Ian Welsh

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

Sterile Elites and the French Election

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On May 3, 2017

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France has an electoral run-off system. The top two candidates in the general poll go on to a face-to-face election. This year, that is Macron and Le Pen. Melenchon, the left-wing candidate came up just short.

What is happening was inevitable, and predicted. Europe had been sclerotic before 2008, but enough people were doing well. After 2008, Europe, more than perhaps any other areas in the world, doubled down on austerity and neoliberal policies like “labor flexibility” (code for “fire for any reason, reduced (ideally no) protection from bosses.)

And so we now have the neo-fascist (in a much more real way) vs. the neoliberal who ran Hollande’s vastly unpopular economic policy.

The French establishment has reacted predictably.

Elites simply can’t pivot. They don’t know how to do anything but keep doubling down on neoliberal austerity. It is their entire playbook, and this default strategy may wind up costing them everything.

Polls currently have Macron winning, and Le Pen has been softening her rhetoric on leaving the EU, though it’s primarily, “We can wait a bit and have a referendum.”

I consider that a mistake, not because of electoral considerations this time, but because of the electoral considerations next time. As sometime-poster Mandos has pointed out, the EU has set up both membership in the EU and the Euro so that leaving them frontloads the pain onto whoever leaves. If you’re leaving, you need to get it over with right at the start of your term so you have time to recover from the pain.

(Leaving the Euro is clearly correct on policy terms, though whether Le Pen and her team have the chops to manage it properly is another matter.)

The other consideration is that if Le Pen doesn’t win this time (and the polls are unreliable, given past performance around similar candidates and issues), she’ll be on the final ballot in the next round, because the policies Macron will pursue will make the French worse off–just as they did when he ran them from Hollande. They aren’t going to miraculously work now that Le Pen is even more of a threat, or because Mercury goes retrograde or something.

But then there’s a very real chance Melenchon will be on the last round ballot next time, too, and he’s been pulling no punches. He refused to endorse Macron (he did not play Bernie Sanders Nice) and unlike Sanders followers, who overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, about two-thirds of Melenchon supporters refuse to vote Macron.

A Melenchon deputy explained:

We don’t want to help Marine Le Pen, but we don’t want to endorse Mr. Macron,” he said.

“He’s the candidate of free trade,” Mr. Coquerel said. “He’s going to assist in the Uberization of society. Everything we are going to fight against in the coming months. There’s no possible rapprochement.”

This is correct behaviour, as far as I am concerned. Melenchon is not a colleague, he did not run under the same party, and he disagrees with almost all of Macron’s economic policies.

If Macron can’t win against Le Pen without the left’s support, he doesn’t deserve to win, because he isn’t a left-winger on non-social issues. And while social issues are important, so is whether or not you have a good job. Freedom in poverty, as those of us who have been poor know, isn’t really freedom.

Besides, Melenchon is in the same position as Le Pen. He’ll almost certainly be in the next “last round” if Macron wins, because, again, Macron is going to hurt a lot of French. It is inevitable, he cannot avoid doing so because he genuinely believes in neo-liberal austerity as the road forward.

There are a large contingent of people who are “just hanging on.” The status quo sort of works for them, but they can see the abyss, and they don’t want change, yet, even though they aren’t happy.

They will only want change if the game of economic Russian roulette that is austerity happens to take them out, and dump them into a slum. Their numbers decline every election, as some eat that austerity bullet and others die (since they tend to be older) and a very few can no longer stomach buying their present with their children’s future. (This is rare, most don’t care, and I base that on the cold hard numbers. If they cared, things would have changed long ago. Their children are expendable to them.)

So we play the game out. Time’s wheel must grind on, bodies caught in the gears, till the last neoliberal has failed, and we get either the populist right or the populist left.

Those are your choices: populist right, populist left, or continued decline into what will become an increasingly obvious dystopian surveillance state; something out of an 80s cyberpunk novel, but without the actual cool tech (as yet).

But there is no other choice that moves away from current trends except populist right or left. Those are the choices. Choose.

Update (how LePen will win, if she does):

A false story of “I will help fix your awful life” wins against a true story of “I’m going to hurt you, but the other person is lying about helping you and will hurt you even worse.”

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Trump Is Not Wrong to Be Willing to Talk to North Korea’s Leader

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On May 2, 2017

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Oh my, the wringing of hands over Trump saying he’d be willing to talk to Kim Jong Un.

Let’s get the disclaimers for idiots out of the way: Kim Jon Un appears to be a very bad man and Trump often does bad things, or rather, tries to do bad things that are then blocked.

This is not one of those things–even after one stops laughing at people pretending that the White House hasn’t entertained plenty of dictators with blood soaked hands, just as bad as Kim.

For 60 years, the policy for dealing with North Korea has been to keep them in a cage, and it hasn’t worked.

North Korea wants a formal peace treaty, and feels that, absent nukes, they would be attacked.

Given what happened to Qaddafi (sodomized with a knife, then killed) after he gave up his nuclear program, there might be something to this–especially because the West keeps laughing at the idea of a formal peace treaty. If you think they aren’t going to attack, why not give them one? Or at least offer it as a prize for cooperation, along with reducing some of the frankly insane sanctions?

(This approach, by the way, is favored by most South Koreans, the people with the most to lose if the situation turns into war and Seoul gets flattened.)

Is Trump supposed to not meet with the King of Saudi Arabia? Do you know how he treats Shi’ites and women? Do you know what he is doing to Yemen right now? Is he not supposed to meet with George W. Bush, his predecessor, the butcher of Iraq?

Stop clutching pearls. Yeah, Trump is scum, but this is ridiculous. Diplomacy is about talking with your enemies, not just your friends; it is about talking with bad people (which is why everyone keeps talking to the US) when they have something you want.

Trump is right, in this case, and the squealing about it is not only pearl-clutching bullshit, it makes an actual war more likely, as did hitting Trump so hard on Russia that better relations with Russia (the only other country with enough nukes to destroy the world) seem to be off the table. Because God knows, we wouldn’t want good relations between the two nuclear super-powers, and Russia may not be a super power in another way, but it still has a ton of nukes.

A man may be a bad man, and your political opponent, without being wrong about everything, and acting as if he is could cost hundreds of millions of people their lives.

Stop.

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A Modest Proposal to Fix the World

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On May 1, 2017

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Image by TW Collins

Fire every non-commission employee making more than seven times the median national income (all income included).

Put a 100 percent tax on all income over seven times the median, no exceptions for any type of income.

Put a 100 percent tax on on all inheritances over 50 times the median (that’s enough of a head-start on life for winning the lucky sperm contest).

Promote those who were earning less.

Secret: The people running the economy are not the best, and if they are brightest, we need stupider people. I base this on their results.

Going forward, the top income level will increase, as a percentage, equal to the average income of the bottom five percent and the median income.

This will sort out a lot of problems quickly.

First, it gets rid of the people running the economy today, who are obviously either hopeless fuck-ups or completely uninterested in results for anyone but themselves and a few cronies.

Second, it concentrates the minds of those at the top on the problems of those at the middle and bottom. They want that seven-times-the-median to be higher, so suddenly, they care about the poor and the middle class. A lot.

Third, it rather quickly deals with people with too much money now (yes, there is such a thing); if their seven-times the-median income doesn’t support their lifestyle, they will have to dip into their capital to pay for it. Because all capital gains will be treated as income, well, that should be fun.

Yes, there are all sorts of ways people can try to get around this. Plug them as fast as you find them and write the initial laws in very generous ways, like money-laundering laws. (Were you obviously trying to get around money laundering laws? If so, you’re probably going to jail. That’s how they’re written.)

Why seven times? Why not. It’s enough that no one can say they shouldn’t still feel very rich, and if they don’t, then something is deeply wrong with the median.

The general rule of policy is that policy which is good for the rich and the middle class is bad for the middle class because the rich get so much more from it. For instance, the housing bubble looked good for the middle class (and a few people won), but, really, it was so much better for the rich in that it gave them so much power along with other financial shenanigans, that they were able to gut the middle class.

Policy which is good for the middle class and the poor, or even just the poor, is good for the middle class. Poor people spend their money, and poor people who get better off become middle class people. A middle class which identifies with the poor and not the rich, will be secure, because they will support the wellspring of their own success.

There’s a bunch of moral and ethical arguments that should go into a piece like this, but it comes down to this: Every social welfare statistic worth mentioning tracks inequality, not absolute wealth, once you’re beyond the point of “enough so I’m not starving.” (See “The Spirit Level” for the nailed-down, stupidly overdetailed proving of the obvious.)

The rich are rich because society makes it possible, through aggressive enforcement of totally artificial property laws and massive infrastructure which benefits them far more than anyone else. The idea of ideas being property is completely artificial, contracts of adhesion that are standard in software are social bullshit, corporations are bundles of hugely valuable rights to avoid responsibility for losses, and all of that is before we even get to 20 trillion dollars (in the US alone) to bail out bankers who had genuinely lost everything, and that includes Goldman Sachs, because winning bets with counterparties who are bankrupt is worth ten cents on the dollar, and at that rate, Goldman is bankrupt too.

The people in charge have done a terrible job. It is a moral imperative to take that job from them and give it to people who will do it better than they do. (If they do it well, then the world and the economy won’t be so fucked.)

The people not in charge who are familiar with their jobs/businesses deserve a try.

There are bunch of things to add to this, but they all basically come down to two simple rules:

  1. Keep the rich poor.
  2. Never let money or power buy anything that matters.

A better education than normal, a jump in the healthcare queue line, avoiding airport security, flying on a private jet, avoiding traffic in a helicopter, not staying in the same hotels as anyone else. Nothing that matters. They can have nicer consumer goods, as long as they don’t matter, and that is all.

When the people running something are complete fuck-ups, you take away their power. That means their position, and as money is power, their obscene wealth. You replace them with someone else. It is that simple.

Eat the rich, or the rich will eat you.

And they have been dining well.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Was All the “Trump is Hitler” Rhetoric Right?

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On April 29, 2017

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On October 17th, I wrote that demonizing Trump as fascist had consequences.

To most Americans fascist = holocaust, Hitler, and World War II. To be a fascist is to be the worst thing possible.

Popular culture is full of references of going back and killing Hitler before he became powerful. We bewail that no one did anything. We blame Neville Chamberlain for responding to Hitler’s provocations by making concessions.

It is generally accepted that trying to make peace with a fascist is foolishness.

Donald Trump is a fascist, so are many of his followers, and those who follow him but who aren’t fascists are still working to try and get a fascist into power. They must be stopped, and our culture believes violence is justified in stopping fascists.

That is the logic of the rhetoric.

I think it is now pretty clear that Trump is not Hitler reborn. He is not even Mussolini reborn. He was, at most, a right-wing populist, but he’s not even that. He’s just another oligarch who flirted with populist-right ideas, but has mostly not even followed through on those.

He was never Hitler. I didn’t think he was during the campaign, and said so.

And now we have polarization: antifas and fascists. People who didn’t exist on the public stage before they were vaulted there, and with that polarization, we have violence.

I don’t have anything in particular against punching Nazis (though I do have something for free speech), but these people have been elevated from cranks no one knew about, to somebodies.

Only one prominent Trump advisor can credibly be called something of a fascist: Bannon, and he is outweighed by people who are just standard, out-of-the-can neoliberals, like Trump’s daughter, and son-in-law, and, well, almost everyone else. There are a few nasty racists, like Sessions, but they existed long before Trump. There are climate denialists, but that’s a Republican party thing, and so on.

Trump’s not Hitler. He never was. There is not going to be a Reichstag fire in which he seizes power.

The fascist line, like the Russian pawn line, were simply anti-Trump political lines. Extremely dangerous, and in the case of the Russian line xenophobic and dangerous, but just propaganda.

And millions have fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker and are now basing their lives and identities around it, on both sides. This hasn’t weakened the “alt-right,” it has strengthened it, and it sure as hell didn’t stop Trump from being elected.

Skipping a few half million dollar a plate dinners and campaigning in the rust-belt? That might have stopped it. Not opposing a $15/minimum wage, that might have stopped it. Not trying to get “moderate” Republicans to vote Democratic and ignoring traditional Democratic constituencies, that might have stopped it.

Not Hitler, and calling him Hitler didn’t work.

Genius.

I wonder if our next dynastic appointee, Chelsea Clinton, is even just a little more competent as a campaigner than her mother?

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Rentiers vs. Capitalists, Yahoo CEO Edition

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On April 28, 2017

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We tend to think of rentiers as being property owners, but a rentier is anyone who uses control of position to extract monopoly profits. CEOs appoint boards, boards determine CEO compensation, and corporations can pay obscene amounts of money, even when they aren’t making a profit. Heck, even if they’re being taken over.

Corporate America prides itself on rewarding success and punishing failure. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer does not fit comfortably into that narrative. During her five-year tenure at the once-proud tech firm, user levels stagnated, ad revenue dropped, acquisitions cratered, layoffs accelerated, product quality floundered, and hackers stole the personal information of more than one billion users.

But when Yahoo’s sale to Verizon becomes official in June, with the restructured company renamed Oath, Mayer will walk away with $186 million, according to a regulatory filing released this week. That includes shares of Yahoo stock Mayer owned, stock options, and a $23 million “golden parachute” of cash, restricted stock units, and medical benefits. Mayer did relinquish $14 million while taking responsibility for the Yahoo Mail data breach, but she’ll get 13 times that amount just to no longer remain part of the company.

I should point out that the first part–“priding itself on rewarding success and punishing failure”–is pure bullshit when it comes to executives and CEOs, pure mythology. Ordinary workers may (sort of) live in that world, though they get little reward for success, but high ranking executives are compensated irregardless of how their companies are doing. The worst performing CEOs get higher compensation.

If you want to be well paid as a CEO, perform like shit. Science backs it up!

This is not capitalism. This is rentierism. The value of all the loans taken by pbulic corporations in the 2000 run up to the 2008 crash was equal to the stock buybacks made by public corporations.

Why? Because most executive compensation is through stock options!

It’s good to be the Queen/Duke. Ahhhhh…what a life.

And this, folks, is why you don’t have nice things: Because these people run your society and make most of the important decisions. To say that they are parasites is to be generous; many parasites shade towards symbiosis, these people make the economy and their companies perform worse than it would if they did not exist. Restrict compensation to up to seven times the median, fire everyone who earns more, and promote those below them and I guarantee that in ten years the economy would be much better.

You can have lots of really rich people or a good economy; you can have lots of rich people or a democracy.

Those are the choices.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Open Thread

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On April 25, 2017

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Round two of shuddery-cold fever has me in its grip, so please use this threat to talk among yourselves, should you so wish.

Obama Starts Cashing In Directly for Bailing Out Wall Street

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On April 24, 2017

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Not confirmed, at this point.

“What sources are telling FOX Business Network is that former President Obama, now less than 100 days out of office, has agreed to a speaking engagement during Cantor Fitzgerald’s healthcare conference in September,” FBN’s Gasparino said. “We understand that he is going to be the keynote speaker for the lunch, and he’s going to receive a fee of $400,000. We should point out that that’s in line with what Hilary Clinton got… we should point out that Cantor will neither confirm or deny.”

Politicians are owned, not because of campaign donations, but because they are taken care of once they out of office. For many (though not Obama), it’s also because, while in office, their friends and family are taken care of.

Other than this being domestic bribery, and legal, I don’t see a great deal of difference between this and Trump’s conflicts of interest. The bottom line is that Obama made sure the bailouts for Wall Street continued, and he is being rewarded for it.

This is corruption. It is evil. And millions of people suffered for it. Many died. Obama’s administration was very deliberate in not helping homeowners in any serious way (in fact, harming them). They didn’t help homeowners because they felt doing so would hurt banks. Millions lost their jobs, and the economy never fully recovered.

Obama wasn’t the worst president, but that’s because there is lots of competition. But he was a terrible wasted opportunity, is corrupt and did immense evil. The inability of many to recognize that people like Obama (and Bush, and Clinton, and Trump, and Harry Reid and…), in real terms, are far more dangerous to them than someone like bin Laden, is a very real and proximate cause of vast suffering.

There will be many who defend him, but this is indefensible, as was much of his behaviour in office. If you hate Trump, understand that, absent Obama’s failure to make enough Americans better off, there is no Trump as president.

And now, now he’s getting his pieces of silver. I hope they are worth what he sold for them.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

Macron vs. Le Pen in France

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On April 23, 2017

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This is the final showdown. A reminder, Macron ran Hollande’s economic policy, and wants to do even more “liberalizing” of the French economy. A.K.A., more gutting of worker’s rights, wages, and so on.

The polls show Macron winning, but given the reliability of polls lately, who knows?

What I do know is this: Macron will swiftly be as popular as Hollande (meaning, in the doghouse), and the next election, if LePen doesn’t win this one, will be LePen’s to lose (and if she loses, it will be to someone like Melanchon—a left wing populist).

Britain needs LaPen to win. LePen is willing to take the pain to Frexit. She won’t be slowed down by the EU’s promises of pain–instead, she’ll pile it on.

This is what 37 years of international neoliberalism has brought, and bought, us.

(Oh, and Corbyn is Britain’s only chance to do Brexit in a way that isn’t an enema with a sledgehammer, but it looks like that’s what Brits want.)

Should be interesting, anyway.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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