Ian Welsh

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

Category: Power Page 13 of 14

The problem of resistance to the oligarchy

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On January 12, 2014

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is how to hurt their interests at an acceptable cost to those doing the harm.

The traditional answer to this was solidarity and martyrdom.  It is impossible to overstate how dangerous being a union activist right up to the middle of the 20th century was.  You had to accept that you would be beaten, jailed and possibly killed.  Violent confrontations with police and private cops were routine.  Outright battles were not unknown, as when miners squared off against the military in a multi-day battle with over ten thousand casualties.

Nor did the early unions wring their hands about violence, even “criminal” violence. Clarence Darrow was a union lawyer for years.  One of his most prominent cases was defending union members who set off explosives in a newspaper office, killing people in that office.  The unions did not abandon those workers, who had clearly committed what we would call terrorism: they hired a star lawyer, one of the best in the country, to defend them.

The general strike, even more than the strike, was another answer: just shut the entire economy down.  It was used because it inflicted real costs on employers: they still needed some workers. But a strike requires social solidarity: bringing in scabs must be socially unacceptable, either due to mores or because the scabs know they’ll have their kneecaps broken.  A general strike requires enough workers to be willing to do it to shut down an entire city, region, or country.

The Gandhian resistance method is very similar to general strikes: it requires hundreds of thousands to millions of people to be willing to shut down the economy and dare the police or army to kill or imprison them all.  When you have only a few hundred or thousand people, the police can deal with that easily enough: worst case they call in the national guard.  Hundreds of thousands: not so much.

What all of these actions had in common is that they genuinely hurt the interests of the rich where it mattered, in the pocketbook.

You can also get change through making the lives of the rich unpleasant, or making them fear for their very lives.  Social peace has often been bought by treating ordinary people better, when the rich genuinely feared the army and police couldn’t protect them.

But if the elites think that their security forces can protect them, and especially if they live in a bubble where they never have to face people whose lives they have made miserable, as is the case for most of our rich, who fly by private jet, travel about the city in helicopters or chauffered limos and live in gated enclaves; and if you can’t cost them any real money, why should they let you have any of the surplus of society beyond the bare minimum you need to remain useful to them? (Not to survive: as the cutting of food stamps in the US indicates, that’s not a priority for the oligarchy.)

Be clear that distribution of goods and money in an economy is almost entirely unrelated to any ethical idea of merit or deservedness.  The bankers, amongst the best paid people in the world economy, destroyed far more money than they earned in the 00s, and yet are still paid billions of dollars in bonuses every year.  They receive the money they do because they had the power to make the government make them whole after they lost everything, then the power to make the government make them even richer than before.  They control a bundle of valuable rights from the state: the right to borrow at prime, the right to value assets to model (fantasy); the right to huge leverage; and the right lend, which is how money is actually created in our economy (aka. they can print money.)

This is why they’re rich: not because they produce net value: they destroy value; but because they have the power to make the government do what they want it to do and to make it not prosecute them when they break the laws, and even to change the laws so they can take even more money.

Distribution in an economy is based, virtually entirely, on power. A group receives goods and money because it can force others to give it to them.  The libertarian fantasy of free markets and free choice is exactly that. They don’t exist today, they have rarely existed in the past, and to the extent they have existed they owe their existence entirely to government making sure they exist.  As soon as any group gains enough power to take over government, they do, and free markets cease to exist because they make the government give them special rights,whether those are rights to print money, borrow low and lend high, or so-called intellectual property rights that let them continue to profit from ideas created 80 years ago.

Power, power is all that matters.  Even distribution, or something close to it, happens only when there is relatively equality between groups in society or there is an existential threat to society which requires the willing participation of all parts of society.

If you ever want to see raises for ordinary people again, you must figure out how they will become powerful: and power means “what can they do to hurt people who cross them, hurt them really, really badly.”

Peace is the result of everyone knowing and believing in their hearts that if they break the conditions of the peace, others will react with overwhelming force.  When  it becomes clear that there is no cost for taking more of the pie, people will do so, and yes, did do so.

So: how do we punish the rich for what they have done?  How do we force them (not convince, force) to give up more of the surplus crated by society?

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The Power Parable

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On January 9, 2014

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“The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must ” – Thucydides

Imagine that you have crawled out of the desert. You have not drunk in days, and if you do not have water soon you will die. Only one man has water, but he will not give it to you for free, he wants to be paid.

What is that water worth? To put it another way, what is your life worth?

One answer is that your life is worth everything you will ever earn, minus the cost of subsistence. The water-seller might say “if you die, you will never earn anything again. Therefore everything you earn is because I gave you water. So this water is worth your life’s income.”

Now you might not find life worth living under these circumstances, which amount to slavery. If the water-seller had many possible customers crawling out of the desert, he might find that too many people would rather die than pay, and might reduce his price somewhat to maximize his profit. If one quarter of people would rather die than pay, he might reduce the price to two-thirds of his customers life earnings, and see if most of them were willing to pay that.

Over time he might find that, knowing he’d take two-thirds, once saved his customers wouldn’t work very hard: just enough for subsistence and some alcohol, perhaps. So he might continue to experiment—how much could he take to maximize his profits?

But there is another possibility, back at the original bargain “your earnings, or your life?” What if you decide to take the water whether the water-seller wants you to have it or not? What if you’re willing to use violence? You’re weak, you might not win and if you lose you’re dead, but you might win and if you do you don’t have to pay anything. And if you win, you could start selling water yourself.

The water-seller has to take this into account. Which means he either has to reduce the price he charges so it’s not worth people trying to kill him, or he has to spend some of his profits on security. Thugs, pretty much.

But why pay for his own thugs? Why not pay government, and use its thugs? Everybody chips in some money, the government creates police and an army, and they make sure that customers don’t just take the water. They also solve another problem we hadn’t mentioned, making sure that people keep paying up later once they are no longer dying for thirst. The government enforces the water-seller’s contracts.

It should be pointed out that the water-payer is getting a lot more out of the governments thugs than most ordinary people are. Even if we assume the new police enforce all contracts and stop violence against everyone (as best they can), this guy has a lot more enforcement needs and a lot more people who want to kill him than an ordinary person. So even if everyone pays, say, 10% of income for the police, our water-seller is doing well out of this.

But why should the water-seller pay 10%? If the government has politicians whose money is separate from the government’s money, who can’t just use it as their purse, why not give them personally, say, 2% in gifts. That’s enough money to make them, personally, filthy rich. And they can lower water-seller taxes (after all, he saves lives and is a lynchpin of the economy) and raise them on other people. With a bit of work he might not pay any direct taxes, only gifts, and the rest of the population will pay for the enforcement of his contract rights. Yes, that reduces the post-subsistence money he gets from the people whose lives he saved, but for every dollar spent on enforcement he would have only gotten two-thirds anyway.

This is power pricing in a parable.

Back in the eighties I was very poor and did not have a phone. Ever try to get a job without a phone? It limits you to a set of very menial, low paying jobs. How much is a phone worth if you need it to get a better job? In the modern world, where job-hunting is done through the internet, how much is it worth to have email?

For years I didn’t have a credit card. I eventually got one because I needed to travel, and only the lowest grade of hotels will let you stay if you don’t have a credit card. Likewise you can’t rent a car without a credit card. How much is not having bedbugs and having blackout drapes and a good mattress worth to you? How much is being able to drive worth to you?

Let us say you live far from where you work, and there is no public transportation. How much can you be charged for gas before you refuse to pay? Probably just slightly less than the difference between your current job and the best paying job near where you live, minus whatever price you put on the annoyance of having to drive a long ways.

What if there aren’t any jobs near where you live that you can find because the economy is in a prolonged slump? How much can they charge you for gas, and repairs, and car insurance and driver’s license fees then? You have to have a car, you can’t make a living without it. Everyone who sells you something related to cars knows that.

There are two answers to these what-ifs. There’s the free market answer, and there’s the government-for-the-people answer.

The free market answer is that if it is easy for new suppliers of gas, or repairs, or insurance, to start a new business, if the current suppliers charge more than the cost of getting into the business, someone will start a new business and undercut them. The threat of that, and the actual occasional reality of that, will keep current suppliers from gouging you. If there are a lot of people selling, even without new people coming into the business, one of them may “betray” the others and sell for cheaper, so long as they can still make a profit (or to drive people out of the business they might sell for a loss, so they can later charge the full “power price”.)

The second answer is that the government says “that’s not fair” or “it is not in our interest to let you take such high profits, because it reduces economic activity and thus our tax base” and simply doesn’t allow businesses to take maximum profits.

If the government doesn’t stop it, and if the market doesn’t stop it, however, profit maximization will occur.

“What this is really worth to you is just slightly less than every dollar this will earn you or save you. And that’s what we’re going to charge.”

In the real world, of course, there are multiple demands on each consumer – food, water, housing, transportation, education, healthcare, entertainment. So even if in one field there is no government or market reason not to gouge, there is a limit to how much a business can gouge because there are so many businesses trying to do so.

But notice something about that list: food, water, housing, transportation, education, healthcare, entertainment—every one of those things, except entertainment, you either need to survive, or you need to maximize your income. You pretty much must have those things, so anyone who is in a position to take them away is in a position to profit maximize. Now, let us say that in many of those fields the businesses are constrained either by the market or the government so they can’t take almost all of the value of what they offer. In such a case, the field or fields which isn’t constrained is going to make much higher profits. So if water companies are not subject to the possibility of new competition, nor are they regulated that field is going to be making much higher profits than housing, food, education, healthcare and so on.

So every business wants other industries to be subject to regulation, and to be a free market, but they want themselves to be free of regulation and free of real competition. A small number of other firms in the industry, all of whom do business the same way, and none of whom seriously undercut each other is acceptable to profit maximizers, but if it is easy to enter their business, then there is a free market and that’s not good for profit maximization.

Whenever you see an industry where profits are routinely higher than the norm for the society there is a good chance it is neither properly regulated nor a free market.

Because ordinary citizens do not have market power, because they cannot individually break a major firm, they must take prices. If the phone company, or the water company sets a price, you pay, or you don’t have a phone, or water.

Now consumers do have power as a group. If large numbers of consumers move together they can destroy or make a company. However it’s hard for consumers to do this when there is collusion between companies. If they’re all basically the same, if the product and the service is the same, consumer revolts are unlikely, especially for any must-have products. You must have water, you must have food. If you want a good job you must have a phone and internet, and any place without good public transit, you must have a car.

Consumers have power as consumers in markets that are actually free, where there is actual competition. Citizens also have power to the extent that they have power in government, and thus can use government to control industry, either to make sure there are actual free markets, or to ensure that if there aren’t, they are regulated.

To go back to our initial example, if you come crawling out of the desert and anyone can give you water, not just one person or a few people colluding, you’ll probably get it for little more than it usually costs. Indeed, a good samaritan may give you wate for free. If the government is responsive to ordinary citizens sense of outrage and morality “that’s not fair!” then even if there is only one water-seller, the government won’t let him charge you more than anyone else.

Individual consumers are in a weak position. As consumers they have very little power. It is as citizens that they have power, and it is in actual free markets that the producers do not have enough power to take advantage of consumer weakness. Free markets, however, are very fragile things, and usually only exist if government makes sure they do, which comes back to consumers being weak, but citizens having power through government. Citizens who treat politics as consumption, however, will lose both power and prosperity.

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The Role of Violence and Coercion in Saving the World

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On November 9, 2013

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It will be impossible to save the world from climate change without coercion.  The problem of climate change is a problem of common sinks and limited resources: the atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon, the seas only have so many fish and can only withstand us dumping so much plastic and other pollutants into them.  The world has only so many forests, and so on.

These are genuinely limited resources.  Dumping into them, or chopping them down, or overfishing them is an advantage to whoever does it: they can burn dirty (cheap) fuels, they can use plastic packaging consumers like, they can have fish to eat now.

It is rational, in the sense that you receive a benefit, to destroy the world. It is especially rational to do so if you expect to be dead before the costs come to bear, or if you think you can use your money to avoid the worst of climate change.

We have an additional problem: no one has jurisdiction over all of the atmosphere, all of the seas, all of the forests.  If country A decides not to pollute or dump or cut down forests, someone else can do more of that and gain a short term benefit.  And by short term benefit I mean “some of the decision makers and their friends will personally get rich.  Filthy, stinking, rich.”  (This is also one  problem with refusing to have high marginal taxation, capital taxes, estate taxes and corporate taxes.  People are less interested in destroying the world when they’ll only make a little bit off it.  The calculus does change somewhat.)

So how do you ensure that Brazil doesn’t destroy the rest of the Amazon, that Japan doesn’t radically overfish, or that the US doesn’t dump obscene amounts of carbon into the air per capita?

There are three essential approaches.  The first is bribery: we’ll pay you not to do this.  Up to a certain point this is necessary: if Brazilians can make more money chopping down jungle than keeping it around, why wouldn’t they? But everyone has the ability to do destroy the world, everyone can hold you hostage, and once people start, they don’t stop.  Bribery only works if it is short term, if it becomes “we’ll pay for you to transition to a different economic model, but no more than that.”

The second is incentives.  Why are the Brazilians chopping down the jungle?  Because Americans want to eat beef.  If Americans change how they eat, much less reason for the jungles to be chopped down.  If we don’t want plastic to destroy the Oceans maybe we should just forbid most plastic packaging?  It can be done, I grew up with paper bags and glass bottles, for example.  I grew up in a culture where every food worker didn’t wear disposable plastic gloves.  I survived, I guarantee you will too, no  matter how much of a germphobe you are.

The third is coercion.  You will not do this, and if you do we will do bad things to you.  Lock you up, sink your ships, and if it comes to it, kill you.

Now let’s be clear, coercion underlies virtually all social relations.  You pay taxes because if you don’t, somebody with a gun will come along and throw you in jail.  You have property because men with guns enforce your property rights.  You go to school, because if you don’t… well, you get the picture.  No society has EVER existed that did not have some form of coercion available to it.  In many hunter-gatherer societies that coercion was the simplest of all: expulsion.  If you didn’t obey the rules, they kicked you out, and that meant death because no, most people cannot survive alone, and most people don’t want to.

Because there is an advantage to unilateral betrayal: to dumping your pollution on other people and letting them pay the cost, there will always be people who want to do it, and it’s not always worth trying to use incentives to get them not to: it swiftly becomes too expensive.  The best approach is often to unilaterally take certain actions off the table: none of us will unilaterally take each others stuff.  None of us will dump poisons into the air that kill other people we don’t know.  None of us will, on net, allow forests to decrease.  None of us will use plastic packaging.

This is the problem of collective action: if none of us do these things, we’re all better off.  But if one of us or a few of us do it, we have an advantage over other people, and if other people are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.

This brings us to my comment, in my 44 Points Post about needing an armed force to protect the Oceans, a comment which caused much screaming, since people thought it violated my point about not wanting large standing armies.

An army and a police force are not the same thing.  An international “Ocean Guard” is not a navy, it does not need destroyers with depth charges and nuclear submarines with missiles and Aircraft Carriers.  It needs ships capable of find trawlers and boarding them.  Police force.

But the key problem here is jurisdiction: no one has jurisdiction.  No one can say to the US or China or India or Japan, “you will not do this!”

We must create institutions which have the authority to say “you will not pollute, you will not destroy the environment.”  More than that, because we have gone too far, we are going to need institutions which can say “and you will also work to fix the environment.”  Again, countries will want to not contribute, because if someone else does it, and you don’t, you get most of the benefits without the costs.

Now we can create a world economy which is not harmful to the environment and in which everyone is fed, clothed, has shelter and has a meaningful life with a good chance at happiness.  We are going to have to, because people who are unhappy, who do not love, and are not loved, who are frightened, will do whatever they feel they must.  We must drain the swamp of true need, of hunger, of great fear.

But that’s the end point: that’s where we must commit to go.  Along the way, however, bad actors will have to be forced to stop what they are doing coercively.

Failure to do so means death and suffering.  More death and suffering than is caused by coercively, say, sinking Trawlers or trade embargoing countries which won’t stop using plastic containers.  We are in a situation where the median death estimate from climate change is probably a billion people.

We cannot entirely bribe and incentivize ourselves our way out of this problem, some coercion will be necessary.  How much money would you have to pay Wall Street, for example, to stop doing what they do?  As much, or more than they make doing what they do.  How much to stop Big Oil?  Same answer.  We can’t afford it, that money, those resources, must be spent fixing the problem and taking care of ordinary people.  So we must criminalize certain behaviour, on a world scale and then enforce it.

That is policing, if done right, not military action.

There are great big reasons to be scared of anything that looks like a world state.  I have a preference for nations, because a world state that turns totalitarian is a nightmare, and a world state is also likely to lead to stagnation.  My suggestion is to try federalization: specific bodies with specific enforcement, but they must have transnational police powers.  There is no reason these bodies can’t be run by democratic methods, no reasons the courts they run can’t be fair and open. Our current transnational bodies aren’t democratic, indeed are anti-democratic, precisely because our elites don’t want them to be, but that is, again, a social choice.

We figure this problem out, or we fry.  We need institutions for transnational action, institutions with police power, courts and which are democratically constituted.  This isn’t an insoluble problem, either in general, or specific, except that it challenges the people who currently have power and who are currently getting filthy rich by destroying the environment, and in so doing likely killing a billion or more people, and conceivably, risking the future existence of humanity entirely.

Given the stakes, we’d best grow up.  There is only one world, and until we get off it, it is a single point of failure. It must be dealt with as such.

 

Incentives

Why The Republicans Shut The Government Down and Threaten the Debt Ceiling

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On October 6, 2013

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HBR has an article by Justin Fox on the government shutdown in Washington in game theory terms.  It’s good as far as it goes, but it amounts to this:

  1. It works, they get some of what they want
  2. People keep doing what works.

Let’s add some more specifics.

The article mentions that the freezing of redistricting in most Republican states means that Republicans can’t lose the House.  What it fails to mention is this: they can lose their seats by losing the primary.  The Tea Party (unlike progressives) is very good at winning primaries.  Even if they don’t succeed in a primary challenge, their challenges are serious, and politicians don’t want to chance it.  Fighting a challenge is expensive, risky and time consuming.

Fox notes that Obama has repeatedly given in.

But has he?  Remember the famous FDR comment, “I agree with you, now make me do it?”

Obama has a long record of statements and actions which indicate he wants a lower deficit, wants to cut back on entitlement and spending and desires a grand bargain.

Were Republicans making him do things he really didn’t want to do?  Perhaps he might have chosen to do things somewhat differently (he wants mostly spending cuts but at least some new taxes, they want no new taxes).  But the goals of the Republicans (cut entitlements and the deficit) and Obama’s goals (cut the deficit and entitlements) aren’t that far apart.  What they differ on is the exact way in which it should be done.

Obama agreed to past debt negotiation events because he wanted to. He did have other options.  He could simply declare that the constitution says that debts must be paid, argue that one law (the debt-ceiling) does not outweigh another (the budget) and tell the treasury to keep on keeping on.  There is nothing the House, alone, could do about that.

Obama, in other words, to use a game theory term, has a unilateral move: something he can do that cannot (or will not) be stopped by other actors.  His BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated settlement) is to simply tell the House to suck it and keep spending.  He chose not to do so.

When you’re dealing with game theory you have to consider all the players possible moves and their goals.  Obama and the Republicans have been in an extended negotiation over not whether to do a Grand Bargain cutting entitlements or whether to cut the deficit, but what that bargain will look like and how the deficit will be cut.

Add in one more player: Democrats.  Obama cannot, using just Democratic votes, get the entitlement cuts he wants, this was true even when Democrats controlled the House.  Republicans can vote for entitlement cuts and get reelected, too many Democrats can’t.  To slash Social Security and Medicare Obama must have Republican votes.

In other words, this multi-year session of threats about the debt limit, the government shutdown, the furloughs, is a multi-year negotiation between Obama and Republicans.

The Beauty of Obama’s Clapper Appointment

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On August 13, 2013

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As you’ve probably heard, Obama has appointed James Clapper (the man who lied under oath to Congress about NSA spying) to review NSA spying.

I am in awe, few things have impressed me this deeply.

This isn’t just a middle finger to everyone to everyone who is against blanket surveillance (aka. the majority of Americans), it is Obama saying “Kiss My Ass.”

It’s really hard for most people to understand just how much contempt our lords and masters have for us.  They really don’t give a fuck what’s good for us, what we like, or what we think.  They are rich, or powerful, or famous because they deserve it, and if we aren’t any of those things then they don’t give two fucks what we think.  By not being rich, powerful or famous we have proven we don’t deserve any say.  After all, if we had any qualities that were worthwhile beyond the sort of qualities you praise in a dog, we wouldn’t be peons, would we.

In this, Obama is very similar to Bush, actually, but in general it’s a characteristic of everyone near the top of our current society.  Starting at about the Senior VP level, people decide that they deserve everything they’ve got and everyone else doesn’t.  If they did, they’d have it.

The media is full of studies showing that power decreases empathy, and I’ll bet that’s true throughout history. But I’ll also bet this, the degree to which it is true is social, and in many times and places it has been less true.  Over the last couple generations we’ve seen a significant, measurable fall in the general level of empathy in the population as a whole.  If you have an ideology which glorifies greed and which claims that society is a meritocracy when there is copious evidence to the contrary, those who win will believe they “deserve” what they have, and everyone else “deserves” what they have.  Add to that objective circumstances which amount to dog-eat-dop (there simply are not enough good jobs to go around) and people will either band together, or turn on each other.  Generally, we’ve chosen, for ideological reasons, to turn on each other.

This isn’t necessary: it isn’t what happened in the US in the Great Depression, for example.  It’s a choice, and our choice is to be bastards to each other.

 

Why Jeff Bezos Purchased the Washington Post

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On August 5, 2013

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Newspapers don’t make much money any more (though in the 90s they made returns in the teens regularly.)  What they do still have, though, is influence and power.  Even though newspapers don’t have the reach television does, they determine the stories of the day—they control the news cycle more than any other part of the media. More than that, newspapers are intelligence bureaus.  Rupert Murdoch, no fool, would spend hours on the phone with beat reporters, picking their brains.

Power leads to money.  Amazon is under what Bezos must consider attack (as in making Amazon pay sales taxes), and he needs influence, power and intelligence in DC.  The Washington Post, at 250 million, is an absolute steal, even if it loses money every day.

(Bezos letter to Washington Post staff.)

The Hidden Army: Hezbollah Teaches the World How to Fight

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On February 25, 2013

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Surveillance State notes something very, very important:

Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for some time. In an effort to stop Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters from communicating, Israel has in the past jammed the cell phone towers in the Hezbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon. Eager to make sure that didn’t happen again, Hezbollah has covertly built out a fiber-optic network throughout the areas it controls.

He then goes on to note that the last crisis between Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah was over the government trying to shut down that fiber-optic network. Hezbollah regarded that as an act of war:

(Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah) said the government’s decision to shut down Hezbollah’s fiber-optic communications network was tantamount to a declaration of war. For the (central) government, the network represented an intolerable example of Hezbollah’s efforts to set up an Iranian- and Syrian-backed state within Lebanon. Hezbollah justifies the network, which carried its communications during a 2006 war with Israel, as a vital security asset.

The interesting thing is that during the 2006 war, Hezbollah won the information war. Their communications remained secure, but Israeli soldiers carrying cell phones made calls which Hezbollah tracked. Even if they couldn’t listen in, being able to triangulate where some Israeli soldier is making a call from gives some very interesting, and useful, information.

Americans, Israelis and the West in general are used to assuming they’ll win the surveillance, electronic and information war. But Hezbollah defeated or drew Israel in all three. A network of tunnels, pre-prepared camouflage positions for missile launchers and the use of civilian clothes when troops were traveling made aerial surveillance and satellites virtually useless. The Israelis were never able to shut down the majority of Hezbollah’s missile launchers, any more than they’ve been able to find those of the Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s army is a secret one. It’s like an old fashioned spy agency.

It doesn’t exist.

If you’re enrolled in it, you don’t tell anyone. The war was rife with stories of soldiers being killed, and their families finding out for the first time that they were even in Hezbollah’s army. This, of course, is to make it impossible to use assassination, mostly aerial assassination, to take out key leaders.

Hezbollah is an almost perfect Darwinian organization. Israel uses informants and assassination? Great – we’ll keep even our membership secret. Israel uses air power? We’ll dig tunnels and set up aeriel blinds for our missile launchers. Israel doesn’t like taking heavy infantry casualties – fine then, we’ll set up overlapping bunkers which simply cannot be cleared without taking losses.

Hezbollah has created the new model army, and a new model state. Call it the Hidden Army. An army that blends in with the population, that moves only when it cannot be seen, that sets up in the expectation of surveillance. An army that knows all the high tech games, and spent the time to figure out how to nullify them. It sounds like a guerilla army, and it is, but it’s also much more: it’s an army capable of engaging in strategic warfare and an army capable of engaging in full on attrition defense warfare against Israeli main battle forces. It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is.

It’s an unrecognized State with a hidden army. Oh, the UN says there’s a Lebanese government with authority over Hezbollah. But everyone knows that the real government in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah. They pick up the garbage, they give out the pensions, heck, they have their own phone network. Crazy. When the Lebanese “government” picks a fight with Hezbollah, Hezbollah wins.

We are going to see many more of these unrecognized governments, with their hidden armies. Why? Because they work, and they work very well, both at providing government services to a population, and at frustrating much larger, more powerful and expensive conventional armies. As official governments fail, less recognized ones will pick up the pieces. And they will look to Lebanon to see how to do it, survive, and even win.

(Kicking this one to the front again – Feb 25, 2013 – originally reposted in 2009.)

(Another reprint.  This one got some hostile reaction from people who missed the point.  Hezbollah might be the most interesting and successful neo-state in the world.  Anyone who isn’t studying it is a fool. )

Public opinion is irrelevant

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On November 30, 2011

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When Occupy started, there were polls that showed the public supported it.  Later, polls showed that support had dropped and a majority no longer supported Occupy.  In the first case progressives were pleased, in the second upset.

I didn’t care either time.  Repeat after me:

Public opinion does not matter.

It is irrelevant.  A large majority of the population wanted a public option added to the healthcare bill.  A small majority wanted single payor.  Calls against TARP were running 100:1 to 1200:1 against.  There is no public option, there is no single payer, and TARP passed.

In Europe every government other than Iceland has been sure to never allow a referendum on austerity.  Members of the Euro-zone like Spain and Greece and Italy have not had referendums on whether to leave the Euro.  They have had elections in some cases, but both major parties are FOR austerity (it’s not clear that citizens entirely understand this, watching Spaniards talking about how they had voted against austerity in the recent election was pathetic.  They elected a government which will go even more hardcore on austerity.)

Most countries in the developed world do not have functioning democracies in any meaningful sense.  You can vote for party A, B, or C, but they will all do substantially the same things, differing only in how fast they do them and the degree of gratuitous cruelty they engage in.

Your opinion does not matter.  Politicians are almost entirely in the thrall of a neo-liberal ideology, and are almost entirely the bought and paid servants of the very rich.  If a politician does what the oligarchy wants, he or she will be taken care of, even if thrown out of office.  If they don’t, money and influence will be used against them, and once out of office they will be on their own.

Politicians do not work for you.  Neither, just to be clear, do the police.  Nothing is more pathetic than watching folks at Occupy who seem to genuinely believe the cops are on their side.

Our elites will do what they will do regardless of what public opinion is.

What matters is not “opinion”, but action.  So with regards to Occupy, all I cared about is how many people were being radicalized—whether a cadre was being formed; and how much of the population supported them in real terms.  People who would donate goods, would donate money, would spread the message actively, would go down during the day.

What I care about in general, is how many people are willing to impose costs on the oligarchy.  These can be financial costs (as when French protestors occupied a refinery), or they can be personal costs, such as heckling politicians and the rich, slashing the tires of their cars (the Argentines did that, by the way) or, if rioting, rioting where they live and work.

Understand, the true rich live in the bubble.  They fly on private jets, they travel by helicopter, if they stay in hotels they cost tens of thousands of dollars a night and have private entrances, check-ins, elevators and so on that you as a peon never see or use unless you are part of their direct servant class.  Being in the bubble means never having to deal with a human being who isn’t directly financially dependent.  These people do not care what you ‘think’, they only care if you can damage their interests.

Politicians live less in the bubble.  You can reach them, and let them know what you think.  Loudly and insistently.  At their homes.  Their restaurants.  Their fund raisers.  Everywhere they go.  Don’t “occupy Wall Street”.  Occupy Bloomberg.  Go everywhere he goes, and make his life living hell.  That’s a cost to him.

Until politicians fear you more than they fear the rich and covet the favors and money of the rich, they will continue to serve the rich first.  Their salaries are not that important to them, they do not work for you, and they don’t fear you enough.

But that won’t change because of “opinion”.  Opinions don’t matter in aristocracies or oligarchies, and that’s what we are creating, what we’re heading towards.  What matters isn’t what the public thinks, what matters is what the public does which has a tangible, real, cost to politicians or their masters.

So I no longer care about polls in almost all cases.  They don’t matter.  Likewise most elections: elect whoever you want, the policies will remain the same except on the margins as long as the politicians don’t work for you, but for the rich.

Your “opinion” is irrelevant.  The powerful do not care what you think.

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