or your mum or your best friend dying or winding up homeless. You are nothing to them, you’re meat. A prey animal.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

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The Ugly Reality of America’s Powerful

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On April 22, 2021

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It’s been a while since January 6th, and on economic domestic affairs, Biden’s turned out somewhat better than I expected, but nothing’s really changed in terms of his legitimacy:

78 percent of Republicans think Biden stole the US election.

That is a broken country, folks. Fourty-five percent think the January 6th occupation was justified, which seems oddly low; I’d certainly think it was justified — if I also believed the election was stolen. In fact, I’d think it was mild, and that far more than that was justified. In a democracy, stolen elections can’t be tolerated, which is why Gore was wrong to stand down in the face of Bush’s theft in 2000.

What the US has, is a broken media system: There are two sets of facts circulating, and often more, on many issues, and people live in completely different worlds. Most Democrats don’t have any Republican friends, and vice-versa.

The weird bit is that false narratives are driven by facts with ur-truth. “Q” is wrong about the specifics, but not wrong that many American elites are pedophiles. Part of the Q myth is that rich people use a drug made from the pituitary gland of tortured children: That’s not true, but some elites do use the blood of young people (in their twenties) to help rejuvenate themselves.

Ironically, there was a great deal of election fixing, mostly by Republicans. It’s like the old joke from the Iraq war era: “We know they have WMD, we have the receipts!” Biden won despite vast Republican efforts to suppress the vote, but Democrats also suppressed the third-party vote, keeping Green candidates off the ballot wherever they could in a sickening anti-democratic display, and did a great deal during the primary that was anti-democratic against Sanders. It’s not that Democrats don’t believe in suppressing votes; they don’t believe in suppressing their votes, and in general elections, the more people vote, the more Democrats win, unless they’re pesky third-party voters.

The UR-Stories told, then, are true. US elites are evil, anti-democratic, and many are at least pedophile-adjacent (see all the pictures of famous politicians and other rich people with Jeffrey Epstein, including Clinton and Bill Gates.)

Even leaving aside the blood bit, the rich do live off the health of young people: The younger the generation, the poorer they are compared to previous generations. The US economy destroys the health of poor people for the benefit of rich people. Ordinary people, by the time they’re sixty tend to look old; rich people tend to still look young, and keep charging around well into their seventies due to avoiding hard physical labor, eating very expensive food (which is, overall, better for them) and using far superior health care, which they can afford, and the poor and middle class can’t.

The US is an oligarchy where the rich and powerful live longer and are healthier and richer because they oppress everyone else. That’s a fact. The mechanisms of how they do so are boring: Obama immunizing all the bankers and helping them steal people’s homes. Trump’s gigantic tax cut for the rich. The IRS hardly auditing rich people. Laws that make it easy to hide money offshore. Private islands where unspeakable lusts are indulged, and entirely legal use of young people’s blood to feel younger.

Most of this is done out in the open. If you were in the right circles, “everyone knew” about Epstein, but he was protected by the intelligence agencies, presumably because pictures of important people with underage girls are very, very valuable. The laws are passed in the Senate; the Treasury and the Department of Justice bail out and immunize the rich and everyone who belongs to the club is taken care of unless they steal from the club (Madoff) or egregiously embarrass the club by constantly talking up their evil like Martin Shkreli, the so-called “Pharma Bro.” Plenty of other pharma execs have jacked up prices and killed people, including for epi-pens and insulin, but those execs didn’t scream about it to the rooftops.

So conspiracy theories like “Q” are garbage, but they work because the ur-truth is that US and Western elites are, in fact, evil and engaged in hurting and killing ordinary people. It’s just that most of how they do it, Epstein aside, is boring and at scale.

So the US is broken. Republicans think the election was stolen. Back in 2000, an election was actually stolen, and voter suppression and election fixing is routine. Rich people do kill and hurt you for money, and a lot of rich people do seem to like under-aged girls, but certainly don’t need to go to some pizza joint to indulge.

There’s no need for “Q” or most other conspiracy theories (though surely, there are conspiracies). Most of the evil is done in the cold light of day.

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Why Do We Do That?

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On April 19, 2021

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So today I stopped by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and picked up a small bottle of sake.

The teller seemed unhappy, so we chatted for a bit. I told him I’d worked at the LCBO for a couple months about 25 years ago (for the Christmas season), and he opened up a bit.

“Yes, it was a better job then. It was also a better job eight years ago, or three years ago. It just gets a bit worse every year, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than most jobs: we have a pension, and not a lot of jobs offer one any more, but…”

The long and short of it is that every year management tries to take away a little bit of what makes working for the LCBO a pretty good job. It’s still pretty good, but if this doesn’t reverse, one day it won’t be.

This has been going on for decades; a couple generations at least, arguably three to four generations. In the US, working class male wages peaked in real terms in 1968, the year I was born, and I have white hair.

We just keep making life worse for a huge chunk of our population; this is true in Canada, in the US, and in most of Europe.

Our rich are the richest rich in his -— ah, forget it. You’ve heard me say it many times.

And I can tell you the “reasons,” but at the heart of it, I don’t fucking get it. How rich do these assholes need to be? How many private jets and vacation homes and $50k/day hotel room stays do they need? Do they really think their pleasure is worth so much more than billions of people’s suffering? Because much of what they do hits the developing world hard.

Why are they such scum? So evil?

Why do we run a society that is just making things worse for so many people (don’t waste my time with the “extreme poverty numbers,” they’re bullshit)? Why do we have more homes than homeless; waste a third of our food and have hungry people? Why are we on track to kill about half of all known life forms on Earth?

Why are we so stupid, evil, and selfish as a species? Why is our leadership made of so many people who could only, truly, improve the world by taking a long jump of a short pier?

I mean, Bill Gates fought hard to keep vaccines under patent. He’s never been a good actor, of course, but, here, he is protecting his interests by hurting people in the middle of a global pandemic, despite having more money than he could possibly need if he lived a million lifespans.

We have a pair of huge problems as humans:

  1. We’re badly led.
  2. Enough of us support terrible leadership for it to just keep happening.

Either we fix those problems, or Earth is going to continue to be Hell for much of the human race and worse than hell for non-human life.

But, emotionally, I still just don’t get these people. The Clintons’, Bushses, Obamas’, Bidens’, Bezos’, Waltons and so on. They just hurt people, hurt people, and hurt people, over and over again. There’s something deeply wrong with them, and with us as a species that these types of people wind up leading us over and over and over again.

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Only Zero Covid Worked and Everyone Knows It

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On April 6, 2021

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Vietnam has a population of 96 million and 34 Covid Deaths.

America has a population of 328 million and 550,000 Covid Deaths.

 

Australia has a population of 25 million, and 909 deaths.

The UK has a population of 67 million people and 127,000 deaths.

 

South Korea has a population of 52 million, and 1,752 deaths.

Germany has a population of 83 million, and 77,136 deaths.

 

Now here’s the thing, this has been known for at least six to eight months.

You shut down everything except actual essential services until cases are essentially at zero. You track and trace. You quarantine travelers. Any outbreaks afterwards, you shut down the area, HARD.

You can avoid mass lockdowns ONLY if you track and trace furiously at the start, with immediate traveler quarantine, and local quarantines as necessary, along with a mask mandate and other such policies. (See, Taiwan.) Never let Covid get out of control, and no widespread lockdown is necessary.

This works.

Taiwan, population 23 million, 10 deaths

New Zealand, population 5 million, 26 deaths.

Sweden, population 10 million, 13.5K deaths.

So, any government which had the capacity to do this and did not, after the first wave proved it worked, essentially chose to kill a huge number of people who didn’t need to die. Mass negligent homicide, at best.

It also turns out, to the surprise of no one with two brain cells, that Zero Covid produces better economic results than reopening repeatedly and allowing multiple waves.

What Zero Covid doesn’t do, however, is make the rich much, much richer while everyone else suffers. US billionaires increased their wealth 44 percent; 1.3 trillion, over the course of the pandemic until March.

That is SWEET. Forty-Four percent in about a year. Holy shit. This last year has to be one of the best times ever to the filthy rich.

Each US Covid death was worth $4,268 to America’s billionaires.

Is it any wonder that Covid was allowed to reign largely unchecked?

What a great time to be a billionaire! And it isn’t even over yet!

Edit: Article corrected to include the strategy which works with no or limited lockdowns.

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Has the Era of Ordinary Americans Thinking They Are “Pre-Rich” Ended?

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On April 2, 2021

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Nice statistic here:

Buried in the new Morning Consult/Politico poll is an eye-popping statistic: Voters by a 2-to-1 margin prefer a $3 trillion infrastructure bill that includes tax hikes on $400K+ and corporations over one that excludes those tax hikes.

For most of my life, tax-cuts were the mantra of the generation and tax-raises were automatically bad. These tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the rich, but Americans, Canadians, and Brits were all for it.

As many observed, it seemed they believed that one day they would be rich, and therefore that high taxes on rich people were bad.

Now, that seems to have changed, and I suspect it’s that Americans have finally got it through their thick heads that no, most of them will never be rich, and moreover the reason they’ll never be rich is because the people who already are, are kneeling on their necks (fortunately, just on their windpipes, not a full blood choke. Well, for most people the rich are only on their windpipes — most.)

This changes things. Certainly many politicians want to do what the rich want done, because the rich will take care of them, their families, their friends, and their mistresses and boy-toys, but there are always some who are more interested in power and winning, and if the rich don’t offer the best path to victory, they’re perfectly happy to stick a shiv in them and display the bleeding body for the masses.

Yup, that’s where we are. The Pandemic, with the rich getting massively richer while the working class died, was evicted, and generally suffered so that the wealthy and upper middle class could sip delivered lattes in their houses while tapping delicately into their computers, having Zoom meetings, and feeling sorry for themselves may well have been the straw that finally broke the back on the delusion of being “pre-rich.”

We aren’t all in this together, and we never were. It’s been class warfare for as long as humans have lived in “civilizations” (and often enough, before). Some people benefit by hurting other people. Since about 79/80, the rich have been clearly winning the class wars, driving their enemies before them, and thrilling to the lamentations of their men and women.

It’s been glorious! The modern rich are the richest rich to have ever existed, richer than in the Gilded Age. Shitting in golden toilets is nothing; these people travel the world in yachts the size of a village or on private jets, between their half dozen mansions or hotels which charge $50K a night, whose entrance you or I would never be allowed to see.

All while overseeing economies which have broken the backs of the poor and middle class and are on track to kill half the world’s species and over a billion humans.

Clarity having arrived at last, it’s time to break the rich even more than the Great Crash, Great Depression, and marginal tax rates of 94 percent did. Slap on the wealth taxes, raise the marginal tax rate on income more than 10x median to 99 percent, tax corporations, disallow share buy backs, kick foreign money out of real-estate markets, tax empty homes, create a wealth tax on anything more than 30x median, and slap an estate tax on anything over the same; your kids don’t get to rule over everyone else because you were rich. (Yes, yes, put in an exemption for actual family (small) farms and actually family (small) businesses.)

Drive the rich to the edge of extinction, into utter despair. Thrill to the lamentations of their men and women.

And don’t feel bad about it, they’ll just have to get by with, say, three or five times the median per year.

What a horror. They might only live three to five times better than most people ever do.

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When You’ll Get a More Equal Society

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On March 10, 2021

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So, it seems that the salaries of junior bankers are being cut so that senior bankers can have bigger bonuses. At UBS, the average bonus for senior bankers is $2.1 million.

Niiiiice.

Unless you’re a junior banker. Or a customer.

A given means of production, combined with a resource base, will throw off some amount of surplus. That surplus is divided among the population based entirely on their power. Sometimes that power comes from scarcity, often managed scarcity as in the Medieval Guild system, or un-managed scarcity during the first decades of a technological change (hello, programmers!), but most often it comes out of the barrel of a gun, from the point of a spear, or from the edge of a sword.

In Against the Grain, about the rise of early kingdoms after agriculture, the author points out that in agricultural systems where the farmer produces a single major crop, it is really easy to take away all but the bare minimum for the farmer’s survival; you know how much land, how much rainfall, when the crop is harvested, and where the farmer lives. The farmers mostly can’t run away, and they can’t win a fight against professional warriors, so you can just take their crops. In the Middle Ages, there are accounts of knights fighting peasants who outnumbered the knights a hundred to one and the knights came out not just victorious, but with nothing but minor injuries. The peasants, well, they got massacred.

Our own society is similar. Bankers have, along with various adjacent industries and central banks (somehow given “independence”), a monopoly on creating money (which they create as debt). This monopoly, of course, is enforced by the government, and the government’s enforcement rests on men with guns (and, these days, a few women), plus prisons where they brutalize you. Opening a new bank is very, very hard.

Then, within banks, the seniors take most of the gains, as one would expect.

None of this would work without those men with guns and ugly prisons, though.

There are variations on this, of course. After WWII, when a huge percentage of the male population knew how to fight effectively in groups, why, by coincidence the deal was more even. When those men aged out, why, somehow the deal got worse. (This isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one.)

Inequality tracks with force being unequal. When a few men are superior to a huge mass of other men, then inequality soars. The feudal knight was genuinely superior to peasants. Greek Hoplites were equal to each other, but ruled over a huge mass of slaves. The same goes for the Roman legionnaires — but notice the Equites (who could afford a horse to bring to the fight) had higher legal status and rights.

Mercenary armies and police, like most armies and police in the world, are wonderful for this. They’re loyal to whomever pays them. Most revolutions happen when there is a financial crisis for a reason.

So, get control of force and use it to control money/means of production, or get control of money/means of production and use it to create force. Obviously it’s really about some of both, but you use whichever one you have more of to get control over the other one. Wall Street bought DC so that it could have control over the police and courts, which is why Obama immunized them from their crimes and bailed them out — including from really raw and obvious crimes like illegally signing a document saying the bank owned someone else’s house. Absolute fraud and straight robbery: That’s what Obama made go away for the financial industry.

Some of those people who had their houses stolen, in a society with less police and military and nasty prisons, might have taken retribution and recompense into their own hands, but in the US, well, no, that’s really not possible. You might get retribution, but then the cops will imprison or kill you, which they didn’t do to the men who stole your house and probably your job, car, and future.

In raw terms, this is the situation in the US and a lot of other countries (certainly in Britain). A small minority has control over force and money, and as they feel more and more secure in their control of those two things, they take more and more of what the society produces.

The 2008/9 Obama and the Fed was a watershed incident. The rich had lost everything. Absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they had “won” the bet like Goldman Sachs, because if I win a bet with you and you lose all your money, I’m fucked too. The Fed and other central banks bailed them out to the tune of trillions; Obama and other political leaders immunized them from their crimes (and the entire bubble was based on fraud), and our elites then KNEW, without a doubt, that they were in complete control and that they could do anything, and that the violent authorities would bail them out and protect them from their victims.

And that, my friends, is where we are now. There will be no significant downward redistribution until elites either lose control of the violent apparatus, or genuinely think they are about to, or can’t win their side of an oncoming revolution.

Or, of course, until the fact that there is a real economy and environment, and they aren’t just mismanaging it, but effectively burning it down to make money, causes an economic collapse where suddenly money can’t buy the mercenaries’ loyalty any more.

Fun time to be alive.

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Jackson, Mississippi in Third Week Without Water

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On March 4, 2021

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So, another mess. Even before this, much of the water was unsafe and probably lead-poisoned. There are no high-level talks between the State and the city — which is the State capital!

American un-development continues. What is also striking is the complete incapability and unwillingness to handle problems. It’s the third week and the state and the city aren’t in high-level talks? Meanwhile, this news has not gone national: There is no American effort to help Jackson, any more than there was a national effort of any significance to help Flint with its water problems.

This is no longer a society where you can count on the public infrastructure OR on society to help you. Congress is currently cutting Covid aid even more, not just from $2,000 to 1,400 but more and more means testing and based on 2019 incomes, so if you lost your job during the pandemic, you are shit out of luck. (It is also true that people will look back and say Trump gave more money, with a $1,200 check and a $600 one.)

The level of malign indifference displayed by elected officials and senior bureaucrats is mind-boggling. They do nothing to help, but make sure to keep funneling money to the rich people who own them.

You can’t count on the US federal or most state governments. They aren’t interested in the basic duties of governing, like making sure the power and water keep flowing; the dikes are built, the forests are managed, and so on.

That means you have to count on yourself and whatever community you can find or create which is trustworthy.

At the least, build some reserves, but at the most, see what you can do to cut vulnerabilities. I know it’s hard, maybe even mostly impossible if you’re poor, but do what you can. This sort of event is likely to become more common until this political order is replaced, and it’s not clear when that will happen or whether it will be replaced by something better.

After all, California’s PG&E, which had disastrously mismanaged power and also been responsible for some of California’s worst wildfires has paid a heck of a lot of large dividends. To rich people and the politicians they own, it’s doing its job, so they don’t consider any of this a real problem.

Until that attitude changes, probably by changing the politicians, however necessary, you will continue to live in a country where your elites’ depraved indifference to your welfare or even death puts you in danger.

Prepare for it and remember: This state of affairs has actually the norm throughout most of human history. To rulers, people like you and me are cattle, and if the cattle are producing meat and milk, their pain, misery, and death is okay.

It was nice to have a few rulers who weren’t functionally depraved psychopaths for a few decades from FDR on, but for the US and Britain, those times are over.

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