Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 9 of 36

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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Our Society, the Slave Factory

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On March 2, 2021

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Near the start of the pandemic, I wrote a brief guide on how to emotionally handle isolation. A chunk of it was about self-regulation in terms of schedule:

The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists.

But the issue of self-regulation, indeed, of self and routine is much larger.

The fact is that between helicopter parenting and school, most people today have never had to learn how to self-regulate meaningfully beyond the self-regulation required of any good slave or servant. Their schedules, from childhood, were all determined for them. Their self was created by other people, and their fundamental choices boil down to reactions for or against it.

Then, when they become adults they have university (a bit more freedom) and on to jobs, where for 40 of the most useful waking hours, a boss tells them what to do.

Most people have thus never learned to truly manage their own time, thoughts, and emotions without schedules and activities imposed by other people. It’s no wonder that some people retire in their sixties and promptly die, with “nothing to do” absent an overseer.

You can’t be your own person, not truly, without unstructured time, and I would argue, alone time. There’s a study that found most people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with nothing to do.

They rely entirely on the environment, an environment controlled and structured by other people, for emotional regulation.

Without work/school/internet/tv/games, etc… they’re lost. I’d say without those things they stop being a self-regulating person, but the point is that most people have never been self-regulating people.

Worse, activities like school and jobs, despite the lies you have been told, and which some believe (especially, oddly, about school) aren’t designed with your interests at heart. School is a slave factory. You may get some knowledge out of it, but the UR lesson is: “Do what you’re told, when you’re told, the way authority wants it done. Ask for permission to even talk or go to the bathroom.”

That’s what children are trained to do for 12 years. Then university trains them some more: At elite universities, they’re trained to have a bit more freedom to meet goals (deadlines are negotiable at Ivy league universities, but not at most State universities), and you’re released into the job market, where those who went to elites have to make some decisions, and those who didn’t are expected to be good little slaves, and sure as hell not to think or feel for themselves.

We have a society that endlessly talks about freedom, but in our daily lives, the vast majority of us are not free and never have been. We have spent almost all our lives with our primarily daily activity is determined by other people, who often also tell us what to think and how we should feel.

Such a people are not, and cannot be, suited to freedom.

Forget all the other criticism, the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it allows only a small percentage of the population to live free lives, and makes the rest into either slaves or (if they don’t have work) so poor that they have no effective freedom because of their poverty.

Our society is a slave factory and until we recognize that and reorganize it so it isn’t, it will produce slaves.

What we call freedom today is simply the ability, sometimes, to choose who our master is.

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The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

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On February 15, 2021

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The faster we get everyone immunized, throughout the world, the more likely we can stop Covid from going chronic, becoming the new flu (but more deadly, unless/until it mutates to become less fatal, which the untried models say it should.)

However, if Covid is cured, well, you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?

Chronic Covid, mutating constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for vaccine makers.

Ghastly, and I know that many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both explanatory and predictive power?

Does, “Covid makes the rich, richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?

Qui Bono? Who benefits? Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)

I, too, dislike living in a society where this explanation has stronger predictive power than “our leaders don’t want us to die in large numbers, and become poverty-struck, just so they can get richer,” but that statement, well, look at it closely. If that was true, how would our rulers behave? Not just during Covid, but at other times?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve been saying this sort of thing for a while, because it’s obviously true, but I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize it applied to vaccine creators as well, especially since Pharma has a well-known bias towards medicines that are palliatives, not cures. Someone who needs your medicine again and again is much better than someone who needs it only once.

Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton.

It’s them or us, and so far, it’s us.

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Anti-Terrorism “Meat Grinder” Coming Home

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On January 19, 2021

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I can’t say it better than this, so…


If you think this will only be used against people you don’t like, you are delusional. This bat will swing left, hard, and hit BLM and Antifa, certainly harder than it hits the right.

What is laughable about this, of course, is that US anti-terrorism has been massively ineffective. So if they turn it loose in the US, it will, indeed, grind up lives, but it won’t stop any serious insurrection, in fact it will create the conditions for the insurrection to get worse.

Robb also observed that the wall are going up in D.C. and it is being turned into a “Green Zone”. The elites, terrified, are retreating from the public and isolating even further. That move never ends well.

Say what you will about Nixon, but he went to see anti-war protestors with only one aide and no Secret Service protection. FDR, after surviving an assassination attempt, removed the secret service officers from in front of his bedroom.

Our current society is ruled by bed-wetters. On the other hand, they have good reason to be scared, because they know that life for Americans has gotten meaner for over 40 years, and they know they are why. (Yes, the oligarchs bought them, but they sold.)

This American foolishness has gone on long enough. Americans have been divided into camps, hating each other and regarding each other as the enemy. And indeed, they are, but only because they have been suckered into fighting.

The people who have done the most harm to red-staters and to blue-staters are oligarchs and politicians. In a sensible world, differences would be put aside and the oligarchy and politicians who serve them would be taken down.

After that, you might find that you have more in common than not, and that the differences which seemed so important are a lot less important than regaining the over $26K of annual income they stole from you and the declining lifespan.

Meanwhile, the oligarchy is gearing up for a war of them vs. everyone who isn’t on their knees. They’ll hit your enemies, sure, but unless you’re on your knees, they’re going to hit you, too.

As for the Trump insurrection, it occurred only because of elite inter-factional warfare. More on that in another article, perhaps.

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You Can Always Get Half the Population To Hate The Other Half

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On January 15, 2021

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So, there was a lot of violence, relatively speaking, during the Trump administration, though most of it was cops beating BLM protestors. (Generally violence erupted after police started it, though there were exceptions.)

There is going to be more during the Biden presidency, because Republicans don’t believe that Biden won legitimately. These numbers seem to be around 70% or so. Meanwhile Biden is unlikely to fix the economy, though hopefully he will get Covid get under control (an effort which will be hampered by the incompetence and stupidity of Governors, including many Democratic ones like Cuomo,)

My voice is small, the heyday of the blogs is done, but I will gently suggest that “cooling it” might be wise over the next few months. The fact is that the election wasn’t stolen. If it was, I would say so. You simply cannot get to the votes Trump needs with fraud allegations. The worst things the Dems did were actually voter suppression of third parties (keeping them off the ballots with specious bullshit), but Republicans routinely engage in totally egregious voter suppression of their own.

Biden is not going to be a bad President for Red America. He’s bending over backwards to try and appease Republicans. A lot of Democrats think this is a mistake, but this is how it is.

America is strongly polarized. Terribly so. Stories of family members turning in relatives for the Capitol storming are routine.

This is BAD. When you get to the point of families narcing each other out, you’re in a really bad place nationally.

Both sides are convinced that they are in the right. Republicans are, yes, wrong, but we live in media bubbles. I saw a stat that after Fox called the election for Biden it then continued calling the election in doubt hundreds of times. West coast elite techies came down on the side of Democrats, which is going to pay some awful dividends even if it was the right decision (because this has made them a partisan branch of government making decisions that should be made democratically. Places like Faccebook, YouTube and Twitter are Commons, and that they are privately owned does not change that fact.)

If you don’t want this to spiral out of control, find a way to cool it. I am one of the few blogs left who is read by both sides, even though I’m a left winger.

The people who are responsible for this are the people who have spent 40-50 years dividing America. Fox and conservative talk radio started it, places like MSNBC continued it by creating partisan media for centrists (there is no left wing media of significance, Jacobin and WSWS don’t cut it.). Matt Taibbi’s summary of how this happened is essential reading.

Right and center and left have been divided into tribes by the masters. The simple fact is that there is only one enemy, and that is the oligarchy. Everyone who isn’t in the top three to four percent is oppressed by them. They have used culture war to divide. The elites who supported Trump don’t want regular people to be better off: they’re willing to give them anti-abortion policies, sure, but they don’t genuinely want to pay them more or give them more rights.

The same is true of the elites who support centrists: the “Resistance”. Silicon Valley regularly engages in activities meant to suppress wages (the late, sainted, Steve Jobs put together an agreement they wouldn’t hire each other’s engineers, for example.)

Almost no members of the oligarchy support the left: BLM and Antifa have little actual support. They get some nods, but note that Democratic Mayors and Governors, with few exceptions, still let the cops crack down on them terribly and Biden’s response was “we should give the cops more money.”

If the people who stormed the capitol had been successful in overturning the election, it would just have been a victory for one set of nasty elites over another set of nasty elites.

The actual problem in America is people aren’t sharing a reality any more. This isn’t just isolated to Republicans; they’re wrong about the election, yes, but Liberals (centrists) have been terribly propagandized too. Remember the BS story about how Russia was paying bounties for the Taliban to kill American soldiers. It was obvious BS, at the time, and still treated seriously. There have been many such stories floated in the Liberal press, keeping Liberals in a frothing rage at Russia and Trump for the entire Presidency; insanely angry and unable to think even as Democrats voted for almost all of Trump’s bad bills and Democratic governors like Cuomo fucked up the Covid response terribly.

Killing each other; hating each other, at the behest of oligarchical factions is insane. Doing a coup based on lies (as opposed to a revolution based on truth) is insane and self-destructive.

You have an enemy. It is only your fellow Americans because they have been lied to for 40 years. This doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous to you now, of course, but remember the cries of the Capitol protestors; their anger,  when they realized that most of the cops were still willing to fight them.

The cops work for the oligarchy. The red-teamers thought the cops were on their side. Oh, they’re more sympathetic, yes, but they work for the Man.

Divide and keep conquered is the oldest playbook in the hands of ruling classes. America has been riven by it and may be destroyed by it.

Look past the hatred (often well deserved) and see the enemy: the one that manipulated you into hating each other so you wouldn’t go after them. The one who stole $26K in wage increases from you over the last two generations.

Someone’s pulling your strings, and you’re dancing like puppets.

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The Terrible Bind America’s Elites Are In

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On January 11, 2021

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One point worth highlighting right now is that, despite the push to impeach AND convict Trump, Hawley, and others, it’s unclear that it will happen — even unlikely.

These folks did push the invasion of the Capitol, and it’s more and more obvious that some of the invaders had rather sinister plans had they been able to grab Senators, Pence or Reps; the zip-ties make this rather clear.

They made US elites feel unsafe in a way that hasn’t been true since 9/11. US elites regularly kill, impoverish, and hurt millions of people, but for them to even be so much as scared is intolerable.

The problem is, this is colliding with another principle: The principle of elite immunity from consequences. Elites don’t really go after other elites. Trump, pre-Presidency had committed dozens of crimes, but was never prosecuted, because everything he had done, did others had done also.

Essentially, every senior Wall Street and banking executive is guilty of fraud in the lead up to the sub-prime crisis, and they were all let off with slaps on the wrist. George Bush was unquestionably a war criminal and so were many of his senior officials, and I’d argue the same is true of Obama.

Even Clinton’s “emails,” widely dismissed as “no big deal” is the sort of offense which, if done by someone junior, would — at best — end their career and would more likely lead to jail time.

US elites send other elites to jail very rarely, and political elites do this almost never.

So there’s a real bind here. On the one hand, some Republican elites put the rest of the US federal political class at risk. On the other hand, well, who wants to set a precedent that a US president, senator, or representative can be truly held to account? Impeaching is one thing, convicting another (which is why Biden is wishy-washy about impeaching and convicting Trump).

Who knows? After all, where it would end if elites started holding each other accountable, when they all know that almost every one of them has violated many laws and far more norms?

For elites, the law is a sword they use against their lessers, not a weapon intended to be used against them. It is a shield against the hoi-polloi and has nothing to do with justice or equality before the law.

Feel for them, in their terrible dilemma: What is more important? Their physical safety or their legal immunity?

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Effects of the New 60 Percent More Infectious Covid Strain

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On December 28, 2020

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Cases have been found outside of Britain, including in the US and, ironically, France (slammed the door too late.) The practical result of the increased infectiousness are discussed by Tomas Pueyo.

The points are, as you’d expect, that it increases the speed of exponential growth. If it becomes the dominant strain (and it almost certainly will, because it grows faster), you have to really lock down. No sham lockdowns, people don’t go out for anything but food (maybe you even deliver that); schools are closed, no one works outside the house unless they truly are an essential worker.

Herd immunity now requires 75 percent+, not 60 percent of the population. That means it will take longer, and with respect to vaccines, people will need to be convinced to take them, or if necessary, forced to.

Countries that already got Covid-19 under control, like Vietnam, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan (notice a trend?) will be fine. They just keep tracking and tracing; keep quarantining visitors, and keep clamping down hard on even a hint of a break-out. Those of us who haven’t, like most of Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil, and so on, can either get serious RIGHT now and close schools and go to a real lock down, or we are going to have to wait for vaccine immunity, which may take until the end of 2022 depending on how many doses your country is getting and when (and if people will take them, or be forced to).

In general terms, my sense is that the first half of 2022 is going to be worse than 2021 in countries that have fumbled Covid, after that things should start improving noticeably.

This was a pro-active choice by our elites: They decided not to handle Covid. It was handled in many countries, the playbook is known to anyone who cares to know it just by seeing what was done or reading a 101 textbook, but “fumbling” Covid made elites in countries like the UK, Canada, and the US a lot richer and more powerful, so it was allowed to rage through the population and destroy the small business economy so that those who were able to stay open, like Amazon and Apple, and so on could grab huge amounts of market share.

Grandma died and young people got life-long heart problems so Jeff Bezos and private equity scum could get richer.

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Twelve Million Renters To Be Homeless Soon Because It Benefits the Rich

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On December 9, 2020

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And so we are where knew we would be:

Nearly 12 million renters will owe ~$5,800 in back rent and utilities by early January.

This was predicted regularly: people lost their jobs, they got one $1,200 and improved EI benefits for a while, and that’s pretty much it. Eviction protection is nice, but it doesn’t pay the rent and ends. This was 100% predicted and predictable, your lords and masters knew it was happening and would happen.

Oakland Homeless Encampment

They could easily have stopped it, and chose not to. The Fed and Treasury and Congress bailed out rich people, and their wealth has skyrocketed. Meanwhile New York wants to put a tax of $3 on deliveries of anything but food and medicine to bail out the subway system; taxing the poor and middle class rather than the rich who made out like bandits.

The money to fix this is fairly trivial. 69,600.000,000 – about sixty-seven billion dollars. In context, the TARP bailout for rich people was 700 billion back in 2008. The Federal reserve, by some calculations, floated about 20 trillion dollars. Seventy billion isn’t even real money in the modern world.

 

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But when renters can’t pay rent, the landlords will go bankrupt, and the actual rich will buy up the properties. Meanwhile desperate unemployed people keep wages down and ensure that current workers will do anything they are told with no back talk, because they know there are way fewer jobs than workers. Win/win/WIN.

If you’re rich.

So, if you’re going to be homeless, or lose the property you rent, rest assured it’s in the cause of allowing the rich to control even more of the economy, gutting small and medium landlords and small and medium businesses (who have had to shut down, while companies like Amazon and large retailers make mint.)

Your leaders impoverish and kill you for money. That is all. Wouldn’t want you to think this is for no reason at all or because of incompetence. Your poverty and desperation does help somebody, and that’s why it is happening.

 

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