Ian Welsh

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

Category: Leadership Page 3 of 4

Understanding Leadership Responsibility For Death, Harm & Welfare

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On August 5, 2020

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In the law there is a crime known as criminal negligence.

Criminal negligence is the failure on the part of a person on whom a duty is placed to take reasonable steps to prevent a certain bad outcome from happening. Duties may or may not be specifically known to you. For instance, as a driver, you have a duty not to hurt others with your vehicle. You may or may not have known that.

Other examples of people who have duties to others include: parents owing a protective duty to their children, or employers/supervisors at work owing a duty to their workers.

Let’s extend this. When you have authority, if you do something a reasonable person should know would cause harm, you are responsible for that harm.

All positions of power come with duties. American Presidents like to whinge on about how they have a duty to protect Americans, but the actual sworn duty is to uphold the Constitution. All leaders in any sane system are broadly responsible for the welfare of the people they rule and for the consequences of the actions they take, even on non-citizens.

If you go to war, like George W. Bush did, you know that a lot of bad things will happen: deaths, injuries, rapes, property destruction and so on. So you are responsible for all of those deaths. Therefore if you go to war without sufficient reason, you are a criminal. This is true for Obama (Libya, Yemen) and Trump as well (all the ongoing wars he could stop but hasn’t.) It is true of drone murders, both because they kill innocents and because they violate any reasonable reading of the Constitution (due process of law.)

It is also true of creating a medical system that kills tens of thousands of people a year. If you raise the price of drugs so that people can’t afford them without sufficient justification (aka. production and distribution costs have gone up that much), you know people will die. You are guilty of negligent mass murder.

Politicians and bureaucrats have positive duties: to see to the welfare of the people they oversee.

The same is true of corporate officers, or should be. Corporations are bundles of very valuable rights, given to corporations by the people, in the expectation that corporations will increase public welfare. A corporation which does not increase public welfare has broken that bargain and the officers have failed in their positive duty. Likewise the expectation is that the corporation will not actively do harm, certainly not harm that outweighs the good it does.

When you analyze various leaders in society thru this lens it becomes quickly clear who is doing their job and who isn’t. The Federal Reserve deliberately crushed wages for decades. That was deliberate harm, and they knew it. They deliberately made sure that full employment was not reached, which is in direct violation of the explicit aims of their institution.

Trump swore to uphold the constitution and repeatedly violated the prohibitions against profitting from public office. All Presidents of the past decades have supported laws that violate the first and fourth amendments, and do so very clearly.

And so on and so forth.

If a reasonable person, with the knowledge expected of someone in the role (aka. a drug executive should know the result of price increases of drugs, that’s a basic competency of the job) are responsible for the affects of their decisions. Since all of them exist to increase, at the least, the welfare of society, if they do things they know will decrease that welfare, then they have, at best, been negligent, and probably criminally negligent.

This the floor for how leaders in society, whether private or public, should be judged. This doesn’t mean they can never do anything to hurt anyone, many public decisions involve trade-offs, and sometimes harming a few is required to aid the many. A simple example would be a wealth tax. Bezos and Gates would squeal and feel badly done by, but many people would be better off as a result.

If a result of an action or policy is what a reasonable person in that role would expect to happen, leaders can be judged by it. Going to war has obvious consequences. Drone murders with big explosions have obvious consequences. Helping Saudi Arabia keep food out of Yemen has obvious consequences. Keeping life-saving drugs from Iran and Iraq has obvious consequences. Dropping progressive taxes thru the floor and taxing capital gains lower than earned income has obvious consequences. Massively raising insulin prices has obvious consequences. Treating warehouse workers like automata has obvious consequences (acknowledged in at least one case by keeping an ambulance outside an Amazon warehouse.)

When we fail to hold our leadership to “you are responsible for the obvious consequences of your decisions” our leadership no longer serves the people or their welfare, but only the welfare of the very few they decide to care about. At that point they become not leaders, but rulers, and we their subject and in all but name: serfs. Disposable assets to be used up as they see fit, for their benefit, not ours.

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Do Not Ask Western Leadership to Fix Anything

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On June 24, 2020

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References to Corbyn aside, this is as true as it was when I first published in, Nov 16, 2015. I was going to write a new article on trust in leadership, and I will, but I want to emphasize the basics first.

Why are people calling for Western leaders to “fight terrorism”?

Global deaths from terrorism:

2002: 725

2010: 13,186

2014: 32,727

Those attacks mostly weren’t hitting the West. Now, a tiny fraction are.

Next.

Without the US arming and organizing the Afghani Mujahideen in the eighties there is no Al-Qaeda.

Without the US and British invasion of Iraq, there is no ISIS.

Understand this: Widespread global terrorism exists because of the US’s actions specifically and the West’s generally.

Let us turn now to economics. Inequality has been increasing since the 1970s. It has become worse every decade, with only minor reversals. After the financial crisis, it became so bad that more than all the productivity gains in the environment went to the top three percent.

This happened in large part due to various financial, economic, and legislative “reforms.” It was deliberate, in other words. Inequality is a result of deliberate action by US leadership.

Austerity is, likewise, the result of deliberate action by Western elites, generally. They decided to deliberately impoverish their citizens and have done so.

This is not unique to the West. India claims much economic progress, but the average number of calories eaten per capita has gone down over the last thirty years. The average Indian is worse off than they were when India was run on frankly socialist principles.

The leadership classes are chosen for their ability and desire to become leaders. If that overlaps with an ability and desire to make their society good for the majority of the population, that’s great, but in most countries right now, that’s not how or why they are selected.

These people are selected by oligarchs, for oligarchs, and their skillset is pleasing oligarchs. This is done through a system that selects candidates before they get to voters, even primary voters or the equivalent. In most cases, you do not get a choice of a leader who will put ordinary people’s interests first.

To see what happens when someone does slip through, take a look at how UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has been treated by the Press. I have never seen such libelous coverage of a political leader. One UK headline yesterday read “Corbyn and his friends must choose what side they are on” with respect to the Paris attacks.

Here is what Corbyn said, by the way:

“Today, all our thoughts and sympathy are with the people of Paris.

“What took place in the French capital yesterday was horrific and immoral.

“We stand in solidarity with the people of France – as with all victims of terror and violence.

“I have cancelled my engagements today to hold discussions on events in France with shadow cabinet colleagues and be briefed by Downing Street security officials.

“It’s vital at a time of such tragedy and outrage not to be drawn into responses which feed a cycle of violence and hatred.

“We are proud to live in a multicultural and multi-faith society, and we stand for the unity of all communities.”

This is an eminently sane, statesmanlike statement that simply says our response should not make the situation worse, but Corbyn is being vilified for it.

This sort of propaganda works, Corbyn took over the Labour leadership with negative favorability ratings, virtually unheard of. He did so because he had been endlessly smeared by the Press.

Let me blunt. Anyone who wants our leadership to “fix” terrorism has either not been paying attention, is a fool, or is a tool who knows they’ll make it worse but expects to personally benefit in some way.

This situation is similar to the Iraq war in the sense that anyone stupid and immoral enough to invade Iraq could not be expected to run the war in a way which would lead to good results.  One can make a  theoretical case that an invasion of Iraq could have worked out well, but that can’t happen in the real world because no one who would invade Iraq in the first place would be competent or just enough to actually implement improvements.

Note, however, that the Iraq war was an immense profit opportunity and that a great deal of money was funneled to the right people. Again, this is one of our leaders’ core competencies, this is what they do well.

Years ago, Stirling Newberry told me that the job of modern politicians was to wrangle the masses for oligarchs. He was right. That is what they do. They are good at manipulating enough of the population, and they are good at giving money and power to those who already have both.

They are not good at anything else, and expecting them to do anything else is insane.

You do not want Hollande, Obama, and Cameron (let alone Erdogan) trying to fix the Middle East. You do not want the people who report to them trying to do so. You do not want western militaries trying to do so.

At least not if you want a reduction, rather than an increase, in terrorism.

The first rule of holes applies. The first thing you want the leadership to do is stop digging. Other than criminal investigations, you should want them to do nothing. No military action, no legislative changes. Military action hasn’t worked, legislative changes will just be more gutting of civil liberties, and that hasn’t worked either.

This is true of virtually everything. They cannot and will not fix inequality, because their raison d’etre is to create inquality. They cannot fix the financial system or the economy because it exists as it is to increase inequality. They cannot run a war because they were not chosen for that sort of competence.

If you want to fix any problem in the West, or have the West be helpful for fixing any global problem, you need to fix the Western leadership class. That means fixing Western media, education, corporations, etc, etc. The list is long, because they have deliberately broken virtually everything to turn it into an opportunity for a very few people to become richer.

If you are British, you have a decent, honorable man who actually wants to do almost all the right things: Corbyn. Get to work supporting him, however you can. If he goes down, the political class will take it as a lesson that trying to help ordinary people is a really bad idea. (Well, they have already decided this, so work to prove them wrong.)

But, in general, you need to retake control of the system which creates leaders, you need to restructure, bypass, or break the media conglomerates (or all three), and you will need to restructure society from the ground up so that it does not produce either such corrupt leaders or the people who enable them.

This is a goddamn big job. It is far harder than dropping some bombs on the Middle East, or sending in the troops again. But it is an actual solution to a whole series of problems.

In the meantime, don’t ask your leadership to “fix” anything. That’s not what they are there for. Whenever they want to do anything, your default position should be to oppose it–unless you are 100 percent certain it’s in your interest and have done the hard, cold research and thinking to support that conclusion. Sure, sometimes you’ll be wrong, but most of the time you’ll be right, because they are not in power to make your lives better, but to enrich a small class of people and impoverish the majority.

Any knock-on effects, like terrorism, are secondary to them, and even if they had the desire to fix such problems, they cannot–they do not have the ability. They will simply make them worse, even if it was possible they were sincerely trying to do good.

If you live in the West, the great danger to your life, health, and prosperity is your leadership. It is how your society is run. This is cold, hard, and true.

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The Duty and Responsibility of Left-wing Leaders

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On April 14, 2020

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Let us say that you are leading a movement which, if it wins, will save hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, and will take millions of out of poverty.

The corollary to this is that if you fail, if you lose, those people will die or be stuck in poverty, and generally that many others will fall into poverty.

Your loss, then, occasions a great deal of suffering.

It is often hard to know what to do to win, and there are red lines. Unless a situation has descended to civil war, or you intend civil war, like America’s founding fathers or slavery abolitionist John Brown, you shouldn’t murder, and obviously rape and torture are off the board no matter what.

But because the stakes are so high, you do have a responsibility to play your hand seriously. It isn’t actually a game.

In modern democracies, the most important thing is to control parties. Margaret Thatcher said that her victory was only complete when Labour accepted her ideology. If they hadn’t, when they got into power, they would have just un-done everything she did. John Major, the Tory PM wasn’t her true successor–Tony Blair was.

When Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party he took over a neoliberal Blairite party. Most of the MPs had voted for most of the worst Tory policies, or abstained from the key votes. They were complicit in a great deal of the evils of austerity.

They were implacable enemies of Corbyn, as were the party bureaucrats. Indeed, a story came out with emails proving that these bureaucrats worked against Corbyn in the 2017 election. Given just how close that election was, they probably cost Corbyn the victory.

Had Corbyn won, he would have refunded the NHS. If it was a majority victory, he’d still be Prime Minister and he wouldn’t have bungled the Coronavirus response like Johnson, a bungling which appears to have about doubled the death rate next to comparable European countries.

Those bureaucrats, then, are responsible for the deaths caused by Johnson being PM. If you don’t understand this, you need to learn how, because this sort of thing is the key driver of why our societies are so bad: The forseeable consequences of evil actions are treated as if they are incidental. Having incompetent ideologues in charge of government who believe that “society doesn’t exist,” and that government isn’t responsible for people’s welfare has consequences.

Corbyn also failed in another important way: He never kicked out MPs who were traitorously constantly attacking him, nor did he support the mandatory re-selction of MPs, a process by which the Labour membership gets to vote for their nominee.

Doing both of these things would have transformed Labour back into a proper left-wing party, and given Corbyn a much greater chance at victory. Even if he lost both elections, his successor would be left-wing and properly supported by the party, and in first past the post democracy, the second party will eventually wind up in power.

Nothing is more important than ideological control of a party.

Now, the thing here is that neither of these strategies required Corbyn to go against his beliefs: Corbyn always said he believed the party should be run by the membership. Re-selections, indeed re-selection every election, is exactly and completely in accord with that.

Corbyn is a truly good man, but like a lot of people of his generation, he has an addiction to being nice, confusing it with being good.

Being nice to bad actors, to MPs who support cutting the NHS and social welfare and bailing out bankers, isn’t good, it’s evil. They need to be removed from power. This isn’t terrible for them, no centrist MP is likely to wind up on the bread lines if they aren’t an MP (which is part of why they were willing to be evil).

Then we have Sanders. Sanders was never as good a man in political terms as Corbyn, his politics are nowhere near as good. Still, he was a good man in American terms.

Sanders is also addicted to niceness. He refused to attack Biden on Biden’s terrible record, a record which is at odds with everything that Sanders claims to believe in, supposedly because Biden was his good friend.

This is dereliction of duty. If he had done it because he believed it was the best strategy, fine. It might or might not be. But to put his friendship with Biden against the welfare and even the lives of millions of Americans is a sickening betrayal of principle and of his followers.

Power has responsibility. Those who work to save millions of lives and make sure millions more are not in poverty, have a responsibility to their mission, and that responsibility does not allow one to put one’s personal desire to be “nice” ahead of the mission.

Good and nice are not the same thing. Niceness is, well, nice, but people who are willing to impoverish and kill millions are evil people and they need to lose their power. The actions taken to remove their power may not be “nice,” but they are good.

I admire Corbyn more than any other British politician of the past 40 years. But he failed in part because he wasn’t willing to be even moderately ruthless against people who were, well, doing a lot of evil. Traitors, in fact.

As for Sanders, well, it appears the same is true. He asked his followers to fight for someone they didn’t know, but he wasn’t willing to fight someone he did know.

A hypocrite, in effect.

Sanders’ and Corbyn’s times are done. They were the best of the Boomers, the last major politicians who hadn’t sold out or sold their soul. Their failures are not theirs alone. Brits and American Democrats genuinely prefer to let people die and live in poverty than vote for a moderate left-winger. That it is older Brits who voted against Corbyn whom Johnson’s policies are killing is ironic.

New politicians will now rise. Hopefully those on the left are people who understand that if one is the champion of the people, one has responsibilities which go beyond being nice to those doing evil. That, in fact, their responsibility is to remove all power from those who use that power from evil.

Doing so won’t be nice to the people who lose their power. It will be “nice” and good to those who are lifted out of poverty or who don’t die due to evil austerity policies, corruption, and incompetence.

Gotta decide what’s more important. Being nice to bad people, or doing good.

And you have to be willing to actually use power when you have it. The right certainly is. The left needs to be.

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Why Western Elites Are So Incompetent and What the Consequences Are

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On April 2, 2020

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The coronavirus has been striking for the fact that Asian societies have mostly handled the crisis competently (though there’s been variation in how competent), and Western elites, with some exceptions (Germany, for example) have not. At the extreme incompetence level are the US and the UK.

Let’s chalk this up to aristocratic elites. Aristocrats, unlike nobles, are decadent, but don’t stop with that word; understand what it means.

Elites who are not aligned with the actual productive activities of society and are engaged primarily in activities which are contrary to production, are decadent. This was true in Ancien Regime France (and deliberately fostered by Louis XIV as a way of emasculating the nobility). It is true today of most Western elites; they concentrate on financial numbers, and not on actual production. Even those who are somewhat competent tend not to be truly productive: see the Waltons, who made their money as distributers–merchants.

The techies have mostly outsourced production; they don’t make things, they design them. That didn’t work out for England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it hasn’t worked well for the US, though thanks to Covid-19 and US fears surrounding China, the US may re-shore their production capacity before it is too late.

We also have a situation where Western elites are far removed from the actual creation of the systems they run. This is most true in in the US, and to a lesser extent in the UK, which did not suffer the massive bombing and destruction of most of the rest of Europe (the Blitz was minor compared to the bombs dropped on Germany, for example). Of course, reconstructing bombed societies is not the same as pulling oneself out of poverty.

The best handling of the coronavirus crisis in the world was possibly Vietnam, who are run by a generation that just pulled themselves out of poverty. Other excellent handling has happened in societies which still remember times of poverty or which were conquered and set free (Japan/Germany). China’s Xi, probably the most incompetent, also managed the crisis badly, but still better than the US/UK: Once he got serious, he got really serious. Xi, while a princeling, had a hard early life and was forced to work on the communes and so on.

This is all standard three-generation stuff: The first generation builds, the second generation manages, and the third generation wastes and takes it for granted because they’ve never known anything else. Sometimes that extends to four generations or more, but that requires a system which properly inculcates its elites, plus something to force the elites into at least some of the same experiences as the peons. We do not have that kind of a system.

Nobles, as Stirling Newberry explained to me years ago, are elites who make a point of being better than the people below them: better fighters, better farmers, and so on. Aristocrats are people who play court games, which is what financialized economies supported by central banks and bought politicians are. These people aren’t even good at finance. They were actually wiped out in 2008, but used politics to restore their losses and they were/are wiped out by this crisis, but are using politics (the Fed/Congress/the presidency) to restore their losses. The Fed is doing one trillion of operations a day.

So our elites are fantastically incompetent even at finance. The vast majority are completely disconnected from actual production, at best they are distributors. All they are good for is playing court games, i.e., politics. They can’t manage the real economy, they don’t run it, they don’t live in it, and they aren’t subject to its rigors. They live in a Versailles, almost completely disconnected from society except in crises, when they print money to save themselves, and download costs onto the peasantry.

A society such as this cannot survive in this form. Eventually there is an existential crisis which cannot be papered over by the printing of (virtual) money. Perhaps it is a real economic collapse, perhaps it is a natural catastrophe of near-Biblical proportions, or perhaps it is simply the peasants revolting and paying a visit to Versailles.

The vast spread of guillotine memes over the past four years should alarm our elites, but mostly, they seem to feel invulnerable and are still working to preserve their position in the system rather than fix the system and the society. You can see this in how Democrats are standing up a clearly senile Biden and denying the peasantry health care, even in the face of pandemic.

An elite which refuses to manage the economy will either cause its own end, the end of its country’s prosperity and dominance, or both.

Often both.

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The Terrible Impulse to Rally Around Bad Leaders in a Crisis

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On March 31, 2020

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So, Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, had his approval ratings soar 30 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is talk of him becoming the US President (presumably this means making him Biden’s VP candidate, then having Biden step aside).

He sounds good on TV.

Cuomo is attempting to cut funding for Medicaid because he refused to tax the rich, as the crisis continues. A panel Cuomo appointed has recommended 400 billion in cuts to hospitals. He repeatedly said New York City has too many hospital beds. He has let prisoners in New York jails stay in them even as he was warned they would be breeding grounds for the disease. He left going to isolation at least two weeks too long.

In other words, he’s a neoliberal who wants to cut key resources even during a crisis, and incompetent to boot.

Back after 9/11, we saw the same thing happen with Bush, Jr. Bush not only ignored warnings about Al-Qaeda’s intention to strike in the US, the actual government response on 9/11 was terrible–the US could not get armed jets into the air, only unarmed ones. It would have been a hilarious display of incompetence if it weren’t for the consequences. Canada had armedjets up before the US: I joked that, if we invaded the US, we could have destroyed the entire US Air Force on the ground (then given you universal health care).

Bush was an incompetent, stupid, and mentally challenged (listen to his speeches–he was impaired). He used the blank check given to him by the rally-round effect to take the country to war with Iraq, a disaster which has spawned disaster after disaster. The money and resources used in Iraq should have been spent on other things–on almost anything else–and the death, maiming, rape, and torture are his legacy, as well as the legacy of Americans who ran to an incompetent leader.

Something similar is happening in Britain. Boris Johnson, the PM, has had his party’s ratings soar. Boris is the fellow who originally didn’t want to do any social distancing at all, based on a herd immunity theory which amounted to “let the maximum number of people die and the hospital capacity be overwhelmed.” Personally, Boris bragged about shaking hands with infected Covid-19 patients, then going on and shaking hands with everybody else he met. Personally, a typhoid Mary. The Conservative party has spent ten years defunding the NHS, to the point where it has one of the lowest numbers of hospital beds per capita in the developed world.

Yet Johnson and the Conservative party’s ratings have gone up.

Trump’s ratings, while they have not soared, have gone up, and Trump’s Covid-19 reponse has been beyond incompetent, sliding into delusional, Emperor-has-no-clothes territory.

This tendency to rally around even incompetent leaders makes one despair for humanity. The correct response in all cases is contempt and an attempt, if possible, at removal of the corrupt and venal people in charge. Certainly, no one should be approving of the terrible jobs they have done.

All three of these leaders have, or will, use their increased power to do horrible things. The Coronavirus bailout bill, passed by Congress and approved by Trump, is a huge bailout of the rich, with crumbs for the poor and middle class. So little, in fact, that there may be widespread hunger soon. Cuomo is pushing forward with his cuts, and I’m sure Johnson will live down to expectations.

Incompetence and ideological blindness to the good of the people are, then, encouraged by the behaviour of the masses. This, it seems, is what they want.

We either break this cycle, or over the crises and catastrophes to come (and the 21st century will be a century of tragedy), we will lose billions of people we needn’t have.

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Why US Leadership Stinks and Drone Assassination Doesn’t Matter (Leadership in Organizations People Believe In)

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On January 4, 2020

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The assassination strategy the US pursues is interesting, not in what it says about the US’s foes, but what it says about the American leaders. Al-Qaeda’s “No. 2 Man” has been “killed” so often that it’s a running joke, and Taliban leadership is regularly killed by assassination. Bush did this, Obama really, really did this. Probably a lot of these stories are BS, but it’s also probably safe to assume that a lot of leadership has been killed.

The Taliban is still kicking the coalition’s ass.

Leadership isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be–IF you have a vibrant organization in which people believe. New people step up, and they’re competent enough. Genius leadership is very rare, and a good organization doesn’t need it, though it’s welcome when it exists. As long as the organization knows what it’s supposed to do (kick Americans out of Afghanistan), and everyone’s motivated to do that, leadership doesn’t need to be especially great, but it will be generally competent, because the people in the organization will make it so.

American leaders are obsessed with leadership because they lead organizations in whose goals no one believes. Or rather, they lead organizations for whom everyone knows the leadership doesn’t believe in its ostensible goals. Schools are led by people who hate teachers and want to privatize schools to make profit. The US is led by men who don’t believe in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Police are led by men who think their jobs are to protect the few and beat down the many, not to protect and serve. Corporations make fancy mission statements and talk about valuing employees and customers, but they just want to make a buck and will fuck anyone, employee or customer, below the C-suite. They don’t have a “mission” (making money is not a mission, it’s a hunger if it’s all you want to do); they are parasites and they know it.

Making organizations work if they’re filled with people who don’t believe in the organization, or who believe that the “leadership” is only out for themselves and has no mission beyond helping themselves, not even enriching the employees or shareholders, is actually hard. People don’t get inspired by making the C-suite rich. Bureaucrats, knowing they are despised and distrusted by their political counterparts, and knowing that they aren’t allowed to do their ostensible jobs, as with the EPA generally not being allowed to protect the environment, the DOJ not being allowed to prosecute powerful monied crooks, and the FDA being the slave of drug companies and the whims of politically-connected appointees, are hard to move, hard to motivate, making it hard to get to anyone to do anything but the minimum.

So American leaders, and indeed the leaders of most developed nations, think they’re something special. in fact, getting people to do anything is difficult, and convincing people to do the wrong thing, when they joined to actually teach, protect the environment, make citizens healthier, or actually prosecute crooks, even more so. Being a leader in the West, even though it comes with virtually complete immunity for committing crimes against humanity, violating civil rights, or stealing billions from ordinary citizens, is, in many respects, a drag. A very, very well-paying drag, but a drag. Very few people have the necessary flexible morals and ability to motivate employees through the coercion required.

So American leaders, in specific, and Westerners, in general, think that organizations will fall apart if the very small number of people who can actually lead, stop leading. But that’s because they think that leading the Taliban, say, is like leading an American company or the American government. They think it requires a soulless prevaricator who takes advantage of and abuses virtually everyone and is still able to get people to, reluctantly, do their jobs.

Functioning organizations aren’t like that. They suck leadership upwards. Virtually everyone is being groomed for leadership and is ready for leadership. They believe in the cause, they know what to do, they’re involved. And they aren’t scared of dying, if they really believe. Oh sure, they’d rather not, but it won’t stop them from stepping up.

So Obama kills and kills and kills, and somehow the Taliban is still kicking his ass. Al-Qaeda, in whatever country you care to name, has its killed every few weeks, and somehow there’s always another one. Because these people believe. There’s always another believer, if it’s a functioning organization, so on it goes.

The declaration of the Haqqani network as terrorists made me laugh. You read about them, and this is what you discover–the founder was a minister in the Taliban government. So, let’s get this straight. His country, in which he was a minister, was invaded, and ten years later he’s still fighting–and he refuses to negotiate with the US, because hey, he figures he’s winning.

Imagine if the US was invaded, occupied, and a puppet government was set up. A cabinet minister escaped, went underground, and set up a resistance network. What would you call him? A terrorist? Sure, if you’re the occupying power. If you’re a citizen? Well, maybe not, eh? Sure he fights nasty, but the nation which kills so many civilians with drones can’t really cast the first stone, can it?

And one day, they’ll probably kill him.

And it won’t make any damn difference.

Originally published Sept 11, 2012. Back to the top August 13,2018.

Back to the top again, January 4th, 2020 because of Qasem’s assassination.

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Hope Is Bullshit

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On November 18, 2019

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by Shepard Fairey

I am unintersted in “hope.”

Or as we called it in the Obama bullshit years, Hopium.

Hope is not a plan. Hope is bullshit.

Luck is real, but you don’t count on luck other than in the sense that the harder you work, and the more things you do, the more likely you are to “get lucky.” But luck is usually the odds coming in, and bad luck is as real as good.

In term of climate change, there is no reason for hope. It’s going to be bad and, in almost all cases, signature events are happening sooner than expected: We’re losing Greenlandian, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sooner than expected. We’re getting artic methane releases 70 years ahead of schedule. Every time an event comes in, it’s sooner or worse than the models predicted.

This is because of how systems work when they leave bounds–because they tend to accelerate, we can expect this sort of thing to continue. It’s going to get worse, sooner.

That’s the “luck” we’ve made. We’ve put half the greenhouse gases in human history into the atmosphere in the past 30 years, which is to say, after the time when we knew for a fact we were cutting our own throats.

Obama ran on hope in another sense, and created an economy which did nothing (and worse than nothing) for African Americans and which was shit for somewhere between 80 percent to 95 percent of the population. His signature health care plan was garbage, and in his period the price of various drugs rose to historical heights. He tripled the rate of drone murders over Bush (Trump has ramped them up even further), and so on.

He was human garbage, a man who bailed out bankers and then helped them steal people’s houses with fraudulent paperwork, then had his attorney-general immunize them with fines worth less than what they stole.

But this man is worshiped by many Democrats, because, hey, he was only human garbage, and Trump is a shambling mound of garbage (but has yet, note, to start any new wars, though he’s been happy to keep Obama and Bush’s wars going).

Oh, and because he was black, and that mattered more, to many people, than the fact he was human garbage.

Obama’s done very well since he left office, making lots of speeches and millions of dollars. Bankers have been very grateful and have shown their gratitude–just as they did for Bill Clinton (another mound of garbage, who cut welfare to hurt the weakest in the US, killed Iraqis with his sanctions that included medicines, and instituted judicial “reforms” which swelled America’s prison population while ending financial regulations intended to avoid financial collapses).

None of these people ever intended to do the right thing, and if you listened carefully you knew that. The best you could hope is that they were the lesser evil: a smaller mound of garbage than their opponents.

In the Democratic primaries, there was always a better option and that option was never chosen, because most Democrats are bad people who want Reaganism with a side of “but we don’t really mean it.”

Nothing is going to get better until we, whichever we we belong to, start choosing better leaders, whether presidential, or more local. Those leaders must want to actually do “good.” Yes, good. You know, taking care of the hungry and the sick, and not burying single payer and the public option like Obama did. (Yes, yes he did, and he wound up passing the OCA without Republicans anyways. He made a choice, and his choice was evil.)

Or perhaps taking care of poor people, including blacks. Or not allowing pirates in suits to gouge people on drug prices, or perhaps *gasp* not vastly expanding fracking, which is what Obama did and bragged about, even as he signed the Paris Accords, knowing he had no intention of honoring them.

Nor did virtually anyone else who signed them, of course, and anyone who thought otherwise is either a fool or on the payroll.

Mounds of garbage. Merkel, Blair, Cameron, Trudeau, Harper, your country’s leader, odds are. People who have always wanted to do as much evil as they could, and as little good as they could get away with. (Remember nothing happened to Greece Angela Merkel was not okay with–and all so German banks could be bailed out indirectly. It would have been embarrassing to just blatantly bail them out. So a lot of Greeks died and suffered.)

There is no “hope” as long as our leaders are people like this. None.

Don’t get hooked on hopium.

We need to elect leaders who want to do as much good as they can, and as little evil as possible. Sanders in the US, Corbyn in Britain.

But we don’t want those leaders, not as a whole, do we?

We’ve been offered them, we have a chance to elect them.

But will we?

Because they have plans, and those plans are to do good.

That’s the only hope you’ve got.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Our Leaders Kill for Their Own Benefit

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On August 20, 2019

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Big Brother Award

Most people are terribly confused when it comes to understanding our leaders, whether corporate or political.

They think that the sort of ethical or moral constraints which hold them back, hold back leaders.

But being a leader in our society is about “extracting value” from ordinary people.

Raising the price of insulin to $300, for example. Or launching a war against a country which is no threat to you. Or throwing people in jail for 20 years for minor drug offenses.

Our leaders don’t think the same way we do. Their function isn’t to make our lives better, their function is to make their lives better–along with the lives of those people who can help them or the few people they care about. Biden, for example, goes on and on about how much he loves his family. Boo hoo. Then he supports policies like the bankruptcy bill or three strikes laws which destroy other families.

Obama and Geithner quite deliberately created a relief program for homeowners which relieved almost no one and instead made sure that they went bankrupt, so the banks would get their homes. The policy was intended, and this has been admitted, to help the banks, not ordinary people. (See David Dayen’s Chain of Title if you need the tedious proof.)

To elites, we are tools at best, useless eaters at worse. They are trained to look at us and figure out how much value they can extract: as consumers, workers, voters, and soldiers.

Then they extract the value, and if some of us wind up dead, homeless, sick, or crippled, well, they don’t lose one second of sleep over it.

Because to them, we aren’t people.

The great problem of being a member of an elite is keeping the Praetorian guard happy; this doesn’t just mean the core soldiers and cops, but the key retainers who execute policy at the highest level.

The next great problem is the mob: The tools and useless eaters sometimes get uppity, and revolt and you need to be sure you can put them down–hence the Praetorian guard.

But they’re working on this problem. Modern surveillance makes it so much easier to keep us down. Modern education trains us to be obedient (if you don’t think that’s what school, which is “Sit down, shut up, speak only when spoken to, and give me the answer I want, the way I want it,” does, you are either stupid or haven’t thought about it. Or it’s really, really worked on you.)

Meanwhile, we’re not so far out from the military bots. Get bots that can make bots and they won’t need us.

And that’s good, for them, because, man, having so many of us around is causing them huge problems. Once they don’t need us any more, once they have bots who will do what they want, don’t talk back, and don’t mind being scrapped or mistreated, well, the easiest way to deal with climate change is to get rid of six billion people or so, isn’t it?

I mean, they won’t need us. We’ll be a problem. They’ll have a solution: Climate change will kill some, the bots will deal with the rest, and they have the perfect servant class.

Dystopian fiction? Lunacy?

Well, maybe. But tell me, given that they are accelerating climate change, even though they’ve known about it since the 70s (we have the papers, we know they knew), and given their proven willingness to do anything nasty to us they want if they think it’s in their interest and they can get away with it, what would they be doing differently if this wasn’t true?

More reasonably, of course, some of them are planning this and the rest are just willing to go along when push comes to shove.

Remember, $300 insulin. You do that, you know people will die. You’re OK with it.

And your fellow elites haven’t stopped you. (And yes, yes, they could.)

Killing us for money or other benefits is one of the things our leaders do.

And that isn’t going to change until they’re more scared of us than we are of them.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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