Ian Welsh – Page 239 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 27, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-21-20]

People always ask why poor people don’t just revolt and burn shit down. As a poor person I can say with confidence its because there is a startling amount of people cool with shooting us down like animals

https://twitter.com/molotics/status/1340738542469869568

It’s the ~~economy~~ ideology, stupid:

What a Miserable 2020 Revealed About America

Paul Waldman, December 21, 2020 [The American Prospect]

It exposed an impotent political system, a deadly mythology of rugged individualism, and a Republican Party without shame….

Our individualism is deadly. In no other country were the simple public-health measures necessary to contain the coronavirus so quickly and easily politicized. Trump bears much of the blame, but it didn’t take much for him to convince people that wearing masks is a terrible imposition on their freedom, and that it could be a worthwhile emblem of political identity. So many of us have spent our lives steeping in the ideology of “rugged individualism,” learning that any government edict is inherently repressive and making a personal sacrifice for the good of your neighbors, even a tiny one, makes you weak. No quantity of dead Americans has managed to dissuade so many of us from believing this.

Yep, it’s definitely the ideology, stupid:

“Neal Katyal and the Depravity of Big Law: The Democratic lawyer’s sickening defense of corporate immunity in a Supreme Court case reveals a growing moral rot in the legal community.

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Merry Christmas

By Ian Welsh

On December 25, 2020

24 Comments

I hope you all have a good one. If you don’t, and many won’t, my condolences and best wishes that the next year is a better one for you.

Trump Outflanks Dems from the Left

By Ian Welsh

On December 23, 2020

53 Comments

So, as you’ve probably heard by now, Trump is opposing the Covid “stimulus” bill and asking it be amended to include a $2,000 check, not a $600 one. Pelosi says he should pass the bill then they’ll pass another bill with the extra $1,400 (which is a ludicrous lie and we all know that).

The cries from many liberal supporters of the bill are that it is a good bill because it includes unemployment insurance relief increases of $300 a week. That’s sort of true, it’s the main good thing in the bill, but the problem is that a lot of people who need help aren’t currently getting UI.

Trump’s simply right about this, whatever his motives. Moreover, throughout the year he’s fairly consistently advocated more relief than Congress has provided.

But the standard play is unfolding. Screamed warnings that if the bill doesn’t pass no one will get relief, and that if it isn’t passed by the 26th, 12 million people will go off UI, so pass the bill, even if it’s inadequate. “We’re giving you something, in a bill packed with pork, and that’s not nothing, so take something.”

This is based on standard economic-neoliberal thinking. There’s a little decision game about it. You and another person are given a hundred dollars. The other person decides how the money is split. You can’t change how it is split, but you can veto getting any money.

The theory is that even if the person deciding how the money is split offers you a cent, you should take it. After all, you’re better off, right? In the real world, people don’t do that. If the split gets too low, they veto any money.

This is correct if you are dealing with a situation where the “game” will be played more often than once. If you don’t do it, you get a cent each time, and the other person gets almost all the money.

The correct action is a veto.

It’s why the Squad should have taken down Pelosi if she didn’t meet some essential demands — to show that they can’t be bullied, and that they have to be dealt with. If you wont use whatever power you have, you have no power, and you get nothing but table scraps.

In this sense, Trump is able to be “wrong” because he’s lame duck now. If he was going to be around for another four years, this threat would have real power because he could gum a lot of things up and he could insist those 12 million people be put back on UI (it’s not like an amended bill couldn’t do that). Biden is very unlikely to veto such a bill.

But he’s not wrong that $600 checks are too little and an insult. That’s not even a month’s rent for most people.

And if he runs in 2024, a lot of people will remember this attempt to get them more money as his last fight.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

A Brief Note on the New Covid “Stimulus” Bill

By Ian Welsh

On December 21, 2020

66 Comments

So, the bill that looks likely to pass is 900 billion. One $600 check, $300/week in UI improvement (this is the real good thing in the bill) and some miscellaneous good stuff, along with a variety of pork.

It’s a bad bill, totally inadequate to the circumstances. In the new year, millions of Americans will become homeless. It’s hard to say exactly how many, but ten million would be a low end estimate.

There is insufficient support for States and cities, so there will be a round of savage austerity cuts in the new year, given the complete refusal to actually tax rich people.

In many ways, 2021 is going to be WORSE than 2020 for Americans. About a third of small businesses will likely go out of business, the big winners like Amazon will not hire enough people to make up for it, and the end result will be a shittier economy than in 2019 concentrated in fewer hands.

Meanwhile, in London, England, a new Covid strain has appeared that is twice as contagious as the original.

None of this was remotely necessary. Proper support for small business and people would have cost less than the financial crisis bailouts (and could mostly have been done through the Fed for “free”), while the pandemic itself could easily have been crushed in about six months by simply following the same playbook that places like Vietnam used, a playbook that is simply “follow the textbook.”

But, in the US, the UK, and Canada, and I suspect a lot of other nations, Covid-19 has been a huge boon to the rich, vastly increasing their wealth and power. So, well, why save lives and jobs? I know I’ve said this repeatedly, but it’s a point that bears repeating.

You’re getting scraps, while the rich feast, and the politicians tweet selfies of themselves getting vaccinated before ICU nurses and doctors.

It’s how this part of the world runs. But not how it has to.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Fundraising Finale

By Ian Welsh

On December 21, 2020

We did, in the end, raise slightly more than $11,000. I am very grateful, this will make a significant difference. Thank you, all who gave.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 20, 2020

By Tony Wikrent

On December 20, 2020

43 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 20, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

America’s Survival Depends on Bankrupting the Republican Party
Thom Hartmann: [via LA Progressive 12-18-2020]

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experiments and that public health measures like masks are “un-American,” while we’re being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it’s a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city’s board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia….

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means….

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Click through to read Hartmann’s proposed six actions that can hasten the GOP’s exit from the stage of world history.

These Six Steps Can Stop Republican Treason

[Thom Hartmann, December 16, 2020, YouTube]

LA Progressive

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-15-20]

Marianne Williamson
@marwilliamson
The more I learn about the current epidemic of white supremacist groups, the clearer it becomes: we’re losing these people as children. Despair among our youth breeds vulnerability to ideological capture by psychotic forces. If our love doesn’t claim them, hate will.
12:50 AM · Dec 15, 2020

“Chris Arnade: Dignity, Poverty, Faith, & Seeking Respect in Back Row America” (podcast)

[The Moral Imagination, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-20]

“In the second half of the conversation we discuss faith, redemption, and atonement, and how the front row’s empiricist, cold, secular rationalism scientific doesn’t do justice to the complexities of human life, suffering, and the desire for meaning, dignity, and respect. Arnade argues that ‘atheism is an intellectual luxury that is wrong’ and that ‘front row’ scientism lacks epistemic humility, and has a false view of science and certainty. Arnade shows that each person, no matter our state, is a subject, and not simply an object to be manipulated or problem to be solved. And that many of our deepest problems cannot be solved by technical means alone, but are philosophical and cultural problems—not of the poor—but of the elite.”

“How race politics liberated the elites”

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On December 19, 2020

44 Comments

Feel free to use the comments section to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Last Day of Fundraiser and the Role of Opinion and News

By Ian Welsh

On December 18, 2020

44 Comments

Fundraising Update: As of this writing, we’re at approximately $10,430, leaving us $570 from the final goal and tier of $11,000.

$11,000: two more articles, these on the conditions that create good and bad societies to live in; an introduction and conclusion and some commentary and connecting text as seems necessary.

Again, I want to thank everyone who has given. It means a great deal to me, and I will remember. I’ll update tomorrow or Monday on whether we make the final goal.

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The Role of Opinion and News

In a properly run news outlet, news tells you what happened, and opinion tells you what it means.

I’ve seen a lot of people who distrust opinion and respect news, and that’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s often based on the idea that one can trust news, and that’s a problem.

To give two examples, much of the news leading up to the Iraq war was wrong, or, rather lies and propaganda. But it was presented as fact, and about 70 percent of the American population wound up believing that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and therefore supported an illegal war which may have wound up killing a million people or so (and which certainly was responsible for spawning ISIS).

More recently there was a story that Russia had offered bounties for dead American soldiers to the Taliban in Afghanistan. No proof, laughable on its face, and no proof has ever been presented. It was an intelligence agency propaganda op, and the media fell for it.

The problem with news is that people think it’s almost certainly true.

Opinion tends to be labeled opinion, so people know it isn’t fact, but interpretation. Further, it’s easier to deal with; if I read a columnist or blogger regularly, I know their biases, how they think, and what they want. I can know what their financial interests are, who their spouse is, and so on. I can take all of that into account.

As a result, opinion is overall less dangerous because the conflicts are clear, and it is presented as opinion, not fact.

News and Opinion were traditionally separated for exactly this reason — so that readers could (supposedly) know what they could trust and what they had to view carefully. But bad news is far more dangerous than bad opinion, because despite many instances where it has been false, people still tend to assume most of it is true. They don’t run the filters on it or assume someone has an axe to grind or may be operating in bad faith.

Be far more wary of “news” than opinion.

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