[greenwald.substack.com, via Naked Capitalism 3-10-21]
….this is increasingly becoming the playbook for neoliberal elites who are angry that the population has defied them by voting for those they oppose. Thwarted by the democratic process, elites now resort instead to subversions of democracy in the name of upholding it. The employ frivolous impeachments to remove the leader whose legitimacy they never accepted, lawfare designed to make governance impossible through endless investigations or even the unjust imprisonment of their political opponents, and a full-scale union with the corporate media which openly and shamelessly ceases to report and instead engages in tawdry political activism to destroy the leaders chosen by the disobedient population. Indeed, the oligarchical Brazilian media so openly and overwhelmingly favored Dilma’s impeachment that the steadfastly apolitical press freedom group Reporters Without Borders dropped Brazil to 104th in its annual press freedom rankings and warned that the Brazilian press’ abandonment of the journalistic function while agitating for Dilma’s removal was so severe that the Brazilian press itself endangered press freedom.
As neoliberalism destroys more and more lives around the world, leaving an endless array of social pathologies in its wake, power centers will seek out tactics to subvert the democratic will. The increasing insistence on censoring the internet and controlling the flow of information is one symptom of elite fear of popular rage and desperation. So, too, is the related attempt by corporate media outlets to regain their monopoly over news and discourse by discrediting anyone or anything which sits in opposition to them. And the playbook that resulted in Dilma’s removal from office less than eighteen months after Brazil elected her, followed by the unjust imprisonment of Lula to ensure he could not run and win again, is reflective of a pattern already emerging in the west: abusing the force of law, propaganda and state processes to destroy those whom the population was not supposed to elect.\
Let’s start with this little video of the geographical spread of China over time.
Looks like the Han conquered a lot of other people. They then imposed their culture, their writing, and over time, their language on those people.
Here’s the rule: Any people who get a significant military advantage, use it to conquer. They may not do so immediately, but eventually they do so.
The Mongols conquered the largest land empire in history. They were undefeated for generations; absolutely crushing military advantage.
The Russians, later, with the gunpowder advantage, conquered their large land empire.
The gunpowder advantage was big, but not that big. It worked in the Americas because of a plague that killed off over 90 percent of the population. Absent that, at worst/best you have a situation closer to India, though probably with a bit more successful colonization.
In ancient history, the Greeks had a huge military advantage. They knew they had it for a while before it was used by Alexander to conquer a huge swathe of the ancient world. (This is similar to the Mongols’ horse-archer advantage; they had to wait for a Genghis Khan to use it effectively.)
Shaka would have done something similar, had he been born a thousand years earlier, but he had the bad luck to run into the Brits, who posessed a much larger advantage.
We know nothing about the Druids because the Romans slaughtered them, colonized most of their lands, and made the Gauls into semi-Romans. The Christians later finished the job.
The Norse are gone because they lost a multi-century religious war against the Christians. We have weird ideas about the Norse: They were reacting to a hegemonic religious ideology that was already force-converting pagans. Charlemagne (a profoundly evil man) forced Saxons to convert, then killed them. Figured he was saving their souls, no doubt.
So the Norse built a wall across the south of Denmark (being outnumbered) and took to the seas, where they had an advantage. They raided and destroyed monasteries not just because that’s where the loot was, but because it was Christianity driving the forced conversions.
The Norse, despite their “terror,” lost. The last Norse pagans, in Iceland, converted because if they didn’t, they would have lost the ensuing war.
The industrial revolution probably created the greatest military advantage the world has ever known. It was used to conquer most of the world that was still agrarian, and where it didn’t conquer, it humiliated. The second the Japanese industrialized, they went on their own conquering spree. Mao, unifying China, immediately conquered Tibet (ironically using a claim based on the notion that, “The Mongols conquered you and us at the same time, so you should be ours.”)
Again, the rule here is simple. People are people. When a group gets a massive military advantage, they use it to conquer and colonize (Greek colonies in the ancient world were endemic.) The larger the advantage, the more conquests. In time, conquests that are unsustainable go away, and those that have largely eradicated the indigenous culture (sometimes through genocide, sometimes by just getting rid of the culture), remain, even if nominally independent. Canada, Mexico, and even most South American countries are NOT resurgences of the people who ruled the countries before Europeans showed up. Neither are most of the areas China conquered in its millenia long march.
What China is doing in Tibet and to the Uighurs, in that light, is simply a modern version of what the Chinese have done for ages.
None of this means that colonialism and conquest and cultural or actual genocide are good. They aren’t.
They are, however, our current pattern. We are living through a holding pattern right now, to an extent, only because of nuclear weapons. If a massive advantage is obtained which neutralized nukes, this pattern would re-emerge.
If we want this pattern to end, we need to figure out why it happens: What creates the enabling conditions, and we need to become a conscious world civilization.
Right now, if you look at the “greenhouse gas” curve or at the “species extinction curve” and compare it to the curve of a bunch of bacteria in a petri dish growing uncontrollably until they die in their own waste, you won’t see any significant difference.
At the civilization and cultural level, we are not conscious. We do not make choices, much as we think we do. Instead we act like any other animal, driven by unconscious impulses and drives we apparently cannot control.
None of the evils we inflict, as societies, on each other or on the other species of the world, will cease for any significant amount of time, if we do not become conscious and work to change these behaviours.
If we can’t, we will likely go extinct. If not this time around, then next. We will keep careening into absolutely forseeable problems and doing nothing about them until its too late, and one of these days, it will kill us.
A given means of production, combined with a resource base, will throw off some amount of surplus. That surplus is divided among the population based entirely on their power. Sometimes that power comes from scarcity, often managed scarcity as in the Medieval Guild system, or un-managed scarcity during the first decades of a technological change (hello, programmers!), but most often it comes out of the barrel of a gun, from the point of a spear, or from the edge of a sword.
In Against the Grain, about the rise of early kingdoms after agriculture, the author points out that in agricultural systems where the farmer produces a single major crop, it is really easy to take away all but the bare minimum for the farmer’s survival; you know how much land, how much rainfall, when the crop is harvested, and where the farmer lives. The farmers mostly can’t run away, and they can’t win a fight against professional warriors, so you can just take their crops. In the Middle Ages, there are accounts of knights fighting peasants who outnumbered the knights a hundred to one and the knights came out not just victorious, but with nothing but minor injuries. The peasants, well, they got massacred.
Our own society is similar. Bankers have, along with various adjacent industries and central banks (somehow given “independence”), a monopoly on creating money (which they create as debt). This monopoly, of course, is enforced by the government, and the government’s enforcement rests on men with guns (and, these days, a few women), plus prisons where they brutalize you. Opening a new bank is very, very hard.
Then, within banks, the seniors take most of the gains, as one would expect.
None of this would work without those men with guns and ugly prisons, though.
There are variations on this, of course. After WWII, when a huge percentage of the male population knew how to fight effectively in groups, why, by coincidence the deal was more even. When those men aged out, why, somehow the deal got worse. (This isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one.)
Inequality tracks with force being unequal. When a few men are superior to a huge mass of other men, then inequality soars. The feudal knight was genuinely superior to peasants. Greek Hoplites were equal to each other, but ruled over a huge mass of slaves. The same goes for the Roman legionnaires — but notice the Equites (who could afford a horse to bring to the fight) had higher legal status and rights.
Mercenary armies and police, like most armies and police in the world, are wonderful for this. They’re loyal to whomever pays them. Most revolutions happen when there is a financial crisis for a reason.
So, get control of force and use it to control money/means of production, or get control of money/means of production and use it to create force. Obviously it’s really about some of both, but you use whichever one you have more of to get control over the other one. Wall Street bought DC so that it could have control over the police and courts, which is why Obama immunized them from their crimes and bailed them out — including from really raw and obvious crimes like illegally signing a document saying the bank owned someone else’s house. Absolute fraud and straight robbery: That’s what Obama made go away for the financial industry.
Some of those people who had their houses stolen, in a society with less police and military and nasty prisons, might have taken retribution and recompense into their own hands, but in the US, well, no, that’s really not possible. You might get retribution, but then the cops will imprison or kill you, which they didn’t do to the men who stole your house and probably your job, car, and future.
In raw terms, this is the situation in the US and a lot of other countries (certainly in Britain). A small minority has control over force and money, and as they feel more and more secure in their control of those two things, they take more and more of what the society produces.
The 2008/9 Obama and the Fed was a watershed incident. The rich had lost everything. Absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they had “won” the bet like Goldman Sachs, because if I win a bet with you and you lose all your money, I’m fucked too. The Fed and other central banks bailed them out to the tune of trillions; Obama and other political leaders immunized them from their crimes (and the entire bubble was based on fraud), and our elites then KNEW, without a doubt, that they were in complete control and that they could do anything, and that the violent authorities would bail them out and protect them from their victims.
And that, my friends, is where we are now. There will be no significant downward redistribution until elites either lose control of the violent apparatus, or genuinely think they are about to, or can’t win their side of an oncoming revolution.
Or, of course, until the fact that there is a real economy and environment, and they aren’t just mismanaging it, but effectively burning it down to make money, causes an economic collapse where suddenly money can’t buy the mercenaries’ loyalty any more.
Perhaps it makes you angry. If you earn less than $15/hour or care about anyone who does, it probably should.
In our society we demonize negative emotions. The person who doesn’t get angry wins the debate. You’re not supposed to be scared.
And hate, well hate is the worst of all emotions, to us.
But all of these emotions have a purpose.
Fear is supposed to alert you to danger.
Anger is supposed to tell you someone has done something they shouldn’t have (which is why it often comes right on the heels of fear).
And hate, well, hate is supposed to tell you someone is a long term threat.
So, you should fear people like Sinema (she was one of eight Dems who voted no — she just got flack for taking so much joy in it) because they are a danger to you: They want you to be poor, and therefore always in danger of hunger, homelessness, and ill health.
People like Sinema should also make you angry, because they do inappropriate things. (See above).
And yes, you should hate them, because they are a long-term threat to your well-being.
Fear, anger, and hate are working when they ping the appropriate targets. When elites redirect those emotions to people who aren’t a threat to you (Saddam Hussein, say) then they are inappropriate.
They should also be graded appropriately. Even if you think, as an American, that Putin stole the 2016 election (uhmmm), he isn’t nearly the threat to you that your own politicians are. It isn’t Putin who spent 40 years dropping wages through the floor, sending young men and women to war, and destroying American civil liberties.
Likewise, it always amuses me when I talk to helicopter parents and they tell me, “But it’s so much more dangerous today than it was when you were a child.”
No, it actually isn’t. It’s much less dangerous. Moreover, almost all danger to children comes from trusted adults, including relatives, teaches, coaches, and family friends, not from strangers. But people hear on the news about exceptional cases (which are exceptional because they are very rare) where strangers hurt children and think it’s common, when, actually, it’s extraordinarily rare.
In a society where elites control the media, and media determines perception of benefit and danger, people’s fear, anger, and hate calibrations are way off. They fear people who are of little threat to them, and identify with their despoilers (Obama, Trump, Clinton, Bush, Pelosi, the list goes on).
They think spectacular bad events are common (stranger-child attacks) and discount the actual danger (Uncle Bob, or Dad.)
In this context fear, anger, and hate are bad. So are love and trust of partisan authority figures. Remember all the fools worshiping Cuomo, who has always been a vile piece of human garbage.
So one of the first tasks, for sanity, and in order to make good decisions, is to re-orient our emotions. To point hate at long term enemies (our politicians) rather than at our neighbors or foreigners who aren’t a threat. (Unless you’re Iraqi, or Yemeni, say, in which case, well….)
The world has a lot of dangers. They almost always come from the people you trust, whom you shouldn’t. Learn who’s actually trustworthy, and who is a danger.
Noah Smith [Noahpinion, via Naked Capitalism 3-4-21]
A recent paper in The Lancet attempts to model how African population will change as women’s education and access to contraception (the two biggest things other than GDP that we know affect fertility) increase. They predict a population for Sub-Saharan Africa of about 3.4 billion by century’s end — only 0.8 billion lower than the UN median projection. That’s still an absolutely enormous fraction of humanity, and an even larger chunk of the young population.
Thus, the future of Africa is the future of humanity, despite the fact that Africa will experience a normal fertility transition and its population will eventually stabilize rather than explode. I don’t think people in the U.S. (or, probably, other regions) have come to grips with the full import of this.
But what happens to Africa is even more important, relative to the rest of the world, than these population numbers suggest! This is because Africa is still a mostly poor region. Economics teaches us that marginal utility — i.e. the amount life gets better when you get a little richer — is much higher for poor people. And with China and (to some degree) India industrializing successfully and seeing population growth slow, soon most of the extremely poor people in the world will probably reside in Africa.
China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged half a billion doses of its vaccines to more than 45 countries. With just four of China’s many vaccine makers claiming they are able to produce at least 2.6 billion doses this year, a large part of the world’s population will end up inoculated not with the fancy Western vaccines boasting headline-grabbing efficacy rates, but with China’s humble, traditionally made shots.
We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.
The situation is especially concerning in the United States, where a decade of creeping authoritarianism has produced one of the world’s most rapid paces of democratic deterioration, according to the report. In terms of individual freedoms, we’re now “closer to countries such as Romania and Panama than Western European partners such as France and Germany,” as Ishaan Tharoor noted recently. But there’s a major economic component to our recent decline, as well: the yawning divide between rich and poor, which researchers have found to be both a cause and a consequence of democratic backsliding here and elsewhere….
American un-development continues. What is also striking is the complete incapability and unwillingness to handle problems. It’s the third week and the state and the city aren’t in high-level talks? Meanwhile, this news has not gone national: There is no American effort to help Jackson, any more than there was a national effort of any significance to help Flint with its water problems.
This is no longer a society where you can count on the public infrastructure OR on society to help you. Congress is currently cutting Covid aid even more, not just from $2,000 to 1,400 but more and more means testing and based on 2019 incomes, so if you lost your job during the pandemic, you are shit out of luck. (It is also true that people will look back and say Trump gave more money, with a $1,200 check and a $600 one.)
The level of malign indifference displayed by elected officials and senior bureaucrats is mind-boggling. They do nothing to help, but make sure to keep funneling money to the rich people who own them.
You can’t count on the US federal or most state governments. They aren’t interested in the basic duties of governing, like making sure the power and water keep flowing; the dikes are built, the forests are managed, and so on.
That means you have to count on yourself and whatever community you can find or create which is trustworthy.
At the least, build some reserves, but at the most, see what you can do to cut vulnerabilities. I know it’s hard, maybe even mostly impossible if you’re poor, but do what you can. This sort of event is likely to become more common until this political order is replaced, and it’s not clear when that will happen or whether it will be replaced by something better.
After all, California’s PG&E, which had disastrously mismanaged power and also been responsible for some of California’s worst wildfires has paid a heck of a lot of large dividends. To rich people and the politicians they own, it’s doing its job, so they don’t consider any of this a real problem.
Until that attitude changes, probably by changing the politicians, however necessary, you will continue to live in a country where your elites’ depraved indifference to your welfare or even death puts you in danger.
Prepare for it and remember: This state of affairs has actually the norm throughout most of human history. To rulers, people like you and me are cattle, and if the cattle are producing meat and milk, their pain, misery, and death is okay.
It was nice to have a few rulers who weren’t functionally depraved psychopaths for a few decades from FDR on, but for the US and Britain, those times are over.
