Ian Welsh

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 3, 2022

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On July 3, 2022

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

“America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat”

Ed Yong [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-28-2022]

“In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or ‘Figure it out yourself.’ It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic.” We call it “personal risk assessment.” ….

“Across the country, almost all government efforts to curtail the coronavirus have evaporated….. I have interviewed dozens of other local officials, community organizers, and grassroots groups who are also swimming furiously against the tide of governmental apathy to push some pandemic response forward, even if incrementally. This is an endeavor that all of American society would benefit from; it is currently concentrated among a network of exhausted individuals who are trying to figure out this pandemic, while living up to public health’s central tenet: Protect the health of all people, and the most vulnerable especially…. Building a stronger public-health system demands an unfettering of the moral imagination: Americans need to believe that their government should invest in systems that keep everyone safer from disease—and to trust that such systems are even possible.

But throughout his decades-long career, [AIDS activist and Yale epidemiologist Greg] Gonsalves has witnessed social safety nets being repeatedly shredded, leading to ‘a collapse of any faith in the state to do good,’ he told me. That faith eroded further when public institutions buckled during the pandemic, and when two successive administrations failed to control the coronavirus. The resulting ‘pandemic fatigue’ is not just a craving for the status quo, but a deep cynicism over the possibility of something better. In one study, most Americans preferred a better, fairer post-pandemic future, but mistakenly thought a ‘back-to-normal’ one was more popular [a Keynesian beauty contest, but one where the minimizers were given the megaphone by the 1%] —and so more likely>. ‘People can imagine a world with crypto-banking and the metaverse, so why is it so hard to imagine a world with less disease and death?’ Céline Gounder of Kaiser Health News said.”

 

How Japan Achieved One of The World’s Lowest Covid Death Rates 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 6-30-2022]

“If the US had Japan’s death rate, only 82,000 people would have died. Not 1 million+.”

 

The roots of Trumpism 

Robert Reich [via Naked Capitalism 6-29-2022]

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina. I was doing research on the changing nature of work in America. During my visits I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs, their views about America, and their thoughts on a variety of issues. What I was really seeking was their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement; angry that their children weren’t doing any better than they did at their children’s age. They were angry at those at the top who they felt had rigged the system against them, and for their own benefit. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. Some others had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political. They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common apart from the states and regions where I found them was their positions on the income ladder. All were middle class and below. All were struggling. They no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it….

Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion — or, if you will, revolution — continues to this day.

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush had all the advantages — deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want — but neither of them could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system, and therefore part of the problem….

Much of the political establishment still denies what has occurred. They prefer to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism. Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism (and its first cousin, xenophobia) had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it’s important to see what drove the racism. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic….

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Open Thread

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On July 2, 2022

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Use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Sweden and Finland Sell Their Souls For NATO Membership

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On July 1, 2022

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I live (for at least a little longer) in a house full of Turks. I’ve heard the refugee stories, and I know what it takes to be called a “terrorist” (and not be one, at all.) So I can read between the lines here:

Extraditing terror suspects means “people who Sweden and Finland would otherwise judge were not terrorists will be extradited to Turkey, where they will be imprisoned and often tortured.”

This goes beyond Kurds; the secular opposition is treated savagely, and intellectuals and academics are particularly at risk.

Perhaps they’ll get the safety they sold their principle for from NATO, I have my doubts, but there is a strong case for it.

But they did sell their souls.

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Spring of Down, By Stirling Newberry, Chapters X-XII

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On July 1, 2022

мене на могилis[xxxix]

Cry Havoc, Let slip the dogs of war![xl]

He let his voice slide into a whisper as he controlled the crowded cockpit. In his imagination he could see a drone’s eye view of the slag towers.

Imagine.

And he was in the best tank now in service – the T-14, whose low rumbling sleek military green frame was out on the battlefield in a pack of wolves over the land. Where the streets have no name, merely Number-Letters in an astute vision akilter. In Cyrillic, because they were Russian, he to flame out the old enemy. Without a trace. He looked across at the gunner, rotating through his list of targets. Burred with the taste of beardlets he concentrated Concentrated on  destruction by madness, on starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn.[xli]

This was the torture plain of Donbas. For now, the streaming gang of Russians mobbing the зелёнка, green scraggly brush meant to hide them from hidden opponents. Russian tanks poured across the disputed border – because, to the Russian, what is his but what is yours is negotiable – in number and scope.

There was occasionally even some semblance of moderate military discipline. A hate-filled gas of iron, germs, and bad tactics.

He focused, focused, focused. Focus on the dawn which was now breaking along the distant trees on the sullen horizon. Love turned to rust on the guts of red. Kostik moved his head to shake out his tinnitus but quickly turned back to sight, not sound. It was a sight that killed you. He knew that, at least in the front of his skull.

The land was empty of wheat and fodder for hoofed beats, but its’terrain was what the tank was designed for: a thoroughbred of orthogonal grace. It was quiet as the three watched their stations.

But finally, the driver, Kostik, uttered: “They are burning their money in wastebaskets.” He spat on the running floor where everything moved in staccato.

Driver Lyonya startled at first then composed. “Whatever do you mean?”

“The fuel is the commodity. Burning it like trash that warms the caliber.”

“If they get hits, it does not matter.” Lyonov wished for nothing more than to wait in the sunlight and drink coffee and talked for hour after hour. He said none of this, now or any time.

“We are the terror through the wall, creeping up by Wolf’s tail for surprise.” Kostik then beaded his eye through the tube sensing that there was a Javelin man in the rubbish bushes. He swiveled and searched – but did not find what he was looking for. Dull roots with spring rain dappled the escape. When searching for the acute angle,  man and machine are one. Where the dead tree gives no shelter.

But inside he was hungry, for Kostik’s stomach growled. Stale borscht without enough beef or sour cream. It was harder to kill, not having enough to eat. Even wisps of odor turned rancid in the cheap cologne and stale soap.

Kostik waded his dry tongue over a dry inner check. Dry stone, no sound of wate,r even the shadow under this red skin.

“Why do they fight this way?”

“They fended off Kyiv. Why not hold their ground in the disputed territories on the free regions?” By this Lyonov meant the two nations which Russia recognized. Both men thought ‘Know respect for the near abroad.’ That is why the DEFCON was raised. This was a Russian police action.

Kostik strained his neck. Bleary cheery fatigue had set in. He thought: ‘Open your eyes!’ It became a kind of chant in the heat of the moment. Pies Iesu Domine. Dona eis requiem. Thunk.

Du hast. Du hast. Du hast.[xlii]

Would any name of the rose be so logical in the swing of Foucault’s Pendulum?

Search and Destroy. Or be destroyed.

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One Chart To Predict The Future of Civilization Collapse

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On June 29, 2022

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I first read Limits To Growth sometime around 1982. Limits used computer models to predict possible futures of resource use, pollution and population over-shoot.

At the time I thought it was right, and everything since then has come in about as it said.

I found this chart from it, with a couple of added date lines in an excellent post on the retrospective book “Limits and Beyond.”

The chart’s a couple years off, but notice that we’re hitting the food per capita just a few years after it expected. You can say “this is because of the Ukraine war” but we were at the stretching point, which is why one war (and a bunch of stupid sanctions) were able to do this.

Note that services and industrial output are expected to peak around the same time. Population starts dropping in about 20 years and the death rate goes vertical about the same time.

Notice how extreme the declines and rises are once they get going. This should be familiar to people from the Covid pandemic, but these trends will last for decades; indeed for generations.

I’m not sure I entirely buy the population model. It’s based on the fact that poor people have more kids, with some delay, but I think the one things the Club of Rome didn’t entirely take into account is how bad climate change and ecological collapse will be.

The point, now, is that we’re about at the peak or slightly past it. The collapse has started. Covid and Ukraine pushed us into it, but it was going to happen anyway, and there’s always an inciting event. What has changed is that there was no slack in the system (and no competence, with the single major exception of China) to deal with it.

The second point is, again, how sharp these declines become, often almost immediately after they start.

Food isn’t going to get cheaper almost anywhere for a while. Then what will happen is that multiple countries which have surpluses will disconnect from the world supply network so they can feed their own people. This won’t be done for humanitarian reasons at home, our elites don’t have such feelings, it will be done because food shortages are the fastest route to revolution, and that includes food shortages caused by too high inflation. If the food’s out there any can’t afford it, it amounts to it not being out there.

This chart doesn’t break out water specifically, but in a lot of places water is going to be in serious shortage. We’re going to lose a lot of river flow and a lot of rivers and lakes outright, because they are fed by glaciers and snow pack which are already in precipitous decline. In some cases there will be an increase before the decrease: floods and so on caused by more water flow as glaciers melt faster, but then there will be almost none.

In many regions there’ll be more rain and there’ll be more rain overall, but it’s not going to make up for the lost river flow and lakes, or for the aquifers we have drained or poisoned.

This is the map, it may be off in a few places, but it’s going to be essentially correct. It didn’t have to be, the book was published as a warning so we could change our ways, but we didn’t and so it’s turned from possible prediction into prophecy.

Come back to this chart over and over again as you think about and plan for the future, but remember that it is a global chart: local areas will have different profiles and charts especially as we de-globalize, and in response to this collapse we are going to de-globalize with a vengeance.

There are certain places you just don’t want to be, which will get hit earlier and harder. In the US, much of the Southwest and south (Texas, for example.) In Asia: Bangladesh in the first wave, then India soon thereafter. I don’t know Africa well enough, but the same regional effects will occur there.

On the human scale there will be mass migrations, refugee waves of tens to hundreds of millions and war over water and arable land. Multiple societies will collapse into warlordism.

This is the future.

Our future.

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The Next Covid Wave Is Onrushing

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On June 28, 2022

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Covid continues to evolve and it continues to do so in response to whatever is holding it back most.

In the case of Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, this is immunity: either from vaccines or previous infection.

Nature:

Increasingly, scientists think that variants including Omicron and Alpha probably originated from months-long chronic SARS-CoV-2 infections, in which sets of immune-evading and transmissibility-boosting mutations can build up

Whatever holds back a species most is what it will gain the greatest advantage from mutating to defeat. Since most of the world outside of China is no longer bothering with even the most basic non-vaccine measures to stop the spread of Covid, this means vaccines and natural immunity.

By now readers should be familiar with how exponential growth works, and these charts should make you twitchy.

Now, since nearly the beginning of the pandemic this blog has warned about how waves of reinfections would cause spiraling Long Covid numbers. It was obvious this would be the case, both because it appears possible to get it each time you’re infected and because even when there are not obvious symptoms, Covid often does some permanent organ damage, including brain damage, which shows up when people are tested.

Here’s the current known damage in the US, just for cases with actual symptoms.

https://twitter.com/LisaAMcCorkell/status/1539765280397701120

And here’s the math of reinfection:

You don’t want to get infected and you don’t want to get reinfected, especially now that BA.4 and BA.5 are immune escape variants.

Where I live, in Ontario Canada, all mask mandates have been removed. For a while people kept wearing them anyway, but what I’m seeing now is that even in something like the subway or in streetcars, which are tailor made for infection, more than half of people aren’t wearing masks.

And unless you’re wearing a properly fitted N95 mask or a respirator, masks don’t protect you that well: masks primarily protect other people if you’re infected, and remember that it’s very easy to be infected and infectious and not even now it, plus in places with inadequate sick leave, of which Ontario is one, most people who know they’re infected still have to go to work if they can: they can’t take two weeks off, they need the money, and their bosses don’t have to let them have the time off.

So continue to take this seriously. I wear n95 masks when I’m inside buildings or in a large crowd outside. The pandemic isn’t over, and our response to it is essentially to rely on luck that eventually a variant will be produced which is even more infectious but much milder.

That may happen, but we don’t if it will or when. Till then, I advise taking reasonable precautions, and don’t believe it when a new variant happens and people say “oh, it’s milder.” It might be slightly milder in the sense of not very likely to kill you, without being milder in the sense of less likely to cause Long Covid.

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Books and TV and Movies Are Mind Control

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On June 27, 2022

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I read a lot. I’ve read many thousands of books.

Books are mind control, quite literally.

The words in a book are mean to make you experience certain emotions, imagine scenes, and understand certain themes, including moral and ethical ones. A book is a small world with rules, and if you read enough books with the same rules, you learn the rules.

All of this is also true of audio and audiovisual media; they are intended to make you think certain thoughts and feel certain emotions. They, especially audiovisual media like TV, leave less room for visualization and the use of your own imagination (and are both more and less powerful because of it, doing the work invests you more, but fine control is lost).

Every time you read something (including this essay) you’re putting your mind; your consciousness, under the control of someone else.

They may have your best interests at heart (does Fox, MSNBC, Disney, or Ayn Rand?) and they may not, and even if they mean the best, well, what they think is best may not be, or may not, be for you.

This isn’t exactly a revelation. We know advertising works, we know propaganda works, we know media changes how people think of and view the world, and how they feel about it.

But I’ll suggest (trying to change your view) that you see it as mind control. It’s not necessarily bad, and in most cases you’re consenting to it, but you are letting someone else control your mind.

If you’re consuming media, including mine, and it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, then the best thing to do is stop consuming that source of media, and in general, you should consider very carefully who you let control your mind.

Consider why they are doing so. Don’t assume it doesn’t matter — and for God’s sake, don’t think you’re immune, because you aren’t.

Media is mind control. It’s conditioning, and you need to know who’s controlling your mind, and who’s making  you into what, and why, and who that benefits.

Does it benefit you?

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 26, 2022

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On June 26, 2022

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

“Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling Puts States in Spotlight”

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

“By eliminating a constitutional right to an abortion, the high court’s ruling returns the issue to the states, and about half of them, mostly led by Republicans, have been poised to ban many or most abortions if Roe was wiped away. Other Democrat-led states are moving to protect access to the procedure, in some cases preparing for visitors from states where abortion will be unavailable. And in politically diverse states with divided government, clashes over the path forward on abortion policy could continue for years. ‘This is going to put abortion toward the center of our politics for the foreseeable future,’ said Steven Greene, a political-science professor at North Carolina State University. Advocates on both sides of the issue said that the ruling would place additional focus on state and local elections, because governors, state lawmakers and attorneys general will hold new power to enact and enforce a broader array of abortion policies. That means those contests could see additional funding and support from national groups and donors.”

TW: “This is going to put abortion toward the center of our politics for the foreseeable future.” That, I believe, is the actual intent of the puppet-masters and rich funders of movement conservatism: prevent or forestall people from focusing on climate change driven depopulation, ongoing economic collapse as the elites grasp whatever remains, and the transition of USA into a surveillance state of plutocratic despotism. 

 

Thomas, in his concurring opinion, says the quiet part out loud. “Substantive due process” is next:

[Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-24-2022]

.

 

Will This Week’s Events Rouse the Electorate?

Robert Kuttner, June 24, 2022 [The American Prospect]

As a number of critics have pointed out, the Court’s ruling today does a lot more than criminalize abortion. It turns states into inquisitors, compelling women to prove that a miscarriage or stillbirth was not an abortion. It puts doctors on the defensive and makes it far harder for women to get routine care where reproductive health is concerned. It allows individual vigilantes to claim bounties for tracking down women who might have used abortion pills, and their enablers. As Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker, the closest analogy is the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act.

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