An enemy is someone who means you harm and has the means to inflict it.
A friend is someone who has wants to do good for you, and has the means to bestow it.
I once wrote primarily to predict and to change the world.
I now write to help a few people, those who listen.
So, listen, because other than understanding climate change is written in, won’t be stopped (can’t at this point, minus geo-engineering), this is the most important message I have for you.
You must know who wants to harm you and has the means.
“If America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the 3 decades following the second world war… A low-income American earning $35K this year would be earning $61K. A college-educated worker now earning $72K would be earning $120K.
Everyone responsible for this is your enemy, unless you’re in somewhere between the top 4% to top 10%.
How much money, how much good, has the end of the post-war economic order inflicted on you? Adding in interest (because you wouldn’t be in debt, but have investments) it’s over a million dollar for almost everyone. You’d have a home and probably have the mortgage paid off if you don’t. You wouldn’t be drowning in student debt if young (especially since that order kept college costs down.)
(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)
So the people who are responsible have robbed you of a million or more dollars, and a good, prosperous life. These people had names. It started with with intellectuals like Milton Friedman and the oligarchs who funded economics departments to overturn the economic orthodoxy the old order ran on. It moved onto politicians, executive and CEOs. Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan; then Blair and Clinton, who made their victory complete. Thatcher understood that it was Blair who made her victorious, until Labour accepted “There Is No Alternative” they could have simply undone almost everything she did. Clinton, cutting welfare and smashing blacks and poor people in the face with punitive jail sentences, was Reagan’s heir more than George Bush Sr. ever was.(Biden, of course, was there for all of it and supported almost every shitty piece of it. Enemy. If you can’t manage “enemy, but perhaps not as bad an enemy as Trump, you can’t think.”)
This piece isn’t primarily about ideas and the influence of intellectuals and academics, but I do want to give another nod to Milton Friedman. Please remember, always, that in politics and economics ideas do usually come before action, despite everyone telling you otherwise.
that stuff is all downhill from real intellectuals like Milton Friedman giving the intellectual OK for it. (Nobel Prize winning Friedman.)https://t.co/1X02j3Bs40
— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) November 17, 2020
1970, Baby! The sound you hear, to paraphrase Ross Perot, is your jobs going down the drain to every low wage countries around the world.
Now, here’s another fact: wage theft is almost equal to ALL other theft combined, except (get this) it isn’t considered a crime. That’s right, when your boss steals from you, it’s a civil/regulatory matter!
Who’s the enemy?
Now, when it comes to dying, if you live in America or Britain or most of Europe, who is most likely to get you killed?
That dastardly Putin, twirling his metaphorical mustache and cackling about how much he hates the West, “muahahahahahaha, I hate democracy,” he cackles, or your own elites? Did Putin send you or your children to war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Did he bungle your Covid response.
Did Putin do this?
It is very rare, unless you are an Iraqi, say, that the leadership of any country save your own is more dangerous to you than your own. On those rare occasions when they are, it’s because a great power is fucking you up (yes, sometimes that’s Putin, but not if you’re American or a member of the EU.)
Your enemies are you own elites. They are the people who price drugs so high you can’t afford them, fuck up a pandemic response so your parents and grandparents die, or send you to war. They are the ones who create economic policies which funnel money to the rich and impoverish you, and if you don’t think being poor isn’t bad for you, you ain’t ever been poor, that’s for certain.
So, when you prioritize the people to be wary of, to be scared of, and to hurt or harm if you ever can, remember, a wise person knows who their enemies are.
Be a wise person.
Ten Bears
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. These days not even someone I’m willing to work with toward a common end. I think there’s a flaw in “All warfare is based on deception” [Sun Tzu, 1.18] Just not that many people out there, good bad or indifferent, that can be depended upon to do the right thing, can be trusted, even if their lives depend upon it. The scorpion and the frog.
Oh what a tangled web we weave …
In the pipeline. That’s what one of the early bloggers called it, might of been BoP, it’s in the pipeline, no matter what happens between now and then it will be delivered. Geo-engineering won’t “stop” it. It may mitigate the pain, but what’s coming is in the pipeline, it will deliver.
Of course, the answer is never the answer, what’s really interesting is the mystery.
Plague Species
https://medium.com/the-true-crime-times/the-macabre-murders-of-russell-and-shirley-dermond-322a46322706
Hugh
It is both individuals and their class. The rich got rich by stealing from the rest of us. They buy politicians to manipulate the government and laws in their favor, and they buy intellectuals to invent rationales, arguments, defenses, and natural laws for why they the rich deserve to be rich. They stay rich by setting the rest of us against each other, and again manipulating the laws.
The history of the last 50 years has not been about progress, but screw up after screw up after screw up, followed by cover ups and bailouts of the rich. What is different now is that many of the problems the the rich and elites have gifted us with are existential and unsustainable, not just for some but for all, and for the system, our society itself.
Plague Species
Speaking of enemies. Blinken as Secretary of State. Trump never did drain The Swamp and instead added more egregious creatures to it, but Biden prefers the creatures of old, the original swamp creatures. The Swamp is alive and well and thriving.
Blinken was all for expanding America’s presence in Syria so you can bet that theater of conflict will be stoked once again and no doubt another Middle Eastern country will be slated for failing that will be uniquely Biden’s trophy. Blinken advised Biden to vote yes to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Look for the media to lay the groundwork for Biden’s own unique failed state project. There will be a run-up to it. It will be conjured out of thin air.
Michael Oren loves him and says he is a “friend of Israel.”
Plague Species
Biden is willing to use overwhelming American military might to turn Syria into a war-torn failed state, but when Trump does the same thing to Americans Assad was accused of doing in Syria, just biological instead of chemical, Biden tells us we must look forward and not back and that unity must be our goal versus truth and justice.
https://www.voanews.com/usa/biden-no-doubt-syria-carried-out-chemical-attack
Let’s hold the mirror up. Let’s apply the same principle Biden is applying to Syria, to America. Instead of attacking another country and failing another state, Biden should do this instead, but there’s no profit to be made in such an endeavor, is there? Defense contractors won’t get a cut of the action and there will be no blood sacrifice to Mammon.
Joseph, you are a pathetic and malevolent hypocrite. A wasted vote.
S Brennan
When I wrote this* yesterday and Hugh & Willy quickly jumped to Pelosi/DNC’s avid defense even though members of her own party thought it a wicked thing**. Indeed, no matter how politically motivated the cruelty onto American citizens, our resident minders will jump to the DNC’s defense. Such people are not your friends.
*
“Not spoken about here but, as a direct result of Pelosi’s refusal to work out a deal with Trump to [extend/replace/renew] CARES millions of unemployed receiving federal unemployment extensions fall off the rolls at midnight 31 Dec 2020.
That’s a reality that will put millions on the street….simultaneously. Those millions will not be entitled to any relief because their prior income will exclude them. That’s 8-9 million people who, could and normally would have been helped. In the past, during employment crisis federal extensions were the norm, not this time, the unemployed are not going to be helped this time because it’s an election year and D’s thought effing over those out of work would help their election numbers.
And this is brought on by the “blue no matter who crowd” who can’t understand that guaranteeing their vote at the outset without extorting any firm quid pro quo a priori guarantees that the working class can be safely ignored. Any yet, almost everybody here argued for just that….and will the next time…and the next.
Why will something like that happen…
If the polls are to be believed, Biden is the most popular Democrat of all time and by a large margin. If polls are to be believed, the DNC denying the Sanders wing was the smartest thing the DNC has ever done. If polls are to be believed, Biden strode through battle unscathed while lessor Democrats were squashed. The DNC was right, the Sanders people are fools, if…polls are to be believed. The immense Biden vote proves once and for all, that any who diverge from DNC dictata should be ignored for all time.
That was the message sent in 2020”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**
“Pelosi has refused a White House offer for a $1.8 trillion coronavirus aid package – despite mounting pressure from members of her own Democratic caucus who would like to see a compromise.
Pelosi angrily defended her stance Tuesday when a CNN interviewer asked her to respond to a progressive Democrat, Representative Ro Khanna, who had urged her to accept the White House proposal instead of waiting until February next year.
“it’s no use giving them a false thing just because the president wants to put a check with his name on it in the mail,” she told CNN.”
Willy
Step 1: Get rid of the abomination of Trump.
Step 2: Reflect on that experience. Hopefully learn something new.
Step 3: Remind our elected officials of what we learned about Trumpism and more specifically, why it happens and how to prevent it.
There may be so much wrong with our culture, that “fixing” wont be a thing until “hit bottom” occurs (Example: “conservative” Americans cultified into combining church and state).
But toying with effective ideas for preventing “hit bottom” seems a worthwhile hobby.
Jan Wiklund
I would add Nixon to the list of destructive politicians. After all, it was he who decided to bust the Bretton Wood principles which made the welfare society possible.
One agreement was that the USD should have a fixed value. But Nixon started to print dollars to pay for the Vietnam war, which spread the costs to all who had saved in dollars.
The Brits responded with easing the bank rules to goad the finance business to London. But they could do that because the Bretton Woods rules were already broken.
Willy
Jimmy Dore is an enemy. At least until that “progressive” starts championing somebody who’s actually on his side. Sure, he speaks of the plight of the working class, but so did Bannon.
And we all know how that turned out. People with poor political instincts, who serve to create only cynicism towards the system, enabling drowning government libertarians, instead of also adding some hope for progressivism, are an enemy.
Hugh
Biden’s Administration choices are thoroughly Establishment (as in progressives need not apply). They consist of Obama-era retreads with some of these checking off various idpol boxes as well. It all looks like an Obama third term.
John Kerry will be the new climate change czar. He’ll be very Paris Accordsish. It shows how senior a person Biden can get to not take a problem seriously. The people Trump picked not to take problems seriously, by contrast, were third-rate dopes or worse. By the by, I wonder whom Biden will choose to address wealth inequality.
Stirling S Newberry
Milton fils had one advantage: he was king. The loser gets Pittsburg.
nihil obstet
I wouldn’t limit the definitions by time — people who want to hurt or help you now may not have the means of doing so, but may have them in the future. That makes it sensible to cultivate the appropriate relationships now.
Our overlords have been so incredibly inept that they’ve left an open history of hurting us. Any thoughts on other ways of identifying potential friends or enemies?
Ten Bears
A good place to start would be a show of good faith on everyone’s part.
But who/what identifies “good faith?”
Hugh
Good faith for me is that a person acts according to what someone in their position should have known to be right and true. Trumpers, for instance, act in bad faith when they deny the results of the election because they wish to believe this even though any reasonable person would accept that wishful thinking isn’t evidence. Experts using the whocoodanode defense are also usually tell of someone acting in bad faith.
different clue
Too bad we don’t have a Star Trek TriCorder to wave at every Trumper so we can separate the Bad Faithers from the True Believers.
Hugh
That’s just it. Being a true believer does not exempt someone from acting in bad faith. Belief doesn’t count. Reasonable knowledge does.
S Brennan
“Too bad we don’t have a Star Trek TriCorder to wave at every” [Obama] voter who voted for Trump in 2016, because they were disgusted with Obama’s record of endless regime change war and upward transfer of wealth.
Again, if polls are to be believed, Biden is the most popular Democrat of all time. D voters, if polls are to be believed, wanted to discredit the “Biden movement”
Sanders voters, thanks to Sanders himself [and Ms Cruz who, dismissed all the “radicals” who helped her win election and now kisses Pelosi’s ring] is the direct cause of why the “left” of the D party can be safely ignored.
S Brennan
D voters, if polls are to be believed, wanted to discredit the “Biden movement”
Should have been,
D voters, if polls are to be believed, wanted to discredit the “Sanders movement”
bruce wilder
My paternal grandmother — not an educated or philosophical woman — I can quite vividly recall, knew Herbert Hoover was her enemy. From my reading of history, working-class Americans strongly distrusted the wealthy and large business corporations, and for good reasons, reasons of experience both personal and shared thru community. Social solidarity on some basis was sufficient to elevate leaders that would confront the bosses. Incidents like the Johnstown Flood or the Park Avenue train crash or the Triangle Shirt Waist fire were widely and accurately attributed to the murderous negligence of the rich. The politics of confrontation tended to produce more stalement than progress, but there were blessed breakthroughs, because people knew their enemies for enemies. Economic and financial scandal was possible, because altruistic punishment of miscreants was expected and often followed.
The political culture still celebrates a pageant of good and evil, but the identified evildoer is conceived in more cartoonish fashion. That is part of the joke in suggesting the possibility of confrontation of Putin.
Ten Bears
Good faith, bad faith, true believer, false believers, what’s the difference, aeh? Boiled down to ones and zeros, balls on a brass monkey it’s still doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, and not what I was talking about. There is literally no one out there, not in this room not out of this room, no one out there that is trustworthy, is worthy of my trust. Yes yes yes, I’m just one old man yelling at clouds, but that’s not the point: there’s no one out there that can be trusted to do the right thing. Though they can certainly be trusted not to.
We have to stop doing what we’re doing. It isn’t working.
S Brennan
“We have to stop doing what we’re doing. It isn’t working.”
Says a commenter who just spent the last year bashing every alternative to the endless stream of shit sandwiches the DNC is willing to serve up. To quote myself:
“the “blue no matter who crowd” can’t understand that guaranteeing their vote at the outset without extorting any firm quid pro quo a priori guarantees that the working class can be safely ignored. Any yet, almost everybody here [this applies to the above commenter] argued for just that…and will the next time…and the next.
Why will something like that happen…
If the polls are to be believed, Biden is the most popular Democrat of all time and by a large margin. If polls are to be believed, the DNC denying the Sanders wing was the smartest thing the DNC has ever done. [I mean why would you give in when the alternative is a sheepdog willing to lead his followers to the slaughterhouse?] If polls are to be believed, Biden strode through battle unscathed while lessor Democrats were squashed. The DNC was right, the Sanders people are fools, if…polls are to be believed. The immense Biden vote proves once and for all, that any who diverge from DNC dictata should be ignored for all time.
That was the message sent in 2020”
Willy
You project a lot Brennan. Why not pick a few people you admire and talk them up, in detail?
Most people voted for Biden to defeat Trump, making Biden the most popular candidate to defeat the most popular less popular candidate.
Gaianne
I am late again–as usual! 😀
Ian–Your third and fourth paragraphs went right to my heart: saying the unsaid. I am writing less these days–though I am still reading. Mainly I try to persuade friends, and work with those I can persuade. Sometimes people will do the right thing even though they have the wrong thoughts–or no coherent thoughts–and that can be enough.
But people are adamantly clueless, This is the propaganda at work. Also simple denial, it must be admitted. Half a week ago some friends were chatting about the new Covid outbreak–the entire US is exploding with new cases probably resulting from back-to-school–and everyone thought our ineffective public measures were fine. When I commented that the US has no public health–well, I broke a taboo. Worse, no one seems aware of what “public health” actually means–their is no concept for it in their heads. That methods developed in the Modern West, including the US, in the 19th and 20th centuries, and now successfully used in Asia, could be employed in this country (that developed them) is literally unthinkable.
So, while I am veering off topic, yes, our enemies are not abroad, but at home. Evading their actions, and acting effectively despite them, is the central problem.
–Gaianne
Jack Parsons
It is not settled science yet, and probably won’t be for a long time, but there are reports that possessing Neanderthal DNA makes a person more vulnerable to Covid-19.
But, yes, by all means use the relative failure of industrialized countries as a political cudgel. I won’t complain. Never let a crisis go to waste!