Ian Welsh – Page 149 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

On May 16th 2022 I wrote an article on who would win and lose from the Ukraine war. Summarizing, the big loser was obviously Ukraine. Even if they “win” they’ve lost millions of population who are never coming back and odds are they’re going to lose a chunk of their country on top of that.

Europe loses because of the economic effects: industry fleeing Europe to the US. They get some increased unity, but in a world where Europe is already in decline, this is a loss.

Russia I said would be about a draw: they’ll get some land, but Sweden and Finland joining NATO and the EU firmly set in place as US satrapies isn’t good for them.

The US—, well, I’ll quote myself.

The final major effect for the US is that freezing Russian reserves and encouraging the massive level of sanctions, is seen by most of the world as evidence it’s not safe to keep money in the US lead banking system, or even to trade with them. This has accelerated de-dollarization and I suspect will be seen as the precipitating event of losing reserve status for the American dollar. The world will split into two financial blocs, one centered around China-Russia, the other around the US-EU. The US receives huge benefits from reserve status and from being at the center of the world financial system, and as with Britain after WWI, it will suffer mightily when it loses this position.

My evaluation is that what the US will likely gain from the Ukraine war is less than it has or will lose: dollar hegemony and being the financial center of the world are a big deal, and confirming Russia as a junior Chinese ally makes their main geopolitical rival far stronger.

It’s clear this is happening. Multiple nations joining the BRICS; ASEAN creating its own trading currency; oil being sold in Yuan, and so on.

The US and the West in general had a BIG GUN. That big gun was going all out on sanctions, using their central position in the world monetary and trade system as a weapon. The US had been using this position coercively ever since WWII, but it really ramped up under Clinton and each President thereafter doubled down. Nations were genuinely scared of this power, seeing what it did Iran and Cuba and Venezuela and so on.

But the world changed. China became the most powerful manufacturing power. Russia recovered somewhat and became a huge net resource producer, including of food. The late USSR couldn’t feed itself, Russia can. China became the main trading partner for almost every nation in South America and Africa. The US declared China its main enemy, and China looked at the US and saw it was vulnerable to a blockade.

And so the sanctions failed, because China and most of the non-Western world, including India, didn’t cooperate.

The BIG GUN had been fired. The one everyone was scared of. And not only didn’t it work, the blowback damaged Europe.

It did damage Russia somewhat, but by not taking Russia out it showed that one could leave the system without being destroyed. And so that’s what’s happening.

Meanwhile, as inflation (largely from Covid, but much from the war) shuddered through the West, the US raised interest rates massively. This caused all the countries who owed money in US dollars extreme harm.

Being exposed to the US dollar was clearly a liability. A big one. Going off the dollar used to seem insurmountable but Russia had gone off it and while it lost a bit of GDP, basically done OK, because China and other countries supported it.

And if Russia could do it, well, so could other nations.

And so they are.

As for America, it reminds me of a 60 year old who still thinks he’s 40 and in training. “I can take him!” This isn’t the America of 1950, or 1990 or even 2000. This is a weak America, visibly become weaker.

Nobody likes America. Not even the Brits (outside their elites, who like America the way a poodle likes its owner.) Everybody was terrified of America.

Now a lot of them are only scared. And when you’re only scared, not terrified, you take action to protect yourself against whomever you’re scared by.

So, I have to say that I’m moving America from the “slight loss” column over to the big loss. It’ll take longer than Ukraine to be obvious, but the train is in motion and it isn’t stopping. Pax Americana is a zombie; it’s still shuffling along, but it’s functionally dead and only waiting for decay to reduce it to a shambling heap.

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Believing You Should Be Happy

By Ian Welsh

On June 22, 2023

3 Comments

For most of my life I was pretty miserable. There were good reasons for that: alcoholic parents, serious illness and rather a lot of poverty, among other things.

So I started meditating. That helped, after a while (quite a while, though many people get faster results.)

One of the things that came up is that bad emotions are, well, bad. By “bad” I mean, emotions that are unpleasant. There’s a lot of advice around emotions, and negative emotions aren’t 100% evil or anything. Anger tells you something is unacceptable; hatred that someone is a long term threat and so on. Now emotions aren’t always right, you can be angry inappropriately. You can hate people who aren’t a threat (Nazis hating Jews) or who are only a threat because of how you treat them (Israeli Zionists and Palestinians), and so on.

Still, a negative emotion in the affective sense; in the unpleasant sense is bad in the same way that pain is bad. Sometimes pain is useful because it tells you to do something or stop doing something, and sometimes it’s just pain: there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it and it’s pointless.

This realization, really grinding it in, is important. That the emotion itself is unpleasant and, as importantly, that you don’t want to have it.

Most of us wander around thinking “I should be angry”, “I should be sad”, “I should hate”, under certain circumstances. Someone said something mean or cut us off in traffic or hurt us and we are angry. But if the emotion of being angry is unpleasant, all we’re doing is compounding our suffering.

But then the next thought comes up, “if I don’t get mad, I won’t protect myself.”

And this can be true. Sometimes we need the unpleasantness to spur us to action, to tell someone they shouldn’t hurt us, or to remove ourselves from a bad situation.

But it doesn’t have to be. The old saying “I don’t get mad, I get even” rather covers it. If you’ll take action to fix the problem without the emotion, then at most you need the emotion briefly to tell you something is wrong, and then you don’t need it any more.

And if you have firm rules about what is acceptable or not, you may not even need the emotion. “My boss made me work overtime then didn’t pay me, that’s unacceptable and I will find a way to stop it.”

Much of why we have certain emotions is because we think we should have them. If you think you should be angry or sad or scared or whatever, it’s very hard not to be.

One way to get past this is pure self-concern. Just look at the emotion, and realize “this emotion is unpleasant. I don’t like feeling this way.” Do that often enough, and you’ll start feeling the emotion less often, and it will go away sooner when it does arise.

But to do this you have to believe the emotion isn’t necessary for your well-being, because if you feel it is, your mind will keep bringing it up.

You aren’t here to suffer, whatever some religions may say, and it’s OK to do what you can to suffer less.

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Jewish, Israeli & Zionist Are Three Different Things

By Ian Welsh

On June 21, 2023

12 Comments

There are few people I despise more than those who conflate being anti-zionist with being anti-semitic.

Anyone who does this is a write off to me. Worthy of no respect; moral or intellectual. I only hope they are being paid well to be both evil and intellectually dishonest.

“We are going to emigrate to Palestine until we are the majority, then use force to steal Palestinian homes” is not defensible in any terms except “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

And no one who is Jewish should want to live in such a world.

Some Jews are Zionists, but not all Jews are Zionists. This is fairly basic.

One can be against the Zionist project and not be against the Jewish people. It is evil of Israel to wrap themselves in Jewishness, and push their crimes onto people who had nothing to do with them.

Some Jews are Zionists, but not all Jews are Zionists. This is fairly basic. One can be against the Zionist project and not be against the Jewish people. It is evil of Israel to wrap themselves in Jewishness, and push their crimes onto people who had nothing to do with them.

In the long run, the crimes of Israel, because Israelis wrap them in “Jewishness” do more damage to Jews than perhaps even to Palestinians.

Being Jewish and being Israeli and being Zionist are three different things.

Conflating them is wrong.

There isn’t much of a real opposition left in Israel; of people who genuinely oppose stealing other people’s homes. But they exist. That’s why being Israeli /= being Zionist.

Being Zionist means believing you have a right to take other people’s homes. Being Israeli is citizenship

This is similar to the fact that both Russia and the US have done a lot of evil shit, but that doesn’t mean all Russians or Americans are evil, just the ones who support doing evil shit.

Likewise, there were Germans who opposed the Nazis. They were not evil. They were good.

You don’t get to choose if you’re German, or Jewish, or American, or Russian. You do get to choose whether you’re a Nazi, a Zionist, a Neocon or a Stalinist.

You get to decide whether you support doing evil or oppose it.

Apartheid is evil. Are you for it, or against it?

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The Duty Of The Good Is To Be Powerful

By Ian Welsh

On June 20, 2023

18 Comments

There is no more important line in all of the humanities and the social sciences than this one from the Melian dialogue:

the strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must

We have a system which requires those who wish to be powerful to perform evil acts. It is difficult to become powerful without having been vetted, without having “made ones bones.” To be sure, if you want power in a corporation or as a politician or in an organization like the World Bank or IMF, your killing and your torture of people is sanitized and done at arm’s length, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

You must prove you can make the “tough” decisions, which apparently means hurting other people while paying yourself very very well.

So tough.

Some few may make it thru to the bottom rungs of power, they, like AOC, are socialized into the requirements of power. First a politician who has noted that Israel is an apartheid state, for example, is made to bow before Israel, then step by step they are lead to vote for or at least abstain on votes they know are evil.

A manager is made to lay people off or fire them even as executive salaries increase, or to steal wages, or to force overtime. They are made to enforce policies they know are wrong.

In either case, after a time they become evil because we become what we do.

The good tend to be repulsed by power, because they see how it is abused, and they believe that power corrupts. There is some truth to this, of course, when you’re powerful you don’t have to care what other people think, or who you hurt, because they can’t retaliate. The weak are very well aware that if they hurt someone, that person may hurt them back.

Thus you never truly know if someone who is weak is truly good, it is power that reveals a person’s soul because true goodness is not a result of fear or bargaining.

But Thucydides was right: the powerful do as they will and the weak suffer what they must. The only way to create a good world is for the good to be powerful, and to create a system which filters out the evil and does not allow them to become powerful. When they do make it thru, and some will, just as very occasionally a good person gains power in our world, they must be forced out.

But if we want a good world, the good cannot run from power. They cannot disdain it. They must seek it, while understanding that it appears evil now because it is controlled by those who are evil.

If the good do not seek power, and if the good do not fight for it and if the good do not fight to keep the evil away from power, then we will always live in Hell.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

By Tony Wikrent

On June 18, 2023

7 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

MY FIFTY YEARS WITH DAN ELLSBERG

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 6-17-2023]

Climate and environmental crises

WTF is Happening? An Overview

[Watching the World Go Bye, via Naked Capitalism 6-14-2023]

As of June 10, 2023, worldwide data showed the remarkable concurrence of three dramatic climate events.

The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean.…

For the second WTF we are going to move from the ocean to land and consider global 2-meter surface temperatures, where on June 10, for the third consecutive day temperatures breached the 1.5°C barrier (above the 1850-1900 IPCC baseline)….

And the third WTF is perhaps the furthest from any notion of normalcy. WTF is happening to the world’s oceans, and in particular the North Atlantic? Ocean temperatures have been setting unprecedented daily records, spiking to highs that are shocking climate scientists, as they look for possible reasons….

Narrowing the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 6-13-2023]

How Arizona squeezes tribes for water

[High Country News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2023]

Strategic Political Economy

The AMLO Project

[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-12-2023]

The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender….

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?

Lina Khan Fires a Crooked CEO

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 6-16-2023]

The FTC blocked a genomics technology merger, leading to the firing of a CEO. The deal involved Bill Gates, Barack Obama, China and Jeff Bezos. And corporate America is in shock….

…it’s worth taking a look at one of the biggest recent stories in corporate America that went largely unnoticed by the political world. Last Sunday, Francis deSouza resigned from his position as the CEO of Illumina, which is one of the most important medical technology firms in the world. Since 2019, deSouza had pursued a string of failed acquisitions, and ultimately his shareholders revolted. His most recent was an attempt to buy cancer test producer Grail, which was ruled unlawful by both European antitrust enforcers and the Federal Trade Commission’s Lina Khan.

You may not have heard of Illumina, and you probably haven’t heard of deSouza. But deSouza is now the second CEO to lose his job due to Biden antitrust enforcers, after Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle resigned last year in the wake of a failed merger with Simon & Schuster. In C Suites, and within the antitrust bar, deSouza, and Dohle, are now cautionary tales of empire building gone wrong….

…And this brings me to Microsoft, which is pursuing a somewhat irrational acquisition of game giant Activision, a bank shot attempt to monopolize gaming. The merger is on the rocks, because Great Britain ruled that it’s illegal, and the combination is also being challenged by the FTC. And yet Microsoft won’t relent. A few weeks ago, in an essay called Corporate Temper Tantrums, I noted that there’s an open question about whether large corporations or democratic governments set the rules for our societies. Microsoft is the key example. Its threat to combine operations with Activision, despite the British government calling the transaction illegal, looks completely crazy, akin to civil disobedience by a Fortune 500 firm. There’s no reason for it, since the firm has a great path ahead embedding AI in its products. Gaming is a sideshow. Why would the firm destroy its political reputation with this scorched earth campaign?

The answer, I believe, runs straight through the resignation of Illumina’s CEO….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On June 17, 2023

17 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Quick Takes 3: Foreign Interference, Pandemic Deaths As New Normal, China-Brazil Trade and More

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2023

5 Comments

In Covid news:

1) CO2 levels below 540 are sufficient to stop exponential Covid spread.

2) The European Mortality Project will start using death numbers from 2020-2022 and late when calculating excess mortality. Meaning that they will make “people who died due to Covid or Covid related mortality” just part of the normal. An out of control pandemic is normal now.

Given the reduction in testing, I have no idea what current Covid death numbers really are. Last time I wrote an article a commenter kindly pointed out that the CDC’s numbers were much less than the numbers I’d posted (always check the most recent numbers, woops) and I adjusted them down, but how much of that reduction in Covid deaths is real, I just don’t know. I’m 100% sure it’s not, well, 100%, however.

We’re all just going to pretend the pandemic is over and if that means not testing and changing statistical indices to make a pandemic level of death normal, well that’s what we’re going to do.

Meanwhile, readers who were with me thru the pandemic will know I constantly said we needed filtering and ventilation. Turns out that if we’d done that, we could have ended the damn thing. What a sur…-well, ok, not a surprise. Complete common sense solution would have worked. Who would’a’thunk?

Who’s Interfering In Country’s Politics?

Every time I hear some idiot whine about Russian interference in the US I laugh my ass off, and chasing it down and bolting it back in place has significantly inmproved my fitness.

But what everyone knows is that the country that interferes the most in other countries’ politics is the US. I knew a senior aide in the Mulroney government of the 80s, and she said they confirmed that the US had the place wired for sound. Everything said in the parliament buildings, including in private ministerial officers were known to the Americans.

Anyway, the French are doing a witch hunt about foreign (read “Russian”) interference, and Francois Fillion (prime Minister from 2007 to 2012) told them the following

“Have I encountered foreign interference in my political life, and particularly when I was in government? Yes, I have encountered it. Most of the time they came from a friendly and allied country called the United States. I am not passing judgement: your commission is working on foreign interference. I am telling you that, for example, I was listened to with President Sarkozy for 5 years by the NSA. We found out when documents from the American secret services leaked, and everyone focused on the fact that the NSA was listening to Ms. Merkel, but they were also listening to all members of the French government and probably those of other European countries.”

You’d have to have a room temperature IQ and the judgment of a cabbage to think otherwise, but our journalists and pundit class are down with the requirements of their jobs.

That China Developing Country Trade Thing

So, if you were Brazil, which country would be more important to you, the US or China?

Brazil’s extreme, but the issue is simple: this sort of stuff is going on all through Africa and South America, though in most cases it’s less one sided: the Chinese sell a lot of goods. But whatever way you slice it, Chinese grade is more important than the US or the EU now to most developing countries. (France, in particular, used to be a big deal in a lot of Africa. China has eaten their lunch.)

Then we have US/Israel Blowback. It seems that when Israel decided to support Ukraine, and Iran not only sold Russia drones it needed but helped them build a domestic factory, Russia decided to reciprocate by giving Iran hypersonic missile technology, which, yeah, the Israeli “Iron Dome” is not going to be able to shoot down worth a damn.

Russia spent a lot of time balancing its Syria interests against not antagonizing Israel, but I guess Israel didn’t realize there were limits.

And remember, Iran hit a US base with missiles when the US assassinated one of its generals.

Enough for today, more in the future.

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What Made Wagner Useful To Putin & Russia + Notes On Ukraine’s Counteroffensive

By Ian Welsh

On June 13, 2023

19 Comments

People misunderstand Wagner’s role in the Ukrainian war.

Wagner is a prison to meat-grinder operation. Convicts were recruited, given a bit of training and sent on the most dangerous attacks. This meant that regular Russian troops were not expended, and that less civilians had to be drafted or recruited.

When Prigozhin complains about mistreatment, he’s probably right. To the Russian military, Wagner are useful, but scum. Remember that Prigozhin himself is an ex-convict, and he was sent to prison for theft, which included in one case choking a woman nearly to death.

Using convicts may have saved Russian troops, but convicts in the military never ends well. The same thing was done, without the mercenary cutout, in Afghanistan by the Russians and it did great damage to the Russian military.

Prigozhin, though I have no sympathy for him, is refusing to send more convicts into the meat grinder for Putin, or perhaps he’s running low on convicts and would now have to use his more valuable troops.

Which leads us to the counter-offensive. It’s going badly. So far, very badly. The equipment NATO gives Ukraine and even the training is all very nice, but NATO militaries are built around the assumption of air superiority or supremacy, and they don’t have that. This makes Ukrainian columns (and they keep attacking in columns, which seems unwise) very vulnerable to Russia air and artillery.

I’ve heard some people say the heavy brigades have yet to be committed, so we’ll see what happens. But I’d be surprised in the counter-offensive really changes the picture of the war. So far the Russians are betting they can win a war of attrition, especially if the attrition is born more by Ukrainians and Russian convicts than by Russian troops, and so far, that seems to be true.

This is especially the case as NATO equipment stores have been drawn down to the point where most NATO countries are leery of sending large amounts of equipment to Ukraine because it would leave the cupboards completely bare.

The war would already be over if there hadn’t been massive NATO supply and command and control, but Ukraine has lost a lot of men and I don’t see how NATO can keep up the resupply. Russia’s seems to have some supply issues, but it looks to me like Ukraine’s are more serious.

We’ll see how it plays out.

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