Atomization of workforce and establishment of national security state after 9/11 so far prevented
large organized collective actions (recent riots were not organized, and with the current technical
capabilities of the three letter agencies any organization is difficult or impossible). I think that
conversion of the state into national security state was the key factor that saved a couple of the
most notorious neoliberals from being hanged on the electrical posts in 2008 although I remember
slogan "Jump suckers" on the corner of Wall Street.
But neoliberal attacks on organized labor started much earlier with Ronald Reagan and then
continued under all subsequent presidents with bill Clinton doing the bulk of this dirty job. his
calculation in creating "New labor" (read neoliberal stooges of Wall Street masked as Democratic
Party) was right and for a couple of elections voters allow Democrats to betray them after the
elections. But eventually that changes. Vichy left, represented by "Clintonized" Democratic Party
got a crushing defeat in 2016 Presidential elections. Does not mean that Trump is better or less
neoliberal, but it does suggest that working class does not trust Democratic Party any longer.
2008 was the time of the crush of neoliberal ideology, much like Prague string signified the
crush of Communist ideology. but while there was some level of harassment, individual beatings of banksters in 2008 were non-existent.
And in zombie stage (with discredited ideology) neoliberalism managed to continue and even
counterattack in some countries. Brazil and Argentina fall into neoliberal hands just recently.
Neoliberals actually managed to learn Trotskyites methods of subversion of government and playing
on population disconnect in case of economic difficulties as well if not better as Trotskyites
themselves.
Neoliberalism is based on unconditional domination of labor by capital ("socialism for the rich,
feudalism for labor"). American scholar and cultural critic
Henry Giroux alleges that
neoliberalism holds that market forces should organize every facet of society, including economic
and social life. In labor relations neoliberalism promotes a
social darwinist ethic which elevates self-interest over social needs.A new class of workers lost "good" jobs in the USA since arly 90th. They all, especially, "over 50" caterory, facing acute socio-economic insecurity,
There is no a special tern for such people. They are called 'precariat'.
The imposition of neoliberalism in the United States arose from a the political counterrevolution
led by financial oligarchy in the 1970s. It was their reaction on the falling rate of
profitability in manufacturing industry as well as the emergence of strong competitors both in Europe and Asia,
competitors which no longer were hampered by WWII decimation of industrial potential and in some way
even manage to benefit from reconstruction getting newer better factories then in the USA.
Neoliberalism doesn't shrink government, but instead convert it into a national security state,
which provides little governmental oversight over large business and multinationals, but toughly
control the lower classes, the smacks -- including mass incarceration those at the bottom. With the
inmates along with illegal immigrants slowly becoming an important source of low-wage labor
for some US corporations. Essentially a new incarnation of slave labor.
Neoliberal policies led to the situation in the US economy in which 30% of workers earn low wages
(less than two-thirds of the median wage for full-time workers), and 35% of the labor force is
underemployed; only 40% of the working-age population in the U.S. is adequately employed. The Center
for Economic Policy Research's (CEPR) Dean Baker (2006) argued that the driving force behind rising
inequality in the US has been a series of government step to impose on the society deliberate, neoliberal policy choices including
anti-inflationary bias, anti-unionism, and profiteering in the health industry
It can not be hidden. Redistribution of wealth up is all the neoliberalism is about.
Simplifying, neoliberalism can be defined as socialism for the rich and feudalism for poor.
So forms of brutal exploitation when people work 12 hours a day (as many "contractors" do now,
as for them labor
laws do not apply) or when even bathroom breaks are regulated now are more common. Amazon, Uber and several other companies have shown that neoliberal model can be as brutal as
plantation slavery.
In a way, we returned
to the brutality of the beginning of XX century on a new level characterized by much higher level
of instability of employment. This is not disputed even for neoliberal stooges in economic departments of
major universities. As interesting question arise: "What form the backlash might take, if any ?"
I think it is an observable fact that the US neoliberal elite is now is discredited and entered political crisis in which it
can't govern "as usual": defeat of
Hillary Clinton and ability to Trump to win nomination from Republican Party and then managed to win them despite opposition from
intelligence agencies and attempt to discredit him by trying him to Russia national
elections. Tump victory signifies the start of discreditation of the neoliberal political elite. The sma is true for the success of Sunders in
Democratic Party primaries and the fact that DNC needed to resort to dirty tricks to derail his
candidacy signifies the same. Even taking into account his betrayal of his voters.
If this does not suggest the crisis of neoliberal governance, I do not know what is. Neoliberal Democrats ("Clintonized"
Democratic Party) by and large lost workers and lower middle class votes. It became "Republicans light", the second War Party in
Washington and now rely of "CIA-democrats" (candidates with background in intelligences serves or military) to win the seats in
Congress much like Republicans in the past. There was even (quickly suppressed) revolt against Pelosi in the House of
Representatives, as it is clear that Pelosi represents the "Party of Davos" in the Congress, not American people.
The crisis
of neoliberalism created conditions
for increased social protest which at stage mostly result in passive "f*ck you" to
neoliberal elite. In 2016 that led to election of Trump, but it was Sanders who captures
social protest voters only to be derailed by machinations of DNC and Clinton clan. At the same
time, the efficiency with which Occupy Wall Street movement was neutered means
that the national security state is still pretty effective in suppressing of dissent, so open
violence probably will be suppressed brutally and efficiently. "Color revolution" methods of
social protest are not effective in the USA sitution, as the key factor that allow "color
revolutionaries" to challenge existing government. It is easy and not so risky to do when you
understand that the USA and its three letter agencies, embassies and NGOs stand behind and
might allow you to emigrate, if you cause fail. No so other significant power such as China or
Russia can stand behind the protesters against neoliberalism in the USA. Neoliberals controls all
braches of power. And internationally they are way too strong to allow Russia or China to interfere
in the US election the way the USA interfered into Russian presidential election.
Neoliberalism is the key reason fro the drop in life expectancy
Notable quotes:
"... Declines or stagnation in longevity can signal catastrophic events or deep problems in a society, researchers say. ..."
"... More deaths from homicide, diabetes and chronic liver disease -- which is related to heavy alcohol use -- also contributed to last year's life expectancy drop, the CDC said ..."
"... The declines were largest for Hispanic and Black people, who as population groups were disproportionately affected by the pandemic . The largest drop for any cohort was 3.7 years, for Hispanic men, bringing their life expectancy to 75.3 years of age. ..."
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell by 1.5 years in 2020, the biggest decline since at least
World War II, as the Covid-19 pandemic killed hundreds of thousands and exacerbated crises in
drug overdoses , homicides and some chronic diseases.
... ... ...
The full toll of the pandemic has yet to be seen, doctors and public-health officials said.
Many people skipped or delayed treatment last year for conditions such as diabetes or high
blood pressure and endured isolation, stress and interruptions in normal diet and exercise
routines.
"That has led to intermediate and longer-term effects we will have to deal with for years to
come," said Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine and president of the American Heart Association.
Life expectancy is a measure of a nation's well-being and prosperity, based on mortality in
a given year. Declines or stagnation in longevity can signal catastrophic events or deep
problems in a society, researchers say. Life expectancy fell in the U.S. by 11.8 years in
1918, during a world-wide flu pandemic. Many victims were young.
... ... ...
More deaths from homicide, diabetes and chronic liver disease -- which is related to
heavy alcohol use -- also contributed to last year's life expectancy drop, the CDC said...
Life expectancy would have fallen even more, the CDC said, if not for decreases in mortality
due to cancer, chronic lower-respiratory diseases such as bronchitis, emphysema and asthma, and
other factors.
The declines were largest for Hispanic and Black people, who as population groups were
disproportionately affected by the pandemic . The largest drop for any cohort was 3.7
years, for Hispanic men, bringing their life expectancy to 75.3 years of age.
U.S. longevity had been largely stagnant since 2010, even declining in three of those years,
due in part to an increase in
deaths from drug overdoses , rising death rates
from heart disease for middle-aged Americans and other public health crises. "Getting back
to where we were before the pandemic is a very bad place," said Steven Woolf, director emeritus
of the Center on Society and Health at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine
and author of a recent study comparing the effects of the pandemic on life expectancy in the
U.S. and other high-income countries. "We've got a larger problem here."
... ... ...
Drug-overdose deaths rose nearly 30% last year, driven by a proliferation of the deadly
synthetic opioid fentanyl as well as stress, isolation and reduced access to treatment during
the pandemic, public-health experts said. One study published this month found a 28.3%
decline in initiation of addiction treatment in California from March through October
2020..... ...
Life expectancy for white people dropped 1.2 years to 77.6 years in 2020, the lowest level
since 2002.
What is missing from this article is a comparison of the US with other advanced economies in
Europe and Asia. What is disturbing is how the US spends the most and achieves less than our
economic peers starting with expected average longevity. We had the lowest longevity averages
pre-pandemic and now we have dropped further. This is happening despite the fact that our
health care spending is twice the per capita of other advanced economies (Approx. $11K in the
US vs. $6K based on 2019 data). Contributing to our dismal longevity statistics, with respect
to other wealthy economies, are the highest rates of drug overdose deaths and suicides by
gun. This is just the tip of a long list of sad statistics where we are unfortunately number
1 or close to it. The usual (partisan) response is to claim its government's fault or the
fault of a greedy healthcare system or just say the data is wrong. So far, none of these
strategies is working very well.
Dave Berg SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Life expectancy is the wrong phrase. It's current average life duration. COVID will have no
impact on the life expectancy of babies being born right now. I have two new grandchildren,
their life expectancy will be impacted by things we don't even know about yet.
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
Walmart Brings Automation To Regional Distribution Centers BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY,
JUL 18, 2021 - 09:00 PM
The progressive press had a field day with "woke" Walmart highly
publicized February decision to hikes wages for 425,000 workers to an average above $15 an
hour. We doubt the obvious follow up - the ongoing stealthy replacement of many of its minimum
wage workers with machines - will get the same amount of airtime.
As Chain Store
Age reports , Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in
its regional distribution centers. I.e., it is replacing thousands of workers with robots.
Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology
solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla.,
distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is
either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the
product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck
arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate
places.
Leveraging the Symbiotic solution, a complex algorithm determines how to store cases like
puzzle pieces using high-speed mobile robots that operate with a precision that speeds the
intake process and increases the accuracy of freight being stored for future orders. By using
dense modular storage, the solution also expands building capacity.
In addition, by using palletizing robotics to organize and optimize freight, the Symbiotic
solution creates custom store- and aisle-ready pallets.
Why is Walmart doing this? Simple: According to CSA, "Walmart expects to save time, limit
out-of-stocks and increasing the speed of stocking and unloading." More importantly, the
company hopes to further cut expenses and remove even more unskilled labor from its supply
chain.
This solution follows tests of similar automated warehouse solutions at a Walmart
consolidation center in Colton, Calif., and perishable grocery distribution center in Shafter,
Calif.
Walmart plans to implement this technology in 25 of its 42 RDCs.
"Though very few Walmart customers will ever see into our warehouses, they'll still be able
to witness an industry-leading change, each time they find a product on shelves," said Joe
Metzger, executive VP of supply chain operations at Walmart U.S. "There may be no way to solve
all the complexities of a global supply chain, but we plan to keep changing the game as we use
technology to transform the way we work and lead our business into the future."
when the tax rates increase even more, it just encourages automation or DIY (bring your own sheets to avoid paying the cleaning
fee), which just grinds down growth rather than accelerates it.
Notable quotes:
"... Applebee's is now using tablets to allow customers to pay at their tables without summoning a waiter. ..."
Companies see automation and other labor-saving steps as a way to emerge from the health crisis with a permanently smaller
workforce
PHOTO:
JIM THOMPSON/ZUMA PRESS
... ... ...
Economic data show that companies have learned to do more with less over the last 16 months or so. Output nearly
recovered to pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2021 -- down just 0.5% from the end of 2019 -- even though U.S.
workers put in 4.3% fewer hours than they did before the health crisis.
... ... ...
Raytheon Technologies
Corp.
RTX
0.08%
,
the biggest U.S. aerospace supplier by sales, laid off 21,000 employees and contractors in 2020 amid a drastic
decline in air travel. Raytheon said in January that efforts to modernize its factories and back-office operations
would boost profit margins and reduce the need to bring back all those jobs. The company said that most if not all
of the 4,500 contract workers who were let go in 2020 wouldn't be called back.
... ... ..
Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. HLT -0.78% said last week that most of its U.S. properties are adopting "a
flexible housekeeping policy," with daily service available upon request. "Full deep cleanings will be conducted
prior to check-in and on every fifth day for extended stays," it said.
Daily housekeeping will still be free for those who request it...
Unite Here, a union that represents hotel workers, published a report in June estimating that the end of daily
room cleaning could result in an industrywide loss of up to 180,000 jobs...
... ... ...
Restaurants have become rapid adopters of technology during the pandemic as two forces -- labor shortages that are
pushing wages higher and a desire to reduce close contact between customers and employees -- raise the return on such
investments.
...
Applebee's is now using tablets to allow customers to pay at their tables without summoning a
waiter.
The hand-held screens provide a hedge against labor inflation, said John Peyton, CEO of Applebee's
parent
Dine
Brands Global
Inc.
... ... ...
The U.S. tax code encourages investments in automation, particularly after the Trump administration's tax cuts,
said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the impact of
automation on workers. Firms pay around 25 cents in taxes for every dollar they pay workers, compared with 5 cents
for every dollar spent on machines because companies can write off capital investments, he said.
A lot of employers were given Covid-aid to keep employees employed and paid in 2020. I
assume somebody has addressed that obligation since it wasn't mentioned.
But, what happens to the unskilled workers whose jobs have been eliminated? Do Raytheon
and Hilton just say "have a nice life on the streets"?
No, they will become our collective burdens.
I am all for technology and progress and better QA/QC and general performance. But the
employers that benefit from this should use part of their gains in stock valuation to keep
"our collective burdens" off our collective backs, rather than pay dividends and bonuses
first.
Maybe reinvest in updated training for those laid off.
No great outcome comes free. BUT, as the article implies, the luxury of having already
laid off the unskilled, likely leaves the employer holding all the cards.
And the wheel keeps turning...
Jeffery Allen
Question! Isn't this antithetical (reduction of employees) to the spirit and purpose of
both monetary and fiscal programs, e.g., PPP loans (fiscal), capital markets funding
facilities (monetary) established last year and current year? Employers are to retain
employees. Gee, what a farce. Does anyone really care?
Philip Hilmes
Some of this makes sense and some would happen anyway without the pandemic. I don't need my room
cleaned every day, but sometimes I want it. The wait staff in restaurants is another matter. Losing
wait staff makes for a pretty bad experience. I hate having to order on my phone. I feel like I might
as well be home ordering food through Grubhub or something. It's impersonal, more painful than telling
someone, doesn't allow for you to be checked on if you need anything, doesn't provide information you
don't get from a menu, etc. It really diminishes the value of going out to eat without wait staff.
al snow
OK I been reading all the comments I only have a WSJ access as the rate was a great deal.
Hotel/Motel started making the bed but not changing the sheets every day for many years I am fine as
long as they offer trash take out and towel/paper every day
and do not forget to tip .
clive boulton
Recruiters re-post hard to fill job listings onto multiple job boards. I don't believe the reported
job openings resemble are real. Divide by 3 at least.
But wait: wasn't this recent rise in wages in real terms being propagandized as a new boom
for the working class in the USA by the MSM until some days ago?
And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and
Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a
voice-recognition algorithm.
An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic
legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to
technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and
contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring
workers -- at least at the wages that employers are used to paying -- is providing new momentum
for automation.
Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a
post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some
economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power,
particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.
"Once a job is automated, it's pretty hard to turn back," said Casey Warman, an economist at
Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic .
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving
to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for
waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut
their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in
the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of
leverage , leading to higher pay
, more generous benefits and other perks.
Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those
gains. A
working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that
pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United
States but around the world.
"Six months ago, all these workers were essential," said Marc Perrone, president of the
United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. "Everyone was calling
them heroes. Now, they're trying to figure out how to get rid of them."
Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic
shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult -- so
much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back
behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while
in high school.
"We really felt like there has to be another solution," she said.
So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition
systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant's technology
began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales's drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by
an automated voice designed to understand their orders -- including modifications and special
requests -- suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the
kitchen and the cashier.
The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the
system to her three other restaurants.
"We'll look back and say why didn't we do this sooner," she said.
The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels,
retailers ,
manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a
survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of
businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of
technology.
Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two
decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and
stockholders to compete over their share of the income -- a game that workers tended to lose.
Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could
be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting
firm.
She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for
years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him
win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an
expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.
"For the first time, we're seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity,
lowering cost, but they're also increasing flexibility," she said. "We're starting to see real
momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly."
Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor
without adding much to overall productivity.
In a
recent working paper , Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that "a significant
portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by
automation" -- and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.
"If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we
would have had a very different trajectory for inequality," Professor Acemoglu said.
Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn't looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30
people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level
workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers
and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.
"Our approach is, this is an assistant for you," she said. "This allows our employee to
really focus" on customers.
Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an
hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that
she would lose sales -- and automation allows her to take another course.
Rob Carpenter, Valyant's chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking
drive-through orders is only part of an employee's responsibilities. Automating that task
doesn't eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.
"We're not talking about automating an entire position," he said. "It's just one task within
the restaurant, and it's gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks."
But technology doesn't have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If
automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight
or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology
could erode workers' bargaining power.
"Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no
more," Professor Acemoglu said. "It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I'll get
lower wages."
At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available.
Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States,
has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require
someone to flip burgers -- they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press
of a button.
"You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier," said
Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. "It certainly widens the scope of who you can have
behind that grill."
With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to
the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a
shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.
Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could
significantly change workers' prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said
technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it
hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.
"If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?" Professor Warman said.
Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he
added.
The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people
without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have
reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and
check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a
375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery
customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.
Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop
& Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to
better serve customers -- and that it was a competitive necessity.
"Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and
partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers," she
said. "Stop & Shop needs to do the same."
In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich,
Conn. A decade later, he manages the store's prepared foods department, earning around $40,000
a year.
Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn't concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon,
and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive -- like more powerful ovens for
rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.
But he worries about other technologies -- like automated meat slicers -- that seem to
enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a
career in the industry.
"The business model we seem to be following is we're pushing toward automation and we're not
investing equally in the worker," he said. "Today it's, 'We want to get these robots in here to
replace you because we feel like you're overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he
has to do is push this button.'"
The number of U.S. truck drivers sidelined due to substance abuse violations has surpassed
60,000 and continues to climb by roughly 2,000-3,000 per month, according to federal data. The
latest monthly
report by the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, administered by the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration since January 2020, revealed that 60,299 CDL holders have a drug or
alcohol violation recorded in the clearinghouse as of June 1, up from 57,510 as of May 1 and up
from 18,860 recorded in the clearinghouse as of May 1, 2020.
Drivers with at least one substance abuse violation are barred from operating a commercial
truck until they complete a return-to-duty process, which includes providing a negative
follow-up test result. The percentage of drivers who are completing the RTD process has
steadily increased over the past year, however, from 5.2% as of May 1, 2020, to 22.1% as of May
1, 2021.
Marijuana consistently tops the list of substances identified in positive drug tests, far
outpacing cocaine and methamphetamine, the second- and third-highest drug violations,
respectively, among CDL holders.
The number of violations now recorded in the clearinghouse stands out for another reason:
It's coincidentally just a few hundred shy of an estimated number of drivers needed to fill a
shortfall of commercial drivers to keep pace with freight demand.
"According to a recent estimate, the trucking industry needs an additional 60,800 truck
drivers immediately -- a deficit that is expected to grow to more than 160,000 by 2028,"
testified American Trucking Associations President and CEO Chris Spear at a Capitol Hill
hearing on freight mobility in May.
"In fact, when anticipated driver retirement numbers are combined with the expected growth
in capacity, the trucking industry will need to hire roughly 1.1 million new drivers over the
next decade, or an average of nearly 110,000 per year."
Scopelitis Consulting Co-Director Sean Garney pointed out that the growing number of
prohibited drivers is not a bad thing from a safety standpoint.
"The database is doing what it's supposed to do, which is identify those who should not be
driving," Garney told FreightWaves. "Losing drivers due to positive drug tests may not
necessarily be a good thing for truck capacity, but I think what many others in this industry
also care about is safety."
The problem is that many people face long term unemployment without substantial emergency funds, which further complicates
already difficult situation.
Notable quotes:
"... More than 2K adults to were interviewed to try and ascertain how long they could survive without income. It turns out that approximately 72.4MM employed Americans - 28.4% of the population - believe they wouldn't be able to last for more than a month without a payday. ..."
Imagine you lost your job tomorrow. How long would you be able to sustain your current
lifestyle? A week? A month? A year?
As we await Friday's labor market update, Finder has just published the results of a recent
survey attempting to gauge the financial stability of the average American in the post-pandemic
era.
More than 2K adults to were interviewed to try and ascertain how long they could survive
without income. It turns out that approximately 72.4MM employed Americans - 28.4% of the
population - believe they wouldn't be able to last for more than a month without a payday.
Another 24% said they expected to be able to live comfortably between two months and six
months. That means an estimated 133.6MM working Americans (52.3% of the population) can live
off their savings for six months or less before going broke.
On the other end of the spectrum, roughly 8.7MM employed Americans (or 3.4% of the
population) say they don't need to rely on a rainy day fund since they have employment
insurance which will compensate them should they lose their job.
Amusingly, men appear to be less effective savers than women. Some 32.4MM women (26.7% of
American women) say their savings would stretch at most a month, compared to 40MM men (29.9% of
American men) who admit to the same. Of those people, 9.7MM women (8% of American women) say
their savings wouldn't even stretch a week, compared to 15.5MM men (11.6% of American men) who
admit to the same.
A majority of employed Americans over the age of 18 say their savings would last six months
at most. About 70.7MM men (52.8% of American men) and 62.8MM women (51.8% of American women)
fear they'd be in dire straits within six months of losing their livelihood.
Unsurprisingly, younger people tend to have less of a savings buffer - but the gap between
the generations isn't as wide as it probably should be.
While increasing one's income is perhaps the best route to building a more robust nest egg,
Finder offered some suggestions for people looking to maximize their savings.
1. Create a budget and stick to it
Look at your monthly income against all of your monthly expenses. Add to them expenses you
pay once or twice a year to avoid a surprise when they creep up. After you know where your
money is going, you can allot specific amounts to different categories and effectively track
your spending.
"... Indeed, economists and analysts have gotten used to presenting facts from the perspective of private employers and their lobbyists. The American public is expected to sympathize more with the plight of wealthy business owners who can't find workers to fill their low-paid positions, instead of with unemployed workers who might be struggling to make ends meet. ..."
"... West Virginia's Republican Governor Jim Justice justified ending federal jobless benefits early in his state by lecturing his residents on how, "America is all about work. That's what has made this great country." Interestingly, Justice owns a resort that couldn't find enough low-wage workers to fill jobs. Notwithstanding a clear conflict of interest in cutting jobless benefits, the Republican politician is now enjoying the fruits of his own political actions as his resort reports greater ease in filling positions with desperate workers whose lifeline he cut off. ..."
For the past few months, Republicans have been waging a ferocious political battle to end
federal unemployment benefits, based upon stated desires of saving the U.S. economy from a
serious labor shortage. The logic, in the words
of Republican politicians like Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, goes like this: "the government pays
folks more to stay home than to go to work," and therefore, "[p]aying people not to work is not
helpful." The conservative Wall Street Journal has been beating the drum for the same argument,
saying recently that it was a " terrible
blunder " to pay jobless benefits to unemployed workers.
If the hyperbolic claims are to be believed, one might imagine American workers are
luxuriating in the largesse of taxpayer-funded payments, thumbing their noses at the earnest
"job creators" who are taking far more seriously the importance of a post-pandemic economic
growth spurt.
It is true that there are currently millions of jobs going unfilled. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just
released statistics showing that there were 9.3 million job openings in April and that the
percentage of layoffs decreased while resignations increased. Taking these statistics at face
value, one could conclude this means there is a labor shortage.
But, as economist Heidi Shierholz explained in a New York
Times op-ed , there is only a labor shortage if employers raise wages to match worker
demands and subsequently still face a shortage of workers. Shierholz wrote, "When those
measures [of raising wages] don't result in a substantial increase in workers, that's a labor
shortage. Absent that dynamic, you can rest easy."
Remember the subprime mortgage housing crisis of 2008 when
economists and pundits blamed low-income homeowners for wanting to purchase homes they
could not afford? Perhaps this is the labor market's way of saying, if you can't afford higher
salaries, you shouldn't expect to fill jobs.
Or, to use the logic of another accepted capitalist argument, employers could liken the job
market to the surge pricing practices of ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft. After
consumers complained about hiked-up prices for rides during rush hour,
Uber explained , "With surge pricing, Uber rates increase to get more cars on the road and
ensure reliability during the busiest times. When enough cars are on the road, prices go back
down to normal levels." Applying this logic to the labor market, workers might be saying to
employers: "When enough dollars are being offered in wages, the number of job openings will go
back down to normal levels." In other words, workers are surge-pricing the cost of their
labor.
But corporate elites are loudly complaining that the sky is falling -- not because of a real
labor shortage, but because workers are less likely now to accept low-wage jobs. The U.S.
Chamber of Commerce
insists that "[t]he worker shortage is real," and that it has risen to the level of a
"national economic emergency" that "poses an imminent threat to our fragile recovery and
America's great resurgence." In the Chamber's worldview, workers, not corporate employers who
refuse to pay better, are the main obstacle to the U.S.'s economic recovery.
Longtime labor organizer and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies Bill Fletcher Jr. explained to me in an email
interview that claims of a labor shortage are an exaggeration and that, actually, "we suffered
a minor depression and not another great recession," as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
In Fletcher's view, "The so-called labor shortage needs to be understood as the result of
tremendous employment reorganization, including the collapse of industries and companies."
Furthermore, according to Fletcher, the purveyors of the "labor shortage" myth are not
accounting for "the collapse of daycare and the impact on women and families, and a continued
fear associated with the pandemic."
He's right. As one analyst
put it, "The rotten seed of America's disinvestment in child care has finally sprouted." Such
factors have received little attention by the purveyors of the labor shortage myth -- perhaps
because acknowledging real obstacles like care work requires thinking of workers as real human
beings rather than cogs in a capitalist machine.
Indeed, economists and analysts have gotten used to presenting facts from the perspective of
private employers and their lobbyists. The American public is expected to sympathize more with
the plight of wealthy business owners who can't find workers to fill their low-paid positions,
instead of with unemployed workers who might be struggling to make ends meet.
Already, jobless benefits were slashed to appallingly low levels after Republicans reduced a
$600-a-week payment authorized by the CARES Act to a mere
$300 a week , which works out to $7.50 an hour for full-time work. If companies cannot
compete with this exceedingly paltry sum, their position is akin to a customer demanding to a
car salesperson that they have the right to buy a vehicle for a below-market-value sticker
price (again, capitalist logic is a worthwhile exercise to showcase the ludicrousness of how
lawmakers and their corporate beneficiaries are responding to the state of the labor
market).
Remarkably, although federal jobless benefits are funded through September 2021,
more than two dozen Republican-run states are choosing to end them earlier. Not only will
this impact the bottom line for
millions of people struggling to make ends meet, but it will also undermine the stimulus
impact that this federal aid has on the economies of states when jobless workers spend their
federal dollars on necessities. Conservatives are essentially engaged in an ideological battle
over government benefits, which, in their view, are always wrong unless they are going to the
already privileged (remember the GOP's 2017
tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy?).
The GOP has thumbed its nose at federal benefits for residents before. In order to
underscore their ideological opposition to the Affordable Care Act, recall how Republican
governors
eschewed billions of federal dollars to fund Medicaid expansion. These conservative
ideologues chose to let their own
voters suffer the consequences of turning down federal aid in service of their political
opposition to Obamacare. And they're doing the same thing now.
At the same time as headlines are screaming about a catastrophic worker shortage that could
undermine the economy, stories abound of how American billionaires paid
peanuts in income taxes according to newly released documents, even as their wealth
multiplied to extraordinary levels. The obscenely wealthy are spending their mountains of cash on luxury
goods and fulfilling
childish fantasies of space travel . The juxtaposition of such a phenomenon alongside the
conservative claim that jobless benefits are too generous is evidence that we are indeed in a
"national economic emergency" -- just not of the sort that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants
us to believe.
West
Virginia's Republican Governor Jim Justice justified ending federal jobless benefits early
in his state by lecturing his residents on how, "America is all about work. That's what has
made this great country." Interestingly, Justice owns a resort that couldn't find enough
low-wage workers to fill jobs. Notwithstanding a clear conflict of interest in cutting jobless
benefits, the Republican politician is now enjoying the fruits of his own political actions as
his resort reports greater ease in filling positions with desperate workers whose lifeline he
cut off.
When lawmakers earlier this year
debated the Raise the Wage Act , which would have increased the federal minimum wage,
Republicans wagged their fingers in warning, saying higher wages would put companies out of
business. Opponents of that failed bill claimed that if forced to pay $15 an hour, employers
would hire fewer people, close branches, or perhaps shut down altogether, which we were told
would ultimately hurt workers.
Now, we are being told another story: that companies actually do need workers and won't
simply reduce jobs, close branches, or shut down and that the government therefore needs to
stop competing with their ultra-low wages to save the economy. The claim that businesses would
no longer be profitable if they are forced to increase wages is undermined by one
multibillion-dollar fact: corporations are raking in record-high profits and doling them out to
shareholders and executives. They can indeed afford to offer greater pay, and when
they do, it turns out there is no labor shortage .
American workers are at a critically important juncture at this moment. Corporate employers
seem to be approaching a limit of how far they can push workers to accept poverty-level jobs.
According to Fletcher, "This moment provides opportunities to raise wage demands, but it must
be a moment where workers organize in order to sustain and pursue demands for improvements in
their living and working conditions."
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali,"
a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing
fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was
produced by Economy for All , a project of the
Independent Media Institute.
In IT corporate honchos shamelessly put more then a dozen of very specific skills into the
position rescription and want a cog that hit that exactly. they are not interested in IQ, ability
to learn and such things. that want already train person for the position to fill, so that have
zero need to train this persn and they expect that he will work productively from the day
one.
But corporate elites are loudly complaining that the sky is falling -- not because of a
real labor shortage, but because workers are less likely now to accept low-wage jobs.
Duh. This is so blindingly obvious, but NC is the only place that seems to mention this
fact.
Here in the UK, the outmigration of marginally paid workers from Eastern Europe and the
resultant "labour shortage" triggered by Brexit has made it abundantly clear that Blair's
change to open borders was not from any idealistic considerations but as a way of importing
easily exploited labor.
Business leaders quoted in the the tsunami of hand-wringing MSM articles about the current
catastrophe are offering such helpful solutions as allowing housekeepers to use pools and
gyms in off hours, free meals to waiters, etc. Anything but a living wage.
" I don't actually see any untruths to the GOP talking points. "
"" Workers are less likely to accept a job while receiving Gov't benefits" and "workers are
less likely to accept low wage crappy jobs ".
Well,if u can survive on a $300/week program that ends after several weeks pass,bless u.
No one else in America can. That's a $7.50 hr full time "summer job" with no pension or
medical benefits that teenagers with no dependents,few bills n maintenance issues might be
interested in; adults with adult responsibilities,no way. That so called RepubliCons, the
"economics experts", can make such a fraudulent claim n anyone out of elementary school
believes it has a quantum particle of reality or value is . well I'll just say a sad n
unbelievable situation.
They get 300 dollars plus regular UI. They can also get Medicaid and CHIP, or if they are
still making too much they are eligible for Obamacare exchange. Plus they're eligible for
SNAP and housing vouchers
There is one significant fallacy in this article: The author conflates Republican
opposition to enhanced benefits with opposition to unemployment benefits overall.
I very much stand with labour over business on most (probably all) points, but the
Republican argument is to end the enhanced benefits in most cases – Not to abolish
unemployment assistance. They believe the role of government is to step in to help pay basic
bills in the event of unemployment, but oppose the current higher level of benefit due to the
market distortions it causes (Hence the appearance of the term 'labour shortage'.)
I agree that it basically forces mcdonalds et al to up their wages if they want to do
business, which should be a positive for society, but I find it unlikely that the author
could have unintentionally mistunderstood the argument on such a fundamental level, and all
it does is try to drive a wedge further between each side of the argument.
Anyone that believes that workers supported their jobs being sent overseas is either
demented or delusional or suffers from a mental hernia. The same goes for the common working
stiffs supporting massive immigration to help drive down their ability to demand a livable
wage.
American labor has been sold down the river by the International Labor Leaders,
politicians and the oligarchy of US corporate CEO's.
======
Got a new hip recently. Do your P.T., take it easy, follow the warnings of what not to do
until you heal and you should discover that decades feel like they are lifted off your
shoulders.
Sierra,
You've made a very interesting point that actually never occurred to me and one in which I
never seen fully examined.
Exploiting labour and outsourcing it are two sides of the same coin with the same goal in
mind, diverting revenue streams into the C-suite and rentier class.
Obviously you cannot outsource most of the workers in the hospitality industry or the
non-virtual aspects of world's oldest profession, but a lot of the tech industry and the
virtual aspects of the latter are very amenable to being shipped overseas.
Immigrants are extremely visible and an easy target, while outsourcing is essentially an
impossible to contain concept that creates real world hardship.
Dear NC readers, do you know of any studies comparing and contrasting the economic impact of
immigration and/or limiting it and outsourcing?
Indeed, economists and analysts have gotten used to presenting facts from the
perspective of private employers and their lobbyists.
You are acting if economists and lobbyists are separate groups, as opposed to largely a
subset thereof. Funny how a field entirely based on the study of incentives claims incentives
don't distort their policy prescriptions, isn't it?
As for low-paid jobs, they are traditionally the last resort of immigrants and other
marginalized populations, but the anti-immigration push that began under Obama, and
enthusiastically continued by Trump and Biden, has perfectly predictable consequences.
One factor not mentioned is many free-riding businesses refuse to pay for training, then
wonder why there are no trained workers to hire.
Now, there are definitely fields where there is a genuine and deliberate labor shortage.
Usually white-collar credentialed professions like medical doctors and the AMA cartel.
Economics is not based on incentives. That's behavioral economics. I hate to quote Larry
Summers, but this is Summers on financial economics:
Ketchup economists reject out of hand much of this research on the ketchup market. They
believe that the data used is based on almost meaningless accounting information and are
quick to point out that concepts such as costs of production vary across firms and are not
accurately measurable in any event. they believe that ketchup transactions prices are the
only hard data worth studying. Nonetheless ketchup economists have an impressive research
program, focusing on the scope for excess opportunities in the ketchup market. They have
shown that two quart bottles of ketchup invariably sell for twice as much as one quart
bottles of ketchup except for deviations traceable to transaction costs, and that one
cannot get a bargain on ketchup by buying and combining ingredients once one takes account
of transaction costs. Nor are there gains to be had from storing ketchup, or mixing
together different quality ketchups and selling the resulting product. Indeed, most ketchup
economists regard the efficiency of the ketchup market as the best established fact in
empirical economics.
Happy to see you back at a keyboard, and hoping your recovery is progressing well. I had
the misfortune of spending two days in the hospitals while they got my blood chemistry
strightened out. Here's the kicker; the hospitalist, who I saw 3 times, submitted a bill for
a whopping $17,000. Just yesterday, the practice she works for submitted a bill that was
one-tenth her charges for the work she did, yet her bill is still sitting waiting to be
processed.
OMG, how horrible. HSS is a small hospital for a big city like NYC, only 205 beds and 25
operating rooms. No emergency room. They are not owned by PE and so I don't think play
outsourcing/markup games (they are very big on controlling quality, which you can't do if you
have to go through middlemen for staffing). Some of the MDs do that their own practices
within HSS but they are solo practitioners or small teams, which is not a model that you see
much of anywhere outside NYC
The last time I was hospitalized, all the hospitalists were in the employ of the hospital,
now they are in the employ of a nationwide hospitalist practice, which has all the smell of
private equity around it. I'm really beginning to think that a third party focusted on
healthcare might have a real shot at upsetting the political order – maybe it's time to
drag out your skunk party for 2024.
As for low-paid jobs, they are traditionally the last resort of immigrants and other
marginalized populations, but the anti-immigration push that began under Obama, and
enthusiastically continued by Trump and Biden, has perfectly predictable
consequences.
Well I'm sorry you can't find easily exploitable labor, except I'm not immigrants face the
same ridiculous costs, and weren't hispanic workers more heavily impacted by covid due
to those marginal jobs (I'll switch your dynamic to low wage workers , and
marginal jobs, thanks), so by your logic more should have been let in to die from
these marginal jobs? but yeah we need more PMC except we don't Now, there are definitely fields where there is a genuine and deliberate labor shortage.
Usually white-collar credentialed professions like medical doctors and the AMA
cartel."
Last I checked it was private equity, wall st and pharmaceutical companies and their
lobbyists that drive up costs so labor needs to charge more.
Wake up and smell the coffee.
How much of this is over specification on the part of employers in the ad for the job? We
want the perfect candidate who can do the job better than we can with no training .
OMG this is such a long-standing pet peeve! We've commented on this nonsense regularly.
Companies took the position that they don't have to train and now they are eating their
cooking.
The mismatch between job openings and job applicants is not just about wages.
In fact, if companies were willing to take a chance on people who didn't exactly match the
job requirements, the likely effect would be to raise the wages some of those that did not
qualify under the over exacting job requirements. [And likely paying these new employees less
than they had contemplated paying the perfect candidate.]
But that seems like someone making the hiring decision might, just possibly, be seen as
taking a risk.
At my empolyer we know we can't find any colleges that teach mainframe skills, so we bring
in graduates who are willing to learn those skills – we submit them to a 3-month
bootcamp and then there's a long period of mentorship under a senior person to their group
that has an opening. Since everybody and their dog are now moving headfirst into DevOps,
where all the tooling is in somewhat less ancient software, they get exposed using those
Eclipse/VScode-based tools and are able to come up to speed somewhat quicker. Still, no one
in corporate America dares to bite the bullet and re-platform their core systems with few
exceptions (SABRE) for fear of losing all the institutional knowledge that's in software,
rather than wetware (humans).
Just think what is happening right now with everyone holding an Indian outsourcing
contract. You don't have individual's cellphone numbers over in India, which would cost you
an arm and a leg to call, never mind what's going on in their facilities.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for employers not training their staffs.
In the SF Bay Area computer industry, employees and independent contractors alike continually
race to train themselves in the new technologies that seem to crop up like mushrooms after a
rain. Many companies train their customers–and charge them for it–before they'll
train their staffs. This is a principal reason there's a market for contractors. Training
oneself in new technologies lays a base for opportunities that don't appear if you spend a
decade in the same job (unless, like mainframe programming, your job is so old it's new). I
suppose this is a beneficial side of capitalism?
I get that you want experience for mid to senior level jobs but the experience
requirements for what are ostsensibly entry-level jobs have gotten absurd. The education
requirements have also gotten out of hand in some cases.
That being said, a lot of the shortages are in low-wage, part-time jobs so the issue isn't
necessarily ridiculous requirements, like you sometimes see for entry level white collar
jobs, but wages that are too low and awful working conditions.
How many people want to be treated like dirt–be it by customers, management, or
both–for not much more than minimum wage if they have other options?
A wage increase will help fill these jobs but there also needs to be a paradigm shift in
how employees are treated–the customer is not always right and allowing them to treat
employees in ways that would not be tolerated in other businesses, and certainly not in many
white-collar workplaces is a huge part of the problem and why these jobs have long had
high-turnover.
It never ends – when it was about immigrant labor under George B junior – I
think – the call was
-- - They do jobs that Americans won't -- or something to that effect.
It always bothered me that the sentence was never, in my mind, completed. It should have been
said
-- They do jobs that Americans won't do at that pay level. --
The tax system, economic system and higher education departments have been perverted by the
continuous bribery and endowments by the rentier class to our elected law makers and dept
heads for decades –
The creditor, debtor relationships distorted for eons.
The toll takers have never, in history, been in any higher level of mastery than they are
now.
It is not to throw out the constitution but, to throw out those who have perverted it.
The construction industry knows how to exploit immigrant labor, documented as well as
undocumented. I'm sure most peole born here refuse to work for the same wages.
The exploitation occurs on many levels. For small residential jobs, a lot of wage theft
occurs. For larger jobs, a lot of safety regs get ignored. When you have a population that
won't use the legal avenues available to other citizens to push back against abuse you can
get a lot done :/
When I go looking for a job if a degree isn't required I am very unlikely to pursue it
further. Same if the list of 'required' is overly detailed. I'm making assumptions in both of
these cases (that might not be correct) about pay, benefits, work environment, etc. and what
is actually going on with a job listing. Why? Chiefly my likelihood of actually getting a
reasonable offer. I expect either being seen as overqualified in the first case or the job
only being listed because of some requirement in the second.
I have to wonder if many places know how to hire. This is made much more difficult by
years of poorly written (maybe deceptive) job postings. You probably know many of the
phrases; flexible schedule, family ___, reliable transportation required, and so on. Its no
surprise if puffery doesn't bring back the drones.
If we're playing with statistics. How many of these posted job openings, how many
interviews did the companies offer v. how many offers were made until the position was
filled? If position remains open, has the company increased the base pay offer? guaranteed an
increased min. number of weekly hours? offered bonuses or increased benefits? How many times
has this same job opening using the original posting criteria been re-posted? Is this a real
single job opening that the company plans to fill in real time or just a posting that they
keep opening because they have high turnover? etc., etc., etc.
The real problem with this workers are lazy meme is that it is repeated and repeated all
year long on the local news from the viewpoint of business. It has filtered down to local
people. I hear them repeating what the local news said without giving it any critical
thought. Even those who say that we need unions and believe themselves to be on the side of
workers.
Ear wigs are good for businesses. Insidious for workers.
In the UK, in the days of Labor Strive, before Neo-liberalism , there was always newspaper
reports about "Labor Strife" and "bolshy workers." Never once did the press examine
Management had behaved and caused the workers to become "bolshy" – a direct reaction to
Management's attitudes and behavior, probably based on the worst attributes of the UK's class
system.
Definition: A bolshy person often argues and makes difficulties.
Management get the workers (Their Attitudes) it deserves.
I recommend reading "The Toyota Way" to explore a very successful management style.
This song is getting a probably getting more hits these days
Take this job and Shove It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjEauGiRLo
But I hear lots of businesses will close to to no labor, so when they close they can go work
for 7.25 an hour for one of their competitors who also needs laborors Solidarinosc!
If businesses are suffering, it's restaurants and small scale enterprise. The Covid
response was tailored to the needs of economy of scale mega biz. They likely knew multitides
of mom-n-pops would go away- and they have. But that's fine.
So if state governments can turn down federal unemployment supplements because they want
labor to go back to work for unlivable wages this means the federal government can do nothing
about it. When push comes to shove the question that must be settled is, Is it a human right
to receive employment assistance until a job is found that pays a livable wage? (Not even a
republican will actually say No). So then that puts all the stingy states on notice that
there is a human rights issue here. States will have the choice to either let businesses shut
down for lack of workers, or states can subsidize minimum wages and benefits. If states
choose, in desperation, to subsidize minimum wages, then the states can apply to the feds to
be compensated. The thing that is needed in the interim, between when the real standoff
starts and ends, is a safety net for workers who are being blocked by the state from
receiving unemployment benefits. I say call in the national guard. This is a human rights
issue.
The real exploitation happened when we allowed companies to delocalize, manufacture
product in China and sell it here with no strings attached.
James Goldsmith seems like a prophet now, he was so absolutely right.
Wow. The Clinton flack was insufferable. AND WRONG about pretty much everything. Goldsmith
was brilliant. I wasn't paying enough attention at he time, but how many high profile people
were making the arguments he was making?
I'm surprised that nobody has taken the opportunity to comment on how this discussion
shows how hypocritical Biden and the democrats were not to press for raising the minimum
wage.
The pretense (which they must have coached the "Senate scholar" on) was that raising the
minimum wage was not related to revenue (i.e., a revenue bill). But of course it is! Right
now, paying below-poverty wages enabled Walmart and other employers to make the government
pay part of their wage bill. Higher minimum wages would raise these government aid recipients
out of the poverty range, saving public revenue.
That is so obvious that the failure of the Democrats to make the point shows that they really
didn't want to raise wages after all.
I didn't expect much from Biden but he's even worse than I thought. Along with those
bought senators hiding behind Joe Manchin. Depressing to think how much worse everything will
become for working people here.
When I think about how they're complaining about Manchin now when there was a serious
primary challenge against him last year, and how the Democrat organization rallied around
Manchin and not his challenger, it is disgusting to see Slate/The Guardian/NYT/other "Blue no
matter who" mouth breathers write articles asking what can be done to salvage a progressive
agenda from the curse of bipartisanship.
I had given up on national politics long before the 2020 election circus but this latest
has confirmed my resolve. The destruction of the Democrat party can't come soon enough.
If I call them Hypocritics, when I never believed them in the first place, will they feel
any shame at all? Or must I be part of their class for them to feel even the tiniest of
niggles?
Perhaps they'll feel ashamed once they cut the check for the $600 they shorted us this
winter. Or maybe that they are reneging on the extended unemployment benefits early or
One side makes you sleep on a bed of nails and swear allegiance.The other side generously
offers to help you out, no strings attached, but you might bleed out from the thousands of
tiny means-testing cuts. Each side want the lower tiers to face the gauntlet and prove one's
worthiness, hoping to convince us that a black box algorithm is the same thing as a jury of
peers.
Exactly right! And keep in mind deluge of op-eds telling us that Biden is a
transformational president! The same authors presented a deluge of op-eds telling us how
Senator Sanders was to radical for the American people after he did well in early primaries.
That the reforms he supported like Medicare for all, raising the minimum wage, lowering drug
costs, help with daycare, doing something about climate change etc. were reforms that the
people would never accept because the people value their freedom and don't want to live in a
socialistic country.
It looks like none of the promises Biden made during the campaign will be implemented by
President Biden. That why he is in the White House.
Would a lot of these positions be filled if the US had single payer healthcare or similar?
Would workers accept low paying positions if they didn't have to lose so much of their pay to
crappy health insurance?
At our local Petsmart they cut staff during the pandemic. They laid off all full time
workers
And are only hiring back part time. I knew several of the laid off people and they are not
coming back. Two of the people that worked full time have found other jobs one with slightly
better pay the other with slightly better benefits. We are in California where rent is very
high so another person we know decided to use this as a chance to relocate to another state
where housing is less expensive. Our older neighbor retired, although vaccinated now, he
decided it just wasn't safe and after the CDC told everyone to take off their mask off. He is
glad he just decided to live on a little less money. I suspect there are a lot of reasons as
Yves stated above for a lack of workers, but this "they are lazy" trope is capitalistic
nonsense.
Some highlights:
>> everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will
never be industrious.
-- Arthur Young; 1771
>>Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive
experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the "poverty" of France on its good
weather and fertile soil:
'Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more,
and really live better.
>>Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society It
is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no
riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of
wealth.
I'll just point out, per the Old Testament, that wage, debt and rent slavery were the
exception, not the norm (as they are in the US) for citizens (Hebrews) in ancient
Israel/Judah.
That's because the assets in ancient Israel/Judah were roughly equally owned by all
citizens with provisions in the OT Law (eg. Leviticus 25, eg. Deuteronomy 15, eg. Deuteronomy
23:19-20) to keep it that way in the long run (but less than 50 years).
Contrast that to US where we have privileges for a private credit cartel, aka "the banks",
and no limits to the concentration of land ownership and the roots of our problems are
evident.
So begging for better jobs for citizens is, in the Biblical context, pathetically weak tea
indeed.
On a personal note I had a great job interview Thursday at the local food co-op. This is
my first in person interview since I was terminated without cause by IBM (after almost 24
years there in a server development job) almost a year ago. Despite applying for over 100
positions. I'm over 60 and haven't worked in a year so I admit I'm grateful to even get the
chance.
I have another interview with them next week and hoping to start soon as a produce clerk
making $13.50 an hour. If I can get on full time they offer a decent insurance plan including
dental. The HR person acknowledged that I was "wildly overqualified" but encouraging. The
possibility of getting health care is key; my IBM Cobra benefits will start costing me almost
$1400/monthly for myself and my husband in September after the ARA subsidy expires.
I've adjusted my expectations to reinvent myself as a manual laborer after decades in
fairly cushy corporate life. I've managed to keep my health and physical capacity so somewhat
optimistic I can meet the job requirements that include lifting 50 lb boxes of produce. But
we'll see.
You mean you haven't had a job in a year since it's highly doubtful that you have not done
any work in a year; eg. cooking, cleaning, shopping, car maintenance, gardening,
chauffeuring, mowing the lawn, home maintenance and caring for others count as work.
We need to stop conflating work (good) with wage slavery as if the former necessarily
requires the latter.
Okay sure. I haven't earned in a year. But it's still a problem I'm trying to sort
out best as I can.
Since I still live in the US where earning is highly correlated with insurance
coverage, and I still have about 5 years until we're both qualified for Medicare this may
turn out to be a great thing that has happened.
And since I don't see a path out of wage slavery today I'll be happy to accept almost any
offer from the food co-op. It's a union job with decent pay and benefits and may offer other
opportunities in the future. They mostly buy and sell products that are locally made so that
makes it easier too. The money we are all enslaving each other over is staying around here as
much as possible. Okay.
Good luck! Fyi i strongly suggest u look into taking your IBM pension asap as 1. It will
minimally impact your taxes as u r now earning less n 2. How many more years do u think it
will be there? ( I usually recommend most people take their social security at 62 for similar
reasons but in your case I'd do your research b4 making any move like that. ) Take a blank
state n Fed tax form n pencil in the new income n see what the results are.
Btw truly wonderful people are involved in food co-ops,enjoy!
No one really questions the idea of maximising profit.
How do you maximise profit?
You minimise costs, including labour costs, i.e. wages.
Where did the idea of maximising profit comes from?
It certainly wasn't from Adam Smith.
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and
fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and
high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to
ruin." Adam Smith
Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalising itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services
Today's problems with growth and demand.
Amazon didn't suck its profits out as dividends and look how big it's grown (not so good on
the wages).
The benefits of the system can be passed upwards in dividends or downwards in wages.
Both actually detract from the money available for re-investment as Jeff Bezos knows only too
well.
He didn't pay dividends, and paid really low wages, to maximise the amount that he could
re-invest in Amazon and look how big it's grown.
The shareholders gains are made through the value of the shares.
Jeff Bezos hopes other people are paying high enough wages to buy lots of stuff from Amazon;
his own workers don't have much purchasing power.
Where do the benefits of the system go?
Today, we pass as much as possible upwards in dividends.
In the Keynesian era they passed a lot more down in wages.
> Jeff Bezos hopes other people are paying high enough wages to buy lots of stuff from
Amazon; his own workers don't have much purchasing power.
You are missing the tree in the forest. Jeff hopes other people will pay a high enough
price for Amazon stawk. We already know Jeff doesn't give a shit about the stuff he sells, or
the inhumane working conditions that go along with the low pay and short "career". I mean,
not even the nastiest farmer would treat his mules like that, even if mules were easy and
cheap to come by.
We don't think people should get money when they are not working.
Are you sure?
What's the point in working?
Why bother?
It's just not worth all the effort when you can make money doing nothing.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
They love easy money.
With a BTL portfolio, I can get the capital gains on a number of properties and extract
the hard earned income of generation rent at the same time.
That sounds good.
What is there not to like?
We love easy money.
You've just got to sniff out the easy money.
All that hard work involved in setting up a company yourself, and building it up.
Why bother?
Asset strip firms other people have built up, that's easy money.
"West Virginia's Republican Governor Jim Justice justified ending federal jobless
benefits early in his state by lecturing his residents on how, "America is all about work.
That's what has made this great country."
Have you had a look around recently?
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
America is not about work at all.
The US is largely about exploiting or being exploited with most of US doing both.
We should resent an economic system that requires we exploit others or be a pure victim
ourselves.
That said and to face some truths we'd rather not, the Bible offers some comfort, eg:
Ecclesiastes 7:16 Do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin
yourself?
Ecclesiastes 5:8-9 If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province,
do not be shocked at the sight; for one official watches over another official, and there are
higher officials over them. After all, a king who cultivates the field is beneficial to the
land.
Nonetheless, we should support economic justice and recognize that most of us are net
losers to an unjust economic system even though it offers some corrupt compensation* to
divide and confuse us.
*eg positive yields and interest on the inherently risk-free debt of a monetary
sovereign.
Jim Justice made his money the old fashioned way, he inherited it:
From Wiki: James Conley Justice II (born April 27, 1951) is an American businessman and
politician who has been serving as the 36th governor of West Virginia since 2017. With a net
worth of around $1.2 billion, he is the wealthiest person in West Virginia. He inherited a
coal mining business from his father and built a business empire with over 94 companies,
including the Greenbrier, a luxury resort.
I wonder how much of this is also related to a change in the churn we assume existed
pre-pandemic? For example, the most recent JOLTS survey results from April
2021 show the total number of separations hasn't really changed but the number of quits
has increased.
So, one possible interpretation of that would be employers are less likely to fire people
and those who think they have skills in demand are more interested in leaving for better
opportunities now. That makes intuitive sense given what we've been through. If you had a
good gig and it was stable through 2020 you had very little reason to leave it even if an
offer was better with another company. That goes double if you were a caregiver or had
children. Which of course is why many women who were affected by the challenges of balancing
daycare and a career gave up.
This is also my experience lately. While it's only anecdotal evidence, we're having a hard
time hiring mid career engineers. Doesn't seem like pay is the issue. We offer a ton of
vacation, a separate pool of sick time, decent benefits, and wages in the six figures with a
good bonus program. We're looking to hire 3 engineers. We can't even get people to apply. In
2019 we could be sure to see a steady supply of experienced candidates looking for new
opportunities. Now? If you have an engineering position and your company is letting you work
from home it seems you don't have a good reason to jump.
Look no further than Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. They had only half the
staff they normally need at $10 an hour. So they double the wage to $20 an hour and filled
every job in less than a week. The Conservaturds will never admit they are lying.
As a small business owner providing professional services I am grateful for the comment
section here.
I have called professional peers to get a behind the corporate PR perspective of their
businesses. Although anecdotal, the overall trend in our industry is to accept the labor
shortage and downsize. Most firms have a reliable backlog of work and will benefit from an
infrastructure bill. Our firm has chosen to downsize and close vacant positions.
Remote work, although feasible, has employees thinking they are LeBron James, regardless
of their skill set. Desperate employers are feeding their belief. Two years from now it will
be interesting to see if these employees they fail forward. Company culture minimized
employee turnover pre-covid. This culture has little meaning to an employee working in his
daughter's playroom.
For context, in California, I believe the median income for licensees is approximately
$110,000 with lower level technicians easily at $75k in the urban areas.
Lastly, the "paltry" $300 per week is in additional to the state unemployment checks and
is not subject to taxes. As stated previously, $300 is equal to $7.50 per hour. Federal
minimum wage is $7.25 and is adopted by many states minimum, for what it's worth.
With respect, I do not see any there there in the comment. Adjusted for inflation the
minimum wage at its height in 1968 at 1.60, would be just under $13 per hour today. However,
even at $15 in California, it is inadequate.
Anyone making anything like the minimum wage would not be working from home, but would be
working in some kind of customer service job, and would find paying for adequate food,
clothing, and shelter very difficult. Not in getting any extras, but only in getting enough
to survive. People, and their families, do need to eat.
If the response of not paying enough, and therefore not getting new hires, is to downsize,
perhaps that is good. After all no business deserves to remain in business, especially if the
business model depends on its workers being unable to survive.
I am also fed up with the "lazy worker" meme. Or rather, propaganda. People are literally
exhausted working 2 or 3 lousy jobs and no real healthcare. Equally irritating to me is a
misguided notion that we have some magically accessible generous safety net in the US. As
though there aren't thousands and thousands on waiting lists for government subsidized
housing. Section 8 vouchers? Good luck.
We've ended "welfare as we [knew] it" (AFDC) thanks to Bill Clinton and then the screw was
turned tightly by Junior Bush (no child care, but go to work.) The upshot was bad news for
kids.
Seems to me one of the few things left is the food stamp program, and I can't imagine how
that's been reconfigured. Whomever gave that fantastic list of goodies people can get in the
US with a mere snap of the fingers isn't in the real world, imho.
Ok! Yves, lovely to see you again, my friend! (Cue the Moody Blues ) Get well!
Here is my story.
I am 56 years old, on dialysis and I was collecting SSI of 529 a month.
I was living with and taking care of my mother in her home because she had dementia.
She died in December and I had to start paying the bills. In March I inherited her IRA which
I reported to SS. I was able to roll it over into my own IRA because I am disabled, due to
the Trump tax law changes.
I reported the changes in a timely manner and because I couldn't afford to live here without
a job, I took a part time job for 9 an hour.
So now, because I inherited my mother's IRA and have too much resources I no longer qualify
for SSI and have been overpaid to the tune of almost 2 grand, which I am assuming I will have
to pay back. I have no idea how that works either. Do they just grab money out of your
account? Anyone who knows please tell me.
I would run, run, run to the nearest public assistance counselor or lawyer. In the San
Francisco Bay Area, it is should not be too hard to find one. They saved me. There are also
in California several state websites. There was a useful to me benefits planning site (It only covers nine states though).
The rules for SSI (Supplemental Security Income), SSDI (Social Security Disability
Insurance), Social Security, Medi-Cal or Medicaid, and Medicare are each different. Each
state has its own modifications as well, so that is fifty additional sets of modified rules
especially for the medical benefits. If they are determined to claw back the money, how it is
done might depend on the individual state. It is truly a maze of flycatchers and trapdoors
out for you and your money.
The overworked benefits clerks often do not have the knowledge to deal with anything even
slightly unusual and are not encourage or at least discouraged from finding out due to
the never shrinking pile, not from anyone's malice. This means you could lose benefits
because they did not know what they were doing or just by mistake. So, it is up to you to
find those nonprofit counselors or the for profit lawyer to help you through the laws, rules,
and whatever local regulations there are. Hopefully, you will not have to read through some
of the official printed regulations like I did. If wasn't an experience paper pusher.. The
average person would have been lost. Intelligence and competence has nothing to do with.
Hell, neither does logic, I think.
In my case, when I inherited a retirement account, SSDI was not affected, because of how
the original account was set up. However, SSDI is different from SSI although both have
interesting and Byzantine requirements. I guess to make sure we are all "deserving" of any
help.
So don't ask anonymous bozos like me on the internet and find those local counselors. If
it is nonprofit, they will probably do it completely free. If needed, many lawyers, including
tax lawyers, and CPAs will offer discounted help or will know where you can go.
What is the floor on wages?
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Set disposable income to zero.
Minimum wages = taxes + the cost of living
So, as we increase housing costs, we drive up wages.
The neoliberal solution.
Try and paper over the cracks with Payday loans.
This what we call a short term solution.
Someone has been tinkering with the economics and that's why we can't see the problem.
The early neoclassical economists hid the problems of rentier activity in the economy by
removing the difference between "earned" and "unearned" income and they conflated "land" with
"capital".
They took the focus off the cost of living that had been so important to the Classical
Economists as this is where rentier activity in the economy shows up.
It's so well hidden no one even knows it's there and everyone trips up over the cost of
living, even the Chinese.
Angus Deaton rediscovers the wheel that was lost by the early neoclassical economists. "Income inequality is not killing capitalism in the United States, but rent-seekers like
the banking and the health-care sectors just might" Angus Deaton, Nobel prize winner.
Employees get their money from wages and the employers pay the cost of living through wages,
reducing profit.
This raises the costs of doing anything in the US, and drives off-shoring.
The Chinese learn the hard way.
Davos 2019 – The Chinese have now realised high housing costs eat into consumer
spending and they wanted to increase internal consumption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNBcIFu-_V0
They let real estate rip and have now realised why that wasn't a good idea.
The equation makes it so easy.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
The cost of living term goes up with increased housing costs.
The disposable income term goes down.
They didn't have the equation, they used neoclassical economics.
The Chinese had to learn the hard way and it took years, but they got there in the end.
They have let the cost of living rise and they want to increase internal consumption.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
It's a double whammy on wages.
China isn't as competitive as it used to be.
China has become more expensive and developed Eastern economies are off-shoring to places
like Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
Job gains in May were led by leisure and hospitality, with the sector adding 292,000 jobs.
Payrolls grew by
559,000 last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, up from a revised 278,000 in
April, which marked a sharp drop from March's figure.
The labor recovery has slowed from earlier in the year -- in March, the economy added
785,000 jobs
... The labor-force participation rate, the share of adults working or looking for work,
edged slightly lower in May to 61.6%, down from 63.3% in February 2020.
Republicans, always eager to snatch the bread from the mouths of the poor, are blaming
unemployment benefits for the reluctance of workers to return to jobs. In some red states,
they already are snatching it.
But more men are returning to work than are women. Doesn't that prove that unemployment
benefits are not holding back former workers?
I'll bet more women will return to work in September, after schools start up in-person
classes.
William Lamb
Republican turn a blind on helping people, except themselves. They would rather have one
being a slave and get pay less then nothing with little perks in making less then high
quality item that will still have defects, even if we pride our workmanship that is suppose
to equal to none. It would like being in 1950s, when there was not much world competition,
when world economy was still recovering from WW2.
I guessed Republican want American to continue working by low paying wages so they can
enrich themselves, and show that America can still produce things with slave wages.
johm moore
Most of the jobs are insufficient to support a reasonable quality of life. A job today is
about like a half a job pre-NAFTA and the job export process in terms of the quality of life
that it supports.
Bryson Marsh
If UI was holding back employment, then why are we adding so many low wage jobs? The missing
jobs are in *middle income* sectors.
David Chait
I wouldn't call people returning to work "new" jobs, that just seems disingenuous.
rich ullsmith
Asset prices rise when the jobs report is lukewarm. Thank you, Federal Reserve. May I have
another.
Sam Trotter
It should be made mandatory to publish the offered wage/rate. I see so many fake jobs posted
on LinkedIn with no description of bill rate for contract positions or Base+Bonus for
Full-Time roles. Too many mass scam messages.
The percentage of people quitting their jobs, meanwhile, also rose to a record 2.8% among
private-sector workers. That's a full percentage point higher than a year ago, when the
so-called quits rate fell to a seven-year low.
...A recent study by Bank of America, for example, found that job switchers earned an extra
13% in wages from their new positions. That's a big chunk of money.
...Normally people who quit their jobs are ineligible for unemployment benefits, but they
can get an exemption in many states for health, safety or child-care reasons.
About half of the states, all led by Republican governors, plan to stop giving out the
federal benefit by early July to push people back into the labor force. Economists will be
watching closely to see how many people go back to work.
Just to stay at the oil field – Meth addiction and overtime work goes hand in
hand.
Meth and it's derivates was the drug of the 50s in Germany during rebuilding from the war
(Pervitin, Weckamin). They have been legal until the 70s.
It's the easy way first – just take it and you can work longer. Want to drive a truck
16 hours? Just throw a few Pervitins. Side effects and addiction come later. And the unclean
stuff from the black market kills people faster.
"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in
the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were
engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery
landscape...
In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program
funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and
consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot
servers grows around the country.
And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped
on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and
several others, in the next couple of weeks...
"Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way
they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing
the space with the delivery bots,"
said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...
Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are
placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a
computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and
in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot
will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to
allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in
30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at
Berkeley, where
at least one of its robots burst into flames . But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In
about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000
deliveries...
"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles
and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ
their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is
making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."
A video
shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog
on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer
having to tip human food-delivery workers.
Customers wouldn't have to train the algorithm on their own boxes because the robot was made
to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For example, it can recognize both
shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
... Stretch is part of a growing market of warehouse robots made by companies such as 6
River Systems Inc., owned by e-commerce technology company Shopify Inc., Locus Robotics Corp. and Fetch
Robotics Inc. "We're anticipating exponential growth (in the market) over the next five years,"
said Dwight Klappich, a supply chain research vice president and fellow at tech research firm
Gartner Inc.
As fast-food restaurants and small businesses struggle to find low-skilled workers to staff
their kitchens and cash registers, America's biggest fast-food franchise is seizing the
opportunity to field test a concept it has been working toward for some time: 10 McDonald's
restaurants in Chicago are testing automated drive-thru ordering using new artificial
intelligence software that converts voice orders for the computer.
McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said Wednesday during an appearance at Alliance Bernstein's
Strategic Decisions conference that the new voice-order technology is about 85% accurate and
can take 80% of drive-thru orders. The company obtained the technology during its 2019
acquisition of Apprente.
The introduction of automation and artificial intelligence into the industry will eventually
result in entire restaurants controlled without humans - that could happen as early as the end
of this decade. As for McDonald's, Kempczinski said the technology will likely take more than
one or two years to implement.
"Now there's a big leap from going to 10 restaurants in Chicago to 14,000 restaurants
across the US, with an infinite number of promo permutations, menu permutations, dialect
permutations, weather -- and on and on and on, " he said.
McDonald's is also exploring automation of its kitchens, but that technology likely won't be
ready for another five years or so - even though it's capable of being introduced soooner.
McDonald's has also been looking into automating more of the kitchen, such as its fryers
and grills, Kempczinski said. He added, however, that that technology likely won't roll out
within the next five years, even though it's possible now.
"The level of investment that would be required, the cost of investment, we're nowhere
near to what the breakeven would need to be from the labor cost standpoint to make that a
good business decision for franchisees to do," Kempczinski said.
And because restaurant technology is moving so fast, Kempczinski said, McDonald's won't
always be able to drive innovation itself or even keep up. The company's current strategy is
to wait until there are opportunities that specifically work for it.
"If we do acquisitions, it will be for a short period of time, bring it in house,
jumpstart it, turbo it and then spin it back out and find a partner that will work and scale
it for us," he said.
On Friday, Americans will receive their first broad-based update on non-farm employment in
the US since last month's report, which missed expectations by a wide margin, sparking
discussion about whether all these "enhanced" monetary benefits from federal stimulus programs
have kept workers from returning to the labor market.
Canadian economist Mario Seccareccia, recipient of this year's John Kenneth Galbraith
Prize in Economics, says it's time to reconsider the idea of full employment. He spoke to Lynn
Parramore of the Institute for New
Economic Thinking about why 2021 offers a rare opportunity to rebalance the economy in
favor of Main Street.
Once upon a time – not so long ago, really – unemployment was not a thing.
In agricultural societies, even capitalistic ones, most people worked on the land. A smaller
number worked in villages and towns – shoemakers and carpenters and so on. Some might go
back and forth from the countryside to the town, depending on the availability of work. If your
work in town building houses dried up, you might come back to the country for the harvest.
Economist Mario Seccareccia, who loves history, notes that before the Industrial Revolution,
it was unthinkable that someone ready and able to work had no job to do.
Questions: If unemployment was once unknown, why do we accept it now?
Where did unemployment come from?
In those pre-Industrial Revolution times, there were paupers, mostly people who could not
work for some reason such as a disability. These were deemed deserving of charity. A small
number of paupers were considered deviants and treated harshly, perhaps made to labor in public
work-houses under vile conditions.
Seccareccia notes that early classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo
recognized that able-bodied people could experience temporary joblessness, but not the
long-term variety. The word "unemployment" only became widely used in the nineteenth century.
As cities grew and manufacturing took off, people living in cities and towns grew apart.
Movement between the two places grew less fluid. The agricultural sector of the economy was
shrinking.
At first, if you lost your factory job, you could still probably pick up something in the
countryside to tide you over. But if you had grown up in the city, as more and more people did,
you might not know how to do rural work. By the late nineteenth century, most city dwellers
could no longer count on falling back on agricultural work during hard times.
Karl Marx noted that England's enclosure movement, which gained momentum as early as the
seventeenth century, had made things hard for agricultural workers as wealthy landowners
grabbed up the rights to common lands that workers had traditionally been allowed to use and
were a vital part of their sustenance. Uprooting peasants from the land and traditional ways of
life, Marx observed, created an "industrial reserve army" – basically a whole bunch of
people wanting to work but unable to find a job during times when industrialists held back
investment or when machines took over certain jobs.
Marx saw that this new kind of unemployment was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Still, a
lot of mainstream bourgeois economists thought that the market would somehow sort things out
and eventually provide enough job openings to prevent mass unemployment.
It didn't turn out that way. Exhibit A: The Great Depression.
Especially after World War I, many later economists, most notably John Maynard Keynes,
warned that high rates of unemployment were getting to be the norm in the twentieth century.
Keynes predicted that a lot of people would go on being jobless unless the government did
something. This was very bad for society.
Keynes emphasized that full employment was never going to just happen on its own. Mainstream
economists thought that if wages fell enough, full employment would eventually prevail. Keynes
disputed that. As wages fell, demand contracted even further, leading to even less business
investment and so forth in a never-ending cycle. No, capitalism, with its business cycles led
to involuntary unemployment, according to Keynes.
Seccareccia observes that economist Michał Kalecki agreed that the government could
make policies to help more people stay employed at a decent wage, but there was just one
problem: wealthy capitalists weren't going to have it. They would oppose state-supported
systems to hold demand up so that fear of unemployment checked workers' demands for better pay
and improved work conditions.
For a while, after World War II, the capitalists were on the defense. The Great Depression
and the Communist threat got western countries spooked enough to go along with Keynes's
argument that governments should try to encourage employment by doing things like creating big
projects for people to work on. Safety nets were created to keep folks from falling into
poverty. The goal of full employment gained popularity and many more workers joined unions.
Capitalists v. Full Employment
Economists have bandied about various definitions of what full employment ought to look
like, explains Seccareccia: "A well-known definition came from William Beveridge, who said that
what you wanted was as many jobs open as people looking for them – or even more jobs
because every person can't take every type of job."
In the mid-twentieth century, with the economy doing well, neoclassical economists like
Milton Friedman started to push back against the idea of full employment. He discouraged the
use of fiscal and monetary policy to support employment, arguing that attempts to push down
unemployment beyond what he insisted was its "natural" rate in the economy would simply lead to
inflation.
In the 1960s, some of what Friedman warned about did actually happen. Employment was low and
prices started to go up mildly, particularly during the Vietnam War era. However, the biggest
boost to the credibility of Milton Friedman came with the OPEC cartel oil-price hikes of the
1970s that pushed the inflation rate to double-digit levels while simultaneously pushing up
unemployment. So, in the '70s, western countries started backing off from encouraging full
employment and maintaining strong safety nets. Proponents of the new neoliberal framework were
in favor of cutting safety nets, shedding government jobs, and leaving it to the market to
decide how much unemployment there would be. They said that it had to be this way to keep
inflation from rising, even though the cause of that high inflation of the '70s had nothing to
do with high public spending and excessive money creation that Friedman and his friends talked
about.
Seccareccia points to proof that the neoclassical logic didn't hold up. In the two decades
before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, the rate of unemployment went down, but inflation
didn't go up. That proved that the neoclassical economists were wrong. But unfortunately,
policymakers didn't really digest this before the Great Recession hit. So, they bungled the
response badly by putting the brake on public spending too quickly because of fears of
excessive budget deficits and potentially higher future inflation that never materialized. They
kept insisting that the employment level would return to that "natural" state Friedman had
talked about if they just left things to the market.
"But it didn't work out that way," says Seccareccia. "Unemployment skyrocketed and it took a
decade to return to pre-crisis levels.
Which brings us to the COVID-19 crisis.
A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Seccareccia says that we have to understand the difference between the current situation and
the Global Financial Crisis. This time, it really is different.
"The earlier crisis started in the financial sector and spread to the real economy," he
explains. "But in 2020, when the Coronavirus emerged, the financial and industrial sectors got
hammered at the same time." This meant that people in both sectors stopped spending. Households
couldn't spend even if they wanted to because traveling, dining out, and other activities were
off-limits. Businesses cut investment as uncertainty loomed and exports declined due to
restrictions at borders. Unless you were Home Depot or an e-commerce company, you couldn't sell
anything.
The COVID-19 crisis also saw workers pulled out of activities thought to be too high risk
for spreading the virus. Across the country, non-essential workers were sent home and told to
stay there. Most, especially in sectors like leisure and hospitality,
can't do their work from home . A lot of these people lost their wages, and because most of
them were low-wage to begin with, they could least afford the hit. Many were only able to
maintain their incomes through government unemployment insurance. Businesses, meanwhile, were
kept afloat with subsidies.
Seccareccia notes that unemployment had an interesting twist in the pandemic because it was
both the problem and the initial cure for the health crisis. Unemployment kept the virus from
circulating. It saved lives.
Fast-forward to late spring, 2021. As America and other western countries seek to put the
pandemic behind them, the economy is opening back up. Employers are wanting to hire, and they
are even competing with each other for workers. But many job seekers are waiting to go back to
work. There are a lot of reasons why: caregiving for kids is still a huge burden, and people
are still worried about getting sick. Transit routes have been disrupted making it harder for
people to get to work. It's also possible that some workers may be resisting jobs on offer
which come with low pay and inadequate benefits.
Employers have started complaining they can't find workers and blame the social safety net
as the problem. Some employers, like those in the hospitality industry, are offering higher pay
to lure workers back.
Just as Kalecki predicted, the wealthy capitalists are getting uneasy. The Chamber of
Commerce, for example, has pushed the U.S. to stop expanded unemployment insurance benefits so
that people will be forced to return to low-wage jobs. Some Republican-dominated states have
jumped on board with this idea. Economist Larry Summers, for his part, is warning about
inflation and telling the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates so that wages don't go up. He
complains that when he walks outside,
all he sees are people eager to fill job vacancies . It's unclear where he was living when
he said that, or which people he is talking about.
Others argue that expanded unemployment insurance isn't the problem, but the crappy jobs on
offer. Seccareccia believes that it's a good thing if employers raise their wages, even if that
means a little bit of inflation.
Rising inequality, he emphasizes, is unsustainable in a healthy society, and it's about time
ordinary people had a little power to improve their lot. "When employers are worried about
people quitting," he says, "that's when you know you're getting close to full employment. And
in a capitalist society, it's an extremely rare situation when the number of quits begins to
exceed the number of new hires as an economy nears the peak of a business cycle."
In Seccareccia's view, "there's a balancing act between workers 'fearing the sack' and
employers 'fearing the quit.'" He observes that capitalists are very good at making sure that
the former situation is more common, and they've been spectacularly successful in the last 40
years. "This is why you have flat wages and runaway inequality," says Seccareccia.
"Productivity goes up but the workers don't share in it." Profits pile up at the top.
Right now, inflation has been creeping up in some areas. In a couple of sectors, like used
cars, it's rising a lot. The question is, beyond a couple of unique cases, what will happen to
inflation overall? And will be temporary? A lot of economists think that inflation will be
short-lived and will not get very high, so it's nothing to get excited about. Some economists,
like Antonella Palumbo, think the
worry about inflation is overdone . She notes that with unemployment still high and vast
numbers of people who formerly worked but are still out of the labor force, the ranks of the
famous reserve army of unemployed are still huge. As the economy restarts, all kinds of
short-run bottlenecks are cropping up, but that reserve army is not going anywhere fast and
will continue to limit wage increases.
Seccareccia points out that wealthy capitalists trying to stop workers from getting paid
better and conservatives complaining about laziness fail to mention that meanwhile, the stock
market is soaring, making the rich richer. Plus, the housing market is booming because the more
affluent people lucky enough to have kept their jobs over the pandemic now have extra money
saved to spend on big-ticket items. "Is it really fair," he asks, "to complain about a few
hundred dollars a week received by those at the bottom of the economic ladder? Especially how
much the economy is already titled in favor of the haves?"
So, what exactly should the government do about unemployment? Should it do anything at all?
For Seccareccia's part, he thinks this is a perfect time to reconsider the idea of full
employment, which has been so long abandoned by policymakers in favor of some "natural"
unemployment rate. "Policymakers need to understand why COVID may offer a chance not seen since
the end of WWII," he says. "We could actually make the economy fairer for ordinary people."
> So, what exactly should the government do about unemployment?
My favoured solution, and that of other readers of this blog, I suspect, is the Job
Guarantee as promoted by MMT.
Because a well designed job guarantee would provide a floor on wages and benefits, the
private sector would be forced to match it at the very least. But as has been pointed out on
this blog many times before, Kalecki's point that full employment would remove employers
ability to effectively threaten workers with the sack, means that it will be very difficult
politically to see it implemented.
Next week I start my 2nd year of pandemic triggered unemployment after I was terminated
without cause. On June 26th my extended UI benefits will be halted by TX Governor Greg Abbot.
Okay.
In a year of applying for new positions I have managed to get exactly 1 phone interview
after a 40 year career in technology development, ending up with almost 24 years at IBM. In
my last year with them I received both a performance bonus and a salary hike. But I'm now
over 60 and have been unemployed longer than 3 months so that's probably fairly typical
experience. Okay.
The path to full employment is probably going to require the creation of new opportunities
in a still contracting economic system. It's not impossible if you're focused on the goal.
Here's my shortlist of policy initiatives that could dramatically and quickly grow the number
of available jobs, particularly for the under employed younger people who are paying off
student loans.
Dramatically increase social security and medicare eligibility/benefits to convince older
workers to leave the workforce.
Expand paid family leave and vacation policies to align with other industrialized nations in
order to require businesses to hire to cover needed absences.
Drop the number of hours that define full time work to allow more workers to get full
benefits.
Yeah, I'd like to be considered for another good paying job in a still viable industry. I
spent decades developing skills that are still relevant and valuable. But I'm old and I'm
expensive because I have expectations based on my own employment history that 40 years of
neoliberal policies have rendered obsolete. Okay.
I'm close enough to retirement and lucky enough in my ability to save and plan that this
won't wreck us. I try to imagine my pandemic inspired involuntary retirement as an
opportunity to become a labor rights activist. It helps.
My situation is virtually the same, although in academia as research scientist at major US
university, with last 6 years as invited scientist at German research institute. Returned to
US to the nightmare of Trump at 63, but fully (and naively) intending to continue working.
I've lost count of how many job applications I've tendered, with only one interview in two
years, then COVID. Now resigned to the fact that work for me from here on out will be
different. I continue to write papers with colleagues at university to maintain a reputation
in my field. Now recognize that people take one look at my CV, and think: "Old! Expensive!"
-- but the truth is I would be willing to work for little just to stay active in a field
applying expertise I've spent decades acquiring. I've since met many, many seniors in the
same boat: trained professionals with lots of experience who still want to work (and, in my
case, need at least some income).
But at least I had a career. I can't imagine the hopelessness of people 35-40 years my
junior, with huge debt from college, grad school, and unable to find a decent job.
Something must change. The situation as it exists is unsustainable. One bright light seems
to be increasing recognition of the way the economy actually functions, the role of public
spending, and the real limits to growth, prosperity.
Appreciate your commiseration Rolf. I expect there is an army of people like us who are in
this situation or about to be.
Fwiw (maybe not much), I'm actively trying to get hired full time at the food coop near my
house. The workers there are represented by a union and get full insurance benefits including
dental with a 40 hour work week. The Vt minimum wage of $11.75/hr doesn't matter as much as
those insurance benefits do; we're still in that 5 year gap between age 60 and age 65 where
you are on your own if you need healthcare.
And I've pretty much decided to laugh off Beaux Jivin's campaign promise to drop the
medicare eligibility age to 60 etc. It's abandoned along with many other campaign promises.
Okay.
Thanks, A/S, for your kind words. Yes, benefits are key. I really am increasingly worried
that Biden, and the Democratic Party in general, don't seem the grasp the fact that the GOP
is absolutely committed to recovering control of Congress and the White House by *any* means
necessary. Biden in particular seems to entertain the notion that he can bring the right wing
to his way of thinking by conciliation, negotiation, compromise, and good performance. But
the GOP is not interested in Dem's performance or compromise -- McConnell has made this quite
clear. So Dems have an opportunity to make significant history, a true course correction, but
only this once. To pursue "bipartisanship" with a party that has no interest in compromise is
hugely naïve -- I can't imagine Biden is that foolish, except that he did begin his
campaign with the promise that "nothing would fundamentally change".
The food coop gig sounds like a good, sound shot -- all the best to you.
Fellow army member, age 61. Lucky to have health care via spouse but definitely not enough
wealth to retire. Two interviews in last two years, both in retrospect clearly designed to
fill out an interview field when preferred (much younger) hire had already been identified.
The canard about atrophied skills might apply in the occasional instance but IMO is just more
bullsh1t in defense of existing social order.
Dem obliviousness to the reality all around us is truly horrifying. I used to argue that
the big sort would result in fenced "progressive" enclaves in which all parties – those
inside and those outside – would be thrilled to not have to interact with each other.
But it's clear to me now that progressives don't need physical separation to avoid seeing
what they don't want to; they are completely able to not see the world right in front of
them.
I guess I should include this post script regarding my IBM termination:
After I'd been unemployed for about 90 days I was contacted by a recruiter working on
behalf of IBM and my former managers. They were looking for people with exactly my skills and
experience to come back to work at IBM as temporary contractors. I agreed to a short phone
interview to learn more about the opportunity.
Once the recruiter verified my experience and contacts at IBM, I managed to confirm that
they expected to bring me back on at about 80% of my former salary. With no benefits and zero
job security. I laughed out loud at this acknowledgment of their duplicity but agreed to let
myself be considered and provided a resume. Never heard back which is probably okay.
Amateur Socialist, Rolf and Left in Wisconsin -- I take my hat off to all of you. Work
left both my partner and me a number of years ago, and we quickly learned that we had aged
out of the market and were useless to society as we thought of it. Fortunately, we relatively
quickly became eligible for Medicare, which even in its steadily diminishing state was (and
is) a significant help.
Good luck to all of you, and A/S, please let us know the outcome of your pursuit of the
job with benefits at your local Food Co-op.
I think your experience demonstrates the problem with defining full Employment as, "anyone
who wants a job has one". Using this definition, the simple way to get the economy to FE then
is to just make all the jobs so terrible and low paying that no one wants them. You dont need
a job, and you dont want just any old crappy job. You want one similiar to your old one, If
that doesnt exist anymore, one would reasonably say you dont want a job, since what you want
doesn't exist, hence we're at full employment
All of this is to say, we shouldnt necessarily just encourage the government to get us to
FE. Capitalists by themselves are quite capable of getting us there, as I'd argue they did in
the 19th century. Its government interventions like minimum wage and basic safety protocols
that keep us from reaching FE since that's what makes people actually want a job
it was unthinkable that someone ready and able to work had no job to do.
I think there is a conflation of the language terms bandied
about–work-v-jobs-v-employment are all couched in the concept of a Consumption Based
Economy. I am tired of this.
weeding the garden is work–unless I'm paying you then it becomes a job. In both
instances, however, you are employed in the endeavor. This is grooming behavior using
language, imo, and needs to stop.
I think this muddle is a componant of the current 'Jobs Discussion".
Covid has rattled generations coming out of Displacements following the very unequal GFC,
and an undefined(maybe) examination of Meaning and Place within the current state of the
world and the Economy that has been chosen to fulfill the needs of that Economy (Societal and
Personal). More Intuitive than cognitive to many.
Selling Plastic bric-a-brac for the Man, to make the rent in an endless cycle, may have
lost its cache' subconsciously, to the 'common man' in this time of apparent Climate Crises
et al.
There is still plenty to do, and little time for Idleness( itself a "reward' promoted as a
'something' by the Consumptive Economy).
"Proponents of the new neoliberal framework were in favor of cutting safety nets, shedding
government jobs, and leaving it to the market to decide how much unemployment there would be.
They said that it had to be this way to keep inflation from rising,"
"The market" – that's the first con people have to get over. There is.no "the
market" like there it is something like nature.
It's system of intentional, changeable human decisions backed by beliefs and emotions of all
kinds now matter how many theories or quantifications occur. And a corporate beuracracy is
still a beuracracy.
And actually this neoliberal thinking of letting some imaginary entity "the market"
"decide" (we should be lughing at this silliness!) to keep people unemployed to avoid
"inflation" only makes sense if it actually meant to signify "avoid inflation of the
population."
The modern police force is a consequence of idle and unemployed city dwellers. Idled
workers don't just sit down and die from malnutrition. Instead, they roam around looking for
food, or opportunities that would lead to procuring food. Hungry, impoverished mobs are never
a good idea: Ask Czar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, or the French aristocrats of the 1780's
(rather, interrogate their ghosts) how idle, hungry crowds furthered their reigns. For all
that, look to the unrest of the 1930's in the US.
Given this reality–that unemployed and starving people refuse to sit down and die
peacefully–what will happen as automation starts to rob routine jobs? Already we are
seeing robots prowling the Walmart aisles, driverless vehicles delivering pizzas, and
self-checkout lines in big box stores. We who work are losing the war on unemployment, which
leads to a question: Who is the winner?
Almost as an afterthought, one wonders how much in contributions to Social Security and
Medicare have been lost because of automation. Robots don't pay taxes.
After the achievement of the 40-hour workweek, paid vacations, and other labor
concessions, many influential figures believed that egalitarian access to leisure would
only increase in the 20th century. Among them was economist John Maynard Keynes, who
forecast in 1930 that labor-saving technologies might lead to a 15-hour workweek when his
grandchildren came of age. Indeed, he titles his essay, "Economic Possibility for our
Grandchildren."
The benefits of labour-saving technologies have mostly been taken as money instead of time
and by doing so the capitalist class kept power thereby leading to them getting the
lions-share of the benefits of the labour-saving techologies.
The political class could, and still can, side with people and decide that labour-saving
technologies is to be taken out as reduced amount of hours spent working for someone else. As
is the politcal class have bought the 'lump of labour'-fallacy-fallcy hook, line and sinker
so what we see is increased pension-age etc
I tried out retirement for a few months. I'm 62 and got SS and a very small pension. It's
not enough so I went back – temping. The jobs I can get as a paralegal/admin person
don't pay a lot but there seem to be quite a few of them based on companies that are merging
or have merged and have a huge mess to clean up. So they hire you for a few months to slog
through chaos and fix it. Then on to the next one. I'll keep doing this until I can move to a
cheaper part of the U.S. Remote helps in that if I don't have a Zoom interview they can't
tell how old I am. I feel for everyone who can't even get tedious work. If my SS was higher I
would stop working. If my salary had matched that of the male co-workers that had the exact
same job as me, my pension would be higher. Retiring in America for many people is part
nomadic as you have to move out of your area to survive after you leave your regular job, or
it gets rid of you and the other part is being extremely frugal. Woohoo what a life after
over 40 years of helping companies make money.
Yes a totally true statement. For it to be higher I would have had to wait until almost 67
to take it. It will go up a tad from my additional employment – maybe. Anyway it's a
mostly a set amount. I make as a temp in 2 weeks (take home) what I get in SS once per month.
If I make over about $19k annually while taking the SS, the US gov will begin to reduce the
SS payment.
Social Security takes the highest 40 quarters (10 years) of your earnings to calculate
your benefit. If your current work results in higher numbers than are being used currently,
the higher numbers will be used and your benefit will increase.
I tried to reply to your question – yes it is a true statement. What I wrote
additionally may have been moderated out for some reason so I won't repeat it. It only
mentioned dollar amounts and the US gov so maybe that was bad – not sure!
Victoria H
and I thank you for that.
But I think you, and I will 'work' until we die–
What does work mean?
noun. exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil. productive
or operative activity. employment, as in some form of industry, especially as a means of
earning one's livelihood: to look for work. the result of exertion, labor, or activity; a
deed or performance.
Work | Definition of Work at Dictionary.comhttps://www.dictionary.com › browse
› work
I am personally familiar with what you are going through and My wife is there right
now.
I waited till full retirement at 66 to collect–not being able to leave 2k on the
table(diff btwn 62 and 66 for me). I cannot describe the amount of effort and gyration I
needed to extend to achieve that– which may explain why I am the only one in my
'Friend Circle' to actually accomplish it.
Trigger Warning
I thought the coup de grace was when I had to sign up for–and Pay For, with cash,
Quarterly–Medicare without a SS check to have it automatically deducted from. Because
of my birthday I needed to pony up about 5 months worth of premiums(but i had 3 months to
save up for the next Q pymt). I doubt you've ever been curbed at the end of a physical
altercation, but that is what it felt like to me. Best think about all that.
Good news–do your own taxes for your enlightenment and you will see that the SS Income
Worksheet provides a path to structuring your Income to counter-balance additional
Income.
Discalimer–I am in no way an Acc'tant or Tax Man or even giving Advice. I am a
Carpenter–but Written Instructions are Written Instructions and Numbers are Numbers and
I made a paid living following both–so it's understandable enough to give you some
options to ponder.
And to Rolf/AmSoc and all the others -- IMNSHO(the first ever time I have used this
phrase) the most dispiriting element about 'Retirement' in America is the Stranding of So
Many Valuable Assets embodied in the Retired when the world desperatly needs "All Hands On
Deck" to resist the Man Made Extinction looming.
the most dispiriting element about 'Retirement' in America is the Stranding of So Many
Valuable Assets embodied in the Retired when the world desperately needs "All Hands On
Deck" to resist the Man Made Extinction looming.
These are true words, Rod. I think catastrophic changes (no hyperbole) lie ahead, for
which there is little precedent. Many make absurdly blithe assumptions, thinking they
won't be affected, or that wealth will insulate them. This is arrogant folly, and we will
need everyone to row in the same direction.
The man who owns the Heating and Air Conditioning company I have been using for the last
decade lives in the neighborhood and is 88 years old. After his brother had health problems,
and the young nephew he employed left for greener pastures,he now does pretty much all the
work himself, and let me tell you, he knows his stuff. I know I should have a back-up in
mind, just in case, but so far, haven't found anyone else I can trust.
Well said. I took retirement at 62 for several reasons,number 1 being i didn't believe it
would be around long enough to pay me back.
"All hands on deck" is imo exactly what is needed,but the mostly planned divisiveness
(fake right vs fake left aka RepubliCons vs Dumbocrats) will help ensure that never occurs,to
someone's benefit.
Just think how many people would quit working, or enter self-employment, if they weren't
dependent on employer providedmedical insurance. I don't know the answer/estimate; it would
have to be a large number, enough to significantly raise wages across the board.
Retiring in America for many people is part nomadic
This observation made me remember a critical scene from the excellent oscar winner last
year, Nomadland . Frances McDormand's character meets a friend who explains why she
took to the road: "Five hundred forty dollars a month from Social Security. After working non
stop for over 40 years. How am I supposed to live on that".
I'm paraphrasing possibly badly from memory; it's a very short scene that isn't really
pursued farther in the script. But I do remember thinking "Aha! This is the root cause of all
this misery and despair "
We moved to southern Vermont from Texas just prior to the pandemic believing we had
relocated to a cheaper part of the US as you also mentioned. But Vermont's strong public
health track record during the pandemic has unleashed a huge real estate boom here so who
knows We may end up priced out of Vermont eventually too.
Real estate is still relatively cheap in Texas (at least around Houston), with the caveat
that Republicans don't always keep the power on or the water pressure up in the middle of
winter.
Unfortunately our place was in the Austin exurb of Bastrop. Which is now part of the
Austin insane real estate boom. And yes Houston can be cheap but only if you don't mind
living near a refinery. Or in the path of many future hurricanes. Hard pass.
I keep seeing references to "flat wages." While it's technically true, I suspect it's
enormously deceptive.
Yes, we have flat wages. But the cost of necessities that add little or no value to
people's lives but which they're FORCED to pay for have shot up far, far beyond the pace of
inflation. Think medical care, housing and education, to name just three, all of which are
somehow ignored or slighted in official inflation stats.
Right now the best transition is for the government to regulate capitalism in the
direction the future (sustainability) dictates. The problem with regulating capitalism is
that most capitalists think it is already too regulated; taxes are too high, etc. They are on
the edge of revolution themselves. And regulated capitalism is almost an oxymoron to most
Americans. It's just business as usual to a European because they have better social spending
and blablablah. The statistic I remember is that the EU spends about 45% of its revenue on
social stuff; the US spends a little less than 35%. The problem, as I see it, is this: If we
in the US do not achieve adequate social spending we create the perfect breeding ground for
exploitation of the environment. People will be desperate for a job – any job. Which
will not only cause worse CO2 problems, it will poison off, or starve off, many many species
now living on the edge. We will further pollute the oceans and waterways. And we will not
only stick with our sick and poisonous agricultural practices, we will exponentiate them
– precluding all efforts to fix these unsustainable things. Capitalism as we have known
it must change. So, even the great idea of capitalism must adapt to reality. Somebody please
tell Larry. At this point "inflation" is an absolutely meaningless word. It would be a very
good thing if we followed Eisenhower's advice to LBJ and began to create social structures
that are fair to all of society – to the capitalists whose current mandate of voracious
profiteering is clearly unsustainable, as well as to "labor" – as we see it evolving
– and now, most importantly, we must include the rights of the planet itself and all of
our fellow travelers. We won't last very long if we kill them all off and trash the Earth.
The race to the bottom that all privateering capitalism eventually creates is the most absurd
thing in the history of civilization.
A good start would be breaking up all of the ubiquitous monopolies/monopsonies/cartels,
that have taken over every sector of the economy, from food processing to entertainment to
banking to manufacturing to politics to (ad infinitum/nauseum).
I went to Firehouse Subs yesterday there was a whiteboard inside on a table, facing into
the restaurant, that said they were hiring and offered starting pay of $9.00 for crew members
and $12.00 for shift managers.
Just inside the door, facing out, was a whiteboard offering starting pay of $11.00 for
crew members and $14.00 for shift managers. Seems like they're getting the message.
As an aside, I'd like to give props to Firehouse Subs for using pressed paper clam boxes
and paper bags.
Regarding, "skills shortage," I don't expect t businesses that respect their employees well
will have trouble hiring and retaining staff. The ones in trouble are those who bought into
the "end of employees" propaganda and laid off the people they already had:
The End of Employees Updated
Feb. 2, 2017 12:41 p.m. ET
Never before have American companies tried so hard to employ so few people. The
outsourcing wave that moved apparel-making jobs to China and call-center operations to
India is now just as likely to happen inside companies across the U.S. and in almost every
industry. Hiring an employee is a last resort and "very few jobs make it through that
obstacle course."
Companies with that attitude shouldn't expect easy hiring now. They were bad
companies to work for then, and probably still are. Productive employees now have options on
where to work. Bad employers are at the bottom of the totem pole and will only get the least
desirable people who have nowhere else to go.
Executives at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP have voiced worries that workers who stay remote
could wind up as second-class corporate citizens, falling behind in
promotions and pay , so the company plans to track rates of advancement for office-based and
remote staff in an effort to make sure nobody lags behind.
Ford Motor Co. is
pushing ahead with digital efforts to help bring office workers back to its Dearborn, Mich.,
corporate headquarters, while eyeing a future where many of them continue to work from home,
company officials say.
For now, the auto maker is aiming for a gradual return of some employees to the sprawling
campus beginning in July, with "significantly reduced capacity" to retain social distancing, a
spokeswoman said.
Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for its four-legged robot "dog," this week
announced a new product, a computer-vision enabled mobile warehouse robot named "Stretch."
Developed in response to growing demand for automation in warehouses, the robot can reach up
to 10 feet inside of a truck to pick up and unload boxes up to 50 pounds each. The robot has a
mobile base that can maneuver in any direction and navigate obstacles and ramps, as well as a
robotic arm and a gripper. The company estimates that there are more than 500 billion boxes
annually that get shipped around the world, and many of those are currently moved manually.
"It's a pretty arduous job, so the idea with Stretch is that it does the manual labor part
of that job," said Robert Playter, chief executive of the Waltham, Mass.-based company.
The pandemic has accelerated [automation of] e-commerce and logistics operations even more
over the past year, he said.
... ... ...
... the robot was made to recognize boxes of different sizes, textures and colors. For
example, it can recognize both shrink-wrapped cases and cardboard boxes.
Eventually, Stretch could move through an aisle of a warehouse, picking up different
products and placing them on a pallet, Mr. Playter said.
Looks like this guys somewhat understands the problems with neoliberalism, but still is captured by neoliberal ideology.
Notable quotes:
"... That all seems awfully quaint today. Pensions disappeared for private-sector employees years ago. Most community banks were gobbled up by one of the mega-banks in the 1990s -- today five banks control 50 percent of the commercial banking industry, which itself mushroomed to the point where finance enjoys about 25 percent of all corporate profits. Union membership fell by 50 percent. ..."
"... Ninety-four percent of the jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temp or contractor jobs without benefits; people working multiple gigs to make ends meet is increasingly the norm. Real wages have been flat or even declining. The chances that an American born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down to 50 percent; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent. ..."
"... Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s. The notion they espoused -- that a company exists only to maximize its share price -- became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick. ..."
"... Simultaneously, the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between 1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs. GE, my dad's old company and once a beacon of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007. ..."
The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we arc collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting
pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they're complaining or suffering because
they're losers.
We need to break free of this logic of the marketplace before it's too late.
[Neoliberalism] had decimated the economies and cultures of these regions and were set to do the same to many others.
In response, American lives and families are falling apart. Ram- pant financial stress is the new normal. We are in the third
or fourth inning of the greatest economic shift in the history of mankind, and no one seems to be talking about it or doing anything
in response.
The Great Displacement didn't arrive overnight. It has been building for decades as the economy and labor market changed in response
to improving technology, financialization, changing corporate norms, and globalization. In the 1970s, when my parents worked at GE
and Blue Cross Blue Shield in upstate New York, their companies provided generous pensions and expected them to stay for decades.
Community banks were boring businesses that lent money to local companies for a modest return. Over 20 percent of workers were unionized.
Some economic problems existed -- growth was uneven and infla- tion periodically high. But income inequality was low, jobs provided
benefits, and Main Street businesses were the drivers of the economy. There were only three television networks, and in my house
we watched them on a TV with an antenna that we fiddled with to make the picture clearer.
That all seems awfully quaint today. Pensions disappeared for private-sector employees years ago. Most community banks were
gobbled up by one of the mega-banks in the 1990s -- today five banks control 50 percent of the commercial banking industry, which
itself mushroomed to the point where finance enjoys about 25 percent of all corporate profits. Union membership fell by 50 percent.
Ninety-four percent of the jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temp or contractor jobs without benefits; people working
multiple gigs to make ends meet is increasingly the norm. Real wages have been flat or even declining. The chances that an American
born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down to 50 percent; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent.
Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s
and early 1980s. The notion they espoused -- that a company exists only to maximize its share price -- became gospel in business
schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick.
Hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits, and later activist hedge funds served as prompts to ensure that managers were committed
to profitability at all costs. On the flip side, CF.Os were granted stock options for the first time that wedded their individual
gain to the company's share price. The ratio of CF.O to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016. Benefits were streamlined
and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional.
Simultaneously, the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment
banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization
Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between
1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main
Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs. GE, my dad's old company and once a beacon
of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007.
It's hard to be in the year 2018 and not hear about the endless studies alarming the general public about coming labor automation.
But what Yang provides in this book is two key things: automation has already been ravaging the country which has led to the great
political polarization of today, and second, an actual vision into what happens when people lose jobs, and it definitely is a
lightning strike of "oh crap"
I found this book relatively impressive and frightening. Yang, a former lawyer, entrepreneur, and non-profit leader, writes
showing with inarguable data that when companies automate work and use new software, communities die, drug use increases, suicide
increases, and crime skyrockets. The new jobs created go to big cities, the surviving talent leaves, and the remaining people
lose hope and descend into madness. (as a student of psychology, this is not surprising)
He starts by painting the picture of the average American and how fragile they are economically. He deconstructs the labor
predictions and how technology is going to ravage it. He discusses the future of work. He explains what has happened in technology
and why it's suddenly a huge threat. He shows what this means: economic inequality rises, the people have less power, the voice
of democracy is diminished, no one owns stocks, people get poorer etc. He shows that talent is leaving small towns, money is concentrating
to big cities faster. He shows what happens when those other cities die (bad things), and then how the people react when they
have no income (really bad things). He shows how retraining doesn't work and college is failing us. We don't invest in vocational
skills, and our youth is underemployed pushed into freelance work making minimal pay. He shows how no one trusts the institutions
anymore.
Then he discusses solutions with a focus on Universal Basic Income. I was a skeptic of the idea until I read this book. You
literally walk away with this burning desire to prevent a Mad Max esque civil war, and its hard to argue with him. We don't have
much time and our bloated micromanaged welfare programs cannot sustain.
This is a very short book, almost an essay -- 136 pages. It was published in October 2004, four years before financial crisis of
2008, which put the first nail in the coffin of neoliberalism. It addresses the cultural politics of neo-liberalism ("the
Great Deception")
Notable quotes:
"... By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics. ..."
"... Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have functioned ..."
"... The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND Money--summarize her argument. ..."
"... Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination, privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes. ..."
"... "There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture wars are provisional--and fading...." ..."
"... For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. ..."
By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and
particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics.
The Twilight of Equality? searches out these links through an analysis of the politics of the 1990s, the decade when
neoliberalism-free market economics-became gospel.
After a brilliant historical examination of how racial and gender inequities were woven into the very theoretical underpinnings
of the neoliberal model of the state, Duggan shows how these inequities play out today. In a series of political case studies,
Duggan reveals how neoliberal goals have been pursued, demonstrating that progressive arguments that separate identity politics and
economic policy, cultural politics and affairs of state, can only fail.
Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have
functioned but, more importantly, it shows a way to revitalize and unify progressive politics in the U.S. today.
Mona Cohen 5.0 out of 5 stars A Critique of Neoliberalism and the Divided Resistance to It July 3, 2006
Lisa Duggan is intensely interested in American politics, and has found political life in the United States to have been "such
a wild ride, offering moments of of dizzying hope along with long stretches of political depression." She is grateful for "many
ideas about political depression, and how to survive it," and she has written a excellent short book that helps make sense of
many widely divergent political trends.
Her book is well-summarized by its concluding paragraph, which I am breaking up into additional paragraphs for greater
clarity:
"Now at this moment of danger and opportunity, the progressive left is mobilizing against neoliberalism and possible new or
continuing wars.
"These mobilizations might become sites for factional struggles over the disciplining of troops, in the name of unity at a
time of crisis and necessity. But such efforts will fail; the troops will not be disciplined, and the disciplinarians will be
left to their bitterness.
"Or, we might find ways of think, speaking, writing and acting that are engaged and curious about "other people's" struggles
for social justice, that are respectfully affiliative and dialogic rather than pedagogical, that that look for the hopeful spots
to expand upon, and that revel in the pleasure of political life.
"For it is pleasure AND collective caretaking, love AND the egalitarian circulation of money--allied to clear and hard-headed
political analysis offered generously--that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and
create...something worth living for."
The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND
Money--summarize her argument.
She expected upon her high school graduation in 1972, she writes, that "active and expanding social movements seemed capable
of ameliorating conditions of injustice and inequality, poverty, war and imperialism....I had no idea I was not perched at a
great beginning, but rather at a denouement, as the possibilities for progressive social change encountered daunting historical
setbacks beginning in 1972...."
Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination,
privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities
while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade.
Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to
downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the
upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes.
Her belief is that all groups threatened by the neoliberal paradigm should unite against it, but such unity is threatened by
endless differences of perspectives. By minutely analyzing many of the differences, and expanding understanding of diverse
perspectives, she tries to remove them as obstacles towards people and organizations working together to achieve both unique and
common aims.
This is good book for those interested in the history and current significance of numerous progressive ideological arguments.
It is a good book for organizers of umbrella organizations and elected officials who work with diverse social movements. By
articulating points of difference, the author depersonalizes them and aids in overcoming them.
Those who are interested in electoral strategies, however, will be disappointed. The interrelationship between neoliberalism
as a governing ideology and neoliberalism as a political strategy is not discussed here. It is my view that greater and more
focused and inclusive political organizing has the potential to win over a good number of the those who see support of
neoliberalism's policy initiatives as a base-broadening tactic more than as a sacred cause.
"There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she
writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture
wars are provisional--and fading...."
Reading this book adds to one's understanding of labels, and political and intellectual distinctions. It has too much jargon
for my taste, but not so much as to be impenetrable. It is an excellent summarization and synthesis of the goals, ideologies, and
histories of numerous social movements, both famous and obscure.
Duggan
articulately connects social and economic issues to each other, arguing that neoliberal
politics have divided the two when in actuality, they cannot be separated from one another.
In the introduction, Duggan argues that politics have become neoliberal - while politics
operate under the guise of promoting social change or social stability, in reality, she argues,
politicians have failed to make the connection between economic and social/cultural issues. She
uses historical background to prove the claim that economic and social issues can be separated
from each other is false.
For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that
economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has
only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues.
After the introduction, Duggan focuses on a specific topic in each chapter: downsizing
democracy, the incredible shrinking public, equality, and love and money. In the first chapter
(downsizing democracy), she argues that through violent imperial assertion in the Middle East,
budget cuts in social services, and disillusionments in political divides, "capitalists could
actually bring down capitalism" (p. 2).
Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that
proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. Duggan provides historical background
that help the reader connect early nineteenth century U.S. legislation (regarding voting rights
and slavery) to perpetuated institutional prejudices.
Lifetime real earnings of the median male worker declined by 10% from those who entered the
US labor market in 1967 to those in 1983, or roughly a loss of $136,000.
The study shows the United States shows a "wage stagnation of average earnings and a rise in
income inequality since the 1970s." The charts are based on US Social Security Administration
(SSA) records over 57 years.
The charts are more than a bit confusing unless one carefully dives into the details.
The lead chart is titled " Median Lifetime Earnings " but shows instead annualized real
(inflation adjusted) annual wages, not lifetime or real lifetime earnings.
Lifetime
Definition
Lifetime earnings means earnings between the age of 25 and 55 inclusive.
Annualized lifetime earnings as depicted in the chart is the sum of real annual labor
earnings from ages 25 to 55, divided by 31.
When nominal earnings are deflated by the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator,
the annualized value of median lifetime wage/salary earnings for male workers declined by
$4,400 per year from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort, or $136,400 over the 31-year working
period.
The lifetime earnings of the median male worker declined by 10 percent from the 1967 cohort
to the 1983 cohort. Further, more than three-quarters of the distribution of men experienced no
rise in their lifetime earnings across these cohorts.
Cohort Definition
As used in the article, cohort means all of those who turned 25, 35. 45, etc. in a
particular year.
Median initial earnings fell from $33,300 for the 1967 cohort to $29,000 for the 1983
cohort (PCE adjusted in 2013 dollars).
The analogous figures at age 55 were $55,900 for the former cohort and $54,100 for the
latter, a decline of $1,800, showing no sign of catch-up over the life cycle.
Median initial earnings for men was only $24,400 in 2011, virtually the same level as in
1957.
Cohorts of female workers have seen robust and steady gains, on the order of 22% to 33%
for the median female worker. However, because these gains started from a very low level of
median lifetime earnings for the 1957 cohort, they were not large enough at the aggregate
level to offset the losses by men.
Using the CPI rather than the PCE to convert nominal earnings to 2013 dollars lowers
lifetime earnings growth for both men and women.
Inflation Adjustments
The two most commonly used price indexes are the personal consumption expenditure (PCE)
deflator from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the consumer price index (CPI) from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS). The (older) CPI and the (newer) PCE differ in several
ways that are by now well understood.
The PCE is generally accepted to be the superior index for measuring the overall price
level and its evolution over the business cycle. It is thus the standard choice in aggregate
(macro) economic analyses. However, for more micro work, such as the analyses in this paper,
the CPI has some advantages. In particular, the CPI aims to capture the price level faced by
the typical household for its out-of-pocket expenses and is thus based on a detailed survey
of U.S. household expenditures, whereas the PCE is based on business surveys and also
includes purchases made by others on behalf of households. Consequently, relative to the PCE,
the CPI places a lower weight on health care prices (since a large fraction of total
expenditures is paid by Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies) and a much higher weight
on housing and transportation.
In our empirical analysis, we choose the PCE as our baseline measure for deflating nominal
earnings because it implies a lower cumulative inflation over this period than the CPI . We
report all values in 2013 dollars.
Lifetime Earnings for Men and Women
From the 1957 to the 1983 cohort, annualized mean lifetime earnings for men rose by
around $10,000, from $42,200 to $52,200. This rise corresponds to a cumulative increase of
23.7%, or an average increase of 0.82% between two consecutive cohorts.
However, the bulk of these gains -- 21.9% of the total 23.7% -- accrued to only the
first 10 or so cohorts. From the 1967 to the 1983 cohort, mean lifetime earnings increased
by only 1.5% cumulatively.
Median lifetime earnings for men has barely changed from the 1957 cohort to the 1983
cohort, increasing by only about $250 -- or less than 1%.
Across almost the entire distribution of males, there have been either trivial, or even
negative, gains in lifetime earnings.
Women, on the other hand, have seen increases in lifetime earnings throughout the entire
distribution. Median lifetime earnings increased nearly monotonically from $14,100 for the
1957 cohort to $22,300 for the 1983 cohort.
This steady increase in lifetime earnings for women has been broad-based, with all parts
of the distribution experiencing consistent lifetime earnings growth across cohorts.
Median lifetime earnings for women grew at an average rate of 1.8% per cohort for the 27
cohorts from 1957 to 1983, with almost the exact same annualized growth rates for the 10
cohorts from 1957 to 1967 and the 16 cohorts from 1967 to 1983.
Looking at the population as a whole, we find that the trends for men and women combine
in sometimes offsetting ways.
Closing the Gender Gap
The chart looks severely dated but cohort means the year in which someone turned 25.
Figure 3 plots the ratio of the mean lifetime earnings of females to that of males
In 1960, median inflation adjusted wages for women aged 25 were less than 40% of males. But
fewer women than men were working and fewer women than men were college educated.
After 1965, the gap started to close quickly (showing an almost linear trend), and by the
1983 cohort (working women who turned 25 in 1983), the lifetime earnings of women reached more
than 60% of their male counterparts.
To the extent real median wages have risen in aggregate, it is because of the headway made
by women relative to men.
Decline of Men vs Women
The mean lifetime income for men rose until 1972. The median topped out a bit earlier in
1967 albeit by an arguably meaningless 0.13 percentage points.
Those who turned 25 in 1983 were 55 in 2014. Thus the study misses the last 7
years.
Even Worse Than It Looks
The charts and findings are even worse than they look.
The PCE measure of inflation is understated relative to the CPI.
Both are severely understated since 1999 relative to housing. Housing-adjusted real wages
have been hammered in aggregate, and even more so for men.
The Fed with tremendous help from Congress seeks to destroy the dollar. They have succeeded.
Yet the Fed rails against income inequality.
The Fed, Congress, and Progressive need to look in the mirror to see who is to blame for
falling real wages.
" It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100
bill, but other countries had to pony up $100 of actual goods in order to obtain one ,"
accurately quipped American economist Barry Eichengreen .
In addition to trade distortions inaccurately blamed on NAFTA, real wages is another data
series that goes back to Nixon closing the gold window in 1971.
For April 2021 the official Current Unadjusted U-6 unemployment rate was 9.9% down from 10.9%
in March, and 11.6% in February, January was 12.0%. It was also 11.6% October "" December 2020.
But It was 18.3% in June, 20.7% in May, and 22.4% in April. It is still well above the 8.9% of
March 2020 when unemployment rates started jumping drastically due to massive shutdowns due to
the Coronavirus.
Initial Jobless Claims tumbled (positively) to their lowest since the pandemic lockdowns
began, adding just 406k Americans last week (well below the 425k expected). This is still
double the pre-pandemic norms
y_arrow 1
Truthtellers 11 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Companies laid off an additional 400K people last week and they actually think we are
dumb enough to believe there is a labor shortage? That line of crap is obviously just a
ploy to get employee's to accept lower salaries.
I'll believe there is a labor shortage after 16 million jobs have been added and the
weekly initial claims number is zero.
Until then, I guess if you have a "labor shortage" you better get that pay up.
AJAX-2 13 hours ago (Edited)
Another 400K+ applying for 1st time unemployment benefits and yet they piss on my leg,
tell me it's raining, while proclaiming there is a labor shortage. Bu!!****.
PerilouseTimes 9 hours ago
Close to a million people a week were signing up for unemployment for a year and
unemployment has been extended. Wouldn't that mean at least 40 million Americans are on
unemployment not to mention all the people on welfare and disability? I think the number is
closer to 100 million Americans on the government dole and that doesn't count all the
worthless government jobs out there.
Normal 12 hours ago remove link
I'm on unemployment except California seems to have quit paying people on unemployment.
I tried every-which-way to contact them but there is no way in hell to get through to a
live person. I went and typed in how to speak with a real person at the EDD, and hundreds
of people have posted that they haven't been paid in 12 weeks. I spoke with their Cal-Jobs
representative and she said that many people haven't been paid since March of last year. I
think they are forcing the so-called unemployed to their Cal-Jobs site by not paying
them.
ay_arrow
NEOSERF 13 hours ago
Worst month during the GFC appears to be about 650K...we are only 50% below that....with
21 states preparing to end the extension, things will be fantastic in these numbers shortly
if not the real world...waiting for all the cold/flu season coughing and cold weather in
November...
History repeats and the repetition is coming with some minor variations.
Notable quotes:
"... "Corporate bond rates have been rising steadily since May. Yellen is not doing what Greenspan did in 2004." ..."
"... There isn't much of a difference between signaling tighter money to a market that is skeptical of Fed forecasts and actually tightening. ..."
"... While at 5.0 percent, the unemployment rate is not extraordinarily high, most other measures of the labor market are near recession levels. The percentage of the workforce that is involuntarily working part-time is near the highs reached following the 2001 recession. The average and median duration of unemployment spells are also near recession highs. And the percentage of workers who feel confident enough to quit their jobs without another job lined up remains near the low points reached in 2002. ..."
"... While wage growth has edged up somewhat in recent months by some measures, it is still well below a rate that is consistent with the Fed's inflation target. Hourly wages have risen at a 2.7 percent rate over the last year. If there is just 1.5 percent productivity growth, this would be consistent with a rate of inflation of 1.2 percent. ..."
"... One positive point in today's action is the Fed's commitment in its statement to allow future rate hikes to be guided by the data, rather than locking in a path towards "normalization" as was effectively done in 2004. ..."
Washington, D.C.- Dean Baker, economist and a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) issued the
following statement in response to the Federal Reserve's decision regarding interest rates:
"The Fed's decision to raise interest rates today is an unfortunate move in the wrong direction. In setting interest rate policy
the Fed must decide whether the economy is at risk of having too few or too many jobs, with the latter being determined by the
extent to which its current rate of job creation may lead to inflation. It is difficult to see how the evidence would lead the
Fed to conclude that the greater risk at the moment is too many jobs.
"While at 5.0 percent, the unemployment rate is not extraordinarily high, most other measures of the labor market are near
recession levels. The percentage of the workforce that is involuntarily working part-time is near the highs reached following
the 2001 recession. The average and median duration of unemployment spells are also near recession highs. And the percentage of
workers who feel confident enough to quit their jobs without another job lined up remains near the low points reached in 2002.
"If we look at employment rates rather than unemployment, the percentage of prime-age workers (ages 25-54) with jobs is still
down by almost three full percentage points from the pre-recession peak and by more than four full percentage points from the
peak hit in 2000. This does not look like a strong labor market.
"On the other side, there is virtually no basis for concerns about the risk of inflation in the current data. The most recent
data show that the core personal consumption expenditure deflator targeted by the Fed increased at just a 1.2 percent annual rate
over the last three months, down slightly from the 1.3 percent rate over the last year. This means that the Fed should be concerned
about being below its inflation target, not above it.
"While wage growth has edged up somewhat in recent months by some measures, it is still well below a rate that is consistent
with the Fed's inflation target. Hourly wages have risen at a 2.7 percent rate over the last year. If there is just 1.5 percent
productivity growth, this would be consistent with a rate of inflation of 1.2 percent.
"Furthermore, it is important to recognize that workers took a large hit to their wages in the downturn, with a shift of more
than four percentage points of national income from wages to profits. In principle, workers can restore their share of national
income (the equivalent of an 8 percent wage gain), but the Fed would have to be prepared to allow wage growth to substantially
outpace prices for a period of time. If the Fed acts to prevent workers from getting this bargaining power, it will effectively
lock in place this upward redistribution. Needless to say, workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution can expect
to see the biggest hit in this scenario.
"One positive point in today's action is the Fed's commitment in its statement to allow future rate hikes to be guided
by the data, rather than locking in a path towards "normalization" as was effectively done in 2004. If it is the case that
the economy is not strong enough to justify rate hikes, then the hike today may be the last one for some period of time. It will
be important for the Fed to carefully assess the data as it makes its decision on interest rates at future meetings.
"Recent economic data suggest that today's move was a mistake. Hopefully the Fed will not compound this mistake with more unwarranted
rate hikes in the future."
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to Peter K....
I like Dean Baker. Unlike the Fed, Dean Baker is a class warrior on the side of the wage class. He makes the point about the
path to normalization being critical that I have been discussing for quite a while. Let's hope this Fed knows better than Greenspan/Bernanke
in 2004-2006. THANKS!
likbez said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Very true !
pgl said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
"Longer-term bond rates barely moved, showing that there was very little news." This interest rate rose from 4.45% to 5.46%
already. So the damage was already done:
"... This interest rate rose from 4.45% to 5.46% already..."
Exactly! Corporate bond rates have been rising steadily since May. Yellen is not doing what Greenspan did in 2004. Yellen's
Fed waited until the bond rate lifted off on its own (and maybe with some help from policy communications) before they raised
the FFR.
So far, there is no sign of their making a fatal error. They are not fighting class warfare for wage class either, but they
seem intent on not screwing the pooch in the way that Greenspan and Bernanke did. No double dip thank you and hold the nuts.
I remember when my mom used to bring me to the Walmart super center when I was a kid,
around 1990. They were exploding in popularity. The cheap goods were a blessing for our
growing family. But we all know how the goods got so cheap.
The 1990s for Walmart was the equivalent of the 2010’s for Amazon. The
low wage job model worked for them then and continues to work for them now.
And in the 1990s, Reich was running around being Labor Secretary, of all things.
There’s some simple solutions to this, like strengthening collective
bargaining, but that’s nowhere in sight.
Employers will pay the lowest possible wage until they absolutely need to.
He quit after the first term and wrote a book about how frustrated he was by
Clinton’s refusal to address widening income disparity and labor
issues.
Totally agree with your point about labor markets. But, Just because he
wasn’t successful doesn’t mean he
didn’t try. Correct me if I’m wrong (I often am) but I
don’t think he’s the villain. Seems to have been trying
to do good in whatever way he can and is also very open about the corruption and greed that
makes change so difficult.
One of the biggest risks to U.S. recovery is the difficulty aroun...
U.S. job growth significantly undershot forecasts in April, suggesting that difficulty
attracting workers is slowing momentum in the labor market and challenging the economic
recovery.
Payrolls rose 266,000 from a month earlier, according to a Labor Department report Friday
that represented one of the largest downside misses on record. Economists in a Bloomberg survey
projected a 1 million hiring surge in April.
The unemployment rate edged up to 6.1 per cent, though the labor-force participation rate
also increased.
... The disappointing payrolls print leaves overall employment more than 8 million short of
its pre-pandemic level and is consistent with recent comments from company officials
highlighting challenges in filling open positions.
... While job gains accelerated in leisure and hospitality, employment at temporary-help
agencies and transportation and warehousing declined sharply.
...
Labor force participation, a measure of the percentage of Americans either working or
looking for work, rose to 61.7 per cent in April from 61.5 per cent, likely supported by
increased vaccinations that helped fuel the reopenings of many retail establishments,
restaurants and leisure-facing businesses.
Average weekly hours increased to match the highest in records dating back to 2006. The gain
in the workweek, increased pay and the improvement in hiring helped boost aggregate weekly
payrolls 1.2 per cent in April after a 1.3 per cent gain a month earlier.
Workforce participation for men age 25 to 54 increased last month, while edging lower for
women.
I keep happening on these mentions of manufacturing jobs succumbing to automation, and I
can't think of where these people are getting their information.
I work in manufacturing. Production manufacturing, in fact, involving hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of parts produced per week. Automation has come a long way, but it also
hasn't. A layman might marvel at the technologies while taking a tour of the factory, but
upon closer inspection, the returns are greatly diminished in the last two decades. Advances
have afforded greater precision, cheaper technologies, but the only reason China is a giant
of manufacturing is because labor is cheap. They automate less than Western factories, not
more, because humans cost next to nothing, but machines are expensive.
Neoliberals policies for minority students in education can be called “the soft bigotry
of low expectations.”
Racists want discrimination based on race; wokesters want discrimination based on race too.
One in the name of bigotry, one in the name of “tolerance.” Does the motive really
matter if the outcome is the same?
Notable quotes:
"... the ONS dataset is A09, Labour Market status by ethnic group, is testament to white folks ingenuity to overcome such discrimination ..."
My uncle did admissions at Cambridge and he actively discriminated against Public School
boys, despite being one himself. He was actually involved in hiring that black woman to be
the Master at Christ's College.
Similarly at Citi it was very obvious any remotely competent black was promoted way beyond
there competency, although that was largely limited to back and middle office roles.
Still the ONS dataset is A09, Labour Market status by ethnic group, is
testament to white folks ingenuity to overcome such discrimination and the free market
at work.
"... Hiring is a lot more complex and constrained, than this writeup suggests. In stacks of resumes that I used to review, I found almost all applicants exaggerate or lie. ..."
"... Employers (or the ones the future worker will work directly "" like local manager) are in the majority of cases DO NOT hire directly. ..."
"... There is either a staffing firm/ recruitment firm between, often also a different websites (for job seekers) which only redirects towards those. ..."
"... The problem with the HR/ recruitment firms/ jobseeker websites themselves. They dictate who will work somewhere. ..."
"... It's a new world of fraud, total fraud. Biden is an absurd fraud. They are all frauds, because actual accomplishments, real work, are so very much more difficult than lies. ..."
"... There's nothing new under the sun. It's always been fraud, flimflam and bamboozle. Somebody once said, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. But, then again, he could have just been fooling around. ..."
Hiring is a lot more complex and constrained, than this writeup suggests. In stacks of resumes that I used to review, I found almost all applicants exaggerate or lie. That was very problematic,
because once you hire a person, it's hard to get rid of them, even with "at-will" employment.
There is a major problem with the article/ whole employment process:
Employers (or the ones the future worker will work directly "" like local manager) are in the majority of cases DO NOT
hire directly.(Respect for the ones, who do.)
There is either a staffing firm/ recruitment firm between, often also a different websites (for job seekers) which only
redirects towards those.
Also many company have a HR department, etc... The problem with the HR/ recruitment firms/ jobseeker websites themselves.
They dictate who will work somewhere.
Wish to be workers should meet directly with the ones they supposed to work for.
To see whether racial discrimination exists, researchers send the same CV to employers with the same level of qualifications
but different names attached, to see if the foreign-sounding names lead to a greater degree of rejection. They often find that
to be the case.
Given that British blacks most often bear British sounding names and that foreign whites too bear foreign sounding names, I
don't see how the difference in treatment can be put down to racial bias. Moreover, I don't see anything wrong in giving precedence
to compatriots over foreigners. It is the opposite that is unsound.
As a French national with a foreign sounding name, I never expected to be given precedence over native French candidates and
always counted solely on my competence to get a position. If the world we live in were still normal, that would be the normal
attitude because in a normal world people are allowed to prefer their kin vs folks they don't know from Adam. It is the opposite
that isn't normal.
Discard national preference and you get foreign tribes' nepotism.
researchers send the same CV to employers with the same level of qualifications but different names attached, to see if
the foreign-sounding names lead to a greater degree of rejection. They often find that to be the case.
Because it's a lose-lose to hire a Tyrone or Abdul. Even if they're the most qualified, they're "high-maintenance," arriving
with extra-legal protections and considerations. Down the road they can always hide behind the specter of racism if their performance
is found lacking.
It's a new world of fraud, total fraud. Biden is an absurd fraud. They are all frauds, because actual accomplishments,
real work, are so very much more difficult than lies.
Indians are fantastic fraudsters. Africans are fraud specialists. Many Asians are not so much CV fraudsters as they are test
cheaters.
Agreed as they do it in Swiss. They prefer to employ their folk, if find a suitable person and wait up to 6 months before consider
an outlander. Only then ready to employ someone else.
BUT: Will not employ a dullard just because they share a citizenship/ ancestors. About 20% are foreigners among the employed,
in Geneva probably most of the employed.
And this is strictly the opposite what is common in many place (and self-appointed "nationalists" demand): No matter how incompetent
but employ the dullard native, while send home the competent/ hardworking.
Against meritism/ competition and bad for business.
There are plenty of dishonest Europeans, but honesty as a high value seems Western. Subcons caught in a lie will grin and do
a head waggle something between a nod and a shake. Blacks will insist the lie is true. East Asians will lie until you demonstrate
they cannot get away with it. Latin Americans only lie when they speak.
There's nothing new under the sun. It's always been fraud, flimflam and bamboozle. Somebody once said, you can fool all
of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. But, then again,
he could have just been fooling around.
Probably $25 an hour or $50K a year is more realistic. Part time jobs are even better to hem to avoid money crunch and at the
same time continue to look for an IT job. Might be a viable option for younger healthy IT specialists. CDL course from a
reputable truck driving school is around $3500 and they
provide you a truck for the DMV exam, but you can try self-study and might pass written exam from a second try as there is nothing
complex in the test, saving half of those money.
Notable quotes:
"... What's happening, he said, is that drivers are looking at the fact that they can make $70,000 'and stay home a little more.' ..."
"... To put the numbers in perspective, Todd Amen, the president of ATBS, which prepares taxes for mostly independent owner-operators, said in a recent interview with the FreightWaves Drilling Deep podcast that the average tax return his company prepared for drivers' 2020 pay was $67,500. He also said his company prepared numerous 2020 returns with pay in excess of $100,000. ..."
David Parker is the CEO of Covenant Logistics and he was blunt with analysts who follow the
company on its earnings call Tuesday.
'How do we get enough drivers? ' he said in response to a question from Stephens analyst Jack Atkins. 'I don't know.'
Parker then gave an overview of the situation facing Covenant, and by extension other
companies, in trying to recruit drivers. One problem: With rates so high, companies are
encountering the fact that a driver doesn't need to work a full schedule to
pull in a decent salary.
'We're finding out that just to get a driver, let's say the numbers are $85,000 (per year) ,' Parker said,
according to a transcript of the earnings call supplied by SeekingAlpha. '
But a lot of these drivers are happy at $70,000. Now they're not coming to
work for me, unless it's in the ($80,000s), because they're happy making $70,000.'
What's happening, he said, is that drivers are looking at the fact that they can make $70,000 'and stay home a little
more.'
The result is a tightening of capacity. Parker said utilization in the first quarter at Covenant was three or four percentage
points less than it would have as a result of that development. ' It's an interesting dynamic that none of
us have calculated,' he said.
To put the numbers in perspective, Todd Amen, the president of ATBS, which prepares taxes
for mostly independent owner-operators, said in a
recent interview with the FreightWaves Drilling Deep podcast that the average tax return
his company prepared for drivers' 2020 pay was $67,500. He also said his
company prepared numerous 2020 returns with pay in excess of $100,000.
Parker was firm that this was not a situation likely to change soon. 'There's nothing out there that tells me that drivers are
going to readily be available over the medium [term in] one to two years,' he said. 'And that's where I'm at.'
Paul Bunn, the company's COO and senior executive vice president, echoed
what other executives have said recently:
Additional stimulus benefits are making the situation tighter. He said that while offering some hope that as the benefits roll
off, 'that might help a bit.'
But what the government giveth the government can sometimes taketh away. Bunn expressed another familiar sentiment in the
industry today, that an infrastructure bill adding to demand for workers would create more difficulty to put drivers behind the
wheel. Construction, Bunn said, is 'a monster competitor of our industry' and if the bill is approved, 'that's going to be a big
pull.'
Labor is going to be a 'capacity constraint' through the
economy, Bunn said, while conceding that trucking is not unique in that. And because of that
labor squeeze, capacity in many fields is going to be limited. ' The OEMs,
the manufacturers are limited capacity ,' Bunn said. 'They're not ramping up in a major, major way because of labor, because of
commodity pricing, because of the costs.'
All that means is that capacity growth is going to be
'reasonable,' Bunn said. 'It's not going to be crazy, people growing fleets [by] significant amounts.'
'It's all you can do just to hold serve, '
he added.
After thirteen months, the BLS still cannot count the Unemployed. Headline U.3
Unemployment also remained deep in non-recovery territory. The BLS acknowledged continuing
misclassification of some "unemployed" persons as "employed," in the Household Survey. Where
the count of the understated unemployed had an "upside limit" of 636,000 persons in March 2021,
the February 2021 upside estimate of understated unemployed was 756,000. The difference would
be a potential headline U.3 of 6.44% instead of today's headline 6.05%, which was down from a
headline 6.22% in February. Fully adjusted for COVID-19 disruptions, based on BLS side-surveys
of Pandemic impact, and with more than six million people missing from the headline U.S. labor
force, actual headline U.3 unemployment still should be well above 10%, the highest
unemployment rate since before World War II, outside of the Pandemic and possibly at the trough
of the 1982-1983 recession. Broader March 2021 headline U.6 unemployment [including some
decline in short-term discouraged workers and those employed part-time for economic reasons]
eased to 10.71% from 11.07% in February. Including long-term discouraged/ displaced workers,
the March 2021 ShadowStats Alternate Measure –- moving on top of the decline in U.6
–- notched minimally lower to 25.7%, from 25.8% in February 2021, reflecting some modeled
transition of "short-term" to "long-term" discouraged workers, with the Pandemic having passed
its 12-month anniversary. The latest Unemployment Rates are posted on the ALTERNATE DATA
tab (above).
The ADL, always attuned to any indication that their subjects are getting restless, is
insisting that Tucker Carlson be fired. What brought on their ire was Tucker's use of the word
'replacement' in the context of a discussion of Joe Biden's Open Border policy. Mentioning
replacement in the context of immigration is pretty much in the same category as doubting that
all races have the same potentialities or the official holocaust narrative. Be prepared for
hatred. Tucker, as quoted in The Hill :
"I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally
hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is
trying to replace the current electorate," Carlson said. "But they become hysterical because
that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it. That's true.
Of course it's true, and what's being replaced is the traditional White population of the
country. But Tucker couldn't say that without even more outrage. So he made it all about the
current electorate, which is certainly not just White people.
"I mean, everyone's making a racial issue out of it. Oh, the, you know, white replacement?
No, no, this is a voting rights question," Carlson added later, saying changes to the
population "dilute the political power" of current registered voters.
This is disingenuous but I suppose it's what you have to say to keep your job in the
mainstream media -- and even that might not be enough. Carlson's statement is consistent with
his repeated assertions of color-blindness, and he's careful to restrict his comments to
illegal immigration. His argument is completely color-blind: "every time they import a new
voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter" -- an argument that would apply to any
American citizen no matter what their race. "How dare you think I care particularly about White
voters!" But isn't it obvious that such an argument would also apply to legal immigration?
Of course the ADL immediately labeled his comments as "white supremacy":
Not clear how replacement theory is "anti-Semitic," but I suppose that Greenblatt considers
anything he dislikes as anti-Semitism. After quoting Greenblatt's tweet, The Hill noted that "the ADL head explained that the "Great Replacement" theory
"is a white supremacist tenet that the white race is in danger by a rising tide of non-whites,"
linking to a Daily Beast article saying the whole idea was a "racist lie." But how much of a
"racist lie" is it when the White population is steadily dwindling, probably to around 60
percent, and the left wants to dramatically increase the rate at which it is dwindling?
Greenblatt also
emailed Fox News, writing "Carlson's full-on embrace of the white supremacist replacement
theory on yesterday's show and his repeated allusions to racist themes in past segments are a
bridge too far. Given his long record of race-baiting, we believe it is time for Carlson to
go." This assertion that Carlson is making a "full-on embrace of white supremacist replacement
theory" is a bald-faced lie, but obvious lies seem to be more and more common in high places
these days -- witness
Biden's lie about the new Georgia voting laws as "Jim Crow on steroids." A full-on embrace
of "white supremacist replacement theory" would at least reference a specific concern for White
people losing political clout. Instead, Carlson religiously repeats his mainstream
conservative, color-blind mantras firmly rooted in individualist ideology ("every time they
import a new voter "). Officially, he could care less about White people as White people. One
wonders if Fox would stand by their most popular talking head if he did come out and just say
it. I am pretty sure he believes it.
Officially, Carlson's heart is bleeding for all those Black, Brown, and Asian citizen-voters
whose political clout is being diluted. But of course, that would be wildly inaccurate,
particularly in the age of identity politics where non-Whites are strongly encouraged to
identify with their racial group and do all they can to advance its interests. The collective
power of non-Whites is being increased by immigration and everyone knows it, and White
political power is decreasing in an age when hatred of Whites is becoming increasingly obvious
-- at a time when Critical Race Theory is dominating the educational establishment and
corporate board rooms. CRT is a theory that essentially says it's fine for non-Whites to hate
Whites while at the same time encouraging White guilt about the supposed sins of their
ancestors. One can only imagine the horrors that await a politically powerless White
minority.
And it's not just White political power that is waning. There is clearly a program to
replace Whites as part of the American elite.
Given the voting behavior of non-Whites, it doesn't make much sense to say that America's
non-White voters are being replaced when they are being "replaced" by more non-White voters,
although I suppose one could make the argument that the traditional American Black population
will have less political clout given that the preponderance of immigrants are from Latin
America and Asia. But in any case, they ain't
White , and the ADL and the Democrats are quite well aware that all non-White groups
strongly skew Democrat. In general, the Democrats are in favor of increased legal immigration,
amnesty for illegals, and non-enforcement at the border, all of which are on the table with
Biden in the White House and a Democrat Congress. Putting these ideas into law along with
allowing no-ID voting would give Democrats more or less immediate and permanent hegemony given
that Texas and Florida are the largest destinations of immigrants -- as noted in my comments on
the January 6 "insurrection,"
The Left Will Now Enact Permanent Hegemony. " Their strategy also includes packing
the Supreme Court , in case some of their laws are challenged; Biden is already laying the
groundwork by establishing a commission packed with a
super-majority of liberals .
Biden's immigration plan calls for an increase in "diversity" visas to 80,000 from 55,000
and has an emphasis on family unification -- a code word for chain migration and a bedrock of
Jewish attitudes on immigration since the 1920s and continuing up to the 1965 immigration law (
here, p. 283) and
beyond. What this means is that one lucky visa recipient from, say, Africa, could bring in his
immediate (likely large) family and when they became citizens, they could bring in their
brothers and sisters outside the quota limit, who could in turn bring in their spouses and
children, etc. All these new people would be able to immigrate outside the quota system for
legal immigrants. And all could become citizens.
Tucker Carlson Is a Mass Murdering Terrorist!
Comment on the left has explicitly compared Carlson's mild comments to the manifesto of the
Christchurch and El Paso murderers.
I found the above clip from The Daily Show on Max Boot's
Twitter feed . Boot, former neocon (i.e., a liberal-leftie masquerading as a conservative
active in promoting U.S. fealty to Israel and moving the GOP to the left on social issues). And
now, because of obsessive Trump hate, now is firmly and explicitly ensconced on the left at
The Washington Post. Boot
wrote that Carlson "the top-rated host on Fox "News" Channel, has been attracting attention
for a while with his vile rhetoric against immigrants. Yet now he's reached a new low."
As the left-leaning Media Matters for America
has chronicled , Carlson has a long history of ugly statements. He has called Iraqis "
semiliterate primitive monkeys " and said that Afghanistan is "never going to be a
civilized country because the people aren't civilized." He has complained that an influx of
poor immigrants "
makes our own country poor and dirtier and more divided ." He has repeatedly described
immigration as an "
invasion ," and called the urgent threat posed by white supremacists a "
hoax " and "a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power."
And that new low is that Tucker said something a mass murderer had said, implying, I guess,
that if Hitler said the sky is blue, it would be extremely racist for anyone else to say
it.
The Guardian
noted in 2019 that there were already disturbing parallels between Carlson's rhetoric and
that of white supremacist killers in El Paso, Tex., and Christchurch, New Zealand. For
example, in one of his books, Carlson wrote: "When confronted or pressed for details,
[proponents of diversity] retreat into a familiar platitude, which they repeat like a zen
koan: diversity is our strength. But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common,
the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is that true in neighborhoods or businesses?
Of course not."
And here is what the fiend who killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques said in his
manifesto: "Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It
is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum . But no one ever seems to give a reason
why. What gives a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength?"
On Thursday night, Carlson moved even closer to white supremacist ideology by
explicitly endorsing the Great Replacement theory, which holds that shadowy elites are
orchestrating a plot to replace native-born White people with immigrants of color. The New
Zealand shooter's
manifesto was literally headlined "The Great Replacement," and the neo-Nazis who marched
in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us."
In a
previous article I noted that Tucker Carlson's comments on 'replacement' in the context of
immigration had unleashed a torrent of hatred from the ADL and the liberal media. When the ADL
goes after public figures, the usual response is groveling apology in a typically futile effort
to prevent getting ostracized or fired. After all, the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt had tweeted
that Carlson's comments were "anti-Semitic, racist, and toxic." Accusations of racism -- and
especially anti-Semitism -- are pretty much a death sentence for anyone so accused.
So I was gratified that Carlson didn't back down. Indeed, he doubled down, with a 20-minute
opening monologue elaborating on exactly why the Democrat Party is completely wedded to
importing a new electorate and has been doing so for decades. He also mentioned that Whites
(and Blacks) are being replaced as voters, that the entire project is immoral, and he called
out the hypocrisy of the ADL. As he notes, it's not about compassion as usually advertised, but
about power. And everyone with any brains knows it.
To date, Carlson's monologue is the most powerful and most explicit statement in the
mainstream media that Whites -- as Whites -- have an interest in immigration. Indeed, a vital
interest. In making his argument, he discussed states like California and Virginia that have
become reliably Democrat because of immigration, and he mentions Vermont that is now blue
because of disenchanted New Yorkers who brought their politics with them when they moved there.
He says the same thing is happening to Montana and Idaho as yoga instructors, Google
vice-presidents, and assorted rich White folks leave California for greener pastures. It will
happen to your state. And the result will be permanent hegemony of the left because
the imported electorate are reliable clients of the Democrat Party. 'Client' is the right word
(from the Latin for 'dependent') because these people come to the U.S. for better pay and all
the free stuff -- medical care, welfare if they have children, and the promise of eventual
citizenship and the right to bring in their relatives. This description applies at least to the
Mexicans, Central Americans, and Africans who have flooded our shores (that IQ thing again).
They remain toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and dependent on the government.
Hence reliably Democrat. California went from being the envy of the world to having poverty
levels on par with Mississippi. Without explicitly mentioning Whites, he notes that the middle
class is leaving in droves, resulting in the cost of a U-Haul being five times higher for
people leaving the state as for entering. He portrays the middle class as one of the victim
groups of the Great Replacement as America is transformed into a society with a hostile,
ultra-wealthy elite who are politically supported by a dependent mass of Democrat voters.
Tucker also doubled down on his voter-replacement logic, but this time he was explicit about
White people's vote being replaced, noting that Whites went from 90 percent of Californians to
30 percent since 1960, which means that how White people vote matters much less than it used
to. It's shocking to hear someone in the mainstream media claim that Whites and their vital
interests are victims of the immigration tsunami. One can easily imagine a situation where,
even if White Californians woke up (far too many are still drinking the Kool-Aid), they
couldn't win a statewide election. And that's the whole point. Permanent hegemony.
But because the interests of Whites are definitely not supposed to be paramount, he
emphasized that Blacks in California have also been losing political clout rapidly, with very
large declines in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. In my previous article, I noted
that the voter replacement argument doesn't apply so much to Blacks because the people
replacing them have pretty much the same politics. But I stand corrected. Identity politics has
changed everything. Black Californian politicos like Maxine Waters, Willy Brown, and Kamala
Harris may well become a thing of the past. Harris was replaced by Alex Padilla, a Latino,
after being elevated to the vice-presidency, a result that was not
warmly greeted by the Black political establishment.
California progressives had pushed [Gov. Gavin] Newsom to appoint Representative Barbara
Lee [who is Black] or another like-minded Democrat. Mr. Newsom was also under pressure to
appoint a Black woman to take the place of Ms. Harris, the only Black woman in the Senate.
Representative Karen Bass and Ms. Lee were at the top of that list. The Congressional
Hispanic Caucus strongly backed Mr. Padilla. The L.G.B.T.Q. community and Equality California
lobbied for Robert Garcia, the mayor of Long Beach. Black Women United, a co-founder of Black
Lives Matter, and a range of Black elected officials pushed for Ms. Bass or Ms.
Lee.
As Blacks become less of a demographic force, they will also become less of a political
force. There will be less official sympathy for Black issues like BLM, reparations, dealing
with criminals, and centering on Black grievance in the educational system.
Tucker also did some dog-whistling on Jewish involvement by mentioning Michelle Goldberg's
NYTimes op-ed, "
We can replace them, " which celebrates replacing the White electorate by doing a screen
shot of Goldberg's statement: "The potential is there; Georgia is less than 53 percent
non-Hispanic White." He didn't mention Goldberg's ethnicity, but anyone who knows anything
about the media knows she is a strongly identified Jew writing for a Jewish-owned publication
that is the crown jewel of the elite liberal-left media. As Tucker noted, Goldberg is "a
New York Times columnist, not some QAnon blogger."
The left pretends that demographic replacement is an obsession on the right, but in fact,
it's an obsession on the left. "It's the central idea of the modern Democratic Party." So true.
And so refreshing to hear it in the mainstream media.
As always, the left pretends that their plan to replace the White population is a moral
imperative. In 2019 then-Senator Harris condemned Trump's plan to deport illegals on the basis
that Trump was trying to "remake the demographics of the country"; she tweeted that such
actions are "deeply reprehensible and an affront to our values." Of course, the left would
never think of remaking the demographics of the country!
What's immoral -- and obviously so -- is the left's scheme to remake the electorate in
opposition to the legitimate interests of the traditional White majority. Tucker confronted the
issue head-on, turning the tables on the leftist moralizers by framing their actions as
"cheating." This is an important message for Whites to hear. What is happening to the White
population of America is profoundly immoral. It's an important message because we Whites are
uniquely prone to framing our actions in moral terms. As often discussed here, a major weakness
of uniquely individualist culture characteristic of the West is that individualists are highly
prone to forming moral communities rather than
kinship-based communities typical of the rest of the world. It's a very exploitable weakness,
and our hostile elites have taken full advantage by defining the legitimate interests of Whites
as immoral, as Greenblatt and Harris do. Moral communities are fine as long as they serve the
community's interests, and in the long history of the West, they have indeed been a strength.
But the problem now is that the people who define the moral communities of
the West since World War are the hostile elite who have shaped academic and media culture,
i.e., strongly identified Jews and Jewish-owned mainstream media like the New York
Times. So now a substantial proportion of Whites think it's a moral imperative to replace
the White population. No other culture anywhere at any time has ever felt a moral imperative to
replace its founding population.
However, the best part about Tucker's monologue was that he confronted the ADL directly by
highlighting their lack of principle. Confronting any powerful Jewish organization is virtually
unheard of in American media and political culture where groveling, apologies, and firing are
the norm. And he chose a particularly glaring weakness in Jewish rationalizations of the
adversarial culture they have championed in the U.S.: Jewish hypocrisy in claiming the moral
high ground in America by insisting that any opposition to immigration is racist and hence
immoral, while legitimizing Israel's ethnocentric immigration policy because it threatens the
legitimate interests of its Jewish population. In fact, these activist Jews are consummate
ethnic nationalists -- exactly what they condemn in White Americans. White Americans deserve
just what the ADL and the rest of the activist Jewish community want for Jews, a safe homeland
that remains theirs.
Granted, Carlson didn't mention that the ADL was leading the charge against him, but anyone
paying the least bit of attention to this episode knows damn well that the ADL is leading the
campaign against him. Carlson quoted from the ADL website:
With historically high birth rates among Palestinians, and a possible influx of
Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world, Jews would quickly be
a minority in a bi-national state, thus ending any semblance of equal representation and
protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be politically -- and potentially
physically -- vulnerable. It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect the Jewish population
to expect the state of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and national
identity and become a vulnerable minority in what was once its own territory.
This is another recurrent theme on TOO -- that the traditional White majority will
become a hated and oppressed minority ( 58 articles )
because of the immigration of non-Whites in a culture dominated by an elite with a long history
of hatred toward the White majority of the U.S. We already see a multitude of examples of
hatred toward Whites emanating from the elite media, liberal-left politicians, and just
ordinary non-Whites (like this one from James
Edwards on Twitter), and hate crimes against Whites are ignored or quickly buried. Why would
anyone think this will stop if and when Whites become a minority? It will increase. But the ADL
thinks that Jews, who have been and continue to
be the leading force enacting a multicultural United States, beginning with their
influence in passing the
1965 immigration law , should retain sovereignty in Israel because ceding sovereignty would
be dangerous for Jews. This is massively hypocritical, as Tucker implies, and he invited
Greenblatt on his show to explain why the same principles that he champions for Israel should
not exist in the United States. I rather doubt that will happen.
In fact, Greenblatt repeated his attacks on Carlson in a letter to
Fox News , demanding that he be fired while never mentioning that Carlson had broached the
hypocrisy of the ADL. Pretty clearly he wants to avoid the issue like the plague. Fox News CEO
Lachlan Murdoch responded with a typical mainstream media mantra: "Fox Corporation shares your
values and abhors anti-semitism, white supremacy and racism of any kind." But he rejected the
argument that Carlson had endorsed "anti-semitism, white supremacy and racism," retreating to
Carlson's original voting rights argument. Always a safe move to refuse to avoid issues that
vitally affect White America by presenting them in non-racial terms.
In his letter to Murdoch, Greenblatt claimed that Carlson "did not accidentally echo these
talking points; he knowingly escalated this well-worn racist rhetoric. At a time of intense
polarization, this kind of rhetoric galvanizes extremists and lights the fire of violence."
Intense polarization indeed. That's what happens when there is a powerful attempt to
dispossess the founding population of the country. Ultimately the polarization is a result of
Jewish activism which has been a necessary condition for the immigration and multiculturalism
that is tearing the country apart.
Greenblatt thinks that Tucker's message will galvanize "extremists." Let's hope that it does
indeed galvanize the White population. In any case, it's important for Carlson to not let this
issue drop. It was courageous of him to broach the issue, but it needs to be repeated, just as
the messages of the left on race and multiculturalism are continually repeated on TV, movies,
print media, and throughout the educational system.
Individualists are less naturally ethnocentric, and the left has created a culture that
encourages Whites to inhibit expressions of ethnocentrism while encouraging non-Whites to be
ethnocentric. Because the media is dominated by the left and because even the conservative
media is terrified of appearing to advocate White interests, explicit messages that would
encourage Whites to become angry and fearful about their future as a minority are rare [and
when they occur, they are subjected to vicious attacks, as has happened to Carlson]. Indeed,
the media rarely, if ever, mentions that Whites are well on their way to becoming a minority.
And this for good reason: Whites in the United States and in Canada who are given explicit
demographic projections of a time when Whites are no longer a majority tend to feel angry and
fearful. They are also more likely to identify as Whites and have sympathy for other Whites.
[1]
In other words, while I have emphasized the ability of the higher brain centers to inhibit
ethnocentrism, explicit messages indicating that one's racial group is threatened are able to
trigger ethnocentrism. This is especially important because many Whites live far from the
areas of their countries undergoing the demographic shifts. Their day-to-day life of living
in an essentially White environment hasn't changed while the population centers of New York,
California, Toronto, and Vancouver have changed beyond all recognition from what they were 50
years ago. An obvious inference to be made is that pro-White activists should appeal to
Whites' higher brain centers with explicit messages emphasizing these transformations.
White replacement is our most powerful message. Let's hope Tucker continues to repeat it. We
certainly will.
Note
[1] H. Robert Outten, Michael T. Schmitt, and Daniel A. Miller, "Feeling threatened about
the future: Whites' emotional reactions to anticipated ethnic demographic changes,"
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38 (2011): 14–25.
Go Tucker Go.There is a lot of room to advance on this front. It shouldn't take much more
to expose the complete hypocrisy of their argument,but what has being right got to do with
it? We're talking about trillions upon trillions of "wealth,"not, "debt" and the self
absorbed,egotistical materialists will do everything under the sun to continue ignoring
reality,i.e.humanity.Money is "the GOD"and nobody should get in the way of "the PROPHET$"
that assumed divine authority after the black book was written.Gold, diamonds,private
jets,yachts,islands and lots of "faithful followers" to do all the work. They will
assassinate anything that threatens "THIS"religion,good luck.
Tuck has the moral high ground ..not only are we being replaced ..but Greenblatt's buddies
GLOAT openly about our replacement ..that doesn't really seem like being a light unto the
nations.
For a long time, Tucker has been more than just a political talk show host. He's become a
Man on a Mission; even more so since Biden's enablers stole what was left of our "democracy,"
and fixed November's election. Will Fox fire him due to growing Corporate and Jewish
pressure, or will the Murdoch's continue to have the guts to back him?
No one can know for sure. But Tucker, to a large extent, has Fox News over a barrel. He's
even recently expanded his reach, with his newest show on the subscription based Fox Nation,
where he is able to do long form interviews without commercial interruption. The Murdoch's
must be keenly aware that, if they fire their number one ratings star, they've just flushed
their consistently most watched cable news network down the toilet.
There's another huge issue, never mentioned on TV except with derision, that I'd love to
see Tucker address one day soon: SECESSION! It's the only way forward.
I think ol' Tucker may have bit off more than he can chew on this one. He touched the 3rd
rail pretty strongly on live TV and Big Jew doesn't like that whatsoever. Given that Israel
is supported by both right leaning Neocons and the more liberal Jonathan Greenblatts of the
world his days may truly be numbered now.
Tucker does a good job of poking holes in idiotic liberalism. However, I think it is
interesting that almost no one mentions the elephant in the room, which is that whites went
from a fertility rate of 3.7 to 1.7 in the space of 60 years. Americans in general started
murdering their babies, and swallowed all the jewish lies and "isms" hook, line and sinker.
That is why you have lost your country. The brown tide is a symptom of the problem, not the
cause. The problem is a nation given over to greed, foolishness, and perversion.
Since she first appeared as a talk show host on MSNBC during Obama's first presidential
campaign, Rachel Maddow has been bragging about how Democrats were going to ascend to a
permanent majority in the Congress and permanently control the presidency by virtue of
unhindered "minority" migration into this country. The concept had been floated before by
numerous analysts and even termed the "Reconquista" which Hispanic spokespersons
enthusiastically embraced as the rightful recovery of their stolen patrimony from the
Gringos.
I distinctly recall Maddow gloating about this anticipated outcome night after night while
she demeaned the incipient shrinkage of a "rump Republican Party" to complete irrelevance
when this desired scenario came to pass. She spoke excitedly about recruiting not only the
tidal wave of Hispanic migrants into the Democratic fold to cohabit with the long loyal
blacks, but also assumed that every foreigner, including all Orientals, East Indians, Middle
Easterners and Black Africans should naturally ally with the liberal Dem philosophies:
literally every immigrant but White Europeans (the "Eurotrash") would be a part of the coming
new Democratic Golden Age.
Nobody on the left ever thought of calling her and her bigoted ideas to be "racist," and
she is never called out for being "racist" when she spouts her totally hysterical
over-the-top Russophobia (or is "Russophrenia" a more correct descriptor?). Why doesn't the
ADL pick a bone with her while they are attacking Tucker Carlson who has always been much
less excitable and far more logical that Maddow even when she is sober and not fixing mixed
drinks on air.
A newly formed "America First Caucus" in Congress, supported by a
few far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives, is looking to recruit new
members with an old set of arguments.
These white nationalist tropes found a receptive audience in the American people.
Its platform, now circulating in Washington, is little more than a retread of the white
nationalist screeds of the 1910s and 1920s.
"America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for
uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions," asserts the section on immigration. "History has shown that
societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse
into a country."
A century ago, these same sorts of arguments about the "Anglo-Saxon" character of the United
States and the threat that "foreign" elements would bring to its politics and culture were
quite widespread.
... ... ...
The popular panic over immigration and the pseudo-scientific justifications for nativism and
racism came together in the push for the National Origins Act of 1924, a quota-based measure
that drastically reduced immigration from southeastern Europe and banned all Asians from
immigrating entirely.
Kevin M. Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton University. A specialist in modern
American political, social and urban/suburban history, he is the author and editor of several
books, including "White Flight" (2005), "One Nation Under God" (2015) and "Fault Lines: A
History of the United States since 1974" (2019). He grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and earned
his bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his master's and
doctoral degrees from Cornell University.
I wrote a post on the above-mentioned subject but I deleted it. I will not discuss the
demonisation of White heterosexual Males in all its forms for fear of cancellation. I will
instead leave you with my conclusions – which are consistent with The Walrus Law;
Governments achieve the reverse of their stated objectives.
Conclusion 1. No white male corporate manager is going to risk their career by engaging in
any of the following actions:
– Mentoring female subordinates.
– Taking one on one meetings with any female.
– Participating in any but the most innocuous social functions with female subordinates
and certainly not where alcohol is present.
– In fact avoiding any one on one situation with a female.
– It also stands to reason that women will not be employed or promoted if sufficient
excuse can be found. There wasn't a glass ceiling. There is now.
Why? Because a female subordinate can now permanently end a males career in a microsecond by
the act of alleging any impropriety thanks to #metoo. No proof is required.
Conclusion 2. The British/ European/ American class system is coming back with a vengeance.
Young men and their parents will confine their search for partners and social interactions, to
females of the same social strata, values, financial resources and background as their own.
This is not a guarantee of marital harmony, It does however decrease the likelihood of a male
being accused of relationship and career destroying improprieties twenty years after the
alleged event. You can forget marrying 'for love' outside your social class.
Conclusion 3. Male behaviour in the upper and middle classes is indeed going to change. We
will witness the return of the Chaperone for males. We will witness the end of many mixed sex
parties and entertainments because of the ever present threat of denouncement. Expect single
sex private schools to flourish. Co -education is an invitation for a young males career to be
finished before it even starts – all it takes these days is an allegation made perhaps
years and years after the alleged "event". The first a young male will know about it is when he
is arrested and handcuffed.
Conclusion 4. The nature of families is going to change. We are going to see the return of
stereotyped roles. Case in point? As a Grandfather I have decided I will have nothing more to
do with the informal upbringing of grand daughters – there is too much risk that if they
go off the rails in puberty or get involved in drugs, mental illness, etc. they will
conveniently blame sexual abuse by a relative as the cause. That means I will never allow
myself to be alone with them or be responsible for them ever and the rest of the family know
it. Period. The personal risk is just too great
I have examples to back up each conclusion but I will not share them with you.
I have not addressed the American race and firearm based issues but I would expect that
changes to firearm laws and characterisation of various behaviors as "extremist' will also have
the same opposite effect from what Government intended.
Indeed. I suspect that if I were of dating age (and single) today I would go on to die
celibate. A minority of women have made engaging with the entire gender entirely too
dangerous.
Reply
We are an adaptive bunch; witness how successful Prohibition was, or the alleged 'War on
Drugs'. Look at how Trumps border wall was rapidly shot to hell with a few acetylene
torches and some hinges – making really nice gates for the coyotes to run people
through.
It's interesting that there is no actual, physical way that the number of guns out here
'in the wild' is even known, much less can be seized. Guns can be seized by the
ATF/FBI/etc. making a huge raid on a single family and killing them all as examples –
but once that card is played, the ante will be upped and things will not be as easy for
them. The gun grabbers are literally about 200 years too late, as the gun cow is long out
of the barn.
The Covidian Cult is waning finally – in spite of the push by the globalist CDC,
WHO, Big Pharma, MSM and many others. It's hard to push fear of dying when there is nothing
to base it on any longer.
So now we are back to Ukraine, where Biden is both well known and well connected. Russia
will swat anything approaching her borders, and may swat hard. I would not be surprised to
see our puny couple of ships in their sea crippled electronically, again. But Russia
doesn't want what NATO and Biden are serving for dinner.
It's the same old SSDD of world ending disasters to keep everyone afraid of everyone
else while the big wheels in government are sending contracts out to their family members
and their various foundations using money leveraged against our grandkids.
57 genders; women cannot be approached without opening yourself to legal actions and yet
they are all in the military and government positions in far larger percentages than people
realize. Our local school principal was recently accused of "inappropriate conduct" with a
female teacher who is so obese she requires an electric scooter to move her bulk about.
Having actually seen this female, it was obvious to me, as a man with normal appetites,
that approaching her would have resulted in disgorgement of the previous meal and not
engorgement of anything.
It's human nature that when you forbid something unilaterally, it becomes more
attractive to many, just for the sake of flouting convention. Perhaps that is what the
morbidly obese teacher is striving for?
We are entering the Land of Unintended Consequences, and there is no way but
through.
Not only was the March payrolls report a blockbuster, golidlocks number, much higher than expected but not
too
high
to spark immediate reflation/hike fears thanks to subdued wage inflation, job growth in March was also widespread unlike
February, where 75% of all new jobs
were
waiters and bartenders
. By contrast, in March the largest gains occurring across most industries with the bulk taking
place in leisure and hospitality, public and private education, and construction.
Here is a full breakdown:
Employment in leisure and hospitality increased by 280,000 in March,
as
pandemic-related restrictions eased in many parts of the country. Nearly two-thirds of the increase was in food services
and drinking places (+176,000). Job gains also occurred in arts, entertainment, and recreation (+64,000) and in
accommodation (+40,000). Employment in leisure and hospitality is down by 3.1 million, or 18.5 percent, since February
2020.
In March, employment increased in both public and private education,
reflecting
the continued resumption of in-person learning and other school-related activities in many parts of the country. Employment
rose by 76,000 in local government education, by 50,000 in state government education, and by 64,000 in private education.
Employment is down from February 2020 in local government education (-594,000), state government education (-270,000), and
private education (-310,000).
Construction added 110,000 jobs in March,
following job losses in the
previous month (-56,000) that were likely weather-related. Employment growth in the industry was widespread in March, with
gains of 65,000 in specialty trade contractors, 27,000 in heavy and civil engineering construction, and 18,000 in
construction of buildings. Employment in construction is 182,000 below its February 2020 level.
Employment in professional and business services rose by 66,000 over the month.
In
March, employment in administrative and support services continued to trend up (+37,000), although employment in its
temporary help services component was essentially unchanged. Employment also continued on an upward trend in management and
technical consulting services (+8,000) and in computer systems design and related services (+6,000).
Manufacturing employment rose by 53,000 in March,
with job gains occurring
in both durable goods (+30,000) and nondurable goods (+23,000). Employment in manufacturing is down by 515,000 since
February 2020.
Transportation and warehousing added 48,000 jobs in March.
Employment
increased in couriers and messengers (+17,000), transit and ground passenger transportation (+13,000), support activities
for transportation (+6,000), and air transportation (+6,000). Since February 2020, employment in couriers and messengers is
up by 206,000 (or 23.3 percent), while employment is down by 112,000 (or 22.8 percent) in transit and ground passenger
transportation and by 104,000 (or 20.1 percent) in air transportation.
Employment in the other services industry increased by 42,000 over the month,
reflecting
job gains in personal and laundry services (+19,000) and in repair and maintenance (+18,000). Employment in other services
is down by 396,000 since February 2020.
Social assistance added 25,000 jobs in March,
mostly in individual and
family services (+20,000). Employment in social assistance is 306,000 lower than in February 2020.
Employment in wholesale trade increased by 24,000 in March,
with job gains
in both durable goods (+14,000) and nondurable goods (+10,000). Employment in wholesale trade is 234,000 lower than in
February 2020.
Retail trade added 23,000 jobs in March.
Job growth in clothing and
clothing accessories stores (+16,000), motor vehicle and parts dealers (+13,000), and furniture and home furnishing stores
(+6,000) was partially offset by losses in building material and garden supply stores (-9,000) and general merchandise
stores (-7,000). Employment in retail trade is 381,000 below its February 2020 level.
Employment in mining rose by 21,000 in March,
in support activities for
mining (+19,000). Mining employment is down by 130,000 since a peak in January 2019.
Financial activities added 16,000 jobs in March.
Job gains in insurance
carriers and related activities (+11,000) and real estate (+10,000) more than offset losses in credit intermediation and
related activities (-7,000). Financial activities has 87,000 fewer jobs than in February 2020.
It's hardly a surprise that with the US reopening, the one industry seeing the biggest hiring remains leisure and hospitality
where jobs rose by 280,000, as pandemic-related restrictions eased in many parts of the country, with nearly two-thirds of the
increase in "food services and drinking places", i.e., waiters and bartenders, which added +176,000 jobs in March.
And another notable change was in the total number of government workers, which surged by 136K in March, reversing the 90K
drop in February, as a result of 49.6K state education workers and 76K local government education workers added thanks to the
reopening of schools around the country.
Here is a visual breakdown of all the March job changes:
Finally,
courtesy
of Bloomberg
, below are the industries with the highest and lowest rates of employment growth for the most recent month.
7
play_arrow
Jack Offelday
1 hour ago
The "V" recovery. Where Food Service jobs are the new "Golden Age".
Creamaster
47 minutes ago
(Edited)
My wife is a nurse in an outpatient office under a large hospital umbrella here. Normally these outpatient
spots go within days to a week.
Currently they have 2 openings they have been trying to fill for a few months now. Combine that with the
fact my wife got 3 years worth of raises in a single shot, recently and out of the blue for no reason, tells
me the hospitla is really screwed trying to fill nursing spots.
After this pandemic crap, it has likely scared alot of people away from entering healthcare, and if a nurse
was on the fence about retirement , likely decided to call it quits after all this BS.
newworldorder
45 minutes ago
There are an estimated, 30 million illegals currently in the USA waiting legalization.
WHEN legalization happens, they will bring into the USA (by historical averages,) another 60 to 90 million
of their family members in 10 years.
And all of them US Minority workers, by current US Diversity Laws, - same as all Black Americans.
Medicaid
expansion enrollment grew nearly 30% year-over-year in 19-state sample, Andrew Sprung,
XPOSTFACTOID, March 17, 2021
An update on Medicaid expansion enrollment growth since the pandemic struck. Below is a
sampling of 19 expansion states through January of this year, and 14 states through
February.
Maintaining the assumption, explained here ,
"relatively slow growth in California would push the national total down by about 2.5
percentage points." These tallies still point to year-over-year enrollment growth of
approximately 30% from February 2020 to February 2021.
If that's right, then Medicaid enrollment among those rendered eligible by ACA expansion
criteria (adults with income up to 138% FPL) may exceed 19 million nationally and may be
pushing 20 million. Assuming the sampling of a bit more than a third of total expansion
enrollment represents all expansion states more or less and again accounting for slower growth
in California.
"... Last week was the 53rd straight week total initial claims were greater than the second-worst week of the Great Recession. (If that comparison is restricted to regular state claims -- because we didn't have PUA in the Great Recession -- initial claims are still greater than the 14th worst week of the Great Recession.) ..."
One year ago this week, when the first sky-high unemployment insurance (UI) claims data of the pandemic were released, I said
"
I
have been a labor economist for a very long time and have never seen anything like this
." But in the weeks that followed,
things got worse before they got better -- and we are not out of the woods yet.
Last
week -- the week ending March 20, 2021 -- another 926,000 people applied for UI. This included 684,000 people who applied for
regular state UI and 242,000 who applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the federal program for workers who are
not eligible for regular unemployment insurance, like gig workers.
Last week was the 53rd straight week total initial claims were greater than the second-worst week of the Great Recession. (If
that comparison is restricted to regular state claims -- because we didn't have PUA in the Great Recession -- initial
claims are still greater than the 14th worst week of the Great Recession.)
Figure A
shows continuing claims in all programs over time (the latest data for this are for March 6). Continuing claims
are currently nearly 17 million above where they were a year ago, just before the virus hit.
FIGURE A
Continuing unemployment claims in all programs, March 23, 2019–March 6, 2021
*Use
caution interpreting trends over time because of reporting issues (see below)*
Date
Regular state UI
PEUC
PUA
Other programs (mostly EB and STC)
2019-03-23
1,905,627
31,510
2019-03-30
1,858,954
31,446
2019-04-06
1,727,261
30,454
2019-04-13
1,700,689
30,404
2019-04-20
1,645,387
28,281
2019-04-27
1,630,382
29,795
2019-05-04
1,536,652
27,937
2019-05-11
1,540,486
28,727
2019-05-18
1,506,501
27,949
2019-05-25
1,519,345
26,263
2019-06-01
1,535,572
26,905
2019-06-08
1,520,520
25,694
2019-06-15
1,556,252
26,057
2019-06-22
1,586,714
25,409
2019-06-29
1,608,769
23,926
2019-07-06
1,700,329
25,630
2019-07-13
1,694,876
27,169
2019-07-20
1,676,883
30,390
2019-07-27
1,662,427
28,319
2019-08-03
1,676,979
27,403
2019-08-10
1,616,985
27,330
2019-08-17
1,613,394
26,234
2019-08-24
1,564,203
27,253
2019-08-31
1,473,997
25,003
2019-09-07
1,462,776
25,909
2019-09-14
1,397,267
26,699
2019-09-21
1,380,668
26,641
2019-09-28
1,390,061
25,460
2019-10-05
1,366,978
26,977
2019-10-12
1,384,208
27,501
2019-10-19
1,416,816
28,088
2019-10-26
1,420,918
28,576
2019-11-02
1,447,411
29,080
2019-11-09
1,457,789
30,024
2019-11-16
1,541,860
31,593
2019-11-23
1,505,742
29,499
2019-11-30
1,752,141
30,315
2019-12-07
1,725,237
32,895
2019-12-14
1,796,247
31,893
2019-12-21
1,773,949
29,888
2019-12-28
2,143,802
32,517
2020-01-04
2,245,684
32,520
2020-01-11
2,137,910
33,882
2020-01-18
2,075,857
32,625
2020-01-25
2,148,764
35,828
2020-02-01
2,084,204
33,884
2020-02-08
2,095,001
35,605
2020-02-15
2,057,774
34,683
2020-02-22
2,101,301
35,440
2020-02-29
2,054,129
33,053
2020-03-07
1,973,560
32,803
2020-03-14
2,071,070
34,149
2020-03-21
3,410,969
36,758
2020-03-28
8,158,043
0
52,494
48,963
2020-04-04
12,444,309
3,802
69,537
64,201
2020-04-11
16,249,334
31,426
216,481
89,915
2020-04-18
17,756,054
63,720
1,172,238
116,162
2020-04-25
21,723,230
91,724
3,629,986
158,031
2020-05-02
20,823,294
173,760
6,361,532
175,289
2020-05-09
22,725,217
252,257
8,120,137
216,576
2020-05-16
18,791,926
252,952
11,281,930
226,164
2020-05-23
19,022,578
546,065
10,010,509
247,595
2020-05-30
18,548,442
1,121,306
9,597,884
259,499
2020-06-06
18,330,293
885,802
11,359,389
325,282
2020-06-13
17,552,371
783,999
13,093,382
336,537
2020-06-20
17,316,689
867,675
14,203,555
392,042
2020-06-27
16,410,059
956,849
12,308,450
373,841
2020-07-04
17,188,908
964,744
13,549,797
495,296
2020-07-11
16,221,070
1,016,882
13,326,206
513,141
2020-07-18
16,691,210
1,122,677
13,259,954
518,584
2020-07-25
15,700,971
1,193,198
10,984,864
609,328
2020-08-01
15,112,240
1,262,021
11,504,089
433,416
2020-08-08
14,098,536
1,376,738
11,221,790
549,603
2020-08-15
13,792,016
1,381,317
13,841,939
469,028
2020-08-22
13,067,660
1,434,638
15,164,498
523,430
2020-08-29
13,283,721
1,547,611
14,786,785
490,514
2020-09-05
12,373,201
1,630,711
11,808,368
529,220
2020-09-12
12,363,489
1,832,754
12,153,925
510,610
2020-09-19
11,561,158
1,989,499
10,686,922
589,652
2020-09-26
10,172,332
2,824,685
10,978,217
579,582
2020-10-03
8,952,580
3,334,878
10,450,384
668,691
2020-10-10
8,038,175
3,711,089
10,622,725
615,066
2020-10-17
7,436,321
3,983,613
9,332,610
778,746
2020-10-24
6,837,941
4,143,389
9,433,127
746,403
2020-10-31
6,452,002
4,376,847
8,681,647
806,430
2020-11-07
6,037,690
4,509,284
9,147,753
757,496
2020-11-14
5,890,220
4,569,016
8,869,502
834,740
2020-11-21
5,213,781
4,532,876
8,555,763
741,078
2020-11-28
5,766,130
4,801,408
9,244,556
834,685
2020-12-05
5,457,941
4,793,230
9,271,112
841,463
2020-12-12
5,393,839
4,810,334
8,453,940
937,972
2020-12-19
5,205,841
4,491,413
8,383,387
1,070,810
2020-12-26
5,347,440
4,166,261
7,442,888
1,450,438
2021-01-02
5,727,359
3,026,952
5,707,397
1,526,887
2021-01-09
5,446,993
3,863,008
7,334,682
1,638,247
2021-01-16
5,188,211
3,604,894
7,218,801
1,826,573
2021-01-23
5,156,985
4,779,341
7,943,448
1,785,954
2021-01-30
5,003,178
4,062,189
7,685,857
1,590,360
2021-02-06
4,934,269
5,067,523
7,520,114
1,523,394
2021-02-13
4,794,195
4,468,389
7,329,172
1,437,170
2021-02-20
4,808,623
5,456,080
8,387,696
1,465,769
2021-02-27
4,457,888
4,816,523
7,616,593
1,237,929
2021-03-06
4,458,888
5,551,215
7,735,491
1,207,201
Other programs (mostly EB and STC)
PUA
PEUC
Regular
state UI
Jul
2019
Jan
2020
Jul
2020
Jan
2021
0
10,000,000
20,000,000
30,000,000
40,000,000
Chart
Data
Caution:
Trends over time in PUA claims may be distorted because when an individual is owed retroactive
payments, some states report all retroactive PUA claims during the week the individual received their
payment.
The good news in all of this
is
Congress's passage of the sweeping $1.9 trillion relief and recovery package. It is both providing crucial support to millions
of working families and setting the stage for a robust recovery. One big concern, however, is that the bill's
UI
provisions
are
set to expire the first week in September, when, even in the best–case scenario, they will still be needed. By then, Congress
needs to have put in place long-run UI reforms that include automatic triggers based on economic conditions.
"... freedom is material: a human being must be free from material privation, here and now, in life (and not in the mythical afterlife of reincarnation) in order to be really free. In other words, freedom from need is true freedom. ..."
Marx's concept of freedom is completely different from the liberal or pre-liberal concepts
of freedom. For Marx, freedom is material: a human being must be free from material
privation, here and now, in life (and not in the mythical afterlife of reincarnation) in
order to be really free. In other words, freedom from need is true freedom.
Human beings can only be materially free. Don't fall for the moral victories of
liberalism, the snake oil salesmen's promise of a spot in Paradise from the Abrahamics or the
nihilist bullshittery from the Buddhists et al.
Excellent point by vk here. Despite sometimes pretending to myself that I am a Buddhist (I
am really good at meditating!), real freedom is being free from need. Abstract and
metaphysical "freedoms" are luxuries of the wealthy that few under the thumb of the
empire can afford.
I have been surprised by the explosion in the numbers of people locally living in cars and
vans lately. I guess from my Buddhist perspective they have been freed from the attachment to
a residence. Who could have guessed that capitalism would be such a good teacher of the path
to enlightenment?
It's freedom from Want. The Four Freedoms as articulated by FDR in 1941 were:
1.Freedom of speech
2.Freedom of worship
3.Freedom from want
4.Freedom from fear
Earlier this year on the 80th anniversary of FDR's speech, I wrote a series of comments on
the topic. They remain the four main tasks needing to be accomplished for the Common Man to
be genuinely free. At the time, they were to be the main goals of WW2; goals that were
further articulated by Henry Wallace in 1942 & '43 in his speeches and writings.
Currently, several nations have accomplished those four goals; none of them is a
NATO/Neoliberal nation however.
Contrary to the previous immigrants - who were economic immigrants (not religious
immigrants, as the official history of the USA states) - the post-war immigrants to the USA
are all political immigrants. They're the remnants of South Vietnam, Kuomintang, South Korea,
Mensheviks, Refuseniks, Zionism, Batista's Cuba, Latin American comprador elites. I remember
that once Hugo Chávez or the then president of Ecuador claimed that in Florida alone
were more than 2,000 wanted people (most of them compradores and generals) enjoying political
refugee status.
The only exception to the rule are the Mexican immigrants and some Central American
immigrants (El Salvador, Guatemala in some cases), which had their economies dollarized or
devastated by the advent of NAFTA, and were by chance close to the USA's territory.
"... By Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Subjects of recent books include basic income, rentier capitalism and the growing precariat. He is a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Open Democracy . ..."
"... the precariat was evolving as a class-in-the-making. ..."
"... we should interpret what Karl Polanyi was to call the Great Transformation as beginning with a period of dis-embeddedness, when the old social formation with its specific systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution was being dismantled mainly by the interests of financial capital, guided by an ideology of laissez-faire liberalism ..."
"... "For the proletariat, the norm was and is to be in a stable job. There is nothing labourists love more than to have as many people as possible in jobs. They romanticise being in a job, promising Full Employment, and quietly resorting to workfare. They conveniently forget that being in a job is being in a position of subordination and fail to recall Marx's depiction of labour in jobs as 'active alienation'." ..."
"... Though for most of the 1848-1945 period, its not really true. The proletariat of Capital and Condition of the Working Class in England had an existence as precarious as today's precariat. Indeed, this was one of the things driving the growing militance. There was little in the way of a consumer goods industry selling to proletarians because until quite late in the 19th century the entire wages of all but the skilled and fortunate went for subsistence. ..."
"... A side note: my understanding is that classical Marxism's worry about the lumpenproletariat, aka a "reactionary mass," was based on the observation that their services could be bought to form King and Country mobs to attack working class organizations, along with serving as pogrom foot soldiers. Part of that function was superseded by the formation of regular armies of domestic occupation, aka the police. ..."
"... By complicating basic class analysis with an elaborate class structure, with the revolution to be led by a minority of young, educated 'progressive' precariats, he may be setting the stage for fragmentation of the Left, and further massive losses for workers. ..."
"... being drawn into platform capitalism, as 'concierge' or cloud taskers, controlled and manipulated by apps and other labour brokers. Above all, they are being gradually habituated to precariatisation, told to put up with a norm of unstable task-driven bits-and-pieces existence. ..."
"... That passage called to mind the increasing use by universities of adjunct faculty positions, which are the very definition of precarious. In recent days the was a report of the dismissal of tenured faculty by a college in New York State, whose name escapes me. ..."
"... I could see the 'Go Fund Me' phenomena for Medical (or just groceries, etc) costs in this thought:(my bold) ..."
"... Those characteristics are bad enough. But it is the distinctive relations to the state that most define the precariat. The precariat are denizens rather than citizens, meaning that they are losing or not gaining the rights and entitlements of citizens . Above all, they are reduced to being supplicants, dependent on the discretionary benevolence of landlords, employers, parents, charities and strangers, showing them pity. ..."
"... The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic, celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat. It isn't difficult to romanticize the power and the potential of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or Right) political elite ..."
"... Open Democracy is a Soros organ. Which immediately brings to mind the aspect of our precarious position that the author does not address or even allude to: the nexus of financial, media and paramilitary power that is the "Deep State" or the Spook Apparat if you will. ..."
"... Much of what Standing refers to as the Precariat is basically just the Proletariat yet again. ..."
"... Now that I know it's an Open Democracy piece, I suppose that it's meant to soften the blow of prolonged, steep unemployment and to desensitize people to the pain of "doing more with less" (as the tippytopp rakes it in) by calling it an Arts & Leisure Society. ..."
"... I must agree with DJG, Reality Czar's and others similar take. The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic, celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat. It isn't difficult to romanticize the power and the potential of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or Right) political elite, and when you are a (most likely well paid) participant in the current political system, by working closely with the leadership of one of the bigger old political parties while holding positions that come with stable income if not fungible prestige ["Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)]. ..."
"... "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped" ..."
"... "The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing." ..."
"... "When the credit ran out, the game stopped" ..."
"... Revolt of the Public ..."
"... Can't Get You Outta My Head ..."
"... Charter for the Precariat ..."
"... "The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers." ..."
"... "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." ..."
"... "The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community" ..."
"... The labourers had before 25 The landlords 25 And the capitalists 50 .. 100 ..."
"... Framing Corbyn's election defeat as a failure to understand the needs of the "Labour" electorate, and hence supporting Standing's premise, whilst totally ignoring the fact that Corbyn was hammered by the powers of the right, BBC, MSM, Israel etc etc is totally disingenuous and seems to me to be a case of very sour grapes. ..."
Lambert here: A dense treatment of a subject of burning concern.
By Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences,
and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Subjects of recent books include basic income,
rentier capitalism and the growing precariat. He is a council member of the Progressive Economy Forum.
Originally published at Open Democracy .
Transformations tend to go through several preliminary phases. In Britain, the 'dis-embedded' phase in the development of industrial
capitalism involved the Speenhamland system launched in 1795, the mass enclosures that created a proto-proletariat, and disruption
by a technological revolution. All this prompted a period of primitive rebels – those who know what they are against, but not agreed
on what they are for – in which protests were mainly against the breakdown of the previous social compact.
Those included the days-of-rage phase that culminated in the mass protest in Peterloo in 1819, brutally suppressed by the state,
and the Luddites, misrepresented ever since as being workers intent on smashing machines to halt 'progress', when in fact what they
were doing was protesting at the destruction of a way of living and working being done without a quid pro quo.
In my A Precariat Charter
written in 2014, sketching a precariat manifesto for today's Global Transformation, I concluded by citing the stanza from Shelley's
The Masque of Anarchy
, written in reaction to the Peterloo massacre. Jeremy Corbyn was later to cite it in his campaign speech of 2017, which James Schneider
recalls in his contribution
to this debate . Shelley expressed it in class, not populist terms, as I did, in my case signifying that the precariat was
evolving as a class-in-the-making. Corbyn seems to have expressed it in support of a left populism.
Until his drowning at an early age, Shelley along with Byron and other artists of that era, including Mozart, were railing against
the bourgeoisie, which is why Mozart and Byron were both drawn to the Don Juan/Don Giovanni theme. The Romantics failed to arrest
the march of industrial capitalism but their art put out a marker for the future counter movement.
The UK and 'Decent Labour'
The trouble was that at the time the emerging mass 'working class', the proletariat, had not yet taken shape as a class-for-itself,
and was not ready to do so until late in the century. Three other primitive rebel events should be read into the narrative – the
pink revolutions of 1848, often called the Springtime of the Peoples, wrongly seen by some at the time as presaging the proletarian
revolution, the brave prolonged activities of the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s, which advanced the cause of political democracy
despite defeat, and the upheavals in the 1890s that the left have tended to underplay.
The latter marked an enormous historical error by 'the left'. It is why the term 'dangerous class' was in the sub-title of my
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
, published in early 2011. Although some Marxists have used it to describe the 'lumpen proletariat', the term 'dangerous class' was
used in the nineteenth century to describe those who were in neither the bourgeoisie nor the emerging proletariat. They were the
craftsmen, artisans, street traders and artists, from whose ranks came the leading figures articulating a version of socialism as
rejection of labourism – freedom from labour, freedom to work and to leisure (reviving ideas of ancient Greece, embracing schole
).
In the 1890s, against William Morris and colleagues, including some anarchists, who championed that emancipatory vision, were
the labourists, state socialists, Fabians and others who wanted to generalise decent labour. By the turn of the twentieth century,
the latter had triumphed and marched forward in labour unions, social democratic parties and Leninism, even though most of the first
batch of Labour MPs in 1906, when asked by an enterprising journalist what book had most influenced them, mentioned John Ruskin's
Unto This Last , not anything by Karl Marx.
So, we should interpret what Karl Polanyi was to call the Great Transformation as beginning with a period of dis-embeddedness,
when the old social formation with its specific systems of regulation, social protection and redistribution was being dismantled
mainly by the interests of financial capital, guided by an ideology of laissez-faire liberalism .
This produced growing structural insecurities, inequalities, stress, precarity, technological disruption, debt and ecological
destruction, culminating in an era of war, pandemics – most relevantly, the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, which may have killed 50 million
people – and the Great Depression.
... ... ...
...Donald Trump epitomised the rentiers; he used anti-establishment rhetoric but jealously preserved and advanced the interests
of the rent-seeking plutocracy. He never followed a neo-liberal economic agenda. He stood for mercantilism in foreign economic strategy
and for rentiers eager to plunder the commons domestically, while pursuing a pluto-populist fiscal policy. It is better to see his
era in Gramscian terms, a malignancy of a class-based system in deepening if not terminal crisis.
"For the proletariat, the norm was and is to be in a stable job. There is nothing labourists love more than to have as many
people as possible in jobs. They romanticise being in a job, promising Full Employment, and quietly resorting to workfare. They
conveniently forget that being in a job is being in a position of subordination and fail to recall Marx's depiction of labour
in jobs as 'active alienation'."
Yep, large scale wage-slavery is not something to be embraced but something to be abolished.
Indeed, per the Bible, wage-slavery was the EXCEPTION, not the rule, for Hebrews in ancient Israel with roughly equal ownership
of the means of production being the rule. Yet this was NOT communism since the means of production were individually owned, and
not by the State, which didn't even exist for 400 years or so.
So accepting wage-slavery as some kind of norm is to concede way too much, Biblically speaking.
An "eved" in the Hebrew bible is not really the same thing as a wage slave. The first time slavery is discussed in the Book
of the Covenant following the Ten Commandments in Exodus, the only limitation is 7 years. There was no requirement to pay the
slave anything. This is modified in the "Second Law" in Deuteronomy where the master is required to pay the slave some compensation
upon the end of the 7 years, but not before. And these "eveds" were only the Hebrew slaves. Foreigners (goys) were slaves for
life, but since neither Israel nor Judah won many wars, there were probably never that many foreign slaves anyway.
I'm using "wage-slavery" in the more general sense that if one does not own assets (impossible for a Hebrew in Israel/Judah
for more than 49 years (cf. Leviticus 25)) then one was de facto either a beggar or forced to live as a scavenger in the wilderness
OR forced to work for wages.
As for foreign "permanent slaves", this is in conflict with no Hebrew OR CONVERT(?) could be held for more than 6 years as
a well-treated indentured servant to be released, well provisioned, in the 7th year. So "permanent slavery" of foreigners was
plausibly, imo, a conversion strategy (see Deuteronomy 23:3-7).
Not that the Old Testament is authoritative for Christians since the New Testament but can't we do at least as well wrt economic
justice?
Though for most of the 1848-1945 period, its not really true. The proletariat of Capital and Condition of the Working Class
in England had an existence as precarious as today's precariat. Indeed, this was one of the things driving the growing militance.
There was little in the way of a consumer goods industry selling to proletarians because until quite late in the 19th century
the entire wages of all but the skilled and fortunate went for subsistence.
And until after the changes beginning with the New
Deal and consolidated in the war and postwar years, the end of a job meant the end of income, period.
One take would be that he underplays the interrelationship of class identity, class aspirations, and class struggle. This comes
out most clearly when he makes it seem as though mid-20th c social democracy lost a vision of the future through negligence, rather
than running up against resistance from capital that was gradually getting its ideological act together after the fascist period.
Strong class identity was contingent on a number of things, but one was maintaining labor militancy, MacAlevey's "strike muscle,"
and that became increasingly difficult, and not just because labor movement leadership went for business unionism.
The same applies to the present. The author seems hesitant to define what a Labor Vision should be now, and oscillates between
UBI and other ideas without directly discussing the intensity of resistance from capital that different programs would set off.
He might at least roll in Kalecki, as we so often do here, and with good reason. UBI will bring a very different response compared
to demands that threaten to supplant capital's control of investment decisions, the sphere of "management prerogative." And so
the author seems to be advocating fresh thinking without directly addressing what stands in its way, both the real threat of intensified
class conflict and how that has been "internalized" in various ways over the last 50 or so years.
A side note: my understanding is that classical Marxism's worry about the lumpenproletariat, aka a "reactionary mass," was
based on the observation that their services could be bought to form King and Country mobs to attack working class organizations,
along with serving as pogrom foot soldiers. Part of that function was superseded by the formation of regular armies of domestic
occupation, aka the police.
There is much substance here but it seems that Standing ignores the elephant in the room -- the role that the age of limits (resource,
environmental/climate change, economic/financial ) plays in the emergence of an era of rentier capitalism.
He says: "Reinventing the future, in class terms, has always been the primary task of 'the left'." But he is quick to condemn
"phoney dualism of crude populism of 'the people' versus 'the elite'".
By complicating basic class analysis with an elaborate
class structure, with the revolution to be led by a minority of young, educated 'progressive' precariats, he may be setting the
stage for fragmentation of the Left, and further massive losses for workers.
being drawn into platform capitalism, as 'concierge' or cloud taskers, controlled and manipulated by apps and other labour
brokers. Above all, they are being gradually habituated to precariatisation, told to put up with a norm of unstable task-driven
bits-and-pieces existence.
This is a great framing of the hoped for (by the technologists)labor contract
That passage called to mind the increasing use by universities of adjunct faculty positions, which are the very definition
of precarious. In recent days the was a report of the dismissal of tenured faculty by a college in New York State, whose name
escapes me.
Proposition 22(?) in California epitomizes precarity.
Quit a lot to think on here, and presented pretty clearly.
De-stranding is a part of understanding (and understanding being part of good progress)
I could see the 'Go Fund Me' phenomena for Medical (or just groceries, etc) costs in this thought:(my bold)
Those characteristics are bad enough. But it is the distinctive relations to the state that most define the precariat. The
precariat are denizens rather than citizens, meaning that they are losing or not gaining the rights and entitlements of citizens
. Above all, they are reduced to being supplicants, dependent on the discretionary benevolence of landlords, employers, parents,
charities and strangers, showing them pity.
Much of this essay seems like a good diagnosis, although, after a certain point, I began to mistrust the foundations of the
analysis. And there is this: "So when it came to framing a Precariat Charter, it seemed appropriate to take as a guiding principle
the adage of Aristotle that only the insecure man is free. That means we must not be stuck in the old sense of security, even
though it is a human need to enjoy basic security."
The author is fudging. Aristotle was writing about a stratified society in which there were many slaves (and, yes, Mediterranean
slavery was different from the Anglo-American version). The ideal was the life of leisure (scholē), which was a kind of contemplation
of how to act (but untroubled by having to work, which is a distraction). The "insecure" man was either Diogenes (who was unique)
or a prosperous citizen with property.
We simply don't live in that kind of society. Yet the author keeps making the mistake of describing "labourists" and their
supposedly antiquated ideas about unions and the organization of the workplace as all wet.
Current labor unrest in the U S of A indicates otherwise. Further, I happened to listened to some deeper analysis of the recent
events at Smith College, and the NYTimes writer, Powell, pointed out how much unions shape attitudes (including eliminating racism),
offer real protections, and teach the value of concerted action.
People like Standing, because of his position in society, can be blithe about being precarious. It is indeed a "philosophical"
issue for them. Yet the current Draghi government in Italy has several members who want to remove labor protections and make more
Italians precarious. Everyone will live the glory of being a U.S. style at-will employee. Hmmm. I wonder why this project still
goes on among the powerful.
The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic, celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat.
It isn't difficult to romanticize the power and the potential of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and
your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or Right) political elite, and when you are a (most likely well paid)
participant in the current political system, by working closely with the leadership of one of the largest old political parties,
while holding positions that come with stable income if not fungible prestige ["Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University
of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network
(BIEN)].
The author acknowledges that a simplistic, not multidimensional understanding of class is pseudo-Marxist; why not then
go back to the original texts and review the writings of Marx, Engels, Gramsci et al in order to update the concept of class,
perhaps broadening what being "working class" means today?
Why not trying to organize the workers, those who are precariat and
those who aren't, around the goal of "reinventing the future in class terms", as he puts it?
How will the precariat advance its
own sociopolitical goals now (as "a class-in-the-making") and later (as "a class-for-itself)"? Will it be capable of exerting
any pressure and of promote real transformations without unions and without political parties?
The default arrangement for human intercourse is some sort of feudalism. Regardless of best intended efforts to midwife a kinder
gentler world, some sort of feudal hierarchic death-wish inheres in all social efforts. It seems woven into our humanity.
Aboriginal hunter gatherers have managed to maintain a continuous non-feudal culture, even now, for approximately 50,000 years.
Perhaps the precariat are heading that way?
Agreeing with Heelbiter, feudal hierarchies only emerge when there's a surplus that can be stolen, which tempts people with
power (strongmen + sycophants) to keep it for themselves. Remove either the surplus or the agreement to steal, it's not at all
universal.
Surplus also creates lasting valuable institutions which create huge social good (like Universities, Court systems, School
systems, Regulatory oversight of the private sector, etc.).
Naked Capitalism commentators don't have a concept of hierarchical nature of talents which humans have. Meaning, there are
super producer humans in any field of human endeavor: sports, music, arts, mathematics, sciences, film stars, singers, painters,
etc.
Why would you not expect super producer humans in economic realm (business world)?
The talent spectrum is very wide and desire and ability to take risks for a possible "first mover advantage in business" that
some humans go after.
Even luck (right place at the right time) requires the ability, desire and eye to recognize talents in other humans to create
a high powered team which creates truly outsized results.
Talents of some humans is thousands of times the talents of more average humans.
Our job (democracy's job) is to get the most out of them. And I don't mean tax them a lot. I mean channel their energies in
such a way through appropriate rules (laws) so they contribute outsized social good.
And yet in actual, existing polities for as long as records have been kept, there's a tendency for those with "thousand times
the talents" to make off with all the surplus. Leading to, "The default arrangement for human intercourse is some sort of feudalism.
Regardless of best intended efforts to midwife a kinder gentler world, some sort of feudal hierarchic death-wish inheres in all
social efforts. It seems woven into our humanity."
It appears to be the structural force of "surplus" that engages our social heuristics into self defeating and brutal heirarchies.
I'm with HH & FS that the track record of egalitarianism is a great deal longer than that of material heirarchy and hasn't anywhere
threatened the ecosystems on which all life depends.
Not saying we can get out of our exploitative and self destructive rut, but that this condition is no more essential to our
nature than egalitarianism.
Your super producers "talent" is making money, not producing things or goods, and right behind all of your "there are super
producer humans in any field of human endeavor: sports, music, arts, mathematics, sciences, film stars, singers, painters, etc."
all are the face of a machine in the background with some unknowable tech tracking selling data collecting those are your actual
producers but that isn't good pr, we're great at tracking people, we produce surveillance and sell people things they don't need
and support disintegrating institutions in order to undermine your quote here
"Surplus also creates lasting valuable institutions which create huge social good (like Universities, Court systems, School systems,
Regulatory oversight of the private sector, etc.)."
All of these things are being disintegrated for the benefit of your "super producer" BS as we speak. Maybe it's not the NC
commentariat that has an understanding problem.
I think as far as the religious " concept of hierarchical nature of talents " I think the essential workers proved who they
are over the pandemic, they're the ones who had to face risk, grocery workers, garbage collectors etc I doubt these people are
very high up in your hierarchy.
"If human capital theory someday becomes the fly on the power-theory-of-income elephant, it would signal not only a scientific
revolution, but also a social one. I doubt I'll live to see it happen. And if I do, I have no idea what type of society would
emerge from the other side."
Open Democracy is a Soros organ. Which immediately brings to mind the aspect of our precarious position that the author
does not address or even allude to: the nexus of financial, media and paramilitary power that is the "Deep State" or the Spook
Apparat if you will.
Having a token whack at 'atavist' populism is just 'Basket of Deplorables' put another way. The author is deeply tied to the
technocratic set and the slant is clear enough. The constant manipulation through fear-based stochastic 'war' efforts: War on
Terror, War on COVID. Always some empty and obviously fake rallying point. UBI sounds like a sensible solution if we lived in
the Jetsons future the Great Reset promises. But Klaus Schwab is no Bucky Fuller. Gates, Soros and Schwab are just investors.
Investors with the power to manipulate the markets. Heads they win. Tails you lose.
To them, a guy like Trump is just the last echo of the Industrial age and the installation of a senile grifter the triumph
of the technocracy, shielded by the CIA and MI5/6. These spy organizations were always private companies.
CIA was built by Wall Street and British Intelligence is an arm of the British monarchy and has never been accountable to the
public. A realignment is definitely taking place. Behind the curtain. Challenging the old guard is the nexus of more openly private
intelligence organizations like that of Erik Prince and computer oligarchs like Thiel and Mercer. This is exactly who put Trump
over.
Good summary of the evolution and status quo of liberalism. Liberalism being capitalism. And capitalism being profit. So there's
a conundrum: The "strange death of populism" does not equate with some strange death of survival. Survival is always with us.
There were atavists seeking out remote caves even during the agricultural revolution. Maybe even George Soros' ancient ancestors;
the stone age bond vigilantes.
The underlying argument here by Standing seems to be for a Basic Income. Which is OK, but maybe ahead of its time. A jobs guarantee
is a better option because there is so much work to be done that can be done best by humans it's just that none of them are profit
making. That's the problem with all this political (aka economic) analysis. Because, for one thing, who is gonna clean the latrines?
Yes, of course robots are. So then who is gonna arbitrage the robots? Who is monitoring the protection of the environment for
fraud and graft? All of that will be necessary to ensure nobody is profiteering and polluting in a non-capitalist world. Labor
was actually the best defense against rampant profiteering, because it was labor that was always exploited, so what will replace
it? We should stick with a jobs guarantee for now. A better analysis at this point in time is not how do we live with the ruins
of neoliberalism, but how do we live, equitably, without profit? It will take a while to figure that out. Clearly we'll live by
fiat, but it will have to be controlled as well. I'd just say that if the Precariat is condescendingly guaranteed a "basic income"
so should the rest of society be. That controls everyone. And protects the environment, and stays focused on all the things that
are now imperative.
Good investment and growth are definable as whatever investment and growth would remain if all artificial stimulants by the
government and economists were removed. The ordinary liberal is usually several steps removed from real life. That is how he can
be so foolish.
He is almost always either wealthy, or academic, or artistic, or political, or in some other way has escaped from the need
to do productive work for a living.
It's just really weird seeing a 'left' site conflate 'populism' with 'rightism'. As in, "representing the economically hurting
bottom of 50-90% of voters is bad (because the poor, the struggling working class, and the precarious middle class peoples are
obviously morally suspect – or so saith the economic elites. / heh)." No. That's the elite's take on populism. It isn't the populists'
history and political stance. It's almost like reading the elite's dictating what the bottom 50% economic polity must agree to.
(As if the top 50% (or 1%) don't have an economic interest in guiding the bottom 50%'s away from their own economic interest.
/heh )
I didn't get that, maybe I'll re-read when I have a minute.
What I got was dissaggregating the struggling class into groups with common experience and history resulting in what the author
called "reactionary" and I think you are calling 'rightism'.
The basic message I got was the left can no more restore that past than can the right and when it tries it ends up bolstering
the right by accident.
Much of what Standing refers to as the Precariat is basically just the Proletariat yet again. But coming to the fore
in a period resembling the Victorian era in terms of security more than it resembles the short-lived triumphal period of postwar
welfare state, Keynesian, social democratic capitalism.
I think he wants to expand the definitions of work and "productivity," maybe challenging the labor theory of value, etc. This
piece reminded me of David Graeber in that respect.
Now that I know it's an Open Democracy piece, I suppose that it's meant to soften the blow of prolonged, steep unemployment
and to desensitize people to the pain of "doing more with less" (as the tippytopp rakes it in) by calling it an Arts & Leisure
Society. UBI is a lubricant for privatization, although I did notice and appreciate Standing's mention of the commons.
I must agree with DJG, Reality Czar's and others similar take. The writer of this article seems to be very optimistic,
celebratory even when it comes to the insecurity of the precariat. It isn't difficult to romanticize the power and the potential
of people suffering extreme insecurity when your employment and your social status are linked to the privileges of the (Left or
Right) political elite, and when you are a (most likely well paid) participant in the current political system, by working closely
with the leadership of one of the bigger old political parties while holding positions that come with stable income if not fungible
prestige ["Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder
and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)].
The author acknowledges that a simplistic, not multidimensional understanding of class is pseudo-Marxist; why not then go back
to the original texts and review the writings of Marx, Engels, Gramsci et al in order to update the concept of class, perhaps
broadening what being "working class" means today? Why not trying to organize the workers, those who are precariat and those who
aren't, around the goal of "reinventing the future in class terms", as he puts it? Will the precariat succeed in advancing its
sociopolitical goals as a class ("a class-in-the-making" or "a class-for-itself") outside of organized structures like unions
and political parties (not necessarily the existing, often compromised ones)?
What has happened to inequality? Pretty much what you would expect really.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics did to the US economy
in the 1920s. "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth. This
served then as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves
the kind of effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital accumulation in new plants. In
consequence as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the
game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at the top. A few people have all the money and
everyone else gets by on debt. Wealth concentrates until the system collapses.
What could they do? Keynes added some redistribution to stop all the wealth concentrating at the top, and developed nations
formed a strong healthy middle class.
The neoliberals removed the redistribution. With the capital accumulation of neoclassical economics wealth concentrates at
the top. A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt. Wealth concentrates until the system collapses.
"The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing." Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48
Your wages aren't high enough, have a Payday loan.
You need a house, have a sub-prime mortgage.
You need a car, have a sub-prime auto loan.
You need a good education, have a student loan.
Still not getting by? Load up on credit cards. "When the credit ran out, the game stopped" Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48
Oh yes, I remember now, it was Keynesian capitalism that won the battle against Russian communism. The Americans could clearly
demonstrate the average American was much better off than their Russian counterparts.
Today's opioid addicted specimens might have struggled.
The arc of progress isn't supposed to look like a U-turn. You are supposed to keep moving forwards. After the Keynesian era
we went back to what had preceded it.
After a few decades of Keynesian, demand side economics, the system became supply side constrained. Too much demand and not
enough supply causes inflation. Neoclassical, supply side economics should be just the ticket to get things moving again. It does,
but it's got the same problems it's always had.
I found this article massively interesting and relevant, especially at the same time that I'm trying to process Martin Gurri's
Revolt of the Public and Adam Curtis' new documentary Can't Get You Outta My Head . My take is that all of them
are professing a sort of political realism that is opposed to what they identify as magical thinking on the left, and that's how
I take Standing's critique of left populism.
But more importantly, I want to share a few other related resources that I found as I was digging into this more. First, Standing
has a few TED talks, and this one from 2016 helped me to understand
this article better.
Also, Standing's Charter for the Precariat (linked differently in the article) is currently available on Bloomsbury
open access, so you can actually
download chapter
pdfs of it for free with no login.
Mankind first started to produce a surplus with early agriculture. It wasn't long before the elites learnt how to read the
skies, the sun and the stars, to predict the coming seasons to the amazed masses and collect tribute.
They soon made the most of the opportunity and removed themselves from any hard work to concentrate on "spiritual matters",
i.e. any hocus-pocus they could come up with to elevate them from the masses, e.g. rituals, fertility rights, offering to the
gods . etc and to turn the initially small tributes, into extracting all the surplus created by the hard work of the rest.
The elites became the representatives of the gods and they were responsible for the bounty of the earth and the harvests. As
long as all the surplus was handed over, all would be well.
The class structure emerges.
Upper class – Do as little as they can get away with and get most of the rewards
Middle class – Administrative/managerial class who have enough to live a comfortable life
Working class – Do the work, and live a basic subsistence existence where they get enough to stay alive and breed
Their techniques have got more sophisticated over time, but this is the underlying idea. They have achieved an inversion, and
got most of the rewards going to those that don't really do anything.
Everything had worked well for 5,000 years as no one knew what was really going on. The last thing they needed was "The Enlightenment"
as people would work out what was really going on. They did work out what was going on and this had to be hidden again.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard
work of everyone else. They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss it. The Classical
economist, Adam Smith:
"The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury.
The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions
from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But
every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they died. They had to earn money to live.
The classical economists could never imagine those at the bottom rising out of a bare subsistence existence as that was the way
it had always been.
The classical economists identified the constructive "earned" income and the parasitic "unearned" income. Most of the people
at the top lived off the parasitic "unearned" income and they now had a big problem. (Upper class – Do as little as they can get
away with and get most of the rewards)
This problem was solved with neoclassical economics, which hides this distinction. It confuses making money and creating wealth
so all rich people look good. If you know what real wealth creation is, you will realise many at the top don't create any wealth.
Can you believe Adam Smith said this?
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the
masters of mankind."
The classical economists, Adam Smith and Ricardo, are not what you might expect.
We got some stuff from Ricardo, like the law of comparative advantage. What's gone missing? Ricardo was part of the new
capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through
wages.
"The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community" Ricardo
1815 / Classical Economist
What does our man on free trade, Ricardo, mean?
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Employees get their money from wages and the employers pay the cost of living through wages, reducing profit.
Employees get less disposable income after the landlords rent has gone.
Employers have to cover the landlord's rents in wages reducing profit.
Ricardo is just talking about housing costs, employees all rented in those days.
Low housing costs work best for employers and employees.
In Ricardo's world there were three classes. He was in the capitalist class. The more he paid in labour costs (wages) the lower
his profits would be. He was paying the cost of living for his workers through wages, and the higher that was, the higher labour
costs would be. There was no benefits system in those days and those at the bottom needed to earn money to cover the cost of living
otherwise they would die. They had to earn their money through wages. The more he paid in rents to the old landowning class, the
less there would be for him to keep for himself.
From Ricardo: The labourers had before 25
The landlords 25
And the capitalists 50
.. 100
He looked at how the pie got divided between the three groups.
There were three groups in the capitalist system in Ricardo's world (and there still are).
Workers / Employees
Capitalists / Employers
Rentiers / Landowners / Landlords / other skimmers, who are just skimming out of the system, not contributing to its success
The unproductive group exists at the top of society, not the bottom. Later on we did bolt on a benefit system to help others
that were struggling lower down the scale. Classical economics, it's not what you think.
William White (BIS, OECD) talks about how economics really changed over one hundred years ago as classical economics was replaced
by neoclassical economics.
He thinks we have been on the wrong path for one hundred years. Small state, unregulated capitalism was where it all started
and it's rather different to today's expectations.
Framing Corbyn's election defeat as a failure to understand the needs of the "Labour" electorate, and hence supporting
Standing's premise, whilst totally ignoring the fact that Corbyn was hammered by the powers of the right, BBC, MSM, Israel etc
etc is totally disingenuous and seems to me to be a case of very sour grapes.
The fact that the basic income was not implemented doesn't mean much given that there are many on all sides of the debate who
do not agree with the idea. I think Standing is just pissed off because no one listened to him.
What the proponents of the neo-liberal dispensation have not advertised, if indeed they
even know, is what replaces the 'nation?'
What replaces a nation is often referred to as a "colony", where most of the inhabitants are
no longer "citizens" but "natives" who can be exploited at will.
American unions pathetic, absolutely pathetic! We have been hearing this very same winging
from them for 50 years. Then they, universally, go out and support the glad handing
politicians who do a few rounds of golf with the their bosses and a few more jobs are lost.
Mention to them that maybe they would have a bit more job security if owned their factories
and work places, and watch the smoke start to rise from their collective heads. A hundred
years ago you could have sat in a bar, discussed workers owning the means of production and
the beers would have kept magically appearing in front of you. We are a long, long way from
Flint.
The limited successes of the old trade unions in the US have been their undoing. If only
because they always had, and continue to have, limited vision. They all think that they have
scored major victories if they squeeze another dime out of the bosses. According to this
union VP "We're at the mercy of whoever is supplying us." The guy is an idiot. He and
his cohort are at the mercy of their bosses, and they will always be at the mercy of their
bosses until they become their own bosses. Pathetic!
I thought Mr. Conway's connection of domestic manufacturing with war and imperialism,
a.k.a. 'national security', was pretty obvious. 'War is the health of the state.' However, I
suppose one might say that the American state now includes Japan. God, yes, we need more and
more 'airplanes, munitions, satellites, civilian jetliners' and so on, and more reasons to
keep armies in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and also so on, till the end of the world.
Well yes, but the opposite also applies. If you have a self sufficient economy you don't
have to get involved in wars on the other side of the planet because that's where "your"
energy, raw materials, finance, food, key manufactured goods etc come from. The US did not
have to get involved in either WW1 or WW2 for economic reasons, it was nearly self sufficient
at that time. That is not the case today, hence the fore-ever wars in the middle east, and
military bases scattered as confetti around the globe. Did America have to globalise its
economy? No, but the wind fall profits (initially) that could be reaped from doing so could
not be resisted by America's elites. The problem now is that America's economy has now been
so gutted that it cannot function without globalisation, which will bankrupt it further.
However look on the bright side, America's elites have never been so despised and hate in
their history. And nobody expects them to change, because they have not changed for 50 years.
People are now figuring out that they have to change things themselves. Expect fireworks.
Michael Hudson (of course!) has the first and last word on this. The general principle at
work here is that U.S. industry and jobs must be off-shored so Wall Street and Washington
politicians can create more debt – IOW keep Super (monetary) Imperialism going.
The US is the world's leader in manufacturing DEBT not the wealth that really matters in
today's world.
Yes. Regrettably, the article above is whistling past the graveyard, and I too thought of
Hudson's analysis and shook my head as I read it.
If money is created as credit -- and it is -- and every notional dollar of credit has an
obverse side of debt -- and it does -- then for the U.S. to be the Richest Country In The
World™ and have an elite with so many multibillionaires, there must be debt on the the
other side of all those notional dollars the elite have created for themselves.
You might familiarize yourself with how the national government funds its spending. It
creates new dollars every time it pays a bill. No debt required. So why do we have all this
public debt if it was unnecessary to begin with? It lines the pockets of the One Percent who
buy the safest bonds in the world to insure their immense fortunes. It's a subsidy. The rich
have the best socialism in the world. Right here in the USA.
This issue has very little if any relationship to "how the national government funds its
spending" or any of the other nominally 'conservative' debt bugbears. Those "safest bonds in
the world" would not insure squat if US debt wasn't backed by the US military and threats to
bomb any country that refuses to accept more of it back into the stone age. As Minsky wrote
"Any (economic) unit can create money. The problem is getting it accepted."
The world is being destroyed environmentally as well as militarily because the world's one
percent can think of no better alternative than allowing the US to continue creating debt,
destruction and death so they can – as Trump put it – "keep score" with each
other in the game to see who can accumulate the most unpayable debt.
To paraphrase Woody Allen (or somebody) the US is allowed to continue creating debt
because the world's One Percent needs the money to continue playing their game.
The jobs picture overall has been improving with
379,000 workers added in February , although the U.S. economy still has almost 10 million
fewer jobs than it did before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Economists have been revising
their employment and GDP forecasts are higher.
Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, for example, wrote in a report this week that
the jobless
rate would fall to 4.1% by the end of 2021, from 6.2% last month.
Hyams has been seeing similar encouraging signs on Indeed, with postings on the site already
lapping where they were pre-pandemic. "On Indeed, when we look at new job postings and our
benchmark pre-pandemic of February 1, 2020, at the end of this February we were up 5%
year-over-year. That's still with entire sectors completely shut down," he said.
As for where the hottest demand lies for new jobs, Hyams pointed to e-commerce-related
occupations including logistics, warehousing and delivery, as well as jobs in health care and
pharmacy.
While some of those openings may require showing up regularly in-person, many will not,
which again feeds into Hyams' thesis that interviews will remain virtual.
"If you're going to be a remote worker, interviewing over video actually makes a whole lot
more sense. It's more convenient. It will cut down on travel," he said.
That means many interviewees can continue to pull their blazers and ties out of the closet
-- along with their sweatpants.
Remember job interviews pre-pandemic? The jitters, the choosing of just the right suit, the
race to get there early, maybe even the drive across town or flight across the country for a
shot at a new opportunity?
Like most everything else, the pandemic changed that dynamic. The jitters may remain, but
in-person meetings are largely off the table, interviews among them. The CEO of one of the
most-trafficked jobs websites says it's likely to stay that way even after people get back to
the office.
"People being able to conduct an interview from the safety and convenience of their own
home is going to change hiring forever," said Chris Hyams, Indeed CEO, in an interview with
Yahoo Finance Live. "We believe this is the beginning of a massive secular shift."
"In April, we saw the number of requests for interviews to happen over video shoot up by
1,000%. Even as things have started to stabilize and the economy has opened up over the last 11
months, we've seen that continue to grow," Hyams said.
The jobs picture overall has been improving with
379,000 workers added in February , although the U.S. economy still has almost 10 million
fewer jobs than it did before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Economists have been
revising their employment and GDP forecasts are higher. Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan
Hatzius, for example, wrote in a report this week that the
jobless rate would fall to 4.1% by the end of 2021, from 6.2% last month.
Hyams has been seeing similar encouraging signs on Indeed, with postings on the site
already lapping where they were pre-pandemic. "On Indeed, when we look at new job postings
and our benchmark pre-pandemic of February 1, 2020, at the end of this February we were up 5%
year-over-year. That's still with entire sectors completely shut down," he said.
As for where the hottest demand lies for new jobs, Hyams pointed to e-commerce-related
occupations including logistics, warehousing and delivery, as well as jobs in health care and
pharmacy.
While some of those openings may require showing up regularly in-person, many will not,
which again feeds into Hyams' thesis that interviews will remain virtual.
"If you're going to be a remote worker, interviewing over video actually makes a whole lot
more sense. It's more convenient. It will cut down on travel," he said.
That means many interviewees can continue to pull their blazers and ties out of the closet
-- along with their sweatpants.
Don't you know that whining about race, from the racist or the anti-racist side, doesn't
matter, is more important than billionaires fucking us over. It's more important than
anything. It doesn't matter if we die of freezer burn sleeping on cardboard after we've been
laid-off, evicted, and starved. It doesn't matter if we die in a nuclear war that the
billionaires started because they think it would be a good idea.
Nope. All that matters is whining about race. That's the most important thing. All else is
trivial.
Didn't American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is "grotesquely
and manifestly incompetent" and they were likely to expect "a massive coronavirus outbreak
in China would never spread back to America".
The crucial factor here is that the US is not a nation per the most basic definition of
the word, "a group of people born of a common ancestry". Consequently, as illustrated by
job-killing "trade deals" and in countless other ways, there are plenty of "Americans" who
don't care a whit about the fate of Americans. That makes it entirely plausible that the Deep
State and/or one or more billionaires would release a virus in China in the full expectation
that it would hit the US and that once here it would disrupt, impoverish, and kill millions
of Americans. This was a win-win for them. The Deep State and the billionaires don't like
China, which is a non-liberal country and curtails their power by restricting the use of US
tech products. So if somehow the virus were contained in China it would be okay with them, as
it just would be a smaller win. However, what they really wanted was for the virus circle
back to the US. They knew that once here the disruption it would cause would further enrich
and empower them while giving them a pretext to dump it all on Donald Trump, whom they would
accuse of being incompetent and uncaring.
While full of good insights, the problem with this article as far as COVID is concerned is
that it misleads on the main point. COVID is not biowarfare, it is not a pandemic, it's just
the flu. The US recorded the same death rate in 2020 as in previous years and, as Dr. Colleen
Huber has documented, medical oxygen and supply sales were no different from previous
years.
All those COVID-19 deaths were simply deaths of a different name. Of course, we knew from
last March's Diamond Princess cruise–still by far the best controlled COVID
"experiment"–that the case-fatality rate of COVID-19 for the general public is in the
flu range.
But, it never was about COVID-19, which is just a glorified coronavirus of the type seen
even before the dawn of humans. Long before the virus even hit the streets, the media and
governments and medical establishments had secretly planned to to create a "panic-demic" to
scare people into a whole lot of strange and dangerous behaviors–like giving up their
liberties and economic futures. COVID-19 is just a medical nothing-burger that convinced a
lot of otherwise sane people to scare themselves into oblivion. Or did it? If the
post-election analyses are correct, Trump won in a major landslide and even those who voted
against him were already suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. So, maybe the people
weren't fooled by COVID so much as electorally raped by the vast elite cabal.
Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a
conspiracy theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this
mantra.
Maye both Washington and Beijing are guilty -- of a perpetrating a hoax.
Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the
manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets.
Moreover, he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world.
The next strong man we elect must be an actual STRONG man. I salute Trump for his genius
in identifying the real majority in this country and for forcing the techno-oligarchs into
overdoing their election steal. Now we need someone who is willing to establish real
authority on behalf of the un-queer.
"The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that for more than two years, Amazon didn't pass
on tips to drivers, even though it promised shoppers and drivers it would do so.
The FTC said Amazon didn't stop taking the money until 2019, when the company found out
about the FTC's investigation . The drivers were part of Amazon's Flex business, which started
in 2015 and allows people to pick up and deliver Amazon packages with their own cars. The
drivers are independent workers, and are not Amazon employees.
The FTC said Amazon at first promised workers that they would be paid $18 to $25 per hour,
and also said they would receive 100% of tips left to them by customers on the app
.
But in 2016, the FTC said Amazon started paying drivers a lower hourly rate and used the
tips to make up the difference. Amazon didn't disclose the change to drivers, the FTC said, and
the tips it took from drivers amounted to $61.7 billion."
And a "team" at Amazon reprogrammed the app to steal tips. Managers, programmers,
testers, documentation specialists, accountants, database wizards, etc. Nobody said a word. All
corrupt to the bone. "Learn to code!"
he Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50
trillion from the middle and working classes. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has
been siphoned from labor and the lower 90% of the workforce to the New Nobility and their
technocrat lackeys who own the vast majority of the capital: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018
.
Why has the Great American Middle Class meekly accepted their new role as debt-serfs and
powerless peasants in a Neofeudal Economy ruled by the New Nobility of Big Tech / monopolies /
cartels / financiers? The basic answer is the New Nobility's PR has been so persuasive and
ubiquitous: soaring inequality and Neofeudalism has nothing to do with us, it's just the
natural result of technology and globalization--forces nobody can resist. Sorry about your
debt-serfdom, but hey, your student loan payment is overdue, so it's the rack for you.
The recent Foreign Affairs article referenced here last week Monopoly
Versus Democracy (paywalled) describes the net result of the economic propaganda that the
stripmining of the working and middle classes was ordained and irresistible: Today, Americans
tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. That's how far we've
fallen:
"As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book
Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People , the
robber barons shared with today's high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to
see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and
technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is
that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded
Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back
then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for
a fair and democratic society." (emphasis added)
The bottom 90% of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized : debt has been substituted for
capital . Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits
from the rising tide of debt that's been keeping the bottom 90% afloat for the past 20
years.
As I've often observed here, globalization and financialization have richly rewarded the top
0.1% and the top 5% technocrat class that serves the New Nobility's interests. Everyone else
has been been reduced to debt-serfs and peasants who now rely on lotteries and luck to get
ahead: playing the stock market casino or hoping their mortgaged house in an urban sprawl on
the Left or Right coasts doubles in value, even as the entire value proposition for living in a
congested urban sprawl vanishes.
America has no plan to reverse this destructive tide of Neofeudal Pillage. Our leadership's
"plan" is benign neglect : just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses (the technocrat
term is Universal Basic Income UBI) to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban
and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the New Nobility's pillaging of
America and the planet.
There's a lot of bright and shiny PR about rebuilding infrastructure and the Green New Deal,
but our first question must always be: cui bono , to whose benefit? How much of the spending
will actually be devoted to changing the rising imbalances between the haves and the have-nots,
the ever-richer who profit from rising debt and the ever more decapitalized debt-serfs who are
further impoverished by rising debt?
As I explain in my book
A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet , people don't want to
just get by on UBI , they want an opportunity to acquire capital in all its forms, an
opportunity to contribute to their communities, to make a difference, to earn respect and
pride.
That our "leadership" reckons bread and circuses is what the stripmined bottom 90% want is
beyond pathetic. The middle class has meekly accepted the self-serving claim of the New
Nobility that the $50 trillion transfer of wealth was inevitable and beyond human intervention.
But once the stock market and housing casinos collapse, the last bridge to getting
ahead--high-risk gambling-- will fall into the abyss, and the middle class will have to face
their servitude and powerlessness.
That's how Neofeudal systems collapse: the tax donkeys and debt-serfs finally revolt and
start demanding the $50 trillion river of capital take a new course.
In the last month or so, they have stopped even trying to hide that:
1) the internet is rigged (free speech only for those who say what is approved
narrative),
2) elections are rigged (they openly admit that "all elections have fraud," and the
defending point is that there isn't enough fraud to change the result, or so they say without
investigation);
3) the government is rigged (lots of debate about whether to send a few bucks to people
forced out of work by COVID restrictions, no debate needed on how much to give banks and
defense contractors); and now
4) the markets are rigged (if you figure out a way to beat Wall Street, we simply change
the rules).
Most Americans already knew these things, but felt vaguely conspiratorial in thinking so.
TPTB no longer care what we think or what we know. They are taking down the curtains. They
own this place and if we don't like it and even talk about doing something about it, then
they will label you a terrorist and it's off to Gitmo with you.
Dear Old Hedge 2 hours ago
"That's how Neofeudal systems collapse: the tax donkeys and debt-serfs finally rebel and
start demanding the $50 trillion river of capital take a new course."
Most of the middle class is now run by .Gov employees who are members of big unions. They
will never revolt - they got it to good. Most are Feminazi's who vote Demshevik. &
DFL.
The image above is really their cross and angry husbands who are now powerless.
LetThemEatRand 4 hours ago (Edited)
By design, and the classic model of feudalism. It's why places like present day China or
North Korea have such a huge military and government sector. It's why the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia gives just enough to its citizens that they are comfortable. It's why Rome held
together for as long as it did. Many other examples. Feudalism is the natural order of things
according to history. We have been living through an anomaly that TPTB intend to fix.
NoDebt 3 hours ago
globalization and financialization have richly rewarded the top 0.1% and the top 5%
technocrat class that serves the New Nobility's interests
Like I've said before, "Small number of rich, large number of poor and just enough middle
class to service the rich. As most societies have been throughout most of human history. The
20th century in the US was the anomaly, not the norm."
sgt_doom 1 hour ago remove link
ROFL --- pressure "elected officials" from rigged elections!
You funny . . . .
Whenwas the last time an electsd official responded to me?
Oh yeah, Sen. Canteell about 14 years ago say that she would continue to support the
offshoring of the American medica industry along with the Gates Foundation.
SDShack 13 minutes ago
I've been saying it for YEARS here. New Feudal World Order has been the design all along.
People are finally starting to understand. The solution was always Drone Davos.
chunga 4 hours ago
The battle between capital and labor has been a complete wipeout, made possible by
mountains of pure, solid fraud.
daveO 4 hours ago
It was benign neglect 30 years ago! It's been active destruction since China's admittance
into the WTO with the help of the Clintons.
Mamachief 3 hours ago
David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.
When Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller met with Zhou Enlai in China in 1973 -- just
after President Richard Nixon had visited China establishing official relations -- an
understanding was reached whereby the U.S. would supply industrial capital and know-how to
China.
BEMUSED-CONFUSED 1 hour ago
And Nixon never realized that he sold out the US.
George Bayou 4 hours ago
Why has the Great American Middle Class meekly accepted their new role as debt-serfs and
powerless peasants in a Neofeudal Economy ruled by the New Nobility of Big Tech /
monopolies / cartels / financiers?
I'll tell you why, people don't realize what goes on behind the scenes because they are so
far removed from it and the big corps and politicians keep it that way.
If you don't know you're getting screwed, then you can't fight it.
austinmilbarge 4 hours ago
Most US citizens are debt slaves. Miss one paycheck and it's lights out. They don't have
time to keep up with how Wall Street cheats.
My Days Are Getting Fewer 2 hours ago
I used to subscribe to the author. No longer do so. Charles, stop writing and get a job or
invest in a business.
The headline is false. The Middle Class will not revolt. And, as a group, it no longer
exists.
I am baffled by the understanding that there are no super-rich people, who give a damn
about the destruction of their Country. My grandchildren and their kids will never enjoy the
fundamental freedoms that I knew growing up in high school in the 1950s and maturing in the
1960s through 2000.
In the last 20 years, everything, that was held sacred in this Country, has been uprooted.
Fraud rules, with decency be damned.
I got more than enough money and 30 more years at best.
Money is not a substitute for freedom.
Only hopeless persons will undertake corrective action.
Cloud9.5 3 hours ago
The middle class works for government. They are cops, teachers, code enforcement officers,
judges. The list goes on and on. The entrepreneur middle class has been put out of
business.
Wayne 2 hours ago
Dear Charles,
I am in the smallest room in the house. Your clickbait book promo is in front of me. Soon,
it shall be behind me.
A few words of advice, if I may (and even if I may not, I'm going to anyhow):
Do not use words you found in a thesaurus in book titles.
teleology
[ˌtelēˈäləjē,
ˌtēlēˈäləjē]
NOUN
philosophy
the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated
causes.
theology
the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.
Just makes you look like a pompous, officious, condescending ***.
Oh, that's right, you are.
Like Klaus Schwaub's little treatise, COVID-19 The Great Reset , your book is probably not
wroth reading and should not have been written. There is such a thing in this world as
masturbating, but you and Klaus should stroke your little peenees to **** instead of stroking
your egos with the English language.
Nobody actually needs to know what you think about anything. You could make the world a
better place by driving an Uber, growing guavas, or praying.
Thanks for playing, but the pleas for you to stop are growing louder.
"... By Casey Mulligan, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago and former Chief Economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Originally published at VoxEU ..."
"... The spread of COVID-19 in the US has prompted extraordinary steps by individuals and institutions to limit infections. Some worry that 'the cure is worse than the disease' and these measures may lead to an increase in deaths of despair. Using data from the US, this column estimates how many non-COVID-19 excess deaths have occurred during the pandemic. Mortality in 2020 significantly exceeds the total of official COVID-19 deaths and a normal number of deaths from other causes. Certain characteristics suggest the excess are deaths of despair. Social isolation may be part of the mechanism that turns a pandemic into a wave of deaths of despair; further studies are needed to show if that is the case and how. ..."
Yves here. While this paper does a good job of compiling and analyzing data about Covid
deaths and excess mortality, and speculating about deaths of despair, I find one of its
assumptions to be odd. It sees Covid-related deaths of despair as mainly the result of
isolation. In the US, I would hazard that economic desperation is likely a significant factor.
Think of the people who had successful or at least viable service businesses: hair stylists,
personal trainers, caterers, conference organizers. One friend had a very successful business
training and rehabbing pro and Olympic athletes. They've gone from pretty to very well situated
to frantic about how they will get by.
While Mulligan does mention loss of income in passing in the end, it seems the more
devastating but harder to measure damage is loss of livelihood, thinking that your way of
earning a living might never come back to anything dimly approaching the old normal. Another
catastrophic loss would be the possibility of winding up homeless, particularly for those who'd
never faced that risk before.
By Casey Mulligan, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago and former Chief
Economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Originally published at VoxEU
The spread of COVID-19 in the US has prompted extraordinary steps by individuals and
institutions to limit infections. Some worry that 'the cure is worse than the disease' and
these measures may lead to an increase in deaths of despair. Using data from the US, this
column estimates how many non-COVID-19 excess deaths have occurred during the pandemic.
Mortality in 2020 significantly exceeds the total of official COVID-19 deaths and a normal
number of deaths from other causes. Certain characteristics suggest the excess are deaths of
despair. Social isolation may be part of the mechanism that turns a pandemic into a wave of
deaths of despair; further studies are needed to show if that is the case and how.
The spread of COVID-19 in the US has prompted extraordinary, although often untested, steps
by individuals and institutions to limit infections. Some have worried that 'the cure is worse
than the disease'. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton mocked such worries as a "pet theory
about the fatal dangers of quarantine". They concluded in the summer of 2020 that "a wave of
deaths of despair is highly unlikely" because, they said, the duration of a pandemic is
measured in months whereas the underlying causes of drug abuse and suicide take many years to
accumulate (Case and Deaton 2020). With the extraordinary social distancing continuing and
mortality data accumulating, now is a good time to estimate the number of deaths of despair and
their incidence.
As a theoretical matter, I am not confident that demand and supply conditions were even
approximately constant as the country went into a pandemic recession. Take the demand and
supply for non-medical opioid use, which before 2020 accounted for the majority of deaths of
despair. 1 I acknowledge that the correlation between opioid fatalities and the
unemployment rate has been only weakly positive (Council of Economic Advisers February 2020,
Ruhm 2019). However, in previous recessions, the income of the unemployed and the nation
generally fell.
In this recession, personal income increased record amounts while the majority of the
unemployed received more income than they did when they were working (Congressional Budget
Office 2020). 2 Whereas alcohol and drug abuse can occur in isolation, many normal,
non-lethal consumption opportunities disappeared as the population socially distanced. Patients
suffering pain may have less access to physical therapy during a pandemic.
On the supply side, social distancing may affect the production of safety. 3 A
person who overdoses on opioids has a better chance of survival if the overdose event is
observed contemporaneously by a person nearby who can administer treatment or call paramedics.
4 Socially distanced physicians may be more willing to grant opioid prescriptions
over the phone rather than insist on an office visit. Although supply interruptions on the
southern border may raise the price of heroin and fentanyl, the market may respond by mixing
heroin with more fentanyl and other additives that make each consumption episode more dangerous
(Mulligan 2020a, Wan and Long 2020).
Mortality is part of the full price of opioid consumption and therefore a breakdown in
safety production may by itself reduce the quantity consumed but nonetheless increase mortality
per capita as long as the demand for opioids is price inelastic. I emphasise that these
theoretical hypotheses about opioid markets in 2020 are not yet tested empirically. My point is
that mortality measurement is needed because the potential for extraordinary changes is
real.
The Multiple Cause of Death Files (National Center for Health Statistics 1999–2018)
contain information from all death certificates in the US and would be especially valuable for
measuring causes of mortality in 2020. However, the public 2020 edition of those files is not
expected until early 2022. For the time being, my recent study (Mulligan 2020b) used the
2015–2018 files to project the normal number of 2020 deaths, absent a pandemic.
'Excess deaths' are defined to be actual deaths minus projected deaths. Included in the
projections, and therefore excluded from excess deaths, are some year-over-year increases in
drug overdoses because they had been trending up in recent years, especially among working-age
men, as illicit fentanyl diffused across the country.
I measure actual COVID-19 deaths and deaths from all causes from a Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) file for 2020 that begins in week five (the week beginning 26
January 2020) and aggregates to week, sex, and eleven age groups. To minimise underreporting, I
only use the data in this file through week 40 (the week ending 3 October). In separate
analyses, I also use medical examiner data from Cook County, Illinois, and San Diego County,
California, which indicate deaths handled by those offices through September (Cook) or June
2020 (San Diego) and whether opioids were involved, and 12-month moving sums of drug overdoses
reported by CDC (2020) through May 2020.
Mortality in 2020 significantly exceeds what would have occurred if official COVID-19 deaths
were combined with a normal number of deaths from other causes. The demographic and time
patterns of the non-COVID-19 excess deaths (NCEDs) point to deaths of despair rather than an
undercount of COVID-19 deaths. The flow of NCEDs increased steadily from March to June and then
plateaued. They were disproportionately experienced by working-age men, including men as young
as 15 to 24. The chart below, reproduced from Mulligan (2020b), shows these results for men
aged 15–54. To compare the weekly timing of their excess deaths to a weekly measure of
economic conditions, Figure 1 also includes continued state unemployment claims scaled by a
factor of 25,000, shown together with deaths.
Figure 1 2020 weekly excess deaths by cause (men aged 15–54)
NCEDs are negative for elderly people before March 2020, as they were during the same time
of 2019, due to mild flu seasons. Offsetting these negative NCEDs are about 30,000 positive
NCEDs for the rest of the year, after accounting for an estimated 17,000 undercount of COVID-19
deaths in March and April.
If deaths of despair were the only causes of death with significant net contributions to
NCEDs after February, 30,000 NCEDs would represent at least a 45% increase in deaths of despair
from 2018, which itself was high by historical standards. At the same time, I cannot rule out
the possibility that other non-COVID-19 causes of death or even a bit of COVID-19 undercounting
(beyond my estimates) are contributing to the NCED totals.
One federal and various local measures of mortality from opioid overdose also point to
mortality rates during the pandemic that exceed those of late 2019 and early 2020, which
themselves exceed the rates for 2017 and 2018. These sources are not precise enough to indicate
whether rates of fatal opioid overdose during the pandemic were 10% above the rates from
before, 60% above, or somewhere in between.
Presumably, social isolation is part of the mechanism that turns a pandemic into a wave of
deaths of despair. However, the results so far do not say how many, if any, come from
government stay-at-home orders versus various actions individual households and private
businesses have taken to encourage social distancing. The data in this paper do not reveal how
many deaths of despair are due to changes in 'demand' – such as changes in a person's
income, outlook, or employment situation – versus changes in 'supply' – such as the
production of safety and a changing composition of dangerous recreational substances.
I agree with Yves's counter-argument though I must declare an interest, having done work
on quality of life for 20 years and hope I'm not breaking site rules (given recent reminders
about what is and isn't ok).
The excess deaths (particularly among men) certainly to me seems more consistent with a
collapse in one's ability to do the "valued things in life" and prioritise (to SOME extent)
economic outcomes over relationships. After all, the old trope that men cope less well than
women with retirement is found in happiness, quality of life and other such data.
Whether or not one agrees with me, surely a test as to whether the authors or Yves has the
better explanation for the excess deaths would involve looking at well-being and mortality of
men who retire earlier than they'd like vs that of those whose spouse died earlier than
expected (including the proper control groups).
It would be interesting to find out the following:
1. Did the states with the most generous unemployment benefits (like MA or NJ) have fewer
deaths of despair that the states with much stingier benefits?
2. Did the states which imposed various shutdowns (mainly blue states) have more deaths of
despair than the states which stayed open, like SD or Florida?
My guess is that deaths of despair are too idiosyncratic to blame on Covid lockdowns, but
I am not an expert at all about this.
They could also look for the link with 0% interest on people's saved money and seeing no
f..ing end in sight as the beatings continue. Going down to zero does not make the people
jolly.
It used to be only men who would upon meeting another man, where the first question is
likely 'What do you do for a living?', but with the advent of as many women working, probably
appropriate there too.
Nobody ever asks firstly what your hobby is or what sports team you follow, as the job
query tells you everything about the person in one fell swoop.
There's a lot of people whose jobs were kind of everything in their lives, who had never
gone without work ever, that are now chronically unemployed.
Anybody who has studied suicide readily appreciates that the act is impulsive. Case &
Deaton are probably correct in the limited sense of economic despair derived from
transitioning away from fossil fuels and industrial production to jobs requiring education
unreachable to middle-aged coal miners. However, those deaths were likely derived from easy
access to opioids. Most of those job losses led workers to make disability claims (achy
backs) to extend income. The treatment for achy back is pain killers – oxy-something or
other back then. Those same pills killed the pain of failure. Over time, addiction set in
and, according to Koob & LeMoal's 2008 addiction model, increased consumption becomes
necessary to stay pain-free. Physicians would surely not up dosages indefinitely and that put
addicts on the street literally. All that took time to evolve. But times have changed. Using
your family doc to get you high is no longer an option. So, Mulligan makes sense.
As an internist with boots on the ground – I cannot express enough gratitude that
these kinds of reports are getting out.
As busy as I have been this past year with COVID, the actual patients struggling with
anxiety and depression have just dwarved the actual COVID numbers.
I cannot even begin to tell you the heartbreak of being a provider and having 20-40 year
old young men in your office crying their eyes out. Lots of job loss, lots of income issues,
lots of not being able to pay for things for your kids. All the while being completely unable
to find other work or extra work. It is truly a nightmare for these people. And the attitude
by so many of the lockdown Karens who seem to have no conception of how this is all going
down for these young people has been deeply worrisome to me.
It is really not getting better – if anything slowly getting worse.
I would agree with the article above that loneliness is a problem – this is for the
minority – mainly older people and should not be dismissed.
Loneliness is not the big problem however, in my experience. The big problem is the
economic despair for our young people and the complete loss of socialization for our
teenagers and kids.
Yves here. Sundaram discusses how the obsession with metrics, a long standing favorite topic
of ours (see Management's Great Addiction )
produces policies that give short shrift to the poor and poor countries. One of the big
fallacies is treating money as the measure of the value and quality of life. For instance,
reducing the instance of cancer is worth more in rich countries because their lives are valued
more highly in these models. Similarly, they often fall back on unitary measures like lifespan,
and so don't capture outcomes like diets heavy in low nutrient foods (think simple sugars)
producing higher rates of non-communicable diseases and hence less healthy citizens
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant
Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for
Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at his website
Current development fads fetishize data, ostensibly for 'evidence-based policy-making': if
not measured, it will not matter. So, forget about getting financial resources for your work,
programmes and projects, no matter how beneficial, significant or desperately needed.
Measure for Measure
Agencies, funds, programmes and others lobby and fight for attention by showcasing their own
policy agendas, ostensible achievements and potential. Many believe that the more indicators
they get endorsed by the 'international community', the more financial support they can expect
to secure.
Collecting enough national data to properly monitor progress on the Sustainable Development
Goals
is expensive. Data collection costs, typically borne by the countries themselves, have been
estimated at minimally over three times total official development assistance (ODA).
Remember aid declined after the US-Soviet Cold War, and again following the 2008-9 global
financial crisis. More recently, much more ODA is
earmarked to 'support' private investments from donor countries.
With data demands growing, more pressure to measure has led to either over- or under-stating
both problems and progress, sometimes with no dishonest intent. 'Errors' can easily be
explained away as statistics from poor countries are notoriously unreliable.
Political, bureaucratic and funding considerations limit the willingness to admit that
reported data are suspect for fear this may reflect poorly on those responsible. And once
baseline statistics have been established, similar considerations compel subsequent
'consistency' or 'conformity' in reporting.
And when problems have to be acknowledged, 'double-speak' may be the result. Organisations
may then start reporting some statistics to the public, with other data used, typically
confidentially, for 'in-house' operational purposes.
Money, Money, Money
Economists generally prefer and even demand the use of money-metric measures. The rationale
often is that no other meaningful measure is available. Many believe that showing ostensible
costs and benefits is more likely to raise needed funding. Using either exchange rates or
purchasing power parity (PPP) has been much debated. Some advocate even more convenient
measures such as the prices of a standard McDonald's hamburger in different countries.
Money-metrics imply that estimated economic losses due to, say, smoking or non-communicable
diseases ( NCD s), including
obesity, tend to be far greater in richer countries, owing to the much higher incomes lost or
foregone as well as costs incurred.
Development Discourse Changes
The four UN Development Decades after 1960 sought to accelerate economic progress and
improve social wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, for decades, there have been various debates in the
development discourse on measuring progress.
The rise of neoliberal economic thinking, claiming to free markets, has instead mainly
strengthened and extended private property rights. Rejecting Keynesian and development
economics, both associated with state intervention, neoliberalism's influence peaked around the
turn of the century.
The so-called 'Washington Consensus ' of
US federal institutions from the 1980s also involved the Bretton Woods institutions, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both headquartered in the American
capital.
In 2000, the UN Secretariat drafted the Millennium Declaration. This, in turn, became the
basis for the Millennium Development Goals which gave primacy to halving the number of poor.
After all, who would object to reducing poverty. The poor were defined with reference to a
poverty line, somewhat arbitrarily defined by the Bank.
Poverty Fetish
Presuming money income to be a universal yardstick of wellbeing, this poverty
measure has been challenged on various grounds. Most in poorer developing countries sense
that much nuance and variation are lost in such measures, not only for poverty, but also for,
say,
hunger .
Anyone familiar with the varying significance, over time, of cash incomes and prices in most
countries will be uncomfortable with such singular measures. But they are nonetheless much
publicised and have implied continued progress until the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rejection of such singular poverty measures
has led to multi-dimensional poverty indicators, typically to meet 'basic needs'. While such
'dashboard' statistics offer more nuance, the continued desire for a single metric has led to
the development, promotion and popularisation of composite indicators.
Worse, this has been typically accompanied by problematic ranking exercises using such
composite indicators. Many have become obsessed with such ranking, instead of the underlying
socio-economic processes and actual progress.
Blind Neglect
Improving such metrics has thus become an end in itself, with little debate over such
one-dimensional means of measuring progress. The consequent 'tunnel vision' has meant ignoring
other measures and indicators of wellbeing.
In recent decades, instead of subsistence agriculture, cash crops have been promoted. Yet,
all too many children of cash-poor subsistence farmers are nutritionally better fed and
healthier than the offspring of monetarily better off cash crop or 'commercial' farmers.
Meanwhile, as cash incomes rise, those with diet-related NCDs have been growing. While life
expectancy has risen in much of the world, healthy life expectancy has progressed less as ill
health increasingly haunts the sunset years of longer lives.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Meanwhile, as poor countries get limited help in their efforts to adjust to global warming,
rich countries' focus on supporting mitigation efforts has included, inter alia, promoting
'no-till agriculture'. Thus attributing greenhouse gas emissions implies corresponding
mitigation efforts via greater herbicide
use .
Maximising carbon sequestration in unploughed farm topsoil requires more reliance on
typically toxic, if not carcinogenic pesticides, especially herbicides. But addressing global
warming should not be at the expense of sustainable agriculture.
Similarly, imposing global carbon taxation will raise the price of, and reduce access to
electricity for the 'energy-poor', who comprise a fifth of the world's population. Rich
countries subsidising affordable renewable energy for poor countries and people would resolve
this dilemma.
Following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the UN proposed a Global Green New Deal
(GGND) which included such cross-subsidisation by rich countries of sustainable development
progress elsewhere.
The 2009 London G20 summit succeeded in raising more than the trillion dollars targeted. But
the resources mainly went to strengthening the IMF, rather than for the GGND proposal. Thus,
the finance fetish blocked a chance to revive world economic growth, with sustainable
development gains for all.
The globalists found just the economics they were looking for.
The USP of neoclassical economics – It concentrates wealth.
Let's use it for globalisation.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of
neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s. "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion
of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking
purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital
accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by
borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
This is what it's supposed to be like.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
"... No examination of Neoliberalism's utter failure to deliver benefits to the masses while expropriating the wealth they produced for delivery to the class of Financial Parasites. At least the writers at Global Times get it right: ..."
Global
Times reports on an essay published by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (Check it out b or other German barflies) deeming " China's system, although
'authoritarian,' is 'very successful .'" [My Emphasis]
"It explained that as long as a society can reach the following goals - improving social
welfare, increasing consumption choices, safeguarding domestic security, promoting education,
and providing good healthcare - people will support and trust the system even if their
influence in the decision-making process is limited. Such can 'in part ensure the legitimacy'
of the social system....
"But the authors' introspection stopped from digging problems as they tried to shift blame
to the rise of populism in the US."
No examination of Neoliberalism's utter failure to deliver benefits to the masses
while expropriating the wealth they produced for delivery to the class of Financial
Parasites. At least the writers at Global Times get it right:
"Populism, which helped crown Donald Trump, is being blamed today. Yet it all started
from the widening gap between rich and poor. When German scholars use the US populist
government as a scapegoat, they overlooked the real question - without addressing the
growing inequality in a Western system, will there be a second Trump in the future?" [My
Emphasis]
The fatal thrust is delivered in the two closing paragraphs but still omit naming the
actual culprit, which is the ideology of Neoliberalism:
"The article raised the support and trust of people when it comes to judgment over the
legitimacy of a society. In this regard, data speak louder than words. According to a poll
conducted in 2020 by US-based global public relations and marketing consultancy firm Edelman,
95 percent of Chinese trust their government while the US government only saw an approval of
48 percent .
"What other excuses will the Western world have to question the legitimacy of the Chinese
system? If the West, especially the US, the beacon of democracy, actually senses the crisis
and does not wish to lose the competition, it should stop burying its head in the sand." [My
Emphasis]
The problem isn't heads being buried in sand; rather, it's the design of the ideology to
exploit and degrade a nation's masses so they're left with relatively nothing compared to the
nation's Financial Parasites, all so the latter will always have their Free Unearned
Lunch.
"... The last scene in the video shows that the violent protest and takeover was about more than just the election. After trashing media equipment, one man says, "We gotta change it. They fucking abuse us. They laugh at us. They steal our money." ..."
T he U.S. Justice Department has reversed an earlier assertion in court by prosecutors that
protestors who broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 had plans to "capture and assassinate
elected officials."
Instead, the head of the DOJ investigation into the Capitol siege
admitted that federal prosecutors filed a misleading statement before a federal judge in
Arizona that was intended to prevent Jacob Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, from being released on
bail.
The DOJ said that though there were calls to kill officials during the two-hour takeover of
the Capitol, no evidence has been discovered yet to prove any serious effort to carry out such
a plan.
"There is no direct evidence at this point of kill-capture teams and assassination," Michael
Sherwin, the Washington DC federal district attorney running the investigation of the attack,
told reporters, Agence France-Presse reported. Sherwin said it may be "appropriate" to raise it
at trial, but at this point it could "mislead the court."
The original story of intentions to kill officials has entered the media discourse and is
likely to remain a Democratic talking point despite the DOJ reversal. The only major media
outlets that
reported the new story is NBC News and The
Washington Post . It has not appeared in The New York Times or on CNN's
website, for instance.
Having saturated the public with days of lurid tales of intentions to hang Vice President
Mike Pence and abduct House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it will be hard to shake such beliefs without
reporting the DOJ's reversal with the same intensity.
The original statement filed in court said: "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words
and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and
assassinate elected officials of the United States government."
There has been no suggestion that the prosecutors in Arizona who made the false claim are
being investigated for misleading the court.
The 'Coup'
Riot police at Capitol, Jan. 21, 2017 for Trump's inauguration. (Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia
Commons)
The admission dramatically changes the story, repeated as Democratic Party talking points,
and undermines the unquestioned certainty that what took place was an attempted coup against
the United States government. The new DOJ stance might also weaken efforts to charge Capitol
rioters and intruders with "seditious conspiracy" charges for allegedly attempting to overthrow
the government.
Consortium News has been among the few media outlets to
question the coup narrative from the start.
Even if there were such murderous intentions it would not have amounted to a coup attempt
without the backing of the military or paramilitaries, and without taking over the airport and
radio and TV stations. These days it would probably mean taking over social media companies
too. The U.S. government and media structures are vaster and more powerful than just the
legislature.
Even if the protestors had intended and succeeded in hanging Vice President Mike Pence
(presuming the gallows erected outside the Capitol was sturdy enough), and even if they had
taken Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and others hostage would Donald Trump have
said, "Okay, they didn't certify Biden, I'm still president!"?
No branch of government would have supported Trump in that case and the surviving members of
Congress would have met elsewhere to certify Joe Biden as president.
New Video Inside Capitol
Chansley, the far-right, bare-chested activist with fur headdress and Viking horns, became
the symbol of the brief takeover of the Capitol by Trump supporters. He was arrested and faces
a six-count federal indictment,
charged with:
Civil disorder Obstruction of an official proceeding Entering and
remaining in a restricted building Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building
Violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building Parading, demonstrating, or
picketing in a Capitol Building
He is not charged with insurrection or sedition to overthrow the government.
Jacob Chandsley/ Qananon Shaman. (TheUnseen011101/Wikimedia Commons)
In a new video released on Sunday by The New Yorker, Chansley is seen grunting
primordial chants while playing to a photographer a few feet in front of him in a Senate
balcony. Later he seats himself in Pence's Senate chair.
After a single Capitol police officer pleads with the intruders to leave, Chansley leads the
group in prayer and then files out with the others, but not before scrawling on a piece of
paper on Pence's desk: "It's only a matter of time, justice is coming."
Before Chansley sat in it, the video
shows one of the protest leaders, dressed in military gear, demanding that the others not
occupy the vice president's chair. He says: "It's not our chair. I love you brothers, but we
cannot be disrespectful. It's a PR war, okay? You have to understand it's an IO war. We can't
lose the IO war. We're better than that. It's an Information Operation."
The video shows a couple of dozen protestors rifling through senators' desks looking for, in
the words of one, "something we can fucking use against these scumbags" and taking photos of
documents. At one point they thought they found evidence in Senator Ted Cruz's desk that he was
going to betray them on certification, but read further and realized he would not.
The film is interspersed with very violent scenes of police in riot gear trying to prevent
protestors from entering the Capitol.
The last scene in the video shows that the violent protest and takeover was about more
than just the election. After trashing media equipment, one man says, "We gotta change it. They
fucking abuse us. They laugh at us. They steal our money."
As journalist Chris Hedges said last Thursday, one can decry their
politics, the racism among many, and their tactics, but their pain is real in a system that has
shrunk the middle class and debased workers.
What happened at the Capitol cannot be condoned. But unless Congress defies its oligarchic
backers and serves the interests of average Americans, who also fund them, a real insurrection
may be inevitable. Instead of the reforms to defuse that and bring more economic justice, we
are witnessing a crackdown that will only further inflame the country.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief ofConsortium Newsand a former UN
correspondent forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,
and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for theSunday
Timesof London and began his professional career as a stringer forThe
New York Times.He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter
@unjoe .
rosemerry , January 18, 2021 at 13:15
It is interesting that both sides of the House and Senate manage almost all the time to
arrange that other countries they have decided are enemies or rivals have real "coups" and
takeovers helped by the mighty US . Iraq, Syria,Libya,Venezuela are just a few of the recent
examples, but they are not "USA USA" so they do not count.
rosemerry , January 18, 2021 at 13:07
No surprise that the "paper of record" NYT did not bother to mention this legal angle. The
descriptions I have seen in European papers and in the Sycophant aka the Guardian hardly vary
at all and scream the alleged danger to the poor Congress members.
Anne , January 18, 2021 at 14:25
Nor NPR .Indeed they didn't bother to mention the 1954 shootings in the US Capitol (House)
until AFTER the BBC World Service had and then a week later
Tim S. , January 18, 2021 at 12:54
Anyone who has watched the video filmed by the arch-instigator's would-be-journalist
sidekick can see for themselves that these were not even serious rioters, much less coup
plotters, who were surprised as everybody else about being allowed into the Capitol
building.
And despite some toy guns and one man with the slogan on the back of his jacket "God, guns,
and Trump), it is obvious from their panicky reactions when a woman was killed that they felt
deep down that this was all fun and games. She was trying to break down an interior door,
starting with the window, but when an agent inside pointed a pistol at her, she ignored it.
When he finally shot her, they all start yelling "She's been shot!" and react rather like a
bunch of bystanders.
Does that sound like a gang planning to kill some Congressmen and taken others
hostage?
Jonny James , January 18, 2021 at 11:48
Yes, once again the mainstream narrative stinks, and the fresh air is here on CN. That's
why we don't breathe the miasma of the corporate media.
The Divide and Rule strategies of the ruling classes are working nicely. We can't have the
"99%" get together to work against "the interests of Goldman Sachs" (Hedges). That is not
allowed. The rub is that both the so-called right and so-called left work for the interests
of Goldman Sachs.
I remember very clearly how brutally the peaceful Occupy protests were smashed. The
violent cops used armored vehicles and other military equipment, massive amounts of tear gas,
flash-bang grenades, drones, surveillance etc. etc. , Scott Horton was nearly killed by a
tear-gas canister fired directly at his head. You are not allowed to work against the
interests of the real owners of this country. As George Carlin once said, "they own the f-in
place".
Anne , January 18, 2021 at 14:35
I have yet to hear NPR mention anything about the woman who was shot dead (no weapon on
her) let alone who shot and killed her that she was ex-mil (thus trained to invade, destroy,
devastate, slaughter peoples, cultures, societies far, far, from these shores what you train
for and then deploy will eventually come back home and bite
John Drake , January 18, 2021 at 13:37
Agreed, I find the minimizing of this event truly putrid. What is it about an enraged
crowd, chanting "stop the steal" breaking into a building full of legislators , assaulting,
injuring police and scaring the ..t out of said elected legislators that is not an attempt to
overthrow, interfere, interrupt, prevent a key governmental process? This a governmental
process whose outcome they wanted to alter keeping the Orange Menace in power. A flight of
ridiculous fancy, no doubt, but still attitude, behavior and intent count.
Just because it doesn't rise to the level of well known coups orchestrated by
professionals (CIA): Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, Iran and hundreds more; doesn't mean it
doesn't belong in the same family of nasty socio/political events. Can we compromise and call
it a mini attempted coup or maybe mini coup-lite? Anyway the perpetrators and their enablers
need to major consequences; especially those officials that violated their oath of
office.
By 2016 the concept of "liberal democracy," once bright with promise, had dulled into a
neoliberal politics that was neither liberal nor democratic. The Democratic Party's turn toward
market-driven policies, the bipartisan dismantling of the public sphere, the inflight marriage
of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the cockpit of globalization -- these interventions
constituted the long con of neoliberal governance, which enriched a small minority of Americans
while ravaging most of the rest.
Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers,
Editor in Chief of Raritan, and the author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern
America, 1877–1920, among other books. (January 2021)
Democracy is in trouble, and everyone is casting about for someone to blame. Donald Trump's
grotesque incapacity to govern has made him an easy target, but the difficulties with democracy
are subtler, wider, and deeper. One clue to their complexity is a blog post that appeared on
the liberal website Daily Kos a month after Trump's election in 2016. "Be Happy for Coal
Miners Losing Their Health Insurance," the headline blared. "They're Getting Exactly What They
Voted For."
The dismissal is curt and callous: clearly, Trump's victory provoked some of his opponents
to double down on their hostility toward his supporters. But the blog post also shows -- more
broadly -- that being a liberal Democrat no longer means what it once meant. Sympathy for the
working class has, for many, curdled into contempt. By 2016 the concept of "liberal democracy,"
once bright with promise, had dulled into a neoliberal politics that was neither liberal nor
democratic. The Democratic Party's turn toward market-driven policies, the bipartisan
dismantling of the public sphere, the inflight marriage of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in
the cockpit of globalization -- these interventions constituted the long con of neoliberal
governance, which enriched a small minority of Americans while ravaging most of the rest.
In 2020 the Democrats made little attempt to distance themselves from that calamitous
inheritance. As early as 2019, Joe Biden himself made clear to the donor class that "nothing
would fundamentally change" if he were elected and reassured the medical-industrial complex by
dismissing any discussion of single-payer health care. But he has made no substantial attempt
to reassure the millions of Americans who have lost jobs or homes or health care in recent
months. One might never have known, by following his campaign, that the US was facing the most
serious and protracted economic depression since the 1930s. So it should come as no surprise
that Trump maintained his support among rural and less educated voters and even improved it
among African-Americans and Latinos. Despite Trump's bungling, many ordinary Americans may have
sensed indifference if not outright hostility emanating toward them from his Democratic
opponents. And they would not have been mistaken. The Democratic Party leadership has become
estranged from its historic base.
The spectacle of liberals jeering at coal miners reveals seismic changes in our larger
public discourse. The miners were "getting exactly what they voted for" -- exactly what they
deserved, in other words. The belief that people get what they deserve is rooted in the secular
individualist outlook that has legitimated inequality in the United States for centuries, ever
since the Protestant ethic began turning into the spirit of capitalism. Yet visions of a nation
of autonomous strivers always coexisted with older ideals of community and solidarity -- and
those ideals resurfaced in the Great Depression to become the basis, however limited and
imperfect, of midcentury social democracy. During the last four decades, the autonomous
striving self has returned to the center of the success ethic, but featured in a new narrative
that has focused less on plodding diligence and more on talent, brains, and credentialed
expertise.
Biden, Ds, reneging on $2K stimulus promise . Contortionist language is already being
employed by Biden even before he becomes POTUS, which should surprise nobody, and provides
plenty of I told ya so for Red America.
As I previously calculated, much more than $2K is needed to stave off very dire economic
hardship and further deepening of Great Depression 2.0. But for any stimulus to be effective
for small and medium businesses, operating restrictions related to the pandemic need to be
greatly eased; and even then, it's projected that 1/3 of businesses already closed will
remain closed regardless. That reality constitutes a huge blow for small businesses were seen
by many as a way out of the never ending downsizing and offshoring of decent paying jobs.
The current term "globalization" was originated by Ted Levitt in an article in the Harvard
Business Review in the 80s and taken up by the Reaganites to push for offshoring of factories
to countries with fewer workers rights and environmental concerns. He edited the magazine and
was a professor at Harvard Business School. Those "weirdos" who championed the term were the
corporate and financial behemoths that preferred it as a euphemism for "economic
imperialism"
Posted by: NemesisCalling | Jan 4 2021 1:07 utc | 56
Our nation, right now, is on the cusp of a great earthquake which will change its
arrangement so that the interior will not be beholden to the coastal elites much longer,
who have themselves thrown off the mantle of nationhood in favor of the globalist paradigm
which values nihilistic individualism over all.
So, in short, you're describing capitalism. A capitalist economy favors individualism,
profits over morality, and is mostly centered around the idea of private property as
described by John Locke. This worked wonders in the vast uncharted territories of America in
the 18th and 19th century, when the population of the United States was below 20 million and
they needed to compete, FAST, against agressive european civilizations who looked at them
with envy.
Now that they are 332 millions and counting, that their natural resources are slowly
depleting and that other civilizations have adapted to the previously unknown phenomenon of
the American empire, USans are faced with a crisis in all sectors, including faith. How come
a system that worked so well for you these past 300 years suddenly fails? well, not suddenly,
but realizing that took a while.
Oh, I know!! It must be because of all those treacherous businessmen who traded their
souls and their country for a quick buck! but we need to condemn them without condemning the
whole system, and saying "capitalism sucks" makes us sound like Ivan the Red Commie. What a
pickle. Let's call them "globalists"! so we can rally the nationalists as a bonus and say
it's all because of evil foreigners.
On certain sites, it goes as far as calling "globalists" ... communists. Or Chinese. Or
Russian. Sure, why not, everyone needs their Emmanuel Goldstein.
"Globalism" is a funny name some weirdos invented since the first Wall Street crashes
happened to justify the worst excesses of the current capitalist economic system without
pointing the finger at the real culprits. I say it's funny because it looks like nationalist
clickbait for the 2 minutes of hate everyone in the West is prescribed each day in this
hyper-social Internet.
Sad fact is, "globalists" are run-of-the-mill bosses who decided it was better for their
end-of-year bonuses if they outsourced some or all of their production to cheap chinese
companies, and not have to pay US salaries anymore. That's not globalist, that's called
looking to make a profit in the short term.
Tell me a better term than "globalist" for nationals who are titans of industry who
betray their fellow nationals in the labor force by looking outside their own nation?
A term of rather recent vintage is Labour arbitrage that is substituting less
costly labour for higher costing labour. The driving motive for all offshoring or
externalising labour resources from the home marketplace. Walmart made billions doing this as
does Amazon.
I agree with Lemming's position on this. And I think Nemesis Calling is wrong about what
the term "Globalist" implies. If a "nationalist" is someone who's loyal to a nation, then
isn't a "globalist" someone who is loyal to the whole globe? Humanity today has many massive
problems that are extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to deal with on a purely
national basis. Nuclear weapons, global climate change, pandemic diseases, the potential
threats and benefits of real artificial intelligence, the extinction of so many species,
controlling multinational corporations, the threat of mass starvation, global inequality...
these are all problems which seem to many people to need the whole human species, or the
whole globe, working together to address them.
I think the major reason why many capitalists started calling themselves "globalists" back
in the 1980's was because they saw this was an idea which was becoming increasingly popular,
and they wanted to try and coopt it for their own benefit.
The trouble was that the CEO's who decided it would be personally profitable for them to
ship their companies jobs to low wage countries were not "real" globalists. If they had
really understood what the decisions they were making would do to their countries, or even to
the corporations they were responsible to their shareholders for managing, they might be
accused of being frauds or even traitors. But they probably didn't understand, so it's
probably more accurate to just call them parts of a greedy and shortsighted elite, which was
far too arrogant to realize how countries like China would be able to exploit their
shortsighted folly. They thought they were being so clever about their plans to exploit the
Chinese. But the irony is that a major reason why they underestimated the Chinese is that
they didn't understand that the fact that the Chinese were Marxists meant that the Chinese
had a different and in some ways better understanding of how Capitalism worked than they did.
They never dreamed that the Chinese would be able to make Lenin's prediction that capitalists
would sell them the rope they needed to hang capitalism come true.
..The only upshot of the Larry Summers interview is likely to be that maybe a few people
will think that Joe Biden has bad people advising him, and the vast majority will either
dislike Joe because he sucks or because they're Trumpies in their little faux rebellion or they
will believe everything MSNBC et al. tell them about Joe Biden (and thus by extension they'll
believe every word of Summers).
Here's the important lesson, the one that SHOULD be learned: Summers is a NEOLIBERAL. By
this is meant that he is one of that group that believes that the proper role of government is
to create and enforce markets and that ideally all functions of everyone's lives would be
market functions.
The ultimate principle of neoliberalism, as pointed out in Chapter 2 of Kees van der Pijl's
A Survey of
Global Political Economy, is investor "freedom." This principle comes up on page 46 in the
author's discussion of "microeconomics and rational choice theory." After having gone over the
history of mainstream ("marginalist") economics as an "axiomatic" (which really means
faith-based -- if you agree with its principles you might find it interesting) discipline, van
der Pijl gets to neoliberalism. Here's what he says:
Importantly, the neoliberals no longer confine their prescriptions to the economy. They
want economic rationality to be applied to all aspects of society; no organ of the social
body may be allowed to function according to other principles than that of free choice by
rational, self-interested individuals.
Ultimately, as van der Pijl notes in his discussion of Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), the
standard-bearer of neoliberalism, neoliberalism is committed to investor freedom in all spheres
of life. This is on page 48:
The core concept of neoliberalism is the notion of 'competitively determined freedom'.
This concept of freedom is defined from the principle of privately disposable property of the
means of production, secured by political institutions ensuring 'law and order'. Hayek later
specified law and order as the foundations of private property as such, as freedom of
contract and the coercive upholding of contracts (quoted in Walpen, 2004: 114-5).
Thus, if Larry Summers believes in this insane pile of twaddle, why would he want the
government to send out $2000 checks? That wouldn't promote investor freedom.
(The further catch, of course, is that EVERYONE in DC, in Wall Street, and throughout the
ruling elites of the world, believes in this insane pile of twaddle, and they've believed it
for forty years now. So, in the same way in which Donald Trump was not an exceptional case
responsible for the general insanity of last year's politics, Larry Summers is also not an
exceptional case responsible for why you aren't getting $2,000 checks.)
The day after Christmas, the New York Times online ran a piece on the effects of climate
change(
"The Darkest Timeline," by Jonah Engel Bromwich ). It was basically about another paper,
called "Deep Adaptation," which supposedly changed the course of a lot of people's lives.
Bromwich says about the paper that:
The paper's central thought is that we must accept that nothing can reverse humanity's
fate and we must adapt accordingly. And the paper's bleak, vivid details -- emphasizing that
the end is truly nigh, and that it will be gruesome -- clearly resonated.
"When I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life,"
wrote the author, Jem Bendell. "With the power down, soon you wouldn't have water coming out
of your tap. You will depend on your neighbors for food and some warmth. You will become
malnourished. You won't know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed
before starving to death."
But you don't really adapt to climate change doom. You commit suicide in advance of the
event. And it's hard to tell why a scientific paper, and not, say, the
story of Paradise, California , would motivate people to say, geez, there isn't much point
in living in a doomed society, so let's plan in advance. Or here's an alternative path: when
confronted with the doom of the human race and of you, personally, you choose to believe in a
pile of insane twaddle, and you say:
billions for the rich , $600 for a few of the rest. Isn't that what Congress is doing now?
To be sure, this is a sort of side-adventure, meant to contextualize neoliberals as the sort of
people who say "oh boy! Profit!" when confronted with disastrous reality.
At any rate, neoliberalism. There are a bunch of books about neoliberalism. Probably the
best place to start is with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine , published in 2007.
Klein makes clear what the enormous human costs are of neoliberal policy. The neoliberal
method, Klein describes, is simple:
That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster – the coup, the
terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane – puts the
entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror,
the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in
the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of
comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise
fiercely protect. (17)
It's your basic imperialism. David Harvey calls it "accumulation by dispossession"; his
book, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism , offers a good summary. I love the understatement at the
beginning of the Google Books synopsis (linked):
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting
as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout
much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state
powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State
interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for
the welfare of its citizens are diminished.
"... has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world..." Yeah.
That's like saying that European countries conquered much of Africa between 1870 and
1914. Uh-huh. It's good to appear innocuous when writing for publication!
Also meaningful are the writings of the French team of Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy.
They've written a lot on the topic; the place to start would be Capital Resurgent . I haven't
read this book in awhile. If I recall correctly, Dumenil and Levy argue that neoliberalism was
a conscious choice of the elites, and that they could have chosen otherwise. But they didn't,
and so here we are.
Those with an appetite for biting prose might enjoy Philip Mirowski's
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste . Mirowski wants to chastise everyone -- the
neoliberals for their "logic" (beautifully dissected), everyone else for misrecognizing the
neoliberals and for pronouncing neoliberalism to be "dead" when in fact it's more dominant than
ever.
There's an interesting foreign-policy take on neoliberalism in Kees van der Pijl's
Global Rivalries
from the Cold War to Iraq . Ostensibly a history of foreign relations, van der Pijl found
himself obliged to discuss the history of neoliberalism because the history of foreign
relations in the period after 1980 IS the history of neoliberalism.
Richard Cockett's
Thinking the Unthinkable is a good early history of neoliberalism, from before the first
meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society
to its global triumph with Reagan and Thatcher.
All that having been said, it's amazing to find so many people online who think that
"neoliberalism" is some esoteric phenomenon, or neoliberals who don't think they're
neoliberals, or people who think there's no such thing as neoliberalism. You bring up
neoliberalism and they say things like "I don't like labels." If you were to call a tree
"green," would the tree respond by saying "I don't like labels"? We choose names for things
because otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about them in any serious sense.
Let's be clear. Today, "liberalism" might be this warm, fuzzy belief that government ought
to give ordinary people a thing or two in addition to its usual duties of "national defense"
(under the neoliberal regime this means wars for corporate profit) and "economic policy"
(another giveaway to the rich). That's what the term "liberalism" came to mean in the US in the
period after World War II. There's a longer and deeper meaning for the term "liberalism," and
in that meaning it means what Adam Smith advocated, laissez-faire capitalism. The "neo" in
"neoliberalism," to complete the definition, defines a form of liberalism in which it is
viewed, by the neoliberals, as the duty of government to simulate laissez-faire capitalism by
setting up markets and requiring people to participate in them. That's what neoliberalism is;
that explains its NAME.
The classic neoliberal policy was the original "marketplace" function of the Affordable Care
Act. The ACA was created to keep the insurance companies from pricing their product out of the
market; the ACA obliged people to purchase health insurance (which, significantly, they still
wouldn't be able to use in many ways) by setting up a "mandate penalty" in which non-purchasers
would have to pay more in income taxes.
War for profit is a neoliberal initiative. Since the average consumer cannot purchase a war,
the neoliberal government will step in to insure that there remains a market for war. Typically
the wars serve to create enemies, which then sustain the war. Ultimately, what you see with
neoliberal war is phenomena such as what was reported in Syria in 2016, in which militias
funded by the CIA fought those funded by the Pentagon. It's fine as long as it moves
product.
There shouldn't be any confusion, then, about neoliberalism as a ruling-class ideology. It
has a well-defined meaning and plenty of examples to back up the notion that neoliberalism is a
specific notion with specific beliefs, specific believers, specific policies, and a specific
history.
See if you can acquire some Victor Jara -- good listening. And keep up the struggle!
How is Keith McHenry doing these days? (at least we know he's not a neoliberal.) Have you
visited the encampment in San Lorenzo Park of recent?
Edit to add. Great article on Victor Jara. And song!
No human cost was too high to pay to usher in neoliberalism, to eviscerate the gains
that labor had made under Allende's Popular Unity Coalition, and to maintain a steady
flow of cheap copper, fruit and fish to the U.S. under the auspices of "trade
liberalization." The new constitution passed under Pinochet's dictatorship rolled back
the reforms instituted under Allende. It expanded the power of the presidency and
enshrined private property and corporate profits over social needs; Pinochet rolled
back taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and eliminated a host of government
services. State-owned companies, public housing, education, health care, and pensions
were all privatized, turned into profit centers for corporations and the wealthy. The
constitution written under Pinochet limited reforms, and the gap today between rich and
poor in Chile is one of the highest in Latin America.
Jara's version of the song "Venceremos" or "We Will Overcome," became the anthem of
Allende's Popular Unity Coalition, and also figured centrally in eyewitness accounts of
Jara's death.
Puts a lot into perspective.
One could note that "Trickle Down Theory" got neoliberalism's foot in the door. And now
it is fully inside emptying the fridge.
How you can overheat economy that is in permanent stagnation mode (secular stagnation)? This
is nonsense. What Larry is actually afraid of but can't say is the staut of the dollar the world
reserve currency.
You can almost physically sense the level of hate toward "neoliberal scum" in comments
below
Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, director of the National
Economic Council under Barack Obama, president of Harvard, and Chief Economist at the World
Bank, wrote a post-Christmas editorial for Bloomberg entitled, "
Trump's $2000 Stimulus Checks are a Big Mistake ." It's a classic:
Some argue that while $2,000 checks may not be optimal support for the post-Covid economy,
taking stimulus from $600 to $2,000 is better than nothing. They need to ask themselves
whether they would favor $5,000, or $10,000 -- or more. There must be a limiting
principle.
The genesis of this Summers article is a perfect tale in microcosm about how America's
intellectual elite manages to lose elections to people like Donald Trump. It's a two-step
error. First, they put people like Summers in charge of economic policies. Then, they let them
talk in public.
Summers the day before Christmas
appeared on Bloomberg to offer his initial thoughts on why $2000 checks must be bad: he
looked at which politicians were supporting the plan, and worked backward. "When I see a
coalition of Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting behind an idea, I think
that's time to run for cover," he said, adding: "When you see the two extremes agreeing, you
can almost be certain that something crazy is in the air."
Seeing that his comments "lit up the Twittersphere," Summers then sat down to compose an
article doubling down on his reasoning. Essentially, he argued that from an econometric point
of view, we're already overdoing it on the help front. If you were under the impression that
huge numbers of people are living off meals from food banks and/or are at risk in an
eviction
crisis , you were wrong.
Noting that "total employee compensation" is "only running about $30 billion per month
behind the Covid baseline," he insisted that $200 billion more in tax rebates per month over
the next quarter would "equal an additional seven times the loss of household wage and salary
income over the next quarter."
He then showed a graph explaining that "because of the legislation passed in 2020, total
household income has exceeded normal levels relative to the economy's potential more or less
since the pandemic began." The good news, as a result, is that "the existing stimulus bill is
sufficient to elevate household income relative to the economy's potential to abnormally high
levels -- unheard of during an economic downturn."
The whole piece reads like an extended New Yorker cartoon, in which an evictee with empty
pockets is about to dive after a rotten apple core in a dumpster, only to be blocked by a
cauldron-bellied Harvard economist in a $3000 Zegna suit. Caption: " Actually, total household
income relative to the economy's potential sits at abnormally high levels ."
There are of course different positions one could take on the question of stimulus checks,
but the issue with people like Summers is the utter predictability of their stances. Summers
belongs to a club of neoliberal thinkers who've dominated American policy for decades. From Bob
Rubin to Tim Geithner to Jason Furman to Michael Froman and beyond, the people one friend
jokingly refers to as the "Rubino Crime Family" are all basically the same person, affectless
technocrats who play up reputations as giant-brained intellectuals -- I always imagine them
with bulbous Alien Nation heads -- while reveling in cold, hard truths about the limits of
government assistance.
And this by an inbred group of gluttons who couldn't survive without the life they drain
from others...
yerfej 3 hours ago remove link
That is the key "the life they drain from others". I have no issue with those who work
their aysses off keeping their just rewards, but this kind of insider filth needs a
lamppost.
two hoots 1 hour ago
Summers and those of his Jabba class know that uncontrolled Congressional giving could
cause collateral damage to their lifestyles. So does every comfortable class below them. It
all depends where you are positioned. Here on ZH i find people playing all sides of the class
game to whatever suits their current mood of us/them others. The more an event can affect us
directly determines where we direct our dislikes...up or down...inconsistently.
Doom Porn Star 1 hour ago
ALL politicians and 'public servants' who advocateor demand lockdowns and restrictions
should cede ALL pay, benefits and accrual of all retirement or other benefits for the
duration of ANY lockdown or restriction of ANY kind.
Those who advocate or demand sacrificed should make first, fullest largest sacrifices.
The whole lot of fascist 'some animals are better than others' lot should be thrown in
gitmo or equivalent.
The_Dude 3 hours ago (Edited)
Study what Summer's and his (((ilk))) did to pillage post - Soviet Russia and you will
understand who is untouchable in this society... And why in more sophisticated societies,
they were always kept at the periphery where they couldn't harm others.
Larry 'Dinner with Epstein' Summers has put more than his foot in his mouth.
BlueLightning 3 hours ago
O boy he's scared now
sgt_doom 2 hours ago (Edited)
Isn't Larry Summers the chief poster boy of the Global Banking Cartel ever since he
inserted the credit derivatives clause in the WTO's Financial Services Agreement*** making it
acceptable legal tender?
Believe that was during the Clinton Administration.
Is Larry still a lobbyist for the cental bankers? Oh yes, his photo is still there:
***[Credit to Greg Palast for uncovering this item.]
Arising 2.0 2 hours ago (Edited)
Larry is a cabal member who has always been out of touch with the 'silly goy'.
iambrambles 3 hours ago
The real question is why trillions to foreign govs and corporations.
$2000/American is chump change and isnt what anyone should be focusing on.
America never had the right fiscal priorities, people tend to forget the brilliance of the
US was with the constitution that enabled more freedoms than before.
But fiscally, America was always doomed after the absolution of the gold standard and the
creation of the federal reserve which allowed for endless government largesse.
ElTerco 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
"negative consequences of aid to the less fortunate..."
Yet, no mention from Larry of negative consequences of aid to the more fortunate, which,
so far this year, has been around 40x as much money.
ElTerco 2 hours ago (Edited)
The $10+ trillion that has been pumped into the US economy so far has been a firehose to
top earners, while people who lost their jobs got a trickle of runoff as it worked its way
down the street through a very long, crap filled gutter.
Funny how Summers never mentioned *that*.
Max21c 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
"When I see a coalition of Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting behind
an idea, I think that's time to run for cover," he said, adding: "When you see the two
extremes agreeing, you can almost be certain that something crazy is in the air."
Thus is just more elitist nonsense from the silly conventional wisdom of Washingtonians,
elites, and the Democratic Party establishment. Bernie Sanders was a solid and strong and
energetic candidate and he could have had a chance of beating Trump in a free & fair
election had the Party nomination not been fixed and stolen from him by elites and their
puppet press smear campaigns.
Democrats made a mistake in attacking and undermining Bernie Sanders. Since much of what
has transpired this past year has been massive increases in domestic spending and some social
spending. Bernie Sanders could have beat Trump--fair and square--whereas the Crats had to
cheat with Biden and steal the election. Had the Democratic Party not stolen the election
from Sanders it likely Sanders would have had a significant opportunity to beat Trump. Since
Sanders was positioned right/correctly to be competitive in contrast and have some edge with
a significant part of the public on peace, foreign policy, domestic policy, and social
spending agendas. Would have been a tight race with Sanders versus Trump instead of the fraud
and fraudulent election of 2020. Definitely would have been a tossup on balance. Would have
been even harder if Sanders had teamed with Tulsi Gabbard as they would have had a serious
edge in foreign policy. But both Sanders and Gabbard are official pariahs and lepers in the
Democratic Party and its establishment as well as in the Washington establishment. Sanders
had the issues and would have had the momentum to give Trump a serious run for the money had
he not be forced aside in favor of the establishment candidate in a series of rigged
primaries and media smear campaigns and other subterfuge & Machavellian intrigues.
Max21c 1 hour ago (Edited)
I don't have issue with the size of company but do not like state sponsored industry
whereby the state security apparatus heavily favors state industries and state sponsored
industries--and--the secret police community and intelligence community and political class
ensure that the statals/SEO and state backed companies are protected by the state security
apparatus... The government doesn't have any business being used by Washingtonians, JudeoWASP
elites, Ivy Leaguers and their secret police to using military warmaking powers in the secret
police and intelligence community to rob one and redistribute back to state industries and
state sponsored industries and favor elites and their firms using secret police powers...
That's what both the Bolsheviks and Nazis did... It's the banana republoc and police state
and tyranny...
The socialism Bernie was talking about seemed more his advocating for increases in social
spending. The socialism Washington currently practices both openly and secretively &
covertly and illegally through abuses of secret police powers and state secrecy is much more
dangerous than what Bernie was advocating. The current socialist system as practiced by
Washingtonians and their secret police does much more damage to the country. The police state
socialism is much worse than the social spending games.
Bay Area Guy 2 hours ago remove link
LOL. How do you overheat a dead economy? No real growth (inflation adjusted) in at least
20 years; real unemployment at least 12.5% and probably north of 20%; this DESPITE interest
rates at all time lows and likely to go negative. And this fool is talking about overheating
the economy.
Max21c 2 hours ago remove link
If they can handout hundreds of billions to businesses under a questionable government to
business subsidy program that has been previously fraught with fraud, inefficiencies in
timeliness & appropriateness and geographical distribution. Also, such government to biz
programs which shall likely fail to serve both business and the economy effectively both by
practice and natural elements: such as some businesses being located in areas with a more
sophisticated biz culture; and set of skills; as well as access to better educated &
possibly more skillful entrepreneurs and cultures thereof; as well as some firms being simply
better positioned; as well as some firms being more program wise or welfare wise; and still
other firms being better tuned in or connected to the political system and or its
bureaucracy. Given the afore situation the money is better spent on a basis of widely
scattered and unpredictable et uncontrollable and thus not as apt to manipulation as well as
a direct to households holding the advantage of timeliness.
About 4k is about right for the floor/minimum on the basis of 2k in the form of a stimulus
and another matching 2k+ coming from forwarded tax rebates for future years which can be paid
back through payroll deductions or which can be paid back similar to installment loans
monthly or quarterly.
2k shall suffice in the near term as to stimulating consumer spending, consumer
confidence, business confidence, sales & revenues & profits or the improvement in the
outlook of a future return to profitability and the confidence & risks taking that comes
with firms seeking current and future profits and potentially making investments and pursuing
loans and the potential for an earlier uptick in the credit cycle as banks may change their
outlook on lending sooner than they might otherwise.
"... The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America. ..."
"... This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade." ..."
This is awesome, he nails the dilemma which our owners are confronted with;
I'll put it this way: It is not as though the American ruling class is intelligent,
competent, and patriotic on most important matters and happens to have a glaring blind spot
when it comes to appreciating the threat of China. If this were the case, it would make
sense to emphasize the threat of China above all else.
But this is not the case. The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every
issue of significance for the past several decades. If China were to disappear, they would
simply be selling out the country to India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, or some other country
(in fact they are doing this just to a lesser extent).
Our ruling class has failed us on China because they have failed us on everything. For
this reason I believe that there will be no serious, sound policy on China that benefits
Americans until there is a legitimate ruling class in the United States. For this reason
pointing fingers at the wickedness and danger of China is less useful than emphasizing the
failure of the American ruling class. The bottom line is the true enemies of the
American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people
are the people who control America.
This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to
a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep
state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I
have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly
Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by
destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing.
But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling
class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical
competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free
trade."
@102 karlof1 - "By deliberately setting policy to inflate asset prices, the Fed has
priced US labor out of a job, while as you report employers sought labor costs that allowed
them to remain competitive."
I never heard it said so succinctly and truly as this before. That is what happened isn't
it? The worker can't afford life anymore, in this country.
And if the worker can't afford the cost of living - who bears the cause of this, how
follows the remedy of this, and what then comes next?
I really appreciate your point of view, which is the only point of view, which is that the
designers of the economy, the governors of the economy, have placed the workers of the
economy in a position that is simply just not tenable.
No wonder they strive to divide in order to rule - because they have over-reached through
greed and killed the worker, who holds up the society.
How long can the worker flounder around blaming others before the spotlight must turn on
the employer?
You have to remember these people really do think they are better. They do think in class
terms even if they avoid that rhetoric in public. The problem is they thought they could
control China like they did Japan. That was dumb then and it looks even dumber now. You can
see similar dumbness in their lack of grip on any realisitic view of Russia. Provincials
really. Rich peasants.
Thank you, they certainly DO think in class terms ALWAYS. + Rich peasants is perfect
:))
Thankfully they are blinded by hubris at the same time. The USA destroyed the Allende
government in Chile in 1973. After the Nixon Kissinger visit to China in 1979 they assumed
they could just pull a color revolution stunt when they deemed it to be the right time.
Perhaps in their hubris they thought every Chinese worker would be infatuated with capitalism
and growth.
They tested that out in the People Power colour (yellow) revolt in the Filipines in 1986
following a rigged election by Marcos. In 1989 only 16 years after China had been buoyed up
with growth and development following the opening to USA capitalism, they tried out the same
trick in Tienanmen square in China but those students were up against the ruling party of the
entire nation - not the ruling class. BIG MISTAKE. The ruling party of China was solidly
backed by the peasant and working class that was finally enjoying some meager prosperity and
reward a mere 40 years after the Chinese Communist Party and their parents and grandparents
had liberated China from 100 years of occupation, plunder, human and cultural rapine and
colonial insult. Then in 2020 it was tried on again in Hong Kong. FAIL.
The hubris of the ruling class and its running dogs is pathetic.
We see the same with Pelosi and the ruling class in the Dimoratss today. They push Biden
Harris to the fore, piss on the left and refuse to even hold a vote on Medicare for All in
the middle of a pandemic. Meanwhile the USAi ruling class has its running dogs and hangers on
bleating that "its wrong tactic, its premature, its whatever craven excuse to avoid exposing
the ruling class for what they are - thieves, bereft of compassion, absent any sense of
social justice, fakes lurking behind their class supposition.
They come here to the bar with their arrogant hubris, brimming with pointless information
some even with emoji glitter stuck on their noses. Not a marxist or even a leftie among them.
Still its class that matters and its the ruling class that we must break.
@102 karlof1 and Grieved | Dec 19 2020 3:12 utc | 129
I did not understand inflate-assets/suppress-workers and forgot to return to it to clear
it up. Grieved sent me back to Karlof1. I just got it.
That viewpoint indeed explains method of operation to accomplish the results I observed.
When Nixon was forced to default on Bretton Woods use of Gold Exchange Standard* [the USD is
as good as gold], then printing fiat solved the problem [threat to US inventory of
gold]....but printing fiat [no longer redeemable as a promise convert to gold] became the new
problem [no way to extinguish the promises to redeem/pay].
So how to proceed? Aha! Steal from the workers; squeeze 'em, entertain and dazzle 'em!..
Such an elegant solution...slow, certain and hardly noticeable...like slow-boiling frogs...an
on-going project as we blog.
"... Lockdowns as being inherently against the working class is a capitalist (liberal)
falsification: if you pay them while they're kept safe in their homes, you'll have the best
of the two worlds for the working class (being paid without working). This option is only
an anathema for the middle class and the capitalist class - who can't imagine a world
without the proletarians serving them ..."
We all live in an interconnected world and middle class, capitalist class (whatever that's
supposed to mean) and proletarians alike supply goods and services to one another. Money is
the medium that facilitates such exchanges. It follows then that proletarians also serve one
another and ditto for the other classes.
If working classes are paid to stay in their homes, who then supplies their needs? In
spite of Jeff Bozo's efforts and those of Elon Musk, not all transport is self-automating and
robots in Amazon warehouses still need some human inputs to operate quickly and without
hitches.
One could also argue that working fulfils other, non-monetary needs. Karl Marx actually
foresaw this when he wrote about anomie in capitalist systems of production, in which workers
are denied control over their lives and the work they do by being denied any say in what they
produce, how they produce it, the resources and environment needed to produce outputs, and
maybe even whether they can be allowed to work at all.
Lockdowns can be viewed as another method in which to deny people control over their work
and work environments. People socialise at work and lockdowns may be a way to deny workers a
place or a means to connect with others (and maybe to form unions). Is it any wonder then,
that during lockdowns people's mental health has become an issue and public health experts
became concerned at the possibility that such phenomena as suicide and domestic violence
could increase?
You can understand this from this quotation. It is the internal contradictions of the wesern
capitalist system that is driving the changes we observe, not "pressure applied by China",
which I would say is a myth.
"The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal: it lies
in the contradictionariness within the thing. This internal contradiction exists in every
single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictionariness within a thing is the
fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other
things are secondary causes."
"It (Materialist dialectics) holds that external causes are the conditions of change and
internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through
internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature
can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis."
Mao Zedong. "On Contradiction" August 1937. Selected Works, Vol.1, p.315.
Lockdowns are a medical protection to eradicate a contagious virus.
The lock downs we have had are fake and we're designed to fail. For political reasons.
The very people who complained 10 months ago, were responsible for them not working,
10 months later those people are still complaining. They are the ones who have prolonged the
contagion.
They are to blame. That includes the polatians and duped public.
It's deliberate !
For those of you that worked hard and played by the rules your whole life to try to save
enough money to have a decent retirement you were robbed and played like a bunch of suckers
by Wall Street. The Fed is helping them steal any wealth the middle class has left. I'm not
sure why these people are still breathing. They should be swinging by their neck from a
rope.
Lost in translation 12 hours ago
"The status quo has been increasingly rigged to benefit insiders and elites as the powers
of central banks and governments have picked the winners (cronies, insiders, cartels and
monopolies) and shifted the losses and risks onto the losers (the rest of us)."
Charles displays a remarkable grasp of the obvious. I sometimes wonder if his target
audience isn't 11-year olds.
Sound of the Suburbs 7 hours ago
How can things possibly get any worse for young people?
Sky high housing costs
Student loans
Low wages and precarious part time jobs
A minimum wage specified at an hourly rate that won't pay a living wage in a part time
job
Most young people don't start off with any capital, and with student loans they will
actually start off with loads of debt.
It's all about investors, so people with money can make more money, and they haven't got
any.
Those young people are trying to earn their money and this just isn't the way we do things
anymore.
J J Pettigrew 6 hours ago
how about HB1 visas and the overstaying? Floods the labor market with outsiders.
Fundamentally transforming the nation.
Sound of the Suburbs 5 hours ago
Young people can't afford to start a family anymore.
You've got to sort out the demographic problem with immigration.
yerfej 5 hours ago
The tax system mimics society, both are run by elites and have so much complexity that
ONLY elites have the ability to circumvent them. Lawyers own society and it is of course to
their benefit to make it full of layer after layer of complex rules and regulations, which as
sold as "protecting the commoner", but in reality it protects the elites by stifling
competition. Start by cleaning up the tax code, have ONE flat rate for ANY AND ALL income
above the poverty allowance and be done with it. THEN the elites can't game the system with
layers and tax accountants to avoid paying. If the common people realized how screwed they're
getting by complexity they would force the change to one rate for all.
Bay Area Guy 3 hours ago
The problem in America today was caused by the Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations, along
with a complicit Congress, encouraging the off-shoring of US jobs, along with vastly
increasing the number of jobs given to people holding H1b's visas who, in turn, off shore a
large percentage of their salaries to their home countries, effectively off-shoring even more
money. The result can be seen in US GDP. Real GDP (after including the effects of inflation),
has consistently contracted since 2000 (see Shadowstats). Add in the fact that illegal
immigration (and, to a smaller extent, legal immigration) has increased the population, and
the result is you have a greater number of people trying to get their share of an economic
pie that's shrinking. When the economy was expanding, people generally felt good about their
situation. So if some sector got a bit of an increase that was more than their increase, it
wasn't as big a thing. But now, with a shrinking economy, when the homeless or illegals or
any other group gets more money, people are increasingly seeing that it's taken out of their
share and they see themselves falling further and further behind. So, they react and object
to that.
So, until or unless a way is found to expand the pie (the economy), you're going to see
greater and greater levels of frustration as anytime Group A gets more funding, every other
group is going to scream bloody murder.
Sound of the Suburbs 7 hours ago (Edited)
What is real wealth creation?
The last thing hedge funds, private equity firms and bankers need is anyone finding
out.
I thought those neoliberals were educated.
Well they like to think they are, but they have no idea about the most basic things like
wealth creation and the monetary system.
They have confused making money with creating wealth.
Sound of the Suburbs 7 hours ago
The US is going downhill fast.
What can we do?
Let them know what real wealth creation is, then they should be away.
Where does real wealth creation take place in the economy?
Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a
most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
This is the problem.
Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they
need to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were
maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss
it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith:
"The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining
of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the
labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious
merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his
money."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they
died.
They had to earn money to live.
Ricardo was an expert on the small state, unregulated capitalism he observed in the world
around him.
He was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge problem
with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages.
"The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in
the community" Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist.
They soon identified the constructive "earned" income and the parasitic "unearned"
income.
This disappeared in neoclassical economics.
GDP was invented after they used neoclassical economics last time.
In the 1920s, the economy roared, the stock market soared and nearly everyone had been
making lots of money.
In the 1930s, they were wondering what the hell had just happened as everything had
appeared to be going so well in the 1920s and then it all just fell apart.
They needed a better measure to see what was really going on in the economy and came up
with GDP.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised
inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track
real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth
and therefore does not add to GDP. The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by
GDP.
Real wealth creation involves real work producing new goods and services in the
economy.
So all that transferring existing financial assets around doesn't create wealth?
No it doesn't, and now you are ready to start thinking about what is really going on
there.
Don't get confused between making money and creating wealth.
When you equate making money with creating wealth, people try and make money in the
easiest way possible, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on
making money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
They will load your economy up with their debt products until you get a financial
crisis.
On a BBC documentary, comparing 1929 to 2008, it said the last time US bankers made as
much money as they did before 2008 was in the 1920s.
The financial crisis appears to come out of a clear blue sky when you use an economics
that doesn't consider debt, like neoclassical economics.
Banks – What is the idea?
The idea is that banks lend into business and industry to increase the productive capacity
of the economy.
Business and industry don't have to wait until they have the money to expand. They can
borrow the money and use it to expand today, and then pay that money back in the future.
The economy can then grow more rapidly than it would without banks.
Debt grows with GDP and there are no problems.
The banks create money and use it to create real wealth.
Winter Is Coming for the American working-class.
Even if you don't care about the working poor, their suffering is going to affect you. In some
ways it already has. Despite the CDC eviction moratorium,
evictions have continued during the pandemic. This is led to hundreds of thousands of
people being
infected with Covid .
Expiring state eviction bans have led to hundreds of thousands of additional coronavirus
cases, new research finds, raising alarm about what will happen when the national eviction
moratorium lapses next month.
...
The researchers, from the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California,
San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and Wake Forest University School
of Law, found that lifting state moratoriums and allowing eviction proceedings to continue
caused as many as 433,700 excess cases of Covid-19 and 10,700 additional deaths in the U.S.
between March and September.
If the CDC's eviction ban isn't extended until 2021, experts say, many new cases are
likely to emerge from people being forced out of their houses and apartments.
"This is a time where it's not an overstatement to say that for many people, eviction can
lead to death ," said Helen Matthews, communications manager at City Life Vita Urbana, a
nonprofit in Boston.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that making people homeless during the pandemic is a
public health nightmare. Yet the eviction moratorium did not mean free rent. All that unpaid
rent is build up to $36 billion.
So how many people are about to be evicted? How many people will be homeless on our streets in
the coming months?
It depends on who you ask, but it will be in the tens of millions. Let that sink in for a
moment. Tens of millions of Americans are about to lose their place of residence. The
government has no plans to do anything about it.
One study says 19
million Americans will be evicted in the next two months. That's the conservative
estimate.
Another study says
40 million Americans will lose their homes this winter. These are numbers that will
destabilize American society and the American political system.
The end of the moratorium comes at the same time as the
end of stimulus money .
UI, stimulus, and welfare combined, after spiking to an annual rate of $3.88 trillion in
April, fell to $1.04 trillion in October
39 million Americans
don't have enough to eat right now, and people are waiting in line for hours at food banks
all over the nation just for some Thanksgiving handouts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 12 percent of all Americans did not have
enough food to eat between October 28th and November 9th.
Let's like clear about something. Politicians, the media, and of course the wealthy couldn't
care less about the suffering of the working class.
However, they do care about getting sick and dying. So what's going to happen is that working
class are going to be crushed, and only then, when the Covid cases spiked to unimaginable
levels, will the ruling elites have an epiphany. That epiphany is you really are your brother's
keeper.
Winter Is Coming for the American working-class.
Even if you don't care about the working poor, their suffering is going to affect you. In some
ways it already has. Despite the CDC eviction moratorium,
evictions have continued during the pandemic. This is led to hundreds of thousands of people
being
infected with Covid .
Expiring state eviction bans have led to hundreds of thousands of additional coronavirus cases,
new research finds, raising alarm about what will happen when the national eviction moratorium
lapses next month.
...
The researchers, from the University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San
Francisco, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and Wake Forest University School of
Law, found that lifting state moratoriums and allowing eviction proceedings to continue caused
as many as 433,700 excess cases of Covid-19 and 10,700 additional deaths in the U.S. between
March and September.
If the CDC's eviction ban isn't extended until 2021, experts say, many new cases are likely
to emerge from people being forced out of their houses and apartments.
"This is a time where it's not an overstatement to say that for many people, eviction can
lead to death ," said Helen Matthews, communications manager at City Life Vita Urbana, a
nonprofit in Boston.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that making people homeless during the pandemic is a
public health nightmare. Yet the eviction moratorium did not mean free rent. All that unpaid rent
is build up to $36 billion.
So how many people are about to be evicted? How many people will be homeless on our streets in
the coming months?
It depends on who you ask, but it will be in the tens of millions. Let that sink in for a moment.
Tens of millions of Americans are about to lose their place of residence. The government
has no plans to do anything about it.
One study says 19
million Americans will be evicted in the next two months. That's the conservative
estimate.
Another study says
40 million Americans will lose their homes this winter. These are numbers that will
destabilize American society and the American political system.
The end of the moratorium comes at the same time as the
end of stimulus money .
UI, stimulus, and welfare combined, after spiking to an annual rate of $3.88 trillion in April,
fell to $1.04 trillion in October
39 million Americans
don't have enough to eat right now, and people are waiting in line for hours at food banks
all over the nation just for some Thanksgiving handouts.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 12 percent of all Americans did not have
enough food to eat between October 28th and November 9th.
Let's like clear about something. Politicians, the media, and of course the wealthy couldn't
care less about the suffering of the working class.
However, they do care about getting sick and dying. So what's going to happen is that working
class are going to be crushed, and only then, when the Covid cases spiked to unimaginable levels,
will the ruling elites have an epiphany. That epiphany is you really are your brother's
keeper.
Plenty of money to wage war and create suffering abroad, but not enough to take care of the
peasants at home. I keep hearing the US is a neofeudalist country...in classic feudal times
they took care of the serfs...perhaps that the neo part.
Sure is a sad state you present gjohnsit. Thanks for informing us.
A research team I'm part of just published data looking at the 'diseases of despair' crisis
over the last decade (full article is free and available online).
A brief summary of our findings below, and some thoughts....
Trends in the diagnosis of diseases of despair in the United States...
Background and objective Increasing mortality and decreasing life expectancy in the USA are
largely attributable to accidental...
AUDIO:
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY 100 YEARS, LIFE
EXPECTANCY IS DECREASING IN THE UNITED STATES. IN THIS EPISODE, DR. LARRY SINOWAY DISCUSSES THE DECLINE AND HOW IT RELATES
TO...
view
more
CREDIT: PENN STATE CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE INSTITUTE
Medical diagnoses
involving alcohol-related disorders, substance-related disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors -- commonly referred to
as diseases of despair -- increased in Pennsylvania health insurance claims between the years 2007 and 2018, according to
researchers from Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute and Highmark Health Enterprise Analytics.
Princeton
economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton proposed the concept of deaths of despair in 2015. Case and Deaton's research observed a
decline in life expectancy of middle-aged white men and women between 1999 and 2015 -- the first such decline since the flu
pandemic of 1918. They theorized that this decline is associated with the social and economic downturn in rural communities
and small towns. These changes include loss of industry, falling wages, lower marriage rates, increasing barriers to higher
education, an increase in one-parent homes and a loss of social infrastructure.
"It is theorized
that these changes have fostered growing feelings of despair including disillusionment, precariousness and resignation in many
peoples' lives," Daniel George, associate professor of humanities and public health sciences, Penn State College of Medicine,
said. "Despair can trigger emotional, cognitive, behavioral and even biological changes, increasing the likelihood of diseases
that can progress and ultimately culminate in deaths of despair."
With the
commonwealth's considerable rural and small-town population, particularly around Penn State campuses, Penn State Clinical and
Translational Science Institute led a research study to understand the rate of diseases of despair in Pennsylvania. Institute
researchers collaborated with Highmark Health, one of the state's largest health insurance providers. Highmark provides
employer-sponsored, individual, Affordable Care Act and Medicare plans.
Highmark Health's
Enterprise Analytics team analyzed the claims of more than 12 million people on their plans from 2007 to 2018. Penn State did
not have access to Highmark member data or individual private health information. Although the insurance claims included
members from neighboring states, including West Virginia, Delaware, and Ohio, the majority of the claims were from
Pennsylvania residents. Researchers reported their results in
BMJ Open
.
The researchers
defined diseases of despair as diagnoses related to alcohol use, substance use and suicidal thoughts or behaviors. They
searched the claims data for the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes related to these diagnoses. ICD codes
form a standardized system maintained by the World Health Organization and are used in health records and for billing.
The researchers
found that the rate of diagnoses related to diseases of despair increased significantly in the Highmark claims in the past
decade. Nearly one in 20 people in the study sample was diagnosed with a disease of despair. Between 2009 and 2018, the rates
of alcohol-, substance-, and suicide-related diagnoses increased by 37%, 94% and 170%. Following Case and Deaton's findings,
the researchers saw the most substantial percentage increase in disease of despair diagnoses among men ages 35 to 74, followed
by women ages 55 to 74 and 18 to 34.
The rate of
alcohol-related diagnoses significantly increased among men and women ages 18 and over. The most dramatic increases were among
men and women ages 55 to 74. Rates increased for men in this age group by 50% and 80% for women.
The rate of
substance-related diagnoses roughly doubled for men and women ages 35 to 54 and increased by 170% in ages 55 to 74. In 2018,
the most recent year of claims included in the study, rates of substance-use diagnoses were highest in 18-to-34-year-olds.
The rate of
diagnoses related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors increased for all age groups. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, rates increased
by at least 200%. The rate for all other age groups increased by at least 60%.
The type of
insurance patients had also mattered. People with Medicare insurance had 1.5 times higher odds of having a disease of despair
diagnosis and those with Affordable Care Act insurance had 1.3 times higher odds.
One increase
stood out to researchers: among infants, substance-related diagnoses doubled.
"This increase
was entirely attributable to neonatal abstinence syndrome and corresponded closely with increases in substance-related
disorders among women of childbearing age," Emily Brignone, senior research scientist, Highmark Health Enterprise Analytics,
said.
Neonatal
abstinence syndrome occurs when a baby withdraws from substances, especially opioids, exposed to in the womb.
Future research
can concentrate on identifying "hot spots" of diseases of despair diagnoses in the commonwealth to then study the social and
economic conditions in these areas. With this data, researchers can potentially create predictive models to identify
communities at risk and develop interventions.
"We found a broad
view of who is impacted by increases in diseases of despair, which cross racial, ethnic and geographic groups," Jennifer
Kraschnewski, professor of medicine, public health sciences and pediatrics, said. "Although originally thought to mostly
affect rural communities, these increases in all middle-aged adults across the rural-urban continuum likely foreshadows future
premature deaths."
###
National Center
for Advancing Translational Science of the National Institutes of Health through Penn State Clinical and Translational Science
Institute funded this research.
A podcast about
this topic is available here.
Other researchers
on this project were Lawrence Sinoway, director, Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute; Curren Katz and
Robert Gladden, Highmark Health Enterprise Analytics; Charity Sauder, administrative director, Penn State Clinical and
Translational Science Institute; and Andrea Murray, project manager, Penn State College of Medicine.
Disclaimer:
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the
accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the
EurekAlert system.
Back in 2013 a group of Apple employees decided
to sue the global behemoth. Every day, after they were clocking out, they were required to
go through a corporate screening where their personal belongings were examined. It was a
process required and administered by Apple. But Apple did not want to pay its employees for the
time it had required them to spend. It could be anywhere from 40 to 80 hours a year that an
employee spent going through that process. What made Apple so confident in brazenly
nickel-and-diming its geniuses?
Jeff Rubin, author of The
Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization , has an answer to the
above question that is easily deduced from the subtitle of his book. The socio-economic
arrangements produced by globalization have made labor the most flexible and plentiful resource
in the economic process. The pressure on the middle class, and all that falls below it, has
been so persistent and powerful, that now " only 37
percent of Americans believe their children will be better off financially than they
themselves are. Only 24 percent in Canada or Australia feel the same. And in France, that
figure dips to only 9 percent." And "[i]n the mid-1980s it would have taken a typical
middle-income family with two children less than seven years of income to save up to buy a
home; it now takes more than ten years. At the same time, housing expenditures that accounted
for a quarter of most middle-class household incomes in the 1990s now account
for a third ."
The story of globalization is engraved in the " shuttered
factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls." Rubin
does admit that there are benefits accrued from globalization, billions have been lifted up out
of poverty in what was previously known as the third world, wealth has been created, certain
efficiencies have been achieved. The question for someone in the western world is how much more
of a price he's willing to pay to keep the whole thing going on, especially as we have entered
a phase of diminishing returns for almost all involved.
As Joel Kotkin has written, "[e]ven in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According
to a recent survey by the
Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced
some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder
care." And "[i]n "classless" China, a massive class of migrant workers -- over 280 million --
inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental
conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly
outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most
Westerners encounter. " "Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of
post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, 'China appears to have
skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but
disproportionately
distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.'"
Although Rubin concedes to the globalist side higher GDP growth, even that does not seem to
be so true for the western world in the last couple decades. Per Nicholas Eberstadt, in "Our
Miserable 21st Century," "[b]etween late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged
less
than 1.5 percent per annum." "With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years
2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20
percent higher than it is today."
Stagnation seems to be a more apt characterization of the situation we are in. Fredrik
Erixon in his superb The Innovation
Illusion , argues that "[p]roductivity growth is going south, and has been doing so
for several decades." "Between 1995 and 2009, Europe's labor productivity grew by just 1
percent annually." Noting that "[t]he four factors that have made Western capitalism dull and
hidebound are gray capital, corporate managerialism, globalization, and complex
regulation."
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.426.0_en.html#goog_1789765618 Ad ends in
15s
Contrary to popular belief, globalization has functioned as a substitute for innovation and
growth. With globalization on the march, the western ruling class could continue to indulge in
its most preferred activities, regulation and taxation, in an environment where both of these
political addictions appeared sustainable. Non-western elites could perpetuate their
authoritarian regimes, garnering growth and legitimacy, from the access to the western markets.
Their copy-and-paste method of "innovation" from western firms would fit well with an
indigenous business class composed of mostly insiders and ex-regime apparatchiks.
There are plenty of criticisms that can be laid at the feet of globalization. The issue with
Rubin's book is that is does not advance very much beyond some timeworn condemnations of it.
One gets the sense that the value of this book is merely in its audacity to question the
conventional wisdom on the issue at hand. Rubin, who is somewhat sympathetic to Donald Trump,
seems to be much closer to someone like Bernie Sanders, especially an earlier version of
Sanders that dared to talk about the debilitating effects of immigration on the working
class.
Like Sanders, Rubin starts to get blurry as he goes from the condemnation phase to the
programmatic offers available. What exactly would be his tariffs policy, how far he would go?
What would be the tradeoffs of this policy? Where we could demarcate a reasonable fair
environment for the worker and industry and where we would start to create another type of a
stagnation trap for the whole economy? All these would be important questions for Rubin to
grapple with and would give to his criticisms more gravitas.
It would have also been of value if he had dealt more deeply with the policies of the Trump
administration. On the one hand, the Trump administration cracked down on illegal and legal
immigration. It also started to use tariffs and other trade measures as a way to boost industry
and employment. On the other hand, it reduced personal and corporate taxes and it deregulated
to the utmost degree possible. It was a kind of 'walled' laisser-faire that seemed to work
until Covid-19 hit. Real household income in the U.S.
increased $4,379 in 2019 over 2018. It was "more income growth in one year than in the 8
years of Obama-Biden." And during Trump's time, the lowest paid workers started not to just be
making gains, but making gains faster than the wealthy. "Low-wage workers are getting bigger
raises than bosses" ran a CBS News
headline .
Rubin seems to view tax cuts and deregulation as another giveaway to large corporations. But
these large corporations are just fine with high taxation, since they have a choice as to when
and where they get taxed. Regulation is also more of a tool than a burden for them. It's a very
expedient means for eliminating competitors and competition, a useful barrier to entry for any
upstart innovator that would upend the industry they are in. Besides, if high taxation and
regulation were a kind of antidote to globalization, then France would be in a much better
shape than it appears to be. But France seems to be doing worse than anybody else. In the
aforementioned poll about if their "children will be better off financially than they
themselves are" France was at the bottom in the group of countries that Rubin cited. The recent
events with the yellow-vests movement indicate a very deep dissatisfaction and pessimism of its
middle and working class.
Moreover, there does not seem to be much hostility or even much contention between
government bureaucracies and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Something that Rubin's
politics and economics would necessitate. And cultural and political like-mindedness between
government bureaucracies and the managerial class of large corporations is not just limited to
the mutual embrace of woke politics. It seems that there is a cross pollination of a much
broader set of ideas and habits between bureaucrats and the managerial class. For instance,
Erixon notes that "[c]orporate
managers shy away from uncertainty but turn companies into bureaucratic entities free from
entrepreneurial habits. They strive to make capitalism predictable." Striving for
predictability is a very bureaucratic state of mind.
In Rubin's book, missed trends like that make his perspective to feel a bit dated. There is
still valuable information in The Expendables . Rubin does know a lot about
international trade deals. For instance, a point that is often ignored in the press about
international trade agreements is that "[i]f you're designated a "developing" country, you get
to protect your own industries with tariffs that are a multiple of those that developed
economies are allowed to use to protect their workers." A rule that China exploits to the
utmost.
Meanwhile, Apple, after its apparent lawsuit loss on the case with its employees in
California, now seems committed to another fight with the expendables of another locale. The
Washington Post reported that "Apple
lobbyists are trying to weaken a bill aimed at preventing forced labor in China, according to
two congressional staffers familiar with the matter, highlighting the clash between its
business imperatives and its official stance on human rights." "The bill aims to end the use of
forced Uighur labor in the Xinjiang region of China ." The war against the expendables never
ends.
Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.
Damn, Krystal dropping one of her classic heaters today: "Affirmative action is the type of program that poses little
threat and only benefits to affluent white liberals. It's the college admissions version of identity politics: more
about getting brown faces in high places to make WHITE people feel good than it is about actually addressing the very
real problems it seeks to ameliorate." - Krystal Ball
As a black person I hate to admit that I've bought into the BS all of this time but she is absolutely right. All of her
data is correct. AA is just a tool for bourgeoisie blacks to get into better schools. Period. Nothing else. Stop trying
to sell it as some saving grace that it is not. The point about student loans is exactly right. If you want to help a
ton of black people with college then do something about this BS student loan situation.
"White Saviors" is a way to say what we've been saying all along. Affirmative Action IS racist. You are saying that
someone needs help because of their skin color, as if that makes them inferior. Racist.
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, by Ira
Katznelson (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005), preface, appendix, index, 238 pp.
By Jon Queally, staff writer, Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
Pinpointing a reality denounced as "
morally obscene " by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a new government study shows how some of the
nation's largest and most profitable corporations -- including Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar
General, and Amazon -- feast upon taxpayer money by paying their employees such low wages that
huge numbers of those workers throughout the year are forced to rely on public assistance
programs such as Medicaid and food assistance just to keep themselves and their families
afloat.
According to a statement from Sanders' office, the study he commissioned the Government
Accountability Office to carry out -- titled " Millions of Full-time Workers Rely on Federal Health
Care and Food Assistance Programs " -- found that an estimated 5.7 million Medicaid
enrollees and 4.7 million SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients who
worked full-time for 50 or more weeks in 2018 earned wages so low that they qualified for these
federal benefits. In addition, an estimated 12 million wage-earning adults enrolled in Medicaid
and 9 million wage-earning adults living in households receiving SNAP benefits worked at some
point in 2018.
Upon the study's release Wednesday, Warren Gunnels, staff director and policy adviser for
Sen. Sanders, tweeted: "The real looting in America is the Walton family becoming $63 billion
richer during a pandemic, while paying wages so low that 14,541 of their workers in 9 states
need food stamps -- all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Yes. The Walton family is the real
welfare queen in America."
According to the Washington Post :, based on the GAO report:
Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every
state. McDonald's was in the top five of employers with employees receiving federal benefits
in at least nine states.
In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits -- Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana,
Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington -- Walmart was found
to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with
8,780, according to Sanders's team. In six states that reported Medicaid enrollees, Walmart
again topped the list, with 10,350 employees, followed by McDonald's with 4,600.
In Georgia, for example, Walmart employed an estimated 3,959 workers on Medicaid -- an
estimated 2.1 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people in the state receiving
the benefit. McDonald's was next on the list, employing 1,480 who received Medicaid, or 0.8
percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people on the program. "
"At a time when huge corporations like Walmart and McDonald's are making billions in profits
and giving their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year, they're relying on corporate welfare
from the federal government by paying their workers starvation wages," said Sanders in a
statement. "That is morally obscene."
With the individual wealth of
high-ranking executives and members of billionaire families like the Walton's, who own
Walmart, soaring even as front-line, minimum wage employees and their families struggling to
stay afloat amid the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, Sanders argues that the stark contrast
should be a wakeup call for those who have refused to see how unjust and economically backward
it is for the federal government, meaning taxpayers, to subsidize the cruel wages that massive
profitable companies force their workers to accept.
"U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable
corporations in America," said Sanders. "It is time for the owners of Walmart, McDonald's and
other large corporations to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage."
No one in this country should live in poverty," Sanders added. "No one should go hungry. No
one should be unable to get the medical care they need. It is long past time to increase the
federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15, and guarantee health care
to all Americans as a human right."
These looters at the top don't just rely on welfare for their workers: they also rely on
government assistance in other ways, such as favorable tax treatment and other goodies to
bring their boondoggles to town, and of course trillions in infusions/ giveaways like we saw
this year. Not to mention golden parachutes in corporate bankruptcies, facilitated by the
"way things are done."
""There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism," wrote Walter Benjamin. In precisely this vein, Walton's new Crystal Bridges
museum offers American-made art to strategically cover up the ugly reality Walmart has
created. Spanning the colonial era to the present, the exhibition space's fulsome celebration
of the American spirit eulogizes the nation of shared confidence and abundance, sustainable
mortgages, and worker dignity that Walmart has brutally demolished. The notion that Walton's
supremely self-satisfied kunsthalle might serve as a balm, let alone a monument, to the
market-battered American spirit is analogous to, say, Genghis Khan inviting survivors of his
Mongol hordes to admire an installation of his plunder "
As Amazon uses a network of subcontractors and contractors for everything for logistics to
making toilet paper, all those employees will never show up on "official" stats re.
Amazon.
I called it a straw man because " but let us sweep Whole Foods and Amazon Prime under the
rug" suggested that the piece had done that, when they weren't mentioned.
An equally accurate storyline could be–"Workers in at least 9 states would be forced
to live off even more government handouts without Walmart's employment".
Its tough to give companies grief here simply for paying what the market dictates. I'm all
for going after the route of the problem–monopsony power–but noting the symptoms
without actually raising awareness of the underlying problem is a distraction that keeps the
plebs anger directed where it can't have much effect on the bigger picture. Being mad at
Walmart instead of the government policy that has destroyed unions and made it easier/cheaper
to move jobs overseas isn't serving middle America. Ironically, this distraction serves
Walmart quite well. They actually champion hire minimum wages as it stifles competition
Its an interesting thought experiment to imagine absolutely no minimum wages but a UBI and
universal healthcare so that no one needed a job just to survive. Then Walmart could pay its
employees any low amount and no one would bat an eye (although I suspect wages actually
wouldnt fall because walmart would lose its monopsony power)
Government policy doesn't write itself: lobbyists guide the pen, and donors/ owners like
Walmart pull the guides' puppet strings. "Personal responsibility" goes both ways.
To use yesterday's metaphor, I'd say that the PMC is like the human being co-driver in a
"self"-driving car programmed by capital.
Though if we can get people to admit they feel the symptoms by describing the symptoms,
some of those people might then be ready and willing to hear about the disease which is
giving them the symptoms.
Tempting as it might be to shape the narrative so that the Walmarts of the World appear
more like hapless innovators, shrewdly capitalizing on a crooked playing field, it only works
if you blinker yourself to the fact that the WotW have at least 8 of the ten fingers on the
hands architecting those same playing fields.
Don't get me wrong–I'm not trying to say Walmart is hapless. Maybe I'm too cynical,
but I actually think they're so shrewd they want you to focus on these press releases about
how they pay so little. If the only thing that stems from that is increasing the minimum
wage, they come out big time winners
Here's what the market dictates. " I can get 10 interns who will pay ME to LET them do
your job. Now shut up and get back to work." The way to stop the Market Dictatorship of what
wages will be is to impose a Legal Dictatorship on the market of what wages will be.
That's what the Wages and Hours Act was about to begin with. Make it a long-sentence
hard-time felony to pay less or to take less. Abolish Free Trade in goods , services or
people. That means Sealing the Borders to create zero immigration for as long as necessary to
use the labor shortage to torture the employER class into raising wages and conditions
upward. And to weld shut the "illegal immigration escape hatch" by which employERS (
including limousine liberals) pay less than the legally imposed minimum wage.
Ya, I agree. Providing health care and making sure kids have food and education are
subsidies that help businesses in a healthy way. And a UBI is a great idea as well! Toss in a
Carbon tax, and you have my ideal policy.
We've had this debate here for years so the above article is a bit of a recycled chestnut
rather than an original thought.
And perhaps the answer for the "outrage" of those Walmart heirs is to reestablishment a
meaningful inheritance tax since receiving billions through death is indeed an entitlement
and not just for the Walmart heirs but also for plenty of mansion owners dotting the
Northeast.
As for the company itself, yes it's a crappy and low paid place to work but they are
hardly unique in that and one reason they top those mentioned lists, along with McDonalds, is
that they are the number one and number two employers by number of employees in the country.
And the reason they are so large is that they give their custormers what they want and can
afford which cannot be said of so many competing looters that the author ignores.
There are lots of worse companies than Walmart but in the battle of the coastals versus
the deplorables they have always made a fat juicy target for those who probably pay their
hired help less than Walmart does its "associates."
Right!?
I keep thinking about how at 15/hour people will lose what small piece of our social safety
net that keeps them "making it". No family is purchasing health insurance on that increase.
And really the few dollars per hour might not even make up the food benefits for a medium
sized family. It's scary to get a raise where you end up worse off then before.
I mean I guess that's just the messed up reality when a whole bunch of household costs have
been introduced or increased since policies using means testing (income and asset thresholds)
to determine access. Actually I am sure ok not sure but it would make sense that these
companies know exactly how much pay will kick these employees off benefits. So the employee
community is less likely to make a fuss for small increases in pay which is the norm we have
come to accept as workers. I'm all for real talk minimum/ living wages for the communities
people actually live in.
"Corporate welfare queens" As others have noted, it isn't just Walmart and the Waltons.
Trying to think of an appropriate term to describe the outcome of the decision by a majority
of the US Supreme Court justices in the Citizens United case that not only enabled but
tacitly encouraged One Percent, corporate, Wall Street, executive branch, legislators' and
central bank behavior that, although still a cycle, has led to the opposite of a "virtuous
cycle". "Morally obscene", corrupt and corruptible, and dishonorable are some descriptions of
resultant behavior that come to mind. Too bad "The Swamp" wasn't drained, but has been
further expanded and left both legacy political parties tarnished. It is said that a fish
rots from the head down. That may be so, but that doesn't mean the rot cannot be allowed to
set in. Follow the Money.
It turns out that when the TrumpAdmin used the phrase " the Swamp", what they strictly
specifically and only meant were the impartial scientists at the various departments ,
bureaus and agencies. And they have done all they could to drain out the impartial scientists
and stop the science. Which is all they ever meant by "drain the Swamp".
Citizens United decision was a display of right wing insanity in all it's glory: I
suppose insanity was either baked into the Constitution – or in 1780 – was not
yet insanity?
Still can't get over that decision – ever since, my thought: term limits for friggen
federal judges – and certainly the SCOTUS crew and throw in Congress and the Senate as
well.
We have term limits for state officeholders in Michigan. All that mostly gets us is
cynical amateurs who view their limited term as a chance to make contacts and audition for
lobbying/law/etc. jobs after leaving office.
And the non-cynical amateurs who want to make things better are term-limited out of office
just when they are finally learning where all the hidden levers, ropes, pulleys, secret trap
doors are. Meanwhile, the lobbyists are not term limited.
Term limits for national office would make some things worse while making nothing
better.
Ah, those immortal lobbyists! Term limits for politicians – combined with limits on
lobbyists. One can dream. No? I'd like to try it. How can we actually drain the Swamp/
Oh. Crap. We have a Supreme Court. Freedom to Lobby infinitely. Freedom of bribery – I
mean freedom of speech.
OK, So nothing can be done. Perhaps state office holders are a different thing then National
politicians? (Yeah, maybe not) But Do you want to remove the term limits on our President
then? No? I'd keep that limit.
Should we just resign ourselves to be stuck with this stuff till the Sun expands and swallows
the USA? The future colony on Mars will have a better way? Not likely.
We have term limits. They're called elections. If/when there's something wrong with
Democracy, fix Democracy. If/when there's something wrong with the Constitution, fix the
Constitution
In most cases, artificial term limits don't do either. I would say there are two
exceptions: limiting the presidency to two terms, and limiting the tenure of federal judges.
In the latter case, 18-year term limits have been suggested, and that could be the right
number, I'm not sure.
Now, with respect to fixing Democracy and the Constitution, for a First Step, please see
HJR-48: Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States providing that the
rights extended by the Constitution are the rights of natural persons only -- oh, by the way,
stating that money does not equal speech.
Every looting is real looting. Little looters in the streets are real looters. Big looters
in the suites are real looters.
Since the big looting is currently legal in many cases, laws would have to be changed to
stop the big looters looting. Its worth trying to do. It won't happen with Joemala and
McConnell conspiring together to stop it from happening.
We need to elect a Red Gingrich minority of officeholders into the House and into the
Senate. The "squad" could be the nucleus of that if they decide to center economic justice
instead of critical race wokeness.
Congrease had/has the legal power to enact legislation with which to reign in what has
become the early 21st century gilded age .. but they refuse to .. Nearly ALL of them have
their dirty proboscii harpooning the lowly constituents who elected them ..too busy sucking
any and all of plebian bodilyeconomic liquidity whilst paying deference to the know-it-all,
BigTime-parasitic Oligarchic Brainbugs!
If Biden does that, then Trump himself could very well win again if he runs in 2024. If
that scenario plays out that way, I hope Trump picks Ivanka to be his VP running mate. That
way, Ivanka would be on track to be America's first woman president. I just hope Hillary
would live long enough to see that happen.
I used to dread the Friday news drops. The unemployment numbers, employed people in
minimum wage jobs, workers at home working away, and major inflation in the grocery stores
are hitting people extremely hard coming up to Holiday season. I really can't wait to see the
Friday news drops now. Not just the Trump temper tantrum stuff, but the economic quips they
make. Then what is totally mind blowing are the comments on social media. Some people that
are not hurting much, or at all seem to think that all things are fine as wine in the rest of
the country. I know this reply does not specifically comment on your article, but it is a
wide view of the current situation.
With the computers and big data, the simplest solution is to claw back the benefits paid
to the employees from the corporations, call it humanitarian tax.
But, it would be hard to find a lobbyist to write it, even harder to find a sponsor in the
congress.
That would destroy the ability of these people to get jobs and to receive benefits.
I think you might have the cause and effect mixed up. In my state, anyone who gets SNAP
benefits has to work at least 20 hours a week. These "bad" employers are the ones with
flexible schedules and because the jobs are so crappy, they are readily available. Maybe it's
not that WalMartb workers need benefits, it's that the benefits recipient needs WalMart and
McDonalds.
Every state is different. I just have to show proof of income (which I have, though I
don't have a job). But the amount of SNAP you get varies widely. I am 150% of poverty level
and the state of Pennsylvania just raised my monthly benefit to $16.50.
Another way to put it: Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar General, and Amazon are really
government stores with outsourced management and labor.
Socialism American-style.
Whenever I am in Walmart or any supermarket with automatic check out, I avoid automatic
check out completely and only go to regular check out, no matter how long the line is.
Automatic check out is a precursor to eventually firing all human cashiers. In my "larger"
town, where I often end up in Walmart for the cheaper pet food, an Aldi's was built precisely
opposite it, across the road. I heard an Aldi's employee saying they get paid better than
Walmart. And lots of their prices are the same or better. So I will be spending a lot more
time there.
Consider the structure of the term "common sense", which is just shared opinion. If there
is no common sense, there will be no common action.
The problem with coming together is that the ruling class divides and rules us as a normal
procedure of creating a class system. Nobody in the ruling class has a problem with this.
Their purpose in life is to reproduce the system of mass slavery and adapt it to present
conditions and they, being among the elect, are fine with this.
Cognitive dissonance is a daily occurrence for anyone paying attention. And our struggling
"leaders" are largely struggling over territory while ignoring the state of the nation.
True national emergencies are ignored as they are inconvenient, or more honestly buried
under the rug, because they might mean our sociopaths at the top of the food chain would have
to pony up some of their Ill gotten gains to the social good AND lose some of their leverage
over modern serfs. And unlike "war" and "military intervention" which have been monetized to
the nth degree, pandemic response has been bungled not only because the social systems have
been shredded but because factions are fighting over response in order to find a way to strip
as much public money from it as possible.
We make black jokes here about brunch, but the election of Biden is NOT about him, it is a
probably a vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. The sad thing is that instead of
pretending to be the adults in the room, the usual suspects kept up their four year long
tantrum, instead of letting the process play out and talking about how our system works, it
was all "he isn't giving up, he is being mean." All because it slightly delayed them
reestablishing their rice bowls. And so ends the "bring us together" meme with nary a
whimper.
I wish there was a chance our national leaders would get their heads out of the pockets of
their donors long enough to notice that the foundation THEY depend on for their corrupt
lifestyles had been destroyed. I wish our foundations had not been so corrupted that even one
part remains strong.
I am not entirely pessimistic. The kids are largely alright. I just hope we can hold it
together long enough to give them a chance.
Two slightly different things here, perhaps.
I think it's generally accepted that all societies need a common frame of reference against
which you can have discussions and arguments, make and critique policy and try to interpret
the world. This doesn't mean that everybody agrees, or still less that everybody is obliged
to, but rather that everybody agrees about what the issues are and about the ground over
which they may disagree. Back in the days of the Cold War, for example, there were furious
debates about politics, not to mention wars, atrocities and dictatorships, but pretty much
everybody agreed what the issues were, even if they were on different sides of them.
Historically, this was very much the norm: the religious wars of Europe, or the wars of the
French Revolution were between people with very different views, but who agreed on the
underlying context. What we have now, is what the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre called
"incommensurability": a jaw-breaking term which means, essentially, that people don't even
begin from the same assumptions, and so are condemned to talk past each other. This accounts
for a lot of the cognitive dissonance. In the case of Brexit, for example, much of the
bitterness and confusion arose from the fact that Leavers and Remainers were simply talking
about different things, and starting from different assumptions, but didn't realise it. The
same applies, obviously to the whole TDS story. As a result, Joe Public is now faced with the
need to choose between competing and mutually exclusive interpretations of events, or even
whether events have actually occurred. It's hardly surprising there's so much confusion and
stress.
It's made worse by the kind of thing Thuto mentions. One of the least helpful ideas to
emerge from the 1960s was that children should be "left to find their own way", rather than
being taught things. But children mature by testing their ideas against the norms and
structures of society, and indeed their parents, and coming to some sort of personal vision
of the world. A lot of modern politics (and practically all of IdiotPol) is the result of
middle-class educated people who were never contradicted as children, and are still looking
to shock and provoke twenty or thirty years later. Once you understand that much of the
political and media system is made of people who are basically adolescents ("why does it have
to make sense? Tell me why it has to make sense!) the chaos and stress become easier to
understand.
This is what we should expect.
Western liberalism's descent into chaos.
1920s/2000s – neoclassical economics, high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation,
low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase
1929/2008 – Wall Street crash
1930s/2010s – Global recession, currency wars, trade wars, austerity, rising
nationalism and extremism
1940s – World war.
Right wing populist leaders are what we should expect at this stage in the descent into
chaos.
Why is Western liberalism always such a disaster?
They did try and learn from past mistakes to create a new liberalism (neoliberalism), but the
Mont Pelerin Society went round in a circle and got back to pretty much where they
started.
It equates making money with creating wealth and people try and make money in the easiest
way possible, which doesn't actually create any wealth.
In 1984, for the first time in American history, "unearned" income exceeded "earned"
income.
The American have lost sight of what real wealth creation is, and are just focussed on making
money.
You might as well do that in the easiest way possible.
It looks like a parasitic rentier capitalism because that is what it is.
Bankers make the most money when they are driving your economy into a financial
crisis.
What they are doing is really an illusion; they are just pulling future spending power into
today.
The 1920s roared at the expense of an impoverished 1930s.
Japan roared on the money creation of real estate lending in the 1980s, they spent the next
30 years repaying the debt they had built up in the 1980s and the economy flat-lined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk
Bankers use bank credit to pump up asset prices, which doesn't actually create any
wealth.
The money creation of bank credit flows into the economy making it boom, but you are heading
towards a financial crisis and claims on future prosperity are building up in the financial
system.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
Early success comes at the expense of an impoverished future.
Things haven't been the same since 2008.
Early success came at the expense of an impoverished future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAStZJCKmbU&list=PLmtuEaMvhDZZQLxg24CAiFgZYldtoCR-R&index=6
At 18 mins.
The money creation of bank credit flowed into the economy before 2008 making it boom, but
they were heading towards a financial crisis and claims on future prosperity were building up
in the financial system.
It's repayment time.
Let's get the basics sorted.
When no one knows what real wealth creation is, you are in trouble.
We want economic success
Step one – Identify where wealth creation occurs in the economy.
Houston, we have a problem.
Economists do identify where real wealth creation in the economy occurs, but this is a
most inconvenient truth as it reveals many at the top don't actually create any wealth.
This is the problem.
Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they need
to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to.
The Classical Economists had a quick look around and noticed the aristocracy were
maintained in luxury and leisure by the hard work of everyone else.
They haven't done anything economically productive for centuries, they couldn't miss it.
The Classical economist, Adam Smith: "The labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining
of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the
labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious
merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his
money."
There was no benefits system in those days, and if those at the bottom didn't work they
died.
They had to earn money to live.
Ricardo was an expert on the small state, unregulated capitalism he observed in the world
around him. He was part of the new capitalist class, and the old landowning class were a huge
problem with their rents that had to be paid both directly and through wages. "The interest of the landlords is always opposed to the interest of every other class in
the community" Ricardo 1815 / Classical Economist.
They soon identified the constructive "earned" income and the parasitic "unearned"
income.
This disappeared in neoclassical economics.
GDP was invented after they used neoclassical economics last time.
In the 1920s, the economy roared, the stock market soared and nearly everyone had been making
lots of money.
In the 1930s, they were wondering what the hell had just happened as everything had appeared
to be going so well in the 1920s and then it all just fell apart.
They needed a better measure to see what was really going on in the economy and came up with
GDP.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised
inflating asset prices doesn't create real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track
real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and
therefore does not add to GDP. The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by
GDP.
Real wealth creation involves real work producing new goods and services in the economy.
So all that transferring existing financial assets around doesn't create wealth?
No it doesn't, and now you are ready to start thinking about what is really going on
there.
"Much of their money comes from wealth extraction rather than wealth creation, and they
need to get everyone thoroughly confused so we don't realise what they are really up to."
And this is why the quintessential business model in the U.S (at least since the 1970s)
has been the multi-level marketing scheme.
'There's a war on organizing, collective bargaining, unions and workers': Biden wants to
undo Trump executive orders on federal workers Andrew Keshner 6 hrs ago
President Donald Trump used executive orders to put up roadblocks for unions representing
federal employees, and now President-elect Joe Biden seems poised to reverse those moves.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump signed executive orders mandating stricter deadlines and
procedures when federal workers collectively negotiated new contracts, curbing on-the-clock
time for union duties as well as giving some under-performing workers tight time frames to
boost their performance.
In January 2021, newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden is likely to pull back those same
orders, according to union members, who say the orders have weakened their ability to ensure
rank and file staffers are treated fairly.
The Biden transition team didn't respond to a request for comment, but Biden's campaign
website has signaled that the president-elect will address these issues: "There's a war on
organizing, collective bargaining, unions, and workers. It's been raging for decades, and it's
getting worse with Donald Trump in the White House."
The President-Elect, among other things, supports laws that would penalize companies trying
to interfere with worker organizing efforts, according to his website.
"This is not just about employees," said Tony Reardon, national president of the National
Treasury Employees Union. "Ultimately, this is good for American taxpayers to have federal
employees and agency leaders communicating and taking action together to solve problems before
there's a grievance and a lawsuit."
Reardon, who heads a union with 150,000 members, said he and his staff had heard from Biden
and his campaign in the months leading up to the Nov. 3 election. "The President-Elect, he was
clear with me that he is extremely supportive of labor unions and of workers' rights," Reardon
said.
There's a different point of view from management. "In some ways, you look at [the executive
orders] and go 'Why weren't these there before?'" said Scott Witlin, who represents
private-sector employers as a partner at Barnes & Thornburg.
There's nothing that's unreasonable on its face in the Trump administration orders, he said,
such as a
six-month limit on negotiations. "Six months would be an exceedingly long private-sector
negotiation," he said.
Video: City leaders warn of possible new restrictions as COVID spikes statewide (WWL-TV New
Orleans)
Play Video City leaders warn of possible new restrictions as COVID spikes statewide
Click to expand
In certain ways, the potential executive orders on federal workers are a narrow matter.
The federal government employed almost 3.8 million people in 2019, according to the
Bureau of Labor
Statistics . Of that sum, 1.15 million were represented by unions, the agency said, noting
that the category groups together union members and workers without union affiliation who have
jobs covered by union or employee association contracts.
But it's also a peek at the president-elect's larger views on organized labor.
Declining
union membership
Last year, there were 14.6 million salary and wage workers who were members of a union,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's just over 10% of the workforce, and a
10-percentage-point drop from 1983, the first year comparable statistics became available, the
agency said.
There's a range of reasons why union ranks keep thinning,
observers say . That ranges from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act allowing "union shops" only when
a majority of workers voted for the idea, to globalization -- which sent off factory jobs -- to
state-level "right to work" laws that bar unions from collecting dues from non-union workers
covered in their contracts.
Though right-to-work opponents say those kinds of laws eat into a union's to support itself,
proponents say it's not fair to force workers
into unions that they don't feel are acting in their best interest.
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the left-leaning think tank the
Economic Policy Institute, said Trump's orders focused on federal workers not because he had it
out for them especially, but because "he could accomplish those attacks through the stroke of a
pen."
The Trump administration orders "were designed in order to make it impossible for unions to
fulfill their representation obligations under the law," said Jacqueline Simon, public policy
director at the American Federation of Government Employees, a union comprised of 700,000
federal and District of Columbia government workers.
Reardon said the orders weren't necessary. "There is absolutely nothing about labor and
management sitting down together and collaborating in work that suggests they can't create
efficiencies." And there were already procedures to remove under-performing employees, he
added.
Various unions, including the AFGE and NTEU, sued over the orders. Ultimately,
the D.C Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the unions' challenges last year.
Reardon said he's seen the consequences of the new orders, which result in "sham"
bargaining. Some NTEU members work at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he
noted. In the aftermath of the orders, Reardon said agency negotiators cut the talks short
because they were bound by the orders' rules on what could and couldn't be the focus of
talks.
The sides still haven't come to an agreement, said Reardon.
"HHS is working with employees and their union representation to improve the operations of
the department with the aim of making the federal government a better place to work and better
able to deliver the services to the American people," an HHS spokeswoman said in a
statement.
@Beckow
ow quality Indian workers far less interesting to the profiteers that then get the same low
quality code and have to pay white/east Asian male wages.
It's funny how the tech companies are all about diversity until it means higher costs.
It will also be funny when the token blacks people hiring programs by the tech companies
mean that peak-diversity signaling, token hire Jamal realizes he'll be working with nothing
but Indians that hate anyone would who is not brainwashed by Jewish propaganda and speak
nothing but Hindi to each other and whom you can't understand when they actually try to speak
English,
Excellent analysis, entirely plausible. Lacking any survey of broad opinion, I'm apt to
project my own view as Trump's Waterloo: that while the political damage of poorly managing
the pandemic was mostly washed out by the emerging view that the economic damage (including
the rioting) of the severe course favored by the left has been more harmful than the virus, a
decisive fraction of his core demographic nevertheless arrived at the view – despite
the ceaseless scolding insistence of this by much of mainstream media – that their
president is indeed glaringly ill-suited for public office.
Perhaps it is due to living near Philly, but there is always fraud. Democrats are good at
it, and Republican Inc. loves it. Can't have any honest, straight shooter interrupt the long
standing political graft. Of course the Donald isn't really an honest man. Had he kept that
5% of the 2016 white male vote, any cheating would have been impossible. But hey we have
still have Israel first with President Kamala. Whew on that. However I don't look forward to
being uncomfortable in my house due to the Paris Accords mandates.
In defense of Maga, there are so many professional agitators in their ranks besides Qanon.
Call them dumb, but they really desperate for something called hope. Maybe that is the reason
I tend to think Trump was the bait to reel them in for the sporting catch and kill.
@prime
noticer Trump's a business man, not a career politician like Biden or Hillary. The system
wants the latter. Soros funds BLM, antifa, ect. It's safe to say the system was against
Trump. Much of his own party of sellout politicians weren't with him. Trump got through the
cracks once, the deep state wasn't going to let that happen again. To get 8 years in office
you have to be a total puppet. The Bush's, Clinton, and Obama were all hand-picked puppets.
Trump wasn't in the club. Trump as President was an accident they had clean up, even if he
was more than willing to betray the White men that voted him in and submit to the beast.
It is obvious why (((they))) wanted Trumpstein out, Trumpstein, despite being a cuckold to
the Zionist was threatening to bring our brave young men and women home, protect our borders,
and his base was about 98% White at the lowest. And many of those were common everyday
working class Whites, you know, the people who really made America great, the people who
actually grow food, build buildings, work and produce automobiles in factories, drive trucks,
you know jobs that are REAL JOBS, JOBS THAT ACTUALLY PRODUCE SOMETHING.
(((They))) didn't really hate Trump, they hated the typical Trump voter. Actually it has
already been pointed out, Trump did very little for the average White other than give them
hope, he really didn't deliver that much. Trump became uber popular by just giving the people
crumbs, now can you imagine how popular a man or woman will be when they come out of nowhere
and give the people the hundred per cent truth. It will take a fearless man or woman, someone
with nothing left to lose, because that is the way it has always been. I NEVER expected Trump
to do much, after all, this guy is the typical NYC businessman, think of who this guy has had
dealings with in his lifetime, hell, look at his in-laws. For all his, "I am not a
politician" rantings, Trump spent his life around politicians and pictures are all over the
place with Trump & Bill Clinton golfing together, Trump and Ghislane, Trump &
Epstein, Trump with his friend Baby Nut&Yahoo, etc. Sounds like the typical politician to
me. Trump was NEVER a man of the people and it will take a real man of the people to set
things right in America.
@Ano4
emonized, censored, attacked, and even murdered. I am glad to have sat this one out, between
who knows how many men like me and those 5% we brought this supposed contest to a standstill
and caused a nation of cope.
Wignats gave him 2016 and we turned 2020 into a shitshow in answer to his betrayal. Trump
only has himself to blame for doing almost nothing to stop censorship, clean up the FBI/DOJ,
prosecute Antifa, end birthright citizenship, end H1B, so many other opportunities
squandered. Trump supporters should start working toward something productive for their
interests.
Harris/Biden like Trump/Pence are Israel Firsters, so really all this hoopla over a
transition is not really called for when you think about it. Matter of fact, the 1st and 2nd
Amendment will continue to be under attacked just like it was with Trumpstein, now more than
ever. Anti-White racism will continue until Whites start standing up for their rights the
same way as everyone else. Trumpstein was never the savior for America, face it. Maybe things
will become so bad IF Harris/Biden take over that this country and Whites will gain a spine
again. Until then, new boss, same as the old boss, more or less. Still as bad as the Orange
Man was, IF you are "White" and voted for Harris/Biden, you have to be legally retarded.
Thanks to all the WINOs and white traitor trash out there. Brilliant you bunch of
retards.
A nice splash of cold water on the sadly losing side in the 2020 election. What you say is
mostly true. There are some significant points you don't acknowledge, such as the idea that
massive numbers of mailed ballots will certainly result in unauthorized votes being counted.
It's hard to say how many that is, but I suspect, like you, that it can't have made a
difference of hundreds of thousands across all the states necessary for a Trump victory.
Blame the phony virus for most of these results and I insist that shutdown policies have
been a gross overreaction designed to make Trump powerless to campaign.
Finally, one simply has to admit that Trump was unprepared to be an effective President
and never learned how. Saying things that sound populist over and over isn't governing.
We have a nice wall that's 400 miles long down on the Mexican border and that's about it.
At some point in the fast approaching future, it will have a plaque on it saying, "I am
Ozymandias Trump. Look on all that I survey."
Well?
What kind of pathetic miserable 17 intelligence agencies, with support of democratic party
and Judenpresse would be , if they would not be able to fix the election such way that their
mischief cannot be found. And on top of it Covid with mail in voting was a surefire help.
.
But than you sleep in the bed you make.
Very misleading and dis-informative post. It ignores the Democrats' history of fraudulent
elections and manipulation of Americans. From the beginning and before the elections, the
Democrats said that they will do everything to remove Trump from the White House, by violence
if necessary.
In reality, the only times the Democrats won fair elections were by JFK and Obama recently.
The reasons were because of the efficient and highly successful advertising campaigns
(propaganda) to manipulate Americans. In fact, Obama won a prize for his efficient
advertising campaign to con Americans and "win" the elections. He was far more criminal than
his predecessors.
The amount of cerebral activity wasted here is, well, wasted...It's a class-war people,
recognize it for such. The U.S. needs to fall down among the weeds, and fertilize what's
coming...The libertarian impulse must be squashed until it is unrecognizable!!
Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty in that order, my friends. All else is sickness in the
mind.
I am seeing quite a few references to a $15/hr minimum wage as a target for a "living
wage". I feel this is merely misdirection from the real problems with our money system.
First, let me say that I fully support the idea of a "living wage". After all, I grew up
in the 50's, when a single wage earner was able to buy a modest house, own a car, and provide
for the average family, including medical costs, college plans, etc. Those days have long
gone due to the ongoing debasement of the currency. Thus, it doesn't matter what you
establish as the minimum wage this year, by next year it will have to be raised again (and
again, and again, . . . ). So, why pick a $15 number when $20, $25, etc. are in the future of
an inflating currency.
To suggest a way to break this cycle, please abide with me as I relate a personal
anecdote.
In the late 60's I was negotiating a job with a particularly cantankerous cheapskate. I
told him that I would work for him for $1/ hour. He got really elated and was ready to
formalize the position when I continued ". . . but that dollar has to be a silver dollar." He
broke off negotiations immediately. I didn't care. I really didn't want to work for him.
Silver was still cheap in those days.
Anyway, look at the price of a silver dollar now, and ask yourself if that would be a
"living wage" today. (The melt value of a silver dollar (about .77 oz) is around $20
excluding any premiums or numismatic value.)
I contend that debasement of the currency (the US dollar) by removing all silver (and
copper) from coins and gold backing from the paper dollar has caused more of the economic
problems (IMHO) of the average person we see today.
@vk #110
You do realize that H1B is literal indentured servitude, right?
And that its purpose is nothing more than cheap(er) labor for the tech companies?
I know many people on H1B, as well as several people who specialize in H1B "hiring".
The good news: many of these people are smart and capable.
The bad news: they're stuck at the companies they start at for 7 years or more - and are paid
significantly (20% to 50%) under "market". If they leave, their green card process starts
anew even assuming they find another H1B sponsor.
More bad news: there are also a significant number of "body shops" who do nothing but enter
the lottery for H1B visas, then auction off the "wins" to the tech companies. The H1B people
in these situations are far worse off because they work for the "body shop", not the tech
company.
Most importantly: H1B, even at its peak, brought in less than 200K people (188K by law).
In comparison: in 2017 - legal immigration was
Family and Immediate Relatives: 748,746
Employment: 137,855
Refugees and Asylees: 146,003
Diversity and Other: 94,563
Total Visas Issued: 1,127,167
Over 1.1 million people came in legally without the H1B.
In Greek mythology, men used to fear the stony gaze of the snake-haired Gorgon. Today, men
once again feel such fear – but, ironically, no campaign has done more to impair women's
opportunities either.
A seven-foot statue of Medusa holding a man's severed head was
unveiled in New York this week. For six months, this sculpture, made by the
Argentinian-Italian artist Luciano Garbati, will be situated facing the Manhattan Supreme
Court, where Harvey Weinstein was prosecuted and
convicted of sex crimes against actresses and female film-production staff.
The statue is being used in this position as a symbol of justice enacted against male
rapists. However, it more accurately – and unintentionally – symbolises the
difference between the public triumphalism of the #MeToo movement and its negative
repercussions for women in the United States.
The most famous painting of Medusa – a female character from Greek mythology who had a
hair of snakes and could turn men to stone if they met her gaze directly – was painted by
Caravaggio in
1596. He was inspired by Vasari's account of a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It has been
a common subject for artists since. Garbati's statue was made in 2008 and adopted by the #MeToo
movement subsequently. From moral outrage to financial advantage
The #MeToo movement hit prominence in 2017 and was initially primarily concerned with
incidents, and allegations, of sexual abuse in Hollywood. It quickly grew to include cases of
sexual impropriety in many fields, mainly in the US. However, as it expanded, it encompassed
rape, sexual abuse, inappropriate sexual contact, unwanted advances, and transactional sex.
By refusing to draw distinctions between actual crimes, ethical/professional infractions,
and consensual (but regretted) sex, the movement became diffusely broad. Allegations of sexual
abuse led to the accused losing contracts, jobs, and marriages; in some cases, it contributed
to suicide. In the ensuing storm of moral panic, actual rape was conflated with Ben Affleck's
groping of an actress
in a video interview , a woman complaining
about a date with Aziz Ansari and Louis CK
exposing himself to colleagues (with their consent).
By failing to distinguish between levels of seriousness, the movement lost what moral
credibility it had and became a means of gaining revenge and exacting extortion. If crimes have
been committed, then they should be reported to the police, not aired in a public forum. The
accused need anonymity just as the victims do, until justice can be served.
Sexual accusations have long been weaponized in American pop culture. It has already
been proven that a whisper network of female comic-book professionals has targeted male
colleagues with – alongside actual crimes – unfounded accusations, in order to
provide more opportunities for female creators. This is not a male/female problem; using deceit
and exaggeration to advance oneself is as old as language itself.
In American television and film production, #MeToo gained control of productions via Time's
Up, enforcing quotas of women and extracting payments. It became a grab to secure lucrative
work for women, relying on goodwill from the public and the fear of executives. The Time's Up
movement is co-led by Katie McGrath, who runs production company Bad Robot Productions with her
husband J.J. Abrams. Bad Robot has a history of presenting itself as a pro-social-justice
company. This summer, at a time when rioters were burning shops and destroying historic
monuments, Bad Robot made an
infamous announcement that there had been " Enough polite conversation. Enough white
comfort. "
By presenting a company as an ethical, socially conscious body, that company is an ideal
position to benefit from major firms being pressured into making decisions not based on
competence but politics. Individuals and companies have seen how they can manipulate public
sympathy about sexual abuse to their own advantage. But firms are now realizing this
danger.
No event has done more to impair women's opportunities in the workplace than the
#MeToo/Time's Up movement. Production companies – even those led by women – now see
female colleagues as a source of potential extortion and compensation claims. As a result, they
now
avoid hiring women in order to avert the possibility of costly legal claims and
reputation-impairing social-media campaigns. Following decades-long attempts to persuade
male-dominated industries that hiring women brought advantages and an expansion of the talent
pool, the moral panic of #MeToo has served only to reveal the disadvantages of employing
women.
When male executives see women today, they fear them, just as heroes in Greek mythology
feared the gaze of Medusa. Ironically, rather than celebrating female power, Garbati's statue
is instead a fitting symbol of the way a campaign that began well has, once again, made men
mistrust women.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Alexander Adams
is an artist, art critic and author. His book 'Iconoclasm, Identity Politics
and the Erasure of History' is published by Societas. Follow him on Twitter @AdamsArtist
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Britain is riddled by a class system. This is largely down to the exaggeration of those who
self-identify as "working class".
A snapshot is the cliché thrown around that to be Prime Minister, you have to attend
either Oxford or Cambridge. For those outside of the UK, the insinuation is that you come from
an affluent background, can afford private education which enabled you to enter one of the two
famous universities. Boris Johnson is the poster child for this privileged group of blue
bloods.
But James Callaghan was Prime Minster before Margaret Thatcher took over in 1979, and
couldn't afford to go to university so never went. Neither did her successor, John Major.
Gordon Brown who followed Tony Blair, attended the University of Edinburgh and is well-regarded
as the most intellectual of recent PMs.
There's no denying the political system has a bias towards Oxbridge alumni, but people have
smashed the glass ceiling and, in fact, even of the PMs who did attend Oxford or Cambridge
between 1964 and 1997, Wilson, Heath and Thatcher, none were privately educated.
Why this is pertinent now, is because of the hysteria sweeping Britain's North complaining
of playing with a loaded deck. The gripe is that London and the wealthier pockets of society
are being allowed more attention and flexibility during Covid.
The South of England is the spiritual home of The Conservatives, the land of the millionaire
stockbroker and art history scholar. The North, Wales and Scotland have traditionally been
enemy territory, due to their cities being built on manufacturing, coal mining and industry. In
our current scenario, this Northern population are being driven by a chip on their
shoulders.
London dominates commerce and business, it's a global financial centre. Even so, some of the
capital city's inhabitants are under the misapprehension that Northerners dream of a "London
life". They don't.
The two pillars of British culture; football and music are defined far more successfully
outside of London, than they ever have been inside.
The same discombobulation happens in the other direction and because the Northern towns are
more parochial, they impact on a bigger scale.
Over the last few days, the British government has tightened restrictions particularly in
the North, across the three tiers - they are the only region in the most severe tranche. But
chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a new scheme to pay two-thirds of any employees' wages, if
their place of work is forced to shut.
Large firms who close can claim
grants up to £3,000 per month and smaller businesses are entitled to £1,300.
That's on top of the Job Support Scheme, which kicks-in for anyone working at least a third of
their normal hours. The government will subsidise the remaining two-thirds (up to
£2,100).
This follows furlough, which has been paying 80 percent of salaries (up to £2,500 per
month) of 12 percent of Britain's workforce. Sunak said : "The primary goal of our
economic policy remains unchanged - to support people's jobs...I cannot save every business, I
cannot save every job."
Northern politicians have been quick to dog whistle.
Mayor of Greater
Manchester , Andy Burnham complained: "They're trying to pressurise people into tier three,
even though it will do certain harm to those economies, often quite fragile economies in the
north."
Liverpool's mayor
Steve Rotheram felt he wasn't consulted enough and said: "it was made clear to us that
government would be doing this regardless of if we engaged with them or not."
Whipping up a frenzy ahead of the new rules, Frank McKenna, chief executive of lobby group
Downtown in Business , ranted: "I cannot overstate the devastation that this will cause to
Liverpool and other parts on northern England if these plans are adopted."
Covid is slitting the wrists of our economy. Unemployment has risen to 4.5 percent .
But the pain is everywhere.
National debt stands at £2 trillion and will remain at over 100 percent of GDP, until
2025 at least. New research shows Aberdeen
has the highest remaining income (£1,487.82), after monthly costs are deducted from
average salaries.
Liverpool, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle all rate above London
on the same scale. The residents of the capital are left with £260.97.
London has a glut of millionaires and average figures are distorting. But that's the crux -
statistics and points of view can be massaged.
This antipathy from the North is driven by rose-tinted spectacles. Those in the world of
financial services earn more than their blue-collar counterparts.
That's because fewer people are capable of these jobs and they generate significantly more
wealth than a manual or semi-skilled worker. This is not a criticism of manual workers, just a
fact of life. Parity would be neither fair nor achievable. Living standards are determined by
income, those working in commerce are also able to continue unabated, due to technology and
video conferencing.
The arrival of Covid wasn't Britain's doing and Boris Johnson has handled it appallingly,
for everyone. But even so there has been a herculean level of financial assistance, with The
Treasury opening the cheque book like never before. Along with the other schemes, they've just
handed £257 million to arts organisations across England.
Some elements of the Westminster machine are working for us all, the complaining masses in
the North need to respect that. Moaning about being left dangling by the upper classes is just
jealously at not having what others do.
Life isn't fair but the government's Covid assistance has been, so stop the self-pity.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Two-thirds of the newly laid-off workers are part-time employees: they will be happy to know
that Disney loaded up on massive debt so it could fund stock buybacks.
"... You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end -- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. ..."
James C.
Collins related a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during
his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. [21] [
non-primary source needed ] When Collins asked which prisoners didn't make it out
of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out
by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're
going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then
Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This
is a very important lesson.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end
-- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal
facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.[22]
For example Microsoft success was by the large part determined its alliance with IBM
in the creation of PC and then exploiting IBM ineptness to ride this via shred marketing
and alliances and "natural monopoly" tendencies in IT. MS DOS was a clone of CP/M that
was bought, extended and skillfully marketed. Zero innovation here.
Both Microsoft and Apple rely of research labs in other companies to produce
innovation which they then then produced and marketed. Even Steve Jobs smartphone was not
an innovation per se: it was just a slick form factor that was the most successful in the
market. All functionality existed in other products.
Facebook was prelude to, has given the world a glimpse into, the future.
From pure technical POV Facebook is mostly junk. It is a tremendous database of user
information which users supply themselves due to cultivated exhibitionism. Kind of private
intelligence company. The mere fact that software was written in PHP tells you something
about real Zuckerberg level.
Amazon created a usable interface for shopping via internet (creating comments
infrastructure and a usable user account database ) but this is not innovation in any
sense of the word. It prospered by stealing large part of Wall Mart logistic software
(and people) and using Wall Mart tricks with suppliers. So Bezos model was Wall Mart
clone on the Internet.
Unless something is done, Bezos will soon be the most powerful man in the world.
People like Bezos, Google founders, Zuckerberg to a certain extent are part of
intelligence agencies infrastructure. Remember Prism. So implicitly we can assume that
they all report to the head of CIA.
Artificial Intelligence, AI, is another consequence of this era of innovation that
demands our immediate attention.
There is very little intelligence in artificial intelligence :-). Intelligent behavior
of robots in mostly an illusion created by First Clark law:
"... "Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots. Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of "populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class disenchantment. ..."
The world is becoming more equal but largely at the expense of middle-class Westerners,
according to a recent paper by Branko Milanovic , a Stone Center Senior Scholar
and a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Milanovic's paper was published
in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
and was titled: The World
Is Becoming More Equal, Even as Globalization Hurts Middle-Class Westerners . Broadly
speaking, globalization is the process of increased " worldwide
integration of the economic, cultural, political, religious, and social systems" of the
globe,
producing an increased flow of goods, capital, labour, and information, across national
borders. It was a process that gained steam particularly in the mid-1980s, with globalization
having the greatest transformative impact on life
since the Industrial Revolution .
Milanovic's paper starts by arguing that the world became more
equal between the end of the Cold War and 2007/08 financial crisis, a period of high
globalization. During this period however, globalization weakened the middle class in the West.
As Milanovic writes
:
"The results highlighted two important cleavages [or divisions]: one between middle-class
Asians and middle-class Westerners and one between middle-class Westerners and their richer
compatriots. In both comparisons, the Western middle class was on the losing end. Middle-class
Westerners saw less income growth than (comparatively poorer) Asians, providing further
evidence of one of the defining dynamics of globalization: in the last 40 years, many jobs in
Europe and North America were either outsourced to Asia or eliminated as a result of
competition with Chinese industries. This was the first tension of globalization: Asian growth
seems to take place on the backs of the Western middle class."
"Another chasm opened between middle-class Westerners and their wealthy compatriots.
Here, too, the middle class lost ground. It seemed that the wealthiest people in rich countries
and almost everybody in Asia benefited from globalization, while only the middle class of the
rich world lost out in relative terms. These facts supported the notion that the rise of
"populist" political parties and leaders in the West stemmed from middle-class
disenchantment. "
Milanovic goes on to note
that in an updated paper that looks at incomes in 130 countries from 2008 to 2013-14, the first
tension of globalization holds true: in that, the incomes of the non-Western middle class grew
more than the incomes of the middle class in the West. The impact of globalization on the
Western middle class is imperative to understand. Globalization is a process that has produced
winners and losers , and
the Western middle class has been the greatest loser.
In my opinion, any system that weakens the middle class in any country should be seen as
counterproductive. Having a strong middle class is one of the most important tenets in building
a strong, prosperous, and stable society. The middle class serves as the bedrock of any
country: those who comprise the middle-class work hard, pay taxes, and buy goods. A true
solution to poverty in underdeveloped countries would create more prosperity for everyone, not
take prosperity from one region and redirect it into another. This so-called solution creates
at least as many problems as it supposedly solves.
Globalization has produced, and will seemingly continue to produce, a global standardization
of wealth in many ways. For those special interests who are in the process of creating a global
system, an economic uniformity across the globe is advantageous for the creation of this
one-world system.
Just how far has the working class been left behind by the winner-take-all economy? A new analysis by the RAND
Corporation examines what rising inequality has cost Americans in lost income -- and the results are stunning.
A full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median -- with half the population making more and half making
less -- now pulls in about $50,000 a year. Yet had the fruits of the nation's economic output been shared over the
past 45 years as broadly as they were from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, that worker would
instead be making $92,000 to $102,000. (The exact figures vary slightly depending on how inflation is calculated.)
The findings, which land amid a global pandemic, help to illuminate the paradoxes of an economy in which so-called
essential workers
are
struggling
to make ends meet while the rich
keep
getting richer
.
"We were shocked by the numbers," says
Nick
Hanauer
, a venture capitalist who came up with the idea for the research along with David Rolf, founder
of Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union and president of the
Fair
Work Center
in Seattle. "It explains almost everything. It explains why people are so pissed off. It explains
why they are so economically precarious."
Trends
in Income From 1975 to 2018 [Chart: Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards, RAND Corporation]
"THE $2.5 TRILLION THEFT"
Notably, it isn't just those in the middle who've been hit. RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the
25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone's earnings
from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and '60s.
Workers in the 75th percentile would be at $126,000 instead of $81,000. Remarkably, even those in the 90th
percentile would be better off than they are now if economic growth had been shared as it was in the post-war era.
They'd be making $168,000 rather than $133,000.
Tally it all up, according to RAND, and the bottom 90% of American workers would be bringing home an additional
$2.5 trillion in total annual income if economic gains were as equitably divided as they'd been in the
past -- leading Rolf to dub the phenomenon "the $2.5 trillion theft."
"From the standpoint of people who have worked hard and played by the rules and yet are participating far less in
economic growth than Americans did a generation ago," he says, "whether you call it 'reverse distribution' or
'theft,' it demands to be called something."
The RAND data also makes clear who the winners from inequality are: those in the top 1%.
Of course, they'd be in a less advantageous position if the economic pie had been divvied up since the mid-1970s
like it was previously. If that were the case, RAND says, yearly income for the average one-percenter would fall
from about $1.2 million to $549,000.
Think you can take a sneaky break or have a lie-in because you're 'working' remotely? Forget
it. Employers are increasingly deploying surveillance software to check how productive staff
are at home.
Lockdown and its aftermath has led more and more employees to work from home. Many big firms
have already said they won't even attempt to get back staff back to the office until next year,
at the earliest, amid discussions about how working from home could become the new normal for
at least part of the week.
Working from home has a lot of advantages for many people. It can make childcare easier, for
example. Employees can avoid having to deal with annoying colleagues, or coughing up for long,
expensive and often uncomfortable commutes.
They can also avoid having their bosses constantly looking over their shoulder – or
can they?
Employers are using ever more sophisticated measures to keep tabs on their home-working
staff, anxious that they might be shirking, and introducing new rules governing how their
workers appear and act.
One large London employer, Hammersmith & Fulham Council, has even gone as far as banning
its employees from smoking at their desks at home, demanding
that " any part of a private dwelling used solely for work purposes will be required to be
smoke-free " and that " family members should not be allowed to smoke in the home
worker's office ". The council claims the policy has since been dropped, presumably because
it is unenforceable. (Though, with webcams now ubiquitous, maybe not.) It's also irrational,
since smoking at home can hardly affect your colleagues or the public image of your
employer.
Smokers have long been in the vanguard of interference in our private lives. But having
precedent for interference in our private lives having been established, the rules applied to
smokers have inspired other kinds of meddling.
Most obvious in the current situation is the use of technological measures to monitor staff.
Such surveillance is not new, but it's taken on a new importance and is much more widespread in
the Covid era. A recent feature in
Wired notes the rise of this surveillance culture. As author Alex Christian notes:
" As coronavirus lays waste to workplaces around the world, surveillance software has
flourished: programs such as ActivTrak, Time Doctor, Teramind and Hubstaff have all reported a
post-lockdown sales surge. Once installed, they offer an array of covert monitoring tools, with
managers able to view screenshots, login times and keystrokes at will to ensure employees
remain on track working remotely. Although marketed as productivity software, the technology
– dubbed as 'bossware' for its secrecy and invasiveness – has led to many workers
finding creative ways of evading its omniscient gaze ."
Employees working within these strictures face a reprimand or even the sack for low
productivity or taking too long on their break. One app, Sneek, covertly takes photos of
employees to see if they are at their desks. Project management programs such as Jira and
Basecamp, meanwhile, can allow bosses to spot when workers are not maintaining a high level of
output. Frequent online team meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams can ensure staff are at least
thinking about work – and woe betide anyone who's still in their pyjamas or doesn't show
up at all.
Of course, there are workarounds if you're smart enough. One way is to move your mouse
regularly – or to instal software to give the illusion it's being moved. But the whole
thing has the potential to create a sense that Big Brother Bossman is watching you
constantly.
It's bad enough that working from home leads many people into the trap of blurring work and
home life. That time on the commute, when you might at least be reading or listening to music
or a podcast, becomes work time. It's easy to see how all of this leads to the intensification
of work.
Moreover, working from home deprives us of the solidarity and consolation of colleagues.
It's harder to band together to push back against the imposition of new rules and regulations
if you don't see your peers face to face. Many jobs are intense and stressful, but working in
an office allows staff to sound off to each other informally in the pub on a Friday night
– or maybe hear about better opportunities elsewhere.
Working from home can also be a disaster for younger employees, who need to learn the ropes
from their experienced colleagues. It's harder to learn, and to make a good impression with
those that count, over video calls.
While a middle-class employee with a comfortable and spacious home may wax lyrical about the
benefits of working from home, for many people, it's becoming an ever more intensive and
stressful experience. Knowing that your boss could be spying on you just adds paranoia and fear
to the mix.
We may well be heading backwards in the world of work. In pre-industrial times and beyond,
garment-makers would work themselves to death during long hours to service the demands of
buyers, paid as they were by the piece and not by the hour, and isolated in their home from
other such workers. We need to be very careful that the modern, connected, domesticated
workplace doesn't take us down the same route.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
White House counselor Stephen Miller and CNN's Jim Acosta clash at the Wednesday press
briefing focused on the administration's new immigration proposal:
In short black people are used as pawns in the political struggle between two neoliberal
clans fighting for power, using students without perspectives of gaining meaningful employment as
a ram. We saw this picture before in a different country. And riots do reverse gains achieved in
civil right struggle since 1960th, so they are also net losers. Racial tensions in the USA
definitely increased dramatically.
Notable quotes:
"... Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies. ..."
"... This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated. ..."
"... The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes in fear ..."
"... There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it alone. ..."
"... Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the leaders ..."
Here's your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project",
and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning tell us about what's going on in America
today?
They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people They
suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws They
alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race
war They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are inciting
racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to office in 2016
and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into
a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive
outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned,
insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide
riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. "Critical
Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White Supremacist" warning are as
much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling
of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of "ideology", and all three are being used
to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as "Americans".
The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history,
their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed
by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important
than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative "Reset"
that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds
of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive
element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda
saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don't expect the strategy will
ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging
and unapologetic.
Let's look more carefully at what is going on.
On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that
"White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States". According to an
article in Politico:
" all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white
supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S. , listed above the
immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups . John Cohen, who oversaw DHS's
counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts' conclusion isn't
surprising.
"This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS,
the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related
threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white
supremac y and other far-right ideological causes," he said .
"Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social,
ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United
States," the draft reads. "Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists
will pose the most persistent and lethal threat."..(" DHS
draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat " Politico)
This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that
designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities
for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of
small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their
employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds
the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined.
So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they
chosen to prioritize white supremacists as "the most persistent and lethal threat" when it is
clearly not true?
There's only one answer: Politics.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are
invoking the race card ("white supremacists") to divert attention from their sinister
destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street
friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class "America First" nationalists who
handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by
installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out
their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That's what's really going on.
DHS's announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who
gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the
white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose
no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose
beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who
must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was
abolished more than 150 years ago.
The 1619 Project" is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the
American people. The objective of the "Project" is to convince readers that America was founded
by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the
World Socialist Web Site:
"The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of
American history is rooted in race hatred -- specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of
"black people" by "white people." Hannah-Jones writes in the series' introduction:
"Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country. "
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the
genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and
development . Hannah-Jones's reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive
racial antagonisms from innate biological processes .where does this racism come from? It
is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American "white people." Thus, it
must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions .
. No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting
race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear
responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided
arguments." ("The New York Times's 1619
Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history", World Socialist Web
Site)
Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation
to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution.
The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating
widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of "social justice."
As Hannah-Jones says, "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country", which is to
say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white
patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing
government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning
non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil
unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to
replace America's Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious
Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones treatise does nothing to improve
conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream
of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla.
Then there is "Critical Race Theory" which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The
theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate
workers. White employees are being subjected to "reeducation" programs that require their
participation as a precondition for further employment . The first rebellion against critical
race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs
America's nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo:
"Senator @HawleyMO and
@SecBrouillette have
launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated
their purge against conservatives."
Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory,
race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees -- and all
dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative
employees will be purged." (" There is a civil war erupting
at @SandiaLabs ." Christopher F Rufo)
It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here's more info on how this toxic indoctrination program
works:
"Treasury Department
The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that "virtually all
White people contribute to racism" and demanding that white staff members "struggle to own
their racism" and accept their "unconscious bias, White privilege, and White
fragility."
The National Credit Union Administration
The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was "founded on
racism" and "built on the blacks of people who were enslaved. " Twitter thread here and
original source documents
here .
Sandia National Laboratories
Last year, Sandia National Labs -- which produces our nuclear arsenal -- held a
three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their
"white male culture" and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of
color . Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now
endangering our national security. Twitter thread here and original source
documents
here .
Argonne National Laboratories
Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they
"benefit from racism" and atone for the "pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people. "
Twitter thread here .
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on "microaggressions,
microinequities, and microassaults" where white employees were told that they had been
"socialized into oppressor roles. " Twitter thread here and original source
documents here
." (" Summary of
Critical Race Theory Investigations" , Christopher F Rufo)
On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration "would prohibit federal
agencies from subjecting government employees to "critical race theory" or "white privilege"
seminar. ..
"It has come to the President's attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent
millions of taxpayer dollars to date 'training' government workers to believe divisive,
anti-American propaganda ," read a Friday memo
from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. "These types of 'trainings'
not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its
inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce The
President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using
taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions."
The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see
whether the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project was being used in school curricula
and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding.
Conservative pundits applauded Trump's action as a step forward in the "culture wars", but it's
really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who
continue look for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to
grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled
by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. Alot of thought and effort
went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That's no
small achievement.
Bottom line: "Critical Race Theory", "The 1619 Project", and Homeland Security's "White
Supremacist" warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is
based. The "anti-white" dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the
country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work
together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a "racial" smokescreen that conceals
the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that
was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working
class "populist" movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform
the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO
allies.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer
that must be eradicated.
A good article, but no mention of who exactly these oligarchs are. Or why so many of them
are Jewish.
Or why so many Zionist organisations support BLM and other such groups.
Mike, not mentioning these things will not save you. You will still be cancelled by
Progressive Inc.
This seems like a good explanation of what is happening. I wonder whether too many people
will fall for the propaganda, though. It is the classic effort to get the turkeys to support
thanksgiving.
The deserved progress and concessions achieved by the civil rights struggles for the Black
community is in danger of deteriorating because Black leadership will not stand up and
vehemently condemn the rioting and destruction and killing, and declare that the BLM movement
does not represent the majority of the Black American culture and that the overexaggerated
accusations of "racism" do not necessitate the eradication and revision of history, nor does
it require European Americans to feel guilt or shame. There is no need for a cultural
revolution. The ideology and actions of BLM are offensive and inconsistent with American
values, and Black leaders should be saying this every day, and should be admonishing about
the consequences. They should also use foresight to see how this is going to end, because the
BLM and their supporters are being used to fight a war that they can never win. And when it's
over, what perception will the rest of America have of Black people?
@sonofman g to TPTB. Better to have an amorphous slogan to donate money to than an actual
organization with humans, goals and ideas which can be held up to the light and critically
examined.
The whole sudden race thing is a fraud to eliminate the electoral support Trump had
amassed among blacks before Corona and Fentanyl Floyd. In line with what Whitney says, the
globalists need to take down Trump. And the race card has always been the first tool in the
DNC's toolkit. When all else fails, go nuclear with undefined claims of racism.
Almost every big magazine has a black person on the cover this month. Probably will in
October too. Coincidence? Sure it is.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I'm shocked that they're trying to sell this Q-tier bullshit about Trump fighting the deep
state.
The reality about Trump is that he is the release valve, the red herring designed to keep
whitey pacified while massive repossessions and foreclosures take place, permanently
impoverishing a large part of the white population, and shutting down the Talmudic
service-based economy, which is all that is really left. It is Trump's DHS that declared a
large part of his white trashionalist base to be terrorists.
The populist majority never had anyone to vote for. This system will never give them one.
They aren't bright enough to make it happen.
Agree. Barack Obama in particular will go down in history a real disgrace to the legacy of
the US presidency. He is violating the sacred trust that the people of the United States
invested in him. What a fraud!
Good post Mr. Whitney especially about "white supremacy" garbage .which has only been
going on since the 90s! You know, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elohim City and Okie City, militias,
"patriot groups," etc. This really is nothing new. And, since so many remember the "white
supremacy" crapola was crapola back in the 90s, I'd say everyone pretty much regardless of
race over the age of 40 knows there is, as it says in Ecclesiastes in the Bible, "there is
nothing new under the sun." And, if you home schooled your kids back then, then you kids know
it as well. Fact is this: the DHS as with every other govt. agency is forced to blame "white
supremacy" for every problem in this country because who the heck else can they blame? Jews?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahh when pigs fly After all, Noahide just might be around the
corner ..
Sheriffs have a lot of legal power. Ultimately, the battle is privatized money power
vs Joe Citizen/Sheriffs.
This sheriff is working a Constitutional angle that says: Local Posse (meaning you.. Joe
citizen) working with the Sheriff department to protect your local community. Richard Mack is
teaching other Sheriffs and (some Police) what their Constitutional power is, and that power
doesn't include doing bidding of Oligarchs.
Sheriffs are elected, and their revenue stream is outside of Oligarchy:
So Donald Trump suddenly discovers that racial Bolshevism is the official policy of
his own executive branch – a mere 3 years and 8 months after assuming the
position
... Looks like the same old flim-flam they pull every four years. No matter who wins, the
Davos folks continue to run the circus and fleece the suckers dry.
Because it is. Substitute "the ethnic Russian middle class are class enemies" for
"Anglo-American are all racists" and there you have it. Permission for a small organized
minority to eliminate a whole class on ideological grounds...
I live in a former communist country in Eastern Europe with corrupt politicians, oligarchs
and organized crime.
America was a country with a minor corruption and in which the oligarchs, although
influential, were not united in a small group with decisive force. Now America is slowly
slipping into the situation of a second-hand shit-hole country.
Is that I can see the situation more clearly than an American citizen who still has the
American perception of his contry the way it was 30 years ago.
Essential thing:
1) The current situation cannot exist without the complicity of the secret services and
the police. The heads of the secret services are either part of the cabal or close their eyes
in fear .
2) There can be no single oligarch. It must be a larger group but very united by fear and
a common goal. This can only be achieved if they are all Jews or Masons. Or both under a
larger umbrella like some kind of pedo-ritual killing-satan worshiper. Soros can't do it
alone.
3) Of course politicians are corrupt and complicit but usually they are not the
leaders
4) BLM are exactly the brown shirts of the new Hitler.
Soon we will se the new Hitler/Stalin/ in plain light.
Thirty black children murdered recently; zero by police / BLM & 'the media' say
nothing: https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-volume-7-the-lives-of-innocent-black-kids-do-not-matter/
BTW:
– Last year, the nationwide total for all US police forces was 47 killings of unarmed
criminals by police during arrest procedures.
– 8 were black, 19 were white.
Though blacks, relative to their numbers, committed a vastly higher number of crimes, hence
their immensely greater arrest rate.
@Justvisiting urally, it is nonsense -- nasty, power-hungry, censorious nonsense.
It is the opposite of scientific or empirical thought -- science can not accept theories
which are not capable of falsification. (Take astrology -- actually, don't ! -- what ever
conclusion it comes to can never be wrong : Dick or Jane didn't find love ? Well, one
of Saturn's moons was retrograde & Mercury declensed Venus (I don't know what it means
either) . or Dick went on a bender & Jane had a whole bad hair week.
Frankly, to play these pre-modern tricks on us is just grotesquely insulting. That some are
falling for it is grotesquely depressing.
Another ringer from Mike Whitney! Keep 'em comin', brother.
We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem.
We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad
logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an
extremely impressive ideological campaign.
Yup. TPTB have been grooming BLM/Antifa for this moment for at least 3-4 years now, if not
longer. Here's a former BLMer who quit speaking out three years ago about the organization's
role in the present 'race war':
It is very clever politics and (war) propaganda. You break down and demoralise your
enemies at the same time as assuring your own side of it's own righteous use of violence.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look
beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows.
Nailing it.
4. They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
Which of these four statements best explains what's going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right.
If we believe this – we need to act like it. These are "enemies, foreign and
domestic ". This isn't ordinary politics, it arguably transcends politics.
What hope is there without organization?
And whatever is done – don't give them ammunition. The resistance must not be an
ethno-resistance.
But he is either naive or a bad manager, as his hires are deadly to his aims. And the
management criticism is big, because as a leader that is mostly what he does.
That he gets information to affect US policy for good, from outside of his circle of
trusted personnel, is a sad state of affairs.
@Robert Dolan ds that it would have ended on day one were it not officially sanctioned
and the rioters protected from prosecution. Why hasn't the Janet Rosenberg/Thousand
Currents/Tides Foundation connection with the BLM/DNC/MSM cabal, as well as with Antifa and
social media, been the major investigation on Fox News? Why haven't Zuckerberg, Zucker, et al
been arrested for incitement to commit federal crimes, including capital treason to overthrow
the duly elected president? (Just a few rhetorical questions for the hell of it.) What's so
galling is that the cops and federal agents are being used as just so many patsies who are
deployed, not to protect, but deployed to look like fools and be held up for mockery as
pathetic exemplars of white disempowerment.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the
oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use
them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding.
Agree, but where is President Trump? He was supposed to appoint undersecretaries and
assistant secretaries and deputy undersecretaries and Schedule C whippersnappers on whose
desks such outrages are supposed to die.
I've thought from the beginning that this lack of attention to "personnel as policy" --
with Trump overestimating the ability of the ostensible CEO to overcome such intransigence --
was one of his major failures. I am sympathetic, as there are not many people he could trust
to be loyal to his agenda, much less to him, but this is a disaster in every agency
Few years ago I watch a clip secretly recorded in Ukrainian synagogue where Rabi said
"first we have to fight Catholics and with Muslims it will be an easy job" ...
Thanks to Mr Whitney for being able to cut through the fog and see what's going on behind
it. The term "white supremacist" wasn't much in public use at all until the day Trump was
elected then suddenly it was all over the place. It's like one of those massive ad campaigns
whose jingle is everywhere as if some group decided on it as a theme to be pushed. They're
really afraid that the white working class population will wake up and see how the country is
being sold out from underneath their feet hence the need to keep it divided and intimidated.
Like all the other color revolutions everywhere else they strike at the weak links within the
country to create conflict, in the US case it's so-called diversity. There's billions
available to be spent in this project so plenty of traitors can be found, unwitting or
otherwise, to carry out their assignments. The billionaire class own most of the media and
much else and see the US as their farm. They have no loyalty whatsoever and outsource
everything to China or anywhere else they can squeeze everything out of the workers. They
want a global dictatorship and admire the Chinese government for the way it can order its
citizens around.
You are exactly right. Trump is doing his part (knowingly or unknowingly, but probably
knowingly) to accomplish the NWO objectives. He was not elected in 2016 in spite of NWO
desires, as most Trump supporters think, but rather precisely BECAUSE of NWO desires.
The NWO probably also wants him to win again this year, and if so then he will win. The
reason the NWO wanted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
@Trinity While I tend to agree with you that it looks like a race war, the question is
why is it happening now? If it were just a race war promoted by radicals in BLM and Antifa,
it does not explain the nationwide coordination (let's face it the faces of BLM and Antifa
are not that smart or connected), the support and censorship of the violence by the MSM and
the support of Marxist BLM by corporations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is a color revolution in the making and may come to a peak after Nov. 3rd. Whitney is on
to something, there is much more going on behind the "smoke and mirrors" and AG Barr (if he's
not part of it) should be investigating it.
They indicate that powerful agents -- operating from within the state– are
inciting racial violence to crush the emerging "populist" majority that elected Trump to
office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to
transform America into a tyrannical third-world "shithole".
I keep reading such nonsense in the comments above. the so-called populist majority does
not get it, Trump is not placed here to stop the Globalist agenda, that is an electioneering
stunt. Look at what he has actually and really done.
How has he stopped the Globalist move forward?? By the Covid plandemic being
allowed to circle the globe and shut down the US economy and social norm? By moving our high
tech companies to Israel? Giving Israel and their Wall Street allies what is left of US
credit wealth? Draining the swamp with even more Zio-Neocon Swamp creatures in the govt than
ever? Moving the embassy to Jerusalem and all requests per Netanyahu's wish list? A real
anti-Globalist stand? Looting the Federal Reserve for the Wall Street high fliers, who
garnered more wealth during the crash test run of March-April and are sure to make out with
even more for the coming big crash?
Phoney stunts of stopping immigration or bashing China. Really? China is still rising
propelled by Wall Street and Banker funds. I have not seen any jobs coming home, lost more
than ever in US history this year. Only lost homes for the working and middle classes.
How is Populist America standing up for their constitutional rights which is being
shredded a little more each day? Standing up for their Real Interests, which are eroded and
stolen on an almost daily basis by Trump's NY Mafia and Wall Street Oligarchs. Jobs gone for
good and government assistance to the needy disappearing, as that is against the phoney
Republic individualism, that you must make it on your own. Right just like the big goverment
assistance always going to the big money players and banks, remember as they are too big
to let fail!
Dreaming that Trump is going to save White America from the Gobalists is just
bull corn . From whom BLM? Proven street theatre that will disappear on command. I
actually have come to learn that some Black leaders are speaking out intelligently for street
calm and distancing themselves from BLM.
Problem with the USA is the general population is so very dumbed down by 60 years of MSM
– TV s and Hollywood mind control programming that the public prefers professional
actors like Reagan and Trump over real politicians, and surely never chose a Statesman or
real Patriotic leader. the public political narrative is still set by Fox , CNN and
MSNBC .
The deep state is so infiltrated and overwhelmed with Zio and Globalist agents, that it is
now almost hopeless to fix. Sorry to point out but Trump is best described as the Dummy
sitting on his Ventriloquist's lap (Jared Kushner).
Situation is near hopeless as even here on Ron Unz Review the comments are so
disappointing, almost 80% are focused on the Race as the prime issue and supportive of Trump
fakery (not that I support Biden and Zio slut Kamil Harris either).
In sum, beyond putting their MAGA hats on, White America is more focused more on
playing Cowboy with their toy guns, AR's and all than really getting involved politically to
sort things out to get American onto a better track. Of course, this is not taken seriously
as it might call for reaching out to other American communities that are even more
disenfranchised: African- Americans and Latinos.
@David Erickson nted him in 2016 (and probably wants him to win again) was primarily to
neutralize the (armed) Right in this country so they wouldn't effectively resist the COVID-19
scamdemic lockdown tyranny and BLM/Antifa riots.
Covid and BLM/ANTIFA are just window dressing for the financial turmoil. "Look over here
whitey, there's a pandemic" and "look over here whitey, there's a riot" is much preferred to
whitey shooting the sheriff who comes to take his stuff.
Wave the flag and bible while spreading love for the cops, and the repossessions and
evictions should go off without a hitch. Yes, Trump is a knowing participant.
"My impression is that BLM, Antifa and other protestors are well aware of this"
Like all good Maoists the cult white kids of antifa rigidly adhere to the mission statement
and stick the inconvenient truth in the back of their mushy minds. BLM ... is a mercenary.
Can you imagine any other groups rioting and destroying American cities for over 3 months?
Imagine if the Hells Angels or some other White biker gang was doing what Antifa and BLM are
doing? Hell, imagine if it were a bunch of Hare Krishnas pulling this shit off? Hell, I think
the local mayors, police, and other law enforcement employees wouldn't even take this much shit
even if the rioters were Girl Scouts. We are talking 3-4 months of lawlessness, assaults,
rapes, murders ( cold blooded premeditated murders at that) and still the people in charge let
this shit go on night and day. IF the POTUS doesn't have the authority or the power to stop
shit like this from going on then what the hell do we even vote for anyhow? Granted, I see the
reason for not being ruled by a dictatorship, but who in the hell can justify letting these
riots go on? One can only assume that both the republicants and the demsheviks are fine with
these riots because no one seems in a hurry to shut them down or arrest the hombres funding
these riots. Who is housing and feeding the rioters? Who is paying their travel expenses? I'm
sure most everyone in Washington knows who the people are behind these riots but don't expect
any action anytime soon.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond
the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that
must be eradicated.
That's true to a large degree, but
It is indeed an attempt to liquidate the working and lower middle class. Most of the
American working and lower middle class, obviously not all, is White. So predictably we have
these calls for White Genocide. Agreed and good to see the tie-in with the Coronavirus Hoax
lock downs, too, which also spread the devastation into minority communities under the guise of
public safety.
The one question that remains unanswered is why the major cities were targeted for
destruction. Obviously these are the playgrounds of the oligarchs and have been decimated. We
will learn soon enough.
The Reverend William Barber is the only genuine black leader I am aware of.
And he makes a pointn of not speaking only for blacks, but for all disadvantaged communities,
including poor whites. IMO he is the real deal, and I very much hope he takes the lead in
articulating genuine community values of respect and equality for all, including basics such as
decent health care and food access.
The pressure exerted on someone like Barber by the BLM forces in the media and other
institutions is enormous.
I wish Ron Unz would invite him to write something for the UR.
"... workers are dehumanizingly treated by Amazon as if they are robots – persistently asked to accomplish task after task at an unforgiving rate." ..."
Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of
surveillance and stress, according to a study by the Open Markets Institute.
The think tank and advocacy group that repeatedly takes companies like Google and Facebook
to task warned in the
report [PDF] that Amazon's retail side has gone far beyond promoting efficient working and
has adopted an almost dystopian level of control over its warehouse workers,
firing them if they fail to meet targets that are often kept a secret.
Among the practices it highlighted, the report said that workers are told to hit a target
rate of packages to process per hour, though they are not told what exactly that target is. "We
don't know what the rate is," one pseudonymous worker told the authors. "They change it behind
the scenes. You'll know when you get a warning. They don't tell you what rate you have to hit
at the beginning."
If they grow close to not meeting a target rate, or miss it, the worker receives an
automated message warning them, the report said. Workers who fail to meet hidden targets can
also receive a different type of electronic message; one that fires them.
"Amazon's electronic system analyzes an employee's electronic record and, after falling
below productivity measures, 'automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding
quality or productivity without input from supervisors'," it stated. The data is also generated
automatically: for example, those picking and packing are required to use a scanner that
records every detail, including the time between scans, and feed it into a system that pushes
out automated warnings.
Always watching
As with other companies, Amazon installs surveillance cameras in its workspaces to reduce
theft. But the report claims Amazon has taken that approach to new lengths "with an extensive
network of security cameras that tracks and monitors a worker's every move".
Bezos' bunch combines that level of surveillance with strict limits on behavior. "Upon
entering the warehouse, Amazon requires workers to dispose of all of their personal belongings
except a water bottle and a clear plastic bag of cash," the report noted.
For Amazon drivers, their location is constantly recorded and monitored and they are
required to follow the exact route Amazon has mapped. They are required to deliver 999 out of
every 1,000 packages on time or face the sack; something that the report argues has led to
widespread speeding and a related increase in crashes.
The same tracking software ensures that workers only take 30 minutes for lunch and two
separate 15-minute breaks during the day. The report also noted that the web goliath has
patented a wristband that "can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their
hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction".
Amazon also attempts to prevent efforts to unionize by actively tracking workers and
breaking up any meetings of too many people, including identifying possible union organizers
and moving them around the workplace to prevent them talking to the same group for too long,
the report claimed.
It quoted a source named Mohamed as saying: "They spread the workers out you cannot talk to
your colleagues The managers come to you and say they'll send you to a different station."
The combined effort of constant surveillance with the risk of being fired at any point has
created, according to workers, a " Lord Of The Flies -esque environment where the
perceived weakest links are culled every year".
Stress and quotas
The report said Amazon's workers "are under constant stress to make their quotas for
collecting and organizing hundreds of packages per hour" resulting in "constant 'low-grade
panic' to work. In this sense, workers are dehumanizingly treated by Amazon as if they are
robots – persistently asked to accomplish task after task at an unforgiving
rate."
At the end of the day, warehouse employees are required to go through mandatory screening to
check they haven't stolen anything, which "requires waiting times that can range from 25
minutes to an hour" and is not compensated, the report said.
Amazon also allegedly fails to account for any injuries, the report said, to the extent that
"Amazon employees feel forced to work through the pain and injuries they incur on the job, as
Amazon routinely fires employees who fall behind their quotas, without taking such injuries
into account."
It quoted another piece of reporting that found Amazon's rate of severe injuries in its
warehouses is, in some cases, more than five times the industry average. It also noted that the
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health listed Amazon as one of the "dirty dozen"
on its list of the most dangerous places to work in the United States in 2018.
The report concluded that "Amazon's practices exacerbate the inequality between employees
and management by keeping employees in a constant state of precariousness, with the threat of
being fired for even the slightest deviation, which ensures full compliance with
employer-demanded standards and limits worker freedom."
Being a think tank, the Open Markets Institute listed a series of policy and legal changes
that would help alleviate the work issues. It proposed a complete ban on "invasive forms of
worker surveillance" and a rule against any forms of surveillance that "preemptively interfere
with unionization efforts".
It also wants a law that allows independent contractors to unionize and the legalization of
secondary boycotts, as well as better enforcement of the rules against companies by government
departments including America's trade watchdog the FTC and Department of Justice, as well as a
ban on non-compete agreements and class action waivers.
In response to the allegations in the report, a spokesperson for Amazon told us: "Like most
companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian – be it corporate
employee or fulfillment center associate and we measure actual performance against those
expectations.
"Associate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of time as we know that
a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour. We
support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help
them improve." ®
The harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, one of the greatest adventure
stories of the modern age.
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the
Endurance
and
set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way
through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the
Endurance
became
locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was
finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest
seas to the closest outpost of civilization.
In
Endurance
,
the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous
voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
The
book gave me several adrenaline rushes...it's that well written.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The
book gave me several adrenaline rushes...it's that well written.
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2018
Verified Purchase
This is an amazing account of Shackleton's journey that went into
intricate details about the twists and turns every step of the way for this small group of brave explorers. It
reads like a thrilling fiction novel, but the fact that it is non-fiction makes it even more astounding. The
description really paints a true picture of the hellacious conditions that they continued to face time and time
again. This book really put into perspective what a challenge truly is. A simple headache that we might get now
is nowhere near getting your sleeping bag drenched and still having to sleep in it in temperatures near 0 when
you don't know how the weather or current is going to change while you try to sleep. Great read and really hard
to put down because even though you think you know what's going to happen, you still have to find out how.
Would highly recommend if you're looking for a good book that you will have trouble putting down.
38 people found this helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cold
Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2018
Verified Purchase
Very cold. Always cold. This is a very detailed (true) story about men
trying to survive in a very hostile environment in c. 1915. Stark and full of detail, the reader almost gets to
feel the cold, hunger and pain the crew experienced while trying to survive Antarctica and return to
civilization. it's amazing that anyone survived this ordeal let alone all of them. Sadly, many creatures and
peaceful animals paid the price for mans survival. The details often are so descriptive and redundant due to
the scope of the story, that it sometimes becomes repetitive and familiar. This is because of the constant
distress and horrible conditions the crew experienced for such a long time. It's a well documented and exciting
story with a bit of a history lesson that really held my interest. It's a popular book that is deserving of its
high ratings.
21 people found this helpful
There is no doubt in my mind that I would not be able to endure even one, the best, day of the unimaginable
hardships that the men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Exposition (1914-17) -- under the leadership of Sir Ernest
Shackleton -- struggled with for more than 400 days. They endured and survived some of the most incredible,
unbelievable, conditions ever experienced; and Alfred Lansing captures the urgency, the deprivation, and the
desperation, with spellbinding storytelling.
Recommendation: Best adventure story, ever. Should be read by all, especially those of high school age.
"In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age -- no
warmth, no life, no movement." (p. 46).
Basic Books. Kindle Edition, 268 pages.
16 people found this helpful
A
Riveting True Story of Adventure, Survival and Hope
5.0 out of 5 stars
A
Riveting True Story of Adventure, Survival and Hope
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2014
Verified Purchase
In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton set out on an expedition to make the first
land crossing of the barren Antarctic continent from the east to the west coast. The expedition failed to
accomplish its objective, but became recognized instead as an amazing feat of endurance. Shackleton and a crew
of 27 (plus one stowaway) first headed to the Weddell Sea on the ship Endurance. Their ship was trapped by pack
ice short of their destination and eventually crushed. Forced to abandon ship, the men were trapped on ice
floes for months while they drifted north. Once they were far enough north that the ice thinned somewhat, they
were forced to journey in lifeboats they'd dragged off the ship. After six terrible days, they made it to
uninhabited Elephant Island; from there Shackleton and five other men set off in an open 22-foot boat on an
incredible 800-mile voyage across the notoriously tempestuous Drake Passage to South Georgia Island, where they
hiked across the island's mountain range to reach a whaling camp. From there, they returned in a ship to rescue
the men left behind on Elephant Island.
That these men were able to survive in the harsh, barren conditions of Antarctica, where temperatures
frequently fell below zero is amazing. It's nearly unimaginable that these men could survive for almost two
years, their lives marked by a seemingly endless stretch of misery, suffering, and boredom, not to mention the
threat of starvation. At every turn, their situation seems to go from bad to worse. If this were a work of
fiction, one would be inclined to claim the story was simply too far-fetched. But Endurance isn't just a tale
of misery, it is a vivid description of their journey, the dangers they faced, and the obstacles they overcame.
Through all of this, Shackleton has never lost a man.
Alfred Lansing's book, written in 1958 from interviews and journals of the survivors, is now back in print.
It's a riveting tale of adventure, survival and hope. It is also a rare historical, non-fiction book that is as
exciting as any novel. I've read a number of stories of survival and would rate this as the best of all I have
read. This is one of the great adventure stories of our time. Don't miss it.
Read more
45 people found this helpful
I
recommend this book to add to the collection of those ...
5.0 out of 5 stars
I
recommend this book to add to the collection of those ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2015
Verified Purchase
What a page turner. Lansing is a master for the description of those
explorers hardships, desire to follow Shacketon' orders. I kept saying to myself that there are few humans
today that are as tough as those men. I recommend this book to add to the collection of those books that give
us the knowledge of what it takes to conquer a goal.
51 people found this helpful
By
far one of the best books I've ever read, & I've read many!
5.0 out of 5 stars
By
far one of the best books I've ever read, & I've read many!
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2019
Verified Purchase
I just finished reading 2 of Grann's books - Lost City of Z & The White
Darkness. The latter is the story of Henry Worsley, the grandson of Frank Worsley one of the "extraordinary"
men in Lansing's Endurance. Grann suggested Endurance as a worthy read. Sir Earnest Shackleton & Frank Worsley
were two of some 20 men who incredibly survived a journey to Antarctica that went awry from almost its onset.
Two years later all hands were rescued through the extraordinary will of the men who found themselves at the
mercy of the elements. Lansing's research & grasp of the situation in which these men found themselves in
conjunction with his writing style has put this book at the top of my all time favorites! Fabulous! Fabulous!
Anyone 12 or older will be blown away by this true story & this writer!
4 people found this helpful
But really, it's all about the cheap labor. And not just Europe.
The Ivory Coast used to be pretty prosperous. That meant that workers had high wages,
because that's what prosperity is, but that limited the profits of the rich, and we can't
have that. So the black elite imported massive numbers of muslim refugees as a source of
cheap labor, and by the time they had doubled the population the poverty resulting from this
tore the country apart in a bloody civil war. But that's OK, the right people made a lot of
money.
Brazil had slavery for much longer than the United States, and unlike the United States,
Brazil only got rid of slavery after massive immigration had boosted the population so much
that 'free' labor was cheaper than slave labor. Crushed to the limits, Brazil was stuck in a
capital-starved condition that it never pulled out of.
It's an old story. Look through history, whenever you hear about some place that imported
workers to do whatever, no that's not what happened, they imported workers to cut labor costs
– and the results for the average person have always been a reduction in living
standards and social disruption.
When southern American plantation owners imported back African slaves, it wasn't because
they thought the country needed more black people – they wanted cheap labor. And
centuries later, the damage that that policy has done to American society continues. And it
wasn't necessary – the free white north, without slaves and before mass immigration,
was the place that produced the greatest technological and industrial power the world had
ever seen – but there just wasn't enough cheap labor for a plantation owner to live the
life they wanted, so sad.
So what's happening in Europe is perhaps a bit extreme, but it's an old story. It's not
really about diversity or anti-white or any of that, that's just window dressing and
rationalization. It's about jamming in more and more people so wages will go down and rents
and profits will go up.
Here are a few takeaways from the Democratic Convention:
The Democrats are running on the
same platform they ran on in 2016. The Democrats put style above substance, flashy optics above
ideas or issues. The Democrats think that hollow tributes to "diversity" and "inclusion" will
win the election. The Democrats have abandoned white, working class voters opting instead for
people of color. The Democrats have learned nothing from Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016.
In 2016, Democrat front-runner, Hillary Clinton lost the election because she failed to see
her support was eroding in the key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump won all three states with a measly 77, 651 votes total. All three states were expected to
go Democrat but flipped to the GOP due to Clinton's support for free trade and immigration
policies that cost jobs and imposed unwelcome demographic changes on the working people of
those states. The Democrats and Hillary have never accepted the factual version of how the
election was lost. Instead, they fabricated a conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with
Russia. Although the Mueller Report proved that the claims of meddling were baseless, Clinton
and the Dems continue to trot them out at every opportunity. On Tuesday at the convention,
Hillary again reiterated the lie that Trump stole the election. She said:
"Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are. Remember: Joe and
Kamala can win 3 million more votes and still lose. Take it from me. We need numbers so
overwhelming Trump can't sneak or steal his way to victory."
The determination on the part of the Democrats to mischaracterize what actually happened in
the election is not a trivial matter. It suggests that deception is central to their governing
style. Party leaders do not think their supporters are entitled to know the truth but rather
believe that events must be shaped in a way that best serves their overall political interests.
For Democrats, lying is not a personal failing, but an opportunity for enhancing their grip on
power. This is from an article in The Guardian:
"Donald Trump's electoral college victory rests on the shoulders of more than 200
so-called "pivot counties" across the US. That is, counties that voted for Barack Obama only
four years earlier. The most decisive of these swings occurred in Pennsylvania's Luzerne
county, nestled in the north-east part of the state There, voters gave Trump a nearly
20-point victory after going for Obama by almost 5% in 2012. But Trump's win in Luzerne
was also noteworthy for its magnitude. His 26,000 vote plurality in Luzerne comprised almost
three-fifths of his plurality in the state as a whole, and with it Pennsylvania's 20 coveted
electoral votes ." ("
The Forgotten review: Ben Bradlee Jr delivers 2020 lessons for Democrats" , The
Guardian )
Critical battleground states tilted in Trump's favor because Democratic policies had
decimated their communities and eviscerated their standard of living. Author Ben Bradlee Jr.
explains this phenom in his book "The Forgotten" which should be required reading at the DNC.
Here's a clip from the review at the Guardian:
"The Forgotten documents the ravages of deindustrialization, lost jobs, crime and drugs.
It captures the sense of displacement tied to a changing and less monochromatic America.
Once upon a time, Luzerne was home to coal and textiles, dominated by Protestants from
Wales and Catholics from Ireland and continental Europe. Not any more. Luzerne is poorer and
smaller, for many a less recognizable place. Not surprisingly, immigration and Nafta come in
for constant criticism. " (The Guardian)
This is the real reason Hillary was defeated. Russia had nothing to do with it. The Dems
abandoned the white working-class people who had always voted for them and began to cobble
together their Rainbow coalition. When Hillary denounced these people as "Deplorables", it
forced more of them to join Trump team. The rest is history. Here's more from the same
article:
"In the absence of a recession, however, the party stands to face the same electoral
map it did in 2016. In fact, Ohio now looks an even tougher nut to crack. Much as the
Democratic base loathes the president, reality cannot be wished away. Luzerne would be a
good place for the party to start addressing this reality. " ( The Guardian
)
The point we're trying to make is that the effectiveness of the Democrat Convention can only
be measured in terms of its impact on potential voters. So, why have the Dems shrugged off any
effort to reach out to the people who could help them win?
It's not that complicated. The Dems are merely abandoning the people who, they believe, will
leave anyway as their globalist economic agenda becomes more apparent putting more downward
pressure on overall living standards. It's worth noting, that when Obama left office in 2016,
this process was already well-underway. According to a Gallup poll, 71 percent of the people
said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going. (in Obama's last year.) Only 27
percent said they're satisfied. So, even though Obama's personal approval ratings remained
high, his handling of the economy was extremely unpopular. (except on Wall Street, of
course.)
During this same period, the PEW Research Center conducted a survey titled: "Campaign
Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S" which showed why
Trump was steadily gaining on Hillary. Here are a few excerpts from the report:
"Among GOP voters, fully 75% of those who support Donald Trump for the Republican
presidential nomination say life for people like them has gotten worse "
"GOP voters who support Trump also stand out for their pessimism about the nation's
economy and their own financial situations: 48% rate current economic conditions in the U.S.
as "poor.
"Within the GOP, anger at government is heavily concentrated among Trump supporters
– 50% say they are angry at government "
"Among Republicans, a majority of those who back Trump (61%) view the system as unfair
among Trump supporters, 67% say trade agreements are bad thing "
"Half of Trump supporters (50%) say they are angry at the federal government . Anger at
government – and politics – is much more pronounced among Trump backers than
among supporters of any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat " ("
Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S ", PEW
Research Center)
So, a higher percentage of Trump supporters think they are getting screwed-over by an unfair
system. They think "free trade" only benefits the rich, they think the government is
unresponsive to their needs, they think the system is rigged, and they're really, really
mad.
So, which speaker at the Democrat Convention addressed the concerns or complaints of white
working-class people who now almost-universally harbor these same feelings??
No one, because no one in the Democrat party plans to do anything about these issues, in
fact, just the opposite. Now that the Dems have been subsumed by Wall Street and their big
globalist donors, things are going to get dramatically worse for working people who will see a
vicious attack on essential social services and programs as soon as the election is over. The
massive build-up of debt– by mainly Democrat Governors who deliberately drove their
states into bankruptcy at the behest of Fauci's Vaccine Gestapo– will now be met by a
growing demand for austerity on a scale unlike anything we've experienced in the last century.
The country is being prepared for an excruciating restructuring that will create a permanent
underclass that will provide an endless source of sweatshop labor for the multinational
carpetbaggers. Those jobs will likely go to members of the Dems rainbow coalition while white,
working class people in America's heartland –with their strong sense of patriotism–
will be seen as a potential threat to the emerging new order.
It's clear that the Dems anticipate resistance to their plan by the contemptible way they
have branded struggling workers as "white nationalists" and "racists". But is it true or are
the Democrats and their deep-pocket allies preemptively denigrating these people and supporting
BLM rioters to head-off growing resistance to their strategy of total control through
widespread mayhem, decimation of the economy and extermination of the American middle class?
Author CJ Hopkins summed it up like this in a recent article at The Unz Review:
"What we are experiencing is not the "return of fascism." It is the global capitalist
empire restoring order, putting down the populist insurgency that took them by surprise in
2016.
The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, the fake apocalyptic plague, all the
insanity of 2020 it has been in the pipeline all along. It has been since the moment Trump
won the election. No, it is not about Trump, the man. It has never been about Trump, the
man
GloboCap needs to crush Donald Trump not because he is a threat to the empire , but
because he became a symbol of populist resistance to global capitalism and its increasingly
aggressive "woke" ideology . It is this populist resistance to its ideology that GloboCap
is determined to crush, no matter how much social chaos and destruction it unleashes in the
process.. ." (" The White Black
Nationalist Color Revolution" , CJ Hopkins, The Unz Review )
Bingo. It is the "populist resistance to global capitalism" that is the defacto enemy of the
Party elite, the same elites who conspired with senior-level members of the Intelligence
Community, the FBI, the DOJ and the Obama White House to spy on the Trump Campaign, infiltrate
the presidential transition, and to try to topple the elected government. And while the coup
plotters have still not been brought to justice, they are now within spitting distance of their
ultimate objective, which is seizing executive power and using it to crush the fledgling
opposition, impose a one-party system of government, and transform America into a corporate
superstate ruled by Global Capital. Here's a clip from an article by Gary D. Barnett at Lew
Rockwell:
"By the end of this next planned phase of the 'virus' scare, a global reset of the world
economy will be ready to launch. This reset will be mammoth in scope, as everything we have
known will be restructured. Those out of work in the final stage will most likely stay out of
work, pushing the dependency state to new levels sought by the ruling class. Controlling
the population will be a key component of the plan, including population size, birth rates,
movement, and personal contact among individuals. The elimination of normal human interaction
is sought, and this is only the beginning . The ultimate goal is total control, and every
tool in the box of the tyrants will be used to gain that control. Restraint by the ruling
class will be non-existent, as this staged reset is now going forward at a very accelerated
pace." (
"The Economic Insanity of This Coronavirus Pandemic Plot and the Coming Global Reset ",
Lew Rockwell )
The coup plotters have chosen the candidates they want to carry out the next phase of their
operation. All they need now is to win the election.
The stock market is back to all time highs, but for ordinary Americans the standard of
living has not been worse in decades, if ever.
As Bank of America points out, while the recent covid shutdowns has thrown the economy into
disarray with millions laid off and living on government stimulus checks, life for the vast
majority of workers - i.e., those who comprise the country's middle class - was already
precarious before the pandemic, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Cost of Thriving
Index.
Consider that in 1985 it took 30 weeks at the median wage to pay for big fixed costs like
housing, health care, a car, and education; fast forward to today when it takes a
mathematically impossible 53 weeks of a 52-week year to buy those things.
In other words, as BofA puts it, "'thriving' has become impossible for the average worker"
and adds that " it's no wonder that the uncertainty of forecasts for future growth remains near
record highs."
Of course, it's also why millions of Americans are desperately looking forward to another
stimulus round, and then another, and another after that, for the simple reason that it was the
government's "pandemic relief" that boosted compensation to artificial, if "one-time" record
highs.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
The question is whether this "one-time" stimulus which many equate with Universal Basic
Income, has become a permanent fixture of American life.
Paolo Roberto, 50, a native of Sweden (his father was an Italian), had made a name for
himself: a well-known boxer, he had his own TV show, he appeared in many programmes; Swedish
girls loved to dance with him in Dancing with the Stars ; he also had a profitable
business: he imported Italian olive oil and gastronomic products sold in the large Swedish
supermarket chain CO-OP. All that glory vanished in a moment. Swedish police trapped him as he
visited a girl of dubious character and then paid her for her services. It was a honey-trap.
The policemen appeared from their hiding places and whisked Roberto off to the local precinct
where he was booked and the nation alerted. He didn't deny a thing; he expressed extreme
remorse.
In Sweden, it is perfectly legal to be engaged in prostitution. Today no one in Sweden can
tell a woman what to do with her own body, be it abortion, sex change or prostitution. Yet it
is a crime for a man to pay a woman for sex.
It is not sane; it is as though selling crack were legal while buying crack is the only
crime. Usually it is other way around, a casual user goes free while the pusher is arrested.
But it does not matter; Sweden is not the only country in the world with such a strange law on
her books.
Roberto was charged for this crime. It could be worse: Sweden has some extraordinary crimes
in its law book, one of them is Rape by Misadventure or Careless Rape which is
committed by a man who has sex with a woman who ostensibly agrees to or even solicits sex but
inwardly she is not willing. She may be doing it for money, or boredom, but not for pleasure,
and the man carelessly overlooked her conflicting emotions. It is Swedish Rape. Pity they never
apply the same logic to working people; we often do even less pleasant things for money, to buy
food or pay rent, but the landlord is not punished for raping his tenants.
This new definition of rape deserves Victor Hugo's pen. It is Swedish Rape to have sex
without a condom. It is Swedish Rape if the next day, or a few days later, the woman feels she
may have been raped. Or cheated, or underpaid, or mistreated. For this ill-defined offence,
Julian Assange has already spent ten years in various detention halls. If he would have killed
the girl he would be free by now. Note that you may be guilty of Swedish Rape if you claim to
be infertile and your partner becomes pregnant. Are you guilty of rape if you claim to be a Jew
but aren't? This is an Israeli contribution to the concept of rape. But I digress.
Paolo Roberto is charged with paying a woman for sex, the crime Judah, son of Jacob,
committed with Tamar (Genesis 38). The 25-year-old girl consented, but that does not matter.
She came from a rather poor South European country, so probably her consent doesn't mean much.
Or perhaps she consented just in order to entrap the guy and this is how Swedish justice works.
Swedish prisons would be empty if police weren't allowed to entice and entrap Swedes.
The consequences for Paolo were terrible: he hasn't been tried yet; he hasn't been found
guilty; his likely punishment is little more than a fine; but he was dropped like a hot potato
by Swedish TV, by Swedish sports, by the Swedish chain that marketed his olive oil. His company
was bankrupted overnight. The man was crushed like a bug. It was not Swedish law that crushed
him. In the eyes of Swedish law he is still innocent until proven guilty. Swedish law did not
force the supermarkets to remove his olive oil (actually, a very good one, I used to buy it)
from its shelves. Paolo was lynched by the New Puritan spirit that is part and parcel of the
New Normal.
Once upon a time, Sweden was an extremely liberal and free country. Swedes were known, or
even notorious for free sexual mores. Independent and brave Swedish girls weren't shy, and they
were comfortable with very unorthodox 'family' unions. But, while the US has always espoused
its own brand of politically-correct Puritanism, the global media is now dragging along the
other Western states in its wake. France and even Sweden participated in their own renditions
of the American BLM protests, called for #MeToo, and seem eager to trade in their own cultures
for the New Puritanism.
This rising Puritanism is a contrarian response to the personal freedom we enjoyed since the
1960's, and a jaded weariness with the excessive commercial sexuality of the mass media. The
media sells everything with a lot of sex. You cannot turn a TV on, daytime or night, without
seeing an implied or explicit act of copulation. They sell cars, snacks and sneakers by
displaying naked bodies. This flood of pornography is turning the public mood against sex. Who
should we blame for this blatant exploitation of sex? Men.
The Old Puritanism was hard on women; the witches were burned, and the whores were evicted
from their homes. The New Puritanism is hard on men. Men are being taught that hanky-panky can
have serious consequences. On the site of one of their destroyed statues of Jefferson, the
Americans should erect a statue of Andrea Dworkin, the obese lying feminist who famously
said that every intercourse is rape, and Penetration is Violation . She is an icon
of New Puritan America.
They could not outlaw sex per se, so they invent sordid stories of incestuous sex, of
paedophilia, of abusing priests, each storyteller trying to outdo the last. The vast majority
of these stories are sheer inventions, like the witchcraft stories of the 17 th
century in Old Puritan New England. We are in the midst of a global media campaign, and men are
the targets. The Patriarchy will be diminished by the systematic demonization of boys and
men.
In the current media frenzy I cannot trust any story, any accusation of a man involved in a
sordid sexual crime: these media campaigns are too often employed to unseat a commercial
competitor or destroy the popularity of a political rival. Often the man is not even accused of
any crime, but only of frivolous behaviour: a touch, or an immodest proposal; natural acts
celebrated in the days of my youth. Yes, my young readers, in the 1970's you could touch a
woman's knee and suggest she accompany you on a passionate weekend at a seaside resort, and she
would often agree. This libertine era is over completely. Even to me, it now seems mythical,
like Atlantis. It is gone.
The US is the media's inspirational model of the New Puritanism. Remember the women who
lined up to claim that the future Supreme Court
judge tried to kiss or even rape them when they were kids in college? The most credible of
them would not even allege he behaved criminally; just immorally according to New Puritan
standards. Now every relationship must be re-evaluated in the light of the New Puritanical
historical revisionism. Women who pose for a picture with a presidential candidate now have a
certain amount of power over him. During a media campaign the allegations come fast and
furious, but upon investigation they turn out to be spurious and motivated by self-interest or
politics.
It is good to see that sometimes, quite rarely, a man can still escape a close encounter
with his life intact. Former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond had been accused of all
the usual sexual sins and was fully cleared by the court . No less than
ten women were recruited (apparently with the knowledge of Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond's
successor); they came forward and claimed that they were sexually attacked by Salmond. They
were rather sloppy with their proofs, and it turns out that they claimed they were attacked at
times and places where Salmond could not have been present. The case was dismissed and Salmond
was found not guilty . Scottish prosecutors had spent years of labour trying to condemn
Salmond, and it spectacularly failed.
You might ask, why have these perjurers (who are well-connected women close to the centre of
power of the ruling SNP party) not been prosecuted for their attempt to frame the man? Well,
the very idea of these trials is that the accusing woman can't lose. If she wins, she can
collect millions, and if she loses, even her name remains secret. These ten perjurers are
exempt from legal consequence; nor are they required pay expenses and damages. The women are
protected. Who pays? Our colleague, the excellent writer and former HM Ambassador Craig Murray , that's who. Murray was
reporting on the trial of Alex Salmond for the public's benefit, published onto his own blog,
when he was charged with disclosing the identities of some of the perjuring women. A
conscientious man, Craig wasn't guilty of naming names, but even his vague description of "an
SNP politician, a party worker and several current and former Scottish government civil
servants and officials" was considered by the court to be a monstrous breach of
confidentiality.
The public was well prepared for this onslaught on mankind by the poisonous #MeToo culture,
a massive wave of carefully coordinated media hysteria. Women in communes and nunneries are
known to menstruate at the same time when living in close proximity. #MeToo was a similar mass
event. It was designed to push women's buttons. They even offered up an appropriately grotesque
scapegoat: Harvey Weinstein, a movie producer with 386 Hollywood production credits under his belt.
The actresses that accused Weinstein (over eighty women) would still be unknowns if he had
not given them parts in his movies. And they repaid him with such cruel ingratitude. Actresses
have a certain psychological setup that makes them extremely untrustworthy. They have many
other qualities to offset this deficiency, but you can't just accept the words of a lady who
plays today Lady Macbeth and tomorrow Madam Butterfly as solid truth. They are acting, in life
as well as in their line of work.
Consider the beautiful Angelina Jolie. She is mad as a hatter. Even her own father said that
she had "serious mental problems." Her long history of violent self-abuse culminated with her
choice to cut off her breasts because of a DNA test that indicated risk for breast cancer. She
has had a long line of boyfriends and husbands, and a lot of kids adopted out of Africa, taken
away from their natural parents. Is she a reliable witness? She would say anything that is
fashionable. The woman wants to be adored as the model of an excellent person; this is a
honourable goal, but she is extremely unsuitable for it.
Weinstein's eighty accusers collected millions; the great producer went to a life-long jail
sentence. The public, the great American public was eager to lynch the man who gave them
True Romance and Pulp Fiction . Was he guilty as charged? Even the charges were a
travesty of justice. Men of his generation (and of mine, too) routinely propositioned women. We
are all guilty, though not many of us racked up Weinstein's numbers. Yet every woman was free
to refuse. No
police reports against Weinstein appeared until the #MeToo media campaign was in full
swing. Did he harass them? You and me are harassed daily by offers to take another credit card
or bank loan; we are free to refuse this definitely harassing offer. Every unsolicited proposal
is harassment; and we receive daily hundreds of proposals of various nature. What is so
different about a sexual proposal to a woman? Weinstein may or may not have committed a crime,
but in the poisonous air of #MeToo there is no need to prove any accusation, and the man was
lynched.
Perhaps now I am going to lose your tentative sympathy, but I do not believe the allegations
against Jeffrey Epstein and Ms Ghislaine Maxwell, either. And the attack on Prince Andrew is
similarly unbelievable. Chapeau for Mr Trump who dared to express sympathy to Ms Maxwell. This
was an act of incredible bravery, to step out of line and to say a few kind words to her and
about her. The cowardly Clinton and Obama, who were close friends with Epstein and Maxwell,
were mum. Trump who was not particularly close to the couple, spoke up for them. He really
deserves being re-elected, despite his many faults. Such a man is a master of his own mind, and
this is a very rare quality.
I may mull over a proposal to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, but how possibly can one believe the
stories of the disturbed woman who claims that she had to be forced to have sex with fabulously
wealthy Mr Epstein or to meet glamorous Prince Andrew, let alone that she suffered "extreme
distress, humiliation, fear, psychological trauma, loss of dignity and self esteem and invasion
of her privacy" on his island retreat? The complete absence of evidence and the complete lack
of objectivity could only prevail in the midst of a media campaign. It is believable what Ms
Maxwell said in a deposition, that Ms Giuffre was "totally lying." Indeed all these gold
diggers are totally lying.
Like this one : An
anonymous accuser says she'll testify that 'evil' Ghislaine Maxwell raped her '20-30 times'
starting from when she was 14 and claims she was forced to abort Jeffrey Epstein's baby. Honest
and reputable men like Prince Andrew are forced into the demeaning and impossible position of
having to argue and justify themselves against wild accusations. There are no reasonably
believable accusations of crime against these people. A woman had a photo of her taken with
Prince Andrew. She was at least 17; at this age girls in England are perfectly entitled to have
an affair with a man. Other girls in other photos were apparently of age, too. Young, yes, but
not criminally young. Furthermore, a posed photo does not always indicate a sexual
relationship. Some women claim they were babies and they were raped, but there are no proofs of
anything except their greed.
Mike Robeson who investigated the claims came to conclusion that they were often initiated
by big business to rip off rich Jews. New Puritanism is the Joker card that can trump the
antisemitism ace. He wrote:
I've read Whitney Webb's investigative articles on Epstein, which are often cited by the
alternative and leftist crowd as evidence of his Mossad connections and blackmailing
activities. But Webb's articles are actually full of unsubstantiated rumors, possible immoral
or illegal activities between high level people based on coincidental social or business
connections and potentially damning rumors corroborated mainly by her previous articles and
posts. She has done some fine reporting on other issues. But on the Epstein case, she is part
of what Israel rightly refers to as the New Puritanism.
Supposed evidence of Frau Maxwell's salacious involvement is the famous photo of Prince
Andrew below. This is all the New Puritans need to justify believing the rumors and drawing
their "I told ya' so!" conclusions. But hobnobbing has long been a sport played by the
wannabes with the tacit collusion of the rich and/or famous.
Take a look at the fun couple under Prince Andrew and his alleged squeeze. You may
recognize Rosalynn Carter, then First Lady of the US. Standing next to her is none other than
William Gacy , a
few months before he was arrested as a serial killer and cannibal of those he'd butchered.
Are we to draw certain conclusions from this photo?
Below Rosalynn Carter is another photo, this one showing then President George Bush being
hobnobbed by political has-been George Wallace and by young political wannabe Bill Clinton.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? Was George already then grooming Billy Boy for
higher things in life? Or is it merely more photographic evidence of how wannabes crawl up
the ladder of personal and career advancement? For it is clear that the rich and/or famous,
like Rosalynn Carter and Prince Andrew, have to put up with photo ops, sometimes to their
later discredit.
Very little about the Epstein case makes sense – not his social and financial
connections and especially not his alleged links with the Mossad. Every rich Jew in the US is
sayanim, but that doesn't mean they are running blackmail ops. And the pedo accusations are
ridiculous. His 'victims', none of whom were less than 16 (legal to marry in most European
countries and many American states) were willing, well paid and well taken care of gals who
got lucky to catch a good-looking sugar daddy. Whatever he knew about his rich and famous
clients that may have gotten him killed may have had something to do with what he knew about
them, sure. He probably shared his largesse with his friends and possible donors and
contributors. But if he had been sexually blackmailing them over the years, why did they keep
going back to him?
The blackmail angle doesn't make sense. It makes more sense that a lot of famous people
may have preferred him dead to testifying about his activities. Who, famous or not famous,
would want to get dragged through the mud by the overzealous New Puritan prosecution teams
that had already destroyed the lives of innocent defendants of sexual accusations like Jerry
Sandusky and Larry Nasser, as well as hundreds of others in the past decades of America's
sexual abuse/devil worship hysteria. The Pizzagate fiasco is a demonstration of how mobs can
be raised, aimed and defused by an orchestrated media campaign.
From what I see of Epstein's photos, he was an intelligent, good lucking, confident, fun
loving guy. If he was nailing more hot chicks than I ever did, more power to him.
Another motivation for the liquidation of Epstein's empire is the collaboration between
the media and the unknown figures behind the scenes who are likely to walk away with
Epstein's millions. Are you familiar with the story of Howard Hughes and the destruction of
his Las Vegas empire? It happened to him. Something similar has happened in the past few
years to other wealthy Jews like Donald Sterling , who was first falsely
accused of being a racist and then forced to relinquish his ownership of an NBA team. Other
examples? Richard Fuld of Lehmann Bros. and Bernie Madoff were taken down by their Wall
Street rivals and then used as scapegoats to expiate the sins of corporate raiders. Harvey
Weinstein was the sacrificial schwein to absolve the sick Hollywood culture. Now that
Weinstein has been destroyed, Hollywood can go back to business as usual.
But what about the intimidation faced by hundreds of girls victimized on Epstein's private
island? Why do they claim to be afraid of retribution even after his death? The girls were
treated well. They admit that they cooperated in finding more girls who would massage
Epstein, even supposedly knowing that they too would be 'horribly abused' by the 'monster'.
The reporters and the interviewed women are perfect examples of New Puritans. I feel dirty
after watching them perform. None of their emotional anecdotes reach evidentiary standards
and any court would dismiss their cases out of hand.
As for the source of Epstein's fortune, here is a plausible
investigation . It is interesting that no one can really agree on the amount nor the
source of his millions.
Justice, or what is passing under that name, gets screwed whenever the law is used to
empower a person with a personal grudge, either on his own behalf or to benefit a media
consortium. Emotional appeals could never been considered in the better world of Jefferson,
Lincoln and Washington. Perhaps they had slaves, but they would not have condemned a man, free
or slave, on the basis of empty accusations. Physical evidence is still required in the legal
courts. Only on TV can people be destroyed by edited testimony.
I am very tolerant of anti-Jewish rhetoric. So tolerant that I am often accused of it
myself. Still, the accusations against Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and let's not forget
poor Mr Harvey Weinstein, are often marked by cliché characters such as the crass
foul-mouthed Jew and the innocent girl he despoils. Meanwhile, the facts of each case are
monotonously repeated: one man's career is destroyed while dozens of girls become famous;
millions of dollars are suddenly difficult to track and soon begin to evaporate; the man is
demonized and the women are sainted.
Can the New Puritanism overturn the Jews and their unstoppable juggernaut cry of
antisemitism? Leo Frank was lynched by the mob and the ADL was formed to make sure it never
happened again, no matter what the crime. Is New Puritanism the new mob violence? Perhaps mob
violence is the only way our rulers can overwhelm the paralyzing effects of being called
antisemitic. Perhaps the New Puritanism is an opening salvo in a larger war between shadow
forces.
But I could never believe that Maxwell and Epstein were connected with the Israeli
Intelligence agency, the Mossad. With all my sympathy to our esteemed colleagues Philip
Giraldi and Whitney
Webb , there is not a single shred of evidence for such connection. Conjecture, yes;
evidence, no. Even the father of Ghislaine, the late Mr Maxwell, who was not a saintly person
by any means, might be with better evidence accused of collaborating with Soviet Intelligence,
the KGB, than with the Israelis. A person of his standing probably connected with Israelis,
too, but he was no Mossad agent.
I can understand my American friends. There never was a time worse for American men, when
the statues and memorials of their great ancestors have been uprooted, when their wives and
daughters are queuing to press their pink lips upon the boots of black ghetto dwellers, when
their manhood is defined as "toxic" and their sons are dreaming of a same-sex union with a
glorious black buck. If the US were occupied by the Communists as Amerika envisaged, it wouldn't be as bad as what
you've got now. You have been humiliated thoroughly. I understand that in such a situation you
might jump at the chance to break the bones of rich Liberal Jews like Epstein and Weinstein. I
wouldn't refuse you this comfort. They are anyway already lynched.
However, if you want ever to walk free, you'd better deal with the New Puritan takeover.
Women are wonderful creatures, but often they can be manipulated and do what they are asked to
do. They are also excellent actors and are not troubled by honour. Men are more independent and
solitary by nature; that is why our Masters want to suppress masculinity. It is easier to
shepherd a flock of cows than so many bulls. Women love to be the victims, to blame men for
their failings; add social distance and fear of viral infection; add the mask (the New Western
Burka); add lockdown, and the problem of how to send the children to school might just solve
itself. No
children. The New Puritans are currently purging Hollywood of the most relentlessly
heterosexual men, but when they run out of rich Jews, they just might come after you.
The New Normal is the New Puritan. The pandemic fit into it tight as a glove. Under millions
of cameras and tracing applications, privacy shrinks and disappears. New Puritanism erases the
gap between public and private realms. In the world we knew, there was a difference between the
twain. A man having an affair with a woman (or with another man) was in a private realm. Do
whatever you wish in privacy of your home; just don't frighten the horses, Victorians once
said. Now there can be no privacy. Sex is already more of a political opinion than a physical
act. You might be lionized as a homosexual or despised as a breeder, your choice. Any affair,
or even the attempt to start an affair could be deadly in the post #MeToo world. In an era of
socialized medicine, sex is seen as a dangerous weakness that might endanger lives and imperil
the global healthcare system.
Much of the severity of New Puritanism can be sourced directly to American culture. America
was founded by the Old Puritans of Mayflower in 1620 and has periodically been subject
to hysterical outbursts, from witches to Red scares. Nowhere has the use of sex for advertising
and commerce been so widely spread as in the US. As the US has become the model for the world,
an epidemic of American hysteria is starting to infect countries all around the world. #MeToo
reached even Russia, but it is still only a minor phenomenon, mainly to be found among only the
most woke of hipsters.
Orwell imagined a future of "state-enforced repression and celibacy" while Huxley predicted
"deliberate, narcotising promiscuity". The New Puritans have chosen Orwell's world. I grew up
in something more akin to Huxley's, and I can tell you which one is better. Communist Russia
was very permissive in the private sphere. People had a lot of sex, with their girl/boy
friends, with spouses, with neighbours, with wives of their friends, with their colleagues,
with their teachers and students. The Soviets had none of the restrictions we have now against
sexual relations in the University between teachers and students; in fact, no restrictions
against sex with coworkers, something that now we would call abusive and then call the police.
As religion had little influence in Soviet society, adultery was frequent, and unless connected
with a public scandal, had no consequences.
Russians as well as the French could not understand why Clinton's affair with Monica
Lewinsky made waves in the US that blew into an impeachment trial and ended with the
bombardment of Belgrade. Bill was unfaithful to Hillary? That's not nice, but it is their
private affair. President Clinton lied? Well, he was not in the confession booth. Traditional
religions, be it Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, are quite tolerant of venial sin. Puritanism,
the Old as well as its New offspring are deadly serious in everything, and are unafraid of
killing or bullying a sinner to death. They may have begun with witches, but they are ending up
targeting ordinary folk.
Currently their targets have a lot of wampum, for it is no fun to bully a person for no
material gain. Us, impecunious men, we have nothing to be afraid of yet. But it might be wise
to save society before the New Puritans bring down disaster onto all of us. In my opinion,
America's influence on the world should be reversed, or at least limited. Let America get
influenced by Europe for a change. Mercifully, Europe is suffering from a very light case of
New Puritanism that may be entirely cured with a healthy dose of Anti-Americanism. I hear the
vaccine is under development.
Picture two is not proof, it's illustration. In fact Cord Meyer recruited Clinton as a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford, feathered his wife's nest with a ridiculous bonanza of commodity
trading top-ticks, then appointed Bill to run the CIA covert ops slush fund at Mena airfield.
That picture is junior secret agent Bill Clinton at the office picnic with his big boss the
DCI.
As for picture number one, I'll be forever grateful for the heartwarming thought that
Rosalyn also puts on a clown costume, handcuffs boys, buttfucks them, strangles them, and
buries them in the crawlspace.
Virtually all you wrote is true but with "Very little about the Epstein case makes sense
– not his social and financial connections and especially not his alleged links with
the Mossad" you seem to have quite deliberately blown your cover as another lying judaizer to
those who think Jews are normally incapable of true conversion and that your role in creation
is to show what bad is compared to good.
Indeed, it appears so: a very incisive first half of the article, describing a real
phenomenon (used to manipulate public opinion and society) seems designed to drop the Epstein
turd into.
Epstein is no Puritan witch hunt: Robert Maxwell gets something akin to a state funeral in
Israel, his daughter pimps for guy who uses lavish Wexner money for beehives of celebrities
into which a steady supply of young female flesh is injected and this guy is telling us we
just need to relax a bit.
" then First Lady of the US. Standing next to her is none other than William Gacy, a few
months before he was arrested as a serial killer and cannibal of those he'd butchered. Are
we to draw certain conclusions from this photo?"
Thanks, Israel. Well reasoned and well presented. Although some or many may not agree with
you, it's refreshing to read a straight forward exposition. At least you're laying it out
there for others to take a crack at it.
"Women are wonderful creatures, but often they can be manipulated and do what they are
asked to do. They are also excellent actors and are not troubled by honour. "
I've never met a woman who wasn't a bald-faced liar about anything that concerned her
personally. (And no, I'm not an Incel. Far from it)
"Much of the severity of New Puritanism can be sourced directly to American culture.
America was founded by the Old Puritans of Mayflower in 1620 and has periodically been
subject to hysterical outbursts, from witches to Red scares."
So true. The country was settled by all manner of religious zealots, each and every one of
them forming some sort of utopian colony here–almost all of which went down in
flames.
The Old Puritanism was hard on women; the witches were burned, and the whores were
evicted from their homes. The New Puritanism is hard on men.
Well, it is particularly hard on "beta" men. Their idea is basically to let "alphas" have
harems but all other men to become incels or worse. Just look at this guy, punished for
visiting a whore (in their view anyone who pays for sex is by definition not an alpha, so it
makes sense to punish johns but allow or even celebrate whores)
Yes, Feminism is a kind of inverted puritanism. But being hard on sluts and whore makes
sense if you want to preserve society's order and families. Feminist rules against men only
help to destroy society.
So there's a very big difference between the Old Puritanism and the New Puritanism.
From what I see of Epstein's photos, he was an intelligent, good lucking, confident, fun
loving guy. If he was nailing more hot chicks than I ever did, more power to him.
Come on. No one knows how this guy made money. For all purposes he was a nobody. Yet he
was seen with Elon Musk, Woody Allen, Trump, Clinton, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, anyone who
was "someone" dined with him and maybe one of his girls. There's something very fishy about
this. I don't know, maybe he and Maxwell were just the preferred pimp of the elites, or maybe
there's something else. Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad) was an Israeli spy and a media
magnate, just that is very suspicious.
I mean, of course I don't trust the little whore Giuffre (whoever trusts whores or
actresses, but I repeat myself, is an idiot). But there is something very strange and rotten
about Epstein and the fact that he met with almost everybody in the so-called elite.
Much of this article makes sense, though I can't buy the defense of Epstein and Maxwell.
It's absurd to call him a "pedophile" as many journalists do. He was a pimp for the Deep
State's extortion racket.
Thanks for this. I have been criticized by many for observing holes in the narrative and
objecting to trial by media.
I have, since the start of the last Epstein narrative questioned the "intelligence"
connection. Not because it wasn't possible, rather that Virginia Roberts narrative about
escaping was implausible. If Epstein was doing his alleged blackmail routine for Mossad or
any other intelligence service, Roberts would have been suicided long ago. Loose ends like
that are a danger to the operation.
That doesn't mean that Epstein wasn't diddling underage girls nor does it mean that Maxwell
wasn't recruiting girls to massage Epstein. In Maxwell's case, she may, or may not have known
Epstein was diddling them as alleged. I have yet to see a reasonable explanation of how these
underage girls got passports without parental consent, and if they did, who was the
guarantor? Apparently, all of these accusers had parents who were uninterested in their
underage daughters traveling with a male more than twice their age, on his private jet.
As for Weinstein, Shirley Temple's mother complained people in the studio were trying to get
into her daughter's pants and she had to be vigilant. Marilyn Monroe, on marrying Joe
DiMaggio, is reported to have said that she`d never have to suck another cock. The casting
couch stories have been rampant for as long as I have been alive, yet I am supposed to
believe that none of Weinstein`s accusers knew that it was the price of admission. That does
not mean I approve of taking advantage of women, that has always been done in many ways. Post
war turned millions of German and Italian women into prostitutes, for occupying soldiers, in
order to feed themselves and their families. Apparently that was ok, but young actresses
being turned into millionaires is not.
Not true at all, the majority of people who settled the USA were regular Anglos,
especially in the South.
And Anglo DNA is something like 25% of the USA. This country is full of immigrants from
other stocks, and you know what? They are far more likely to be Democrat-voting liberals,
while the Anglo Americans are more likely to be rural Republicans who think things like MeToo
and BLM are crazy.
What a total crock of shit. I have long maintained that Shamir is Mossad and a pretend
convert to Christianity. This is the guy who argued with passion that those who say that
Muslims did not do 9/11 are depriving them of credit for their rare success. It's
nevertheless surprising to see him cashing in his chips in such a stupid and lazy way. It's
in fact so stupid that it brings to mind Gordon Duff, himself an intelligence figure,
alerting me to the hugely disparate quality of Shamir emissions with the explanation that the
persona "Israel Shamir" is the work of a committee. It looks like desperate times for the big
Jews. The big satanic game -- implicating the Rothschilds, the British royals, and a whole
gaggle of Jews and crypto-Jews including Trump and Bill Gates, and all their attendant goys
such as the Clintons -- could all fall apart.
Israel Adam pretend-Christian Shamir, who is Moloch and why was there a temple to him on
Epstein's island?
Anyone who finds Shamir's protestations of Jewish innocence plausible need look no farther
than Maria Farmer's interview with Whitney Webb. Maria doesn't mention Moloch, but she keeps
wondering what happened to all those girls. Thousands seem to have just disappeared.
innocent defendants of sexual accusations like Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser,
I agree with most of the article, but do you have any proof that Jerry Sandusky and Larry
Nasser are innocent?
Prince Andrew fooling around with a consenting 17 year old does not compare with what
Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser were accused and convicted of doing.
How much have you seen, first hand, of America? The East Coast and Midwest is littered
with former religious communes. Okay, I may have indulged in a little hyperbole, but
nevertheless, there were a lot of them. And I don't know what you're going on about
Democrats, Anglos and such. Seems off topic to me.
I have long maintained that Shamir is Mossad and a pretend convert to Christianity. This
is the guy who argued with passion that those who say that Muslims did not do 9/11 are
depriving them of credit for their rare success. It's nevertheless surprising to see him
cashing in his chips in such a stupid and lazy way.
It's hard to imagine an authentic Christian would defend the deep state and Zionist Hebrew
pedophile operative Epstein. Hebrew-supremacist blood is thicker than any ideology, I guess.
His big Hebrew ego just can't let go of it's delusions of being forged by sacred, primeval
forces. I'm sure a rat would have a huge ego if it could speak, too.
Yes, the anti-Semitic trope of the Jew despoiling the innocent. The only stereotype I can
read here is that of the eternal victim. So Madoff didn't steal millions from elderly
pensioners. And Epstein wasn't linked to the former head of Israeli intelligence or invest in
security companies run by former Unit 8200 types. And Wexner (of Mega Group) didn't gift him
a multimillion dollar surveillance lair. And Maxwell was trolling the parking lot of Groton
School and Philips Andover after the kiddies got released from their chemistry AP test, not
preying on broken girls from broken homes. F#ck you Shamir.
He had murdered the girl, don't forget, and had been convicted by the courts,
despite a protracted and lavishly financed Jewish effort to pin the crime on a Black man who
had not committed it. The mob dragged Frank out of prison and lynched him only after his
death sentence had been commuted by the Governor of Georgia.
All of us regulars at Unz Review know fully well that speaking of Leo Frank being lynched
by the mob as the main story just won't do. Whoever is handling the Israel Shamir persona at
Herzliya these days doesn't have all that much interest in what Ron and others here have been
discussing.
Here is additional support for Shamir's take on Epstein's primary accuser –
"Virginia Roberts . claimed to have met him when she was fifteen and to have been forced to
work as his sex slave. In reality, she was seventeen, which is still below the age of consent
in Florida, but does materially alter her claim that she had sex with Prince Andrew when she
was under age because the age of consent in England is sixteen, something of which she was
almost certainly unaware .
Edward J.Epstein, a long time investigative journalist including on the JFK assassination,
recently published his own angle on the sources of Jeffrey Epstein's riches, and they have
nothing to do with sexual blackmail –
"An extremely savvy financier and philanthropist told me after Epstein's death about a
proposition Epstein had once made him: that he could save more than $40 million in US taxes
if he gave him $100 million to manage.
Epstein claimed the money would be concealed in a maze of offshore non-profits he
controlled so that part of the profits would be transferred to the financier's own
philanthropic foundation, with the balance retained offshore and out of the reach of the
taxman.
When the financier told him that the scheme amounted to illicit tax evasion, Epstein said
it was highly unlikely the Internal Revenue Service would unravel it, and, if it did, he
would protect the financier from any criminal exposure.
The financier asked him how? Epstein said the financier would have to sign over the funds
to him, thus giving him total discretion over where and how the money was invested. This
piece of paper, he said, would provide an alibi to the US tax authorities.
The financier turned down Epstein's proposition, but others – Arab princes, Russian
oligarchs and those interested in hiding some part of their wealth – might have
accepted it.
Indeed, shortly before his arrest last year, Epstein told an associate that he was going
into the business of hiding funds for billionaires who were contemplating divorcing their
wives – for a hefty commission, of course.
He also claimed to be in the final stages of buying a property in Morocco, one of four
countries in the world not to have an extradition treaty with the US.
So perhaps the mystery of Epstein's fortune is not how he made his millions, but to whom
the money ultimately belongs.
Many very powerful people may have had cause to rue Epstein's incarceration on sex charges
– and, given the fact that they were hiding their assets from the authorities, it's
highly unlikely they will ever publicly come forward to try to recover their
investments."
The column seems intended to discomfit and/or discredit as many different people around
here as possible. (I just checked Wikipedia to see how Mr. Multiname is being curated these
days, and noticed that the first of the "RELATED ARTICLES" is Gilad Atzmon.) The oddest yet
from this website's oddest writer.
" Even the father of Ghislaine, the late Mr Maxwell, might be with better evidence accused
of collaborating with Soviet Intelligence, the KGB, than with the Israelis. "
Of course. This makes perfect sense. It explains why the Israeli's gave him a state
funeral attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli President Chaim Herzog,
and "no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence" .. because, after
all, he was KGB Right.
@Anonymous in the Nasser
case, a number of public figures have come forward in Sandusky's defence. The most active is
John Ziegler who maintains a website full of articles showing that the case against Sandusky
and Penn State was and is a sham and money grab. ( http://johnziegler.com/ )
There is also the well known author Mark Pendergrast who wrote a book on the case. Here are
links to two video interviews of both –
@Anonymous likely that
Nassar was sacrificed to atone for all the sex abuse that happens in kids sports. Now that he
is destroyed then child sporting can go back to business as usual because the monster was
vanquished. Note that the Nassar story could have been spun to criticize the families who
hand their children over to strangers, or to attack child sports in general. But it wasn't.
It was aimed directly at one man, and when he was gone the story was gone. That makes him the
sacrificial lamb.
On the other hand, the Sandusky story was immediately expanded into the Pedo Rings story,
indicating it was part of this long term project.
This use of "Puritan" as a swear-word looks simplistic, beyond simplistic, to me. Like
brain-washed Americans using "Socialist" as a swear-word in just the same way.
They might have been bible-fundamentalists, they might have been creationists, they might
have thought the world was flat, but was every witch ever burned in Germany burned by
Puritans? Was witchcraft a solely Puritan fantasy? The first ever mention of a witch was by
them?
But thanks for reminding me of the mad hatter. I'll get a copy of Alice In Wonderland and
compare it with what you write.
PS PC has a very different origin, a different so-called religion.
And this excuses Prince Andrew for fucking teenagers how? A man born into royalty with
every advantage but apparently unable to handle actual mature women. So that makes it cool
for him to partake of sleazy Jeff's procured girls?
No decent guy thinks of doing stuff like that. If that's what having money does to men,
I'll happily remain relatively poor.
Thanks Mr Shamir. What you wrote sounds about right. I do not like the fact that rich and
powerful men got their way with young girls. But this has been the way of the world since
time immemorial. It was all done in the open, and for decades, right under the noses of the
NYT. But neither they nor the New Puritans thought it fit to investigate, since their focus
was elsewhere, namely to tame the Catholic Church through grinding it in the pedophile mill
over alleged crimes largely committed in the 70s. Only now that the Pavlovian Dog known as
Public Opinion can't get any further stimulus from allegations concerning the Papists, they
have turned to Epstein and the Jews with a Royal thrown in instead. But at the end of it, it
would make no difference to the men, women and children trafficked for sex, since the New
Puritans would have turned their focus elsewhere. And for what it is worth I don't think this
a Mossad operation either. I mean how good are these guys? And is it not the responsibility
of politicians holding or aspiring to high office to keep themselves clear of such people and
places?
You're right, you lost my sympathy with this robust defense of Jeffrey Epstein. I
appreciate that it's good to be skeptical of what is reported as well as of the mob mentality
but there is no real defense of this guy based on what I've seen and heard over the past two
years.
All of his residences with surveillance cameras covering every room.
The source of his money being very murky.
His willingness to share his paid-for harem with the most powerful and connected. Out of
the goodness of his heart? No.
The 100% implausible jail suicide.
Isn't that enough red flags?
Even swine like Bret Kavanaugh deserve to not be lynched but Jeffrey Epstein and
Ghislaineare in a whole other rarefied class of scum. Why bother to make excuses for them? Do
you really believe that Trump wished Maxwell well out of magnanimity? More like he's hoping
that none of their dirt on him will see daylight.
Xymphora is also having none of it. (It's an indication of Ron Unz's good editorial
judgment that Shamir's article is not listed on the main page.)
Xymphora (from the website) :
"The New Puritans" (Shamir). Besides being completely clueless about #metoo – it's
about power relationships, not flirting – he has a list of completely innocent
people: Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser, Donald Sterling, Richard Fuld, Bernie Madoff and, of
course, Harvey Weinstein, goyim. Then he tell us that the Mossad has nothing to do with
Epstein-Maxwell. I'm starting to think Shamir's history of being an 'anti-Semite' was just
producing credibility for this important career-defining moment when the operations of the
Mossad and the MEGA Group required protection.
As clear and intelligent as ever. "It is easier to shepherd a flock of cows than so many
bulls".
I suspect the Epstein ring may be linked to Mossad. It is clearly some sort of Jewish
influencing network so seems like an Israeli soft power operation. Having said that Shamir is
spot on about all the pearl-clutching even by sensible alt-right figures.
President Clinton lied? Well, he was not in the confession booth.
Clinton lied under oath in a deposition submitted in a judicial proceeding. He also
coached other witnesses to support his story. These were crimes more serious than any that
could have been charged against Nixon, who was hounded out of office. Clinton took serious
charges and spun them into a story of a harmless peccadillo. Utter brilliance. And while the
Judge in the case tried to sweep these actual crimes under the rug as immaterial to the case,
it nevertheless cost the President his law licence.
How a society views sexuality has a tremendous influence on it's long-term structure and
stability.
I do not agree that the Epstein/MOSSAD-blackmail angle makes no sense, but I think that
Mr. Shamir makes some good points. Excessively strict public morals is a ripe breeding ground
for sanctimonious hypocrisy, and hidden rot, and can have frigthening consequences, and it
would not surprise me to learn that the damnable Jesuit Order has a hidden yet decisive
influence on this "New Puritanism" that the article traces the tentative outlines of.
On the other hand, too loose sexual morals fosters dissipation – as seen in the
lives of highly promiscuous people, or on a larger scale, societies such as Soviet Russia, or
various empires after they lost their moral vigour – such as much of contemporary
America. Some amount of discipline and self-restraint is needed – this seems to be a
moral law of nature.
These waters call for good personal judgment, fairness and balance, and wisdom.
Today, more of the same in Daily Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/30/former-tory-mp-charlie-elphicke-guilty-sexually-assaulting-two/
The woman complained that Elphicke sexually assaulted her after inviting her for a drink at
his London home in 2007.
She was in her early 30s and said Elphicke – who had recently become a father for the
second time – proceeded to kiss her, grope her breast and then chase her round his
house trying to slap her bottom, chanting: "I'm a naughty Tory".
The woman came close to selling her story to The Mirror newspaper for £30,000 around a
decade later, but instead went to police.
She broke down as she gave evidence to the court. She cannot be identified for legal reasons.
END QUOTE.
Is not it typical. The guy had a try 14 years ago. Why didn't she report it to police same
day? Why wait for so long? Act now, or forget. She tried to make money of this allegation.
Still she can't be identified for legal reasons. So she can try it again, with another victim
who made a pass at her some time or another during last thirty years. This is incredible!
I haven't read the entire article yet, so this comment applies only to its initial
part.
Shamir is not very persuasive. He has the merit of explaining the situation clearly, but,
by doing so, he makes his criticism of Swedish law somewhat misdirected. As he explains it,
the legal punishment is very mild. The biggest punishment, he tells us, comes from private
entities. But doesn't that imply that, even if that law did not exist, things would happen
almost exactly as they did?
So, the problem, if it exists, is one of societal codes of moral. I, for one, think that
Sweden is autonomous to decide which codes of moral are best to itself. It's not society
which reflects the law, but the other way around. It is the law which reflects the wish of
the majority of Swedes, which is normal in a healthy democracy.
I don't find Shamir persuasive either. He has a point, women are not particularly more
moral or ethical than men, they need to be watched just like anybody, but OTOH regular
witch-hunts for politicians and plutocrats of both genders who cannot resist exploiting their
positions financially or keep their hands off the staff could be a good thing, overall.
He comes across as somebody with skin in the game here too.
This is stated in the quote from Mike Robeson, so it is better he will respond to the
items mentioned in his quote (signposted on the webpage). I have too little knowledge about
these details.
Sure, but Americans especially American Presidents are exempted from international laws
governing war crimes and crimes against humanity. It's why they can sanction entire
populations with impunity.
The irony of America bombing an aspirin factory in another country, however, is that much
of America's asprin needs are met with imports.
I commented on Xymphora: Regarding the New Puritans: " Jerry Sandusky, Larry Nasser,
Donald Sterling, Richard Fuld, Bernie Madoff and, of course, Harvey Weinstein, goyim."
– these are words of Mike Robeson I quote. It is even signposted as the quote. I hardly
know these names (excepting Weinstein). So I think you may correct your post.
Yes. I'm not sure how it is puritanical to not want middle aged rich men to buy the
services of even one minor girl for any sexual purposes. I thought that was just a civilized
notion of protecting the young.
Perhaps now I am going to lose your tentative sympathy, but I do not believe the
allegations against Jeffrey Epstein and Ms Ghislaine Maxwell, either. And the attack on
Prince Andrew is similarly unbelievable. Chapeau for Mr Trump who dared to express sympathy
to Ms Maxwell.
Trump's "sympathy" to Maxmossad was political noncommitment. Being a gentleman.
"It's not society which reflects the law, but the other way around. It is the law which
reflects the wish of the majority of Swedes, which is normal in a healthy democracy.
"
One of us is an idiot.
@Jefferson Temple Unless
you have inside information, his apparent inability to handle actual mature women is
conjecture, and open ended. Some women are mature at 20, others are not mature at 50.
Jeff's procured girls, beyond them having been employed by him, are unproven allegations.
Curious the parents were seemingly disinterested in their daughters traveling with a male
more than twice the age of their daughter.
That does not mean girls were not procured for illicit purposes or that Andrew may be
morally bankrupt, regardless of whatever happened between him and Giuffre.
@Chris Moore That said, I
disagree with the two main points of the article. One, this is not a "new puritanism", it's
something else, the comparison is patently false. How "puritan" is modern society if there's
porn everywhere?
Two, there's no way to defend Epstein and say that he was just a "normal, rich,
intelligent guy". The guy was, at best, a pervert and a well-connected pimp for politicians
(but how did he get there?). At worst , well, there are many theories and I won't dwell into
that. No way to defend that Jewish scum (sorry, but, he was Jewish, and he was scum).
If the US were occupied by the Communists as Amerika envisaged, it wouldn't be as bad
as what you've got now.
And that's the horrifying truth. For non-rich white Americans, Stalinism, as evil as it
was, would not have been as bad as what we now have under Anglo-Zionist Capitalist
Globalism.
In my Catholic family, putting your hands on a female relatives' body in any unwanted way,
would result in a visit from one of her brothers or cousins and a serious beating. It's also
interesting to see that my old parish priests were right when they spoke about the immorality
of the godless communists in that apparently adultery was common and accepted in the Soviet
Union.
The older I get, the more respect I gain for the moral teachings of the Christian Faith,
adhering to it will keep any young man out of the trouble Mr Shamir writes about.
Using Mick Jagger as a yardstick for acceptable behavior? Is that really what you
meant?
I'm thinking that at least some of those girls actually were responsible for their choices
but under the law, I don't think they can be held responsible. No character flaw or selfish
motive changes the fact that they were minors. A full grown man and woman is a different
story. They get the full advantages that society affords to adults as well as the
accountability. I don't care who rich guys want to fuck. If they target my daughter, they're
going to need an ambulance.
You quoted a big passage from Mike Robeson without reservation. So what if it's signposted
as a quote? One assumes from the context that you are endorsing his views. It does make you
look ridiculous, and I can understand your subsequent eagerness to dissociate yourself from
the quote. But there it is.
I don't think you quite understand Catholics if you think we have a healthy and casual
outlook on sex
("We" in my case is cultural and geographic history. I haven't been actually practicing
nor even much of a believer for a long time. But the culture tends to stick with you for
life, no matter what you do)
For one thing, we are probably only second to Jews when it comes to being guilt-ridden
from birth about sex (among most other things). The jury is still out whether this drives
more of us toward sin than away from it. Catholics are infamously indiscriminately
promiscuous (Zappa wrote a song about it) and somewhat less good at learning from their
mistakes as many others
The incidence of priestly abuse may be exaggerated for Puritanical effect, but it's by no
means an unfounded myth; we were joking about altar boys at least as far back as the 70s when
I took First Communion. BTW we had a Father Chester and, whatever the truth was, his nickname
rhymed
@anon a, Arkansas to run
drugs into the USA. Must of have had some local pull.
An early image of William Jefferson Clinton seated next to George Herbert Walker Bush may
shed light on the Intelligence connections of Bill, besides the two spook schools Yale and
Oxford.
Then there is Hillary's lesbianism. Why would a supposed hetero male marry a lesbian? Bill
did not need her political connections, nor her family connections. Chelsea looks like Bill,
not. Possible that Bill's taste was never a Monica, nor a Hillary, nor a 16 year old Lolita.
Bill and Hill, a match made in Langley.
Israel Shamir: "Currently their targets have a lot of wampum, for it is no fun to bully a
person for no material gain. Us, impecunious men, we have nothing to be afraid of yet."
This isn't true at all, at least in America, and I suspect it's the same elsewhere. Here,
so-called sexual harassment has been a cause of action since at least the 1980s. As someone
who was metooed way back then, before it became a thing, I can tell you that poverty is no
guarantee you won't be targeted. People are scum and really get a kick out of victimizing
each other. They'll do it just for the fun of it. Financial incentives aren't the cause of
this; it's just the icing on the cake for the so-called victim. Also, there is an absurd
culture of chivalry toward women in the matriarchal West that has lingered long past its
expiration date, such that a certain type of man enjoys "white knighting" for women who make
such claims. For such men, and they are very numerous, all a woman has to do is turn on the
water works, start crying and acting hysterical, and she'll be believed. Often it won't even
take that. From my point of view, when I see guys at the top, like Weinstein and Epstein,
having now to deal with it too, I have to confess to a certain degree of shadenfreude. During
my own tribulations with this, they were the ones getting away with it, and often even the
enforcers and enablers of it.
I see it as yet another unintended side effect of two fundamental, revolutionary
technological changes. These changes were first thought by almost everyone concerned to be
wonderful, a sign of Progress at last, but nobody was looking down the road far enough.
First, due to the advent and widespread use of scientific birth control and abortion, women
were given for the first time in history complete control over their own fertility. This led
directly to sexual liberation and modern feminism, both of which would be impossible without
this development. Second, a change in the political technology, namely the extension of the
vote to women. Why, you might ask, did an all-male government ever pass such laws, or in
America, empower its enforcement arm, the EEOC? Because of the woman's vote, of course. No
politician today can hope to succeed without it.
But I could never believe that Maxwell and Epstein were connected with the Israeli
Intelligence agency, the Mossad. With all my sympathy to our esteemed colleagues Philip
Giraldi and Whitney Webb, there is not a single shred of evidence for such connection.
Is this one of C.J. Hopkins "I'm a Russian Asset" parodies? Are you serious?
How many Mossad heads attended "Robert Maxwell's" funeral, Shamir?
Weinstein did nothing wrong?
What do they have on you, Izzy? Blink three times fast in your next video appearance to
let us know they got to you.
No one with their head north of their colon believes anything you just said here. So
that's a plus.
Thanks. I didn't take it personally. But it seems that Kavanaugh is dirty, and so is
Trump. Makes me wonder about the operations to take them down. Russia gate for Trump and
Blasey Ford gate for Kavanaugh. Both so ridiculous that it is almost as if their foes
couldn't use the real dirt without self-incriminating.
@Sollipsist l, impossible
for little children to doubt what the big person says, whether Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy,
Easter Rabbit, anything. So easy to indoctrinate. And it's continued to the present day, the
only denomination that has it's own elementary schools everywhere. Everywhere. All about
capturing the children.
But going back to "Puritan", Wikipedia on Savonarola, in 1494 "he instituted an extreme
puritanical campaign "
So, Ha! Ha!, Roman "Catholic" Puritans of the Fifteenth Century! Didn't molest
children back then, but have ever since!
Feel free to check out how these egalitarian English men have in 10 min permanently banned
my 6 year old Wikipedia account over a comment I made three years ago – proclaiming
that marriage is between a man and a woman is considered homophobic now. (It's a self-plug,
but it's also Christian psychology in real-time, you might appreciate it.)
Does this homosexual psychosis stem from technology, too? The most industrialized nations
on the planet are not sodomitic at all. It all seems to me like an American cultural
thing.
Adûnâi: "Are you not confusing the cause and effect?"
Certainly there is an interplay between the two factors I mentioned that magnifies their
societal effects. They strengthen and support each other.
Adûnâi: "But why did women get the vote to begin with? You don't explain.
From what I know, they were first employed in WW1, and it was a "symbol of gratitude"?
Sounds quite cucked and Christian."
Technology develops according to its own internal logic, often with unpredictable and
sometimes even catastrophic effects on human societies. It is deeply hostile to natural
distinctions of race, sex, and culture that impede its efficient operation. Technological
change drives cultural change, and war stimulates technological change.
Adûnâi: "Why then have the Eastern countries not faced it? Neither the USSR nor
modern China?"
I'd say they have, in their own way. There are, for example, plenty of female
professionals in both countries, who function in their jobs as the equivalent of men. This
would be impossible if they were constantly pregnant and caring for children. Then too, there
is the low birth rate, which is only possible with scientific birth control. They also
participate equally with men in politics, AFAIK, and have equal rights as citizens. N.b. too
that in China, at least, this happened without Christianity -- although, as has been said by
Spengler and others, Marxism can itself be regarded as a form of Christianity.
Adûnâi: "Does this homosexual psychosis stem from technology, too?"
Efficiency is the god of technology, and that is unquestionably true all over the world.
To the extent that cultural factors impede the efficient operation of technology, they have
to change, or all that results is inferior technology. Man's increasing dependence on
technology is why a kind of global culture is emerging now, instead of earlier in history.
Cultural distinctions are being destroyed at an accelerating pace, and also races are being
mixed as an unintended and unforeseen consequence of this dependence.
Because of this, I suspect the decadence you notice today in the West will eventually show
up in the East as well. It's just that because they were relative late comers to technology
and industrialization, it may take a little longer, that's all. There's a certain cultural
inertia that needs to be overcome.
Russian method
In a far away Russian village, gals have heard of the Western way to deal with men, and they
brought their rape complaints to local police. Police checked the claims, found them without
merit, and both ladies were fined 5000 ruble ($80) each. How neat! https://pervo.info/v-achite-eshhyo-odno-lozhnoe-iznasilovanie/
Even without technology, give humans enough time, and one race will emerge triumphant.
Whereas the high tide of Islam failed to conquer Anatolia, the Seljuks came to the Aegean,
and the Ottomans reached Vienna. Failures are weeded out, and those remain who are strong,
not who can make money most efficiently.
@Israel Shamir
And yet, the rural folk of Russia is dying out. Natural change (2018): -3 per 1000 rural
vs -1 per 1000 urban.
Adûnâi: "Everything indeed will be shown in due time. What else are we doing
here but trying to predict the future?"
Yes, I agree with most of what you wrote in this comment. All I'm doing is pointing to the
trend, the way the technological system tends to grind away cultural differences. Of course,
some cultural differences may not affect the efficiency of the system, and those might
remain. Western "decadence" might or might not be one of those things. Ted Kaczynski says
something relevant about this in ISAIF:
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his
real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in
rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into
high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools;
the way of life of the black "underclass" they regard as a social disgrace. They want to
integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist
just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they
want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve
African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture
consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to
black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque.
In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects
more leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white,
middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a
scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good
as white. They want to make black fathers "responsible." they want black gangs to become
nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The
system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears
or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job,
climbs the status ladder, is a "responsible" parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect,
however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into
the system and make him adopt its values.
A corollary of this would seem to be that only trivial differences will remain between
cultures as different cultures fully adapt themselves to the global technological system. The
urging of "oversocialized leftists" isn't actually necessary, as the system itself contains
its own rewards for compliance and punishments for failure to comply. There's also nothing
particularly tied to naturally-occurring races in that system of values; at least, not
obviously so. The system is hostile to natural race distinctions precisely because it is
necessarily race-neutral. Might it create its own artificial race of genetically engineered
humans in order to maximize efficiency? That could be. Certainly, genetic changes to man have
been a side effect of civilization itself. E.g., human beings are much less violent than they
used to be. Obedience, non-violence (at least on a personal level), and conformity has been
bred into us modern humans.
Adûnâi: "Are you of the view that collapse is imminent, even without Unabombers?
And if it is, there will be no going back to high technology?"
It's probably a mistake to underestimate the resilience of the system. Anyone interested
in trying to preserve the status quo as to race will have to act fast to bring the system
down, or it will be too late. Whether high tech can be rebuilt after a global collapse would
depend on a lot of factors impossible to know without knowing at least the method used to
cause the collapse, as that would have an effect on how long any ensuing "Dark Age" would
last.
Yes its kind of strange. Kavanaugh is not an ideological conservative in the mould of
Scalia or Thomas. Makes one wonder what the fuss was all about. I must revisit what you wrote
about earlier on his earlier judgements.
I'm not disagreeing, but don't forget it was 19th Century "Great Awakening" Protestants
who were responsible for creating the public school system in the US. Can we question their
motives?
In England, a struggle to dismiss a parliamentarian because of a vague complaint
Chief whip Mark Spencer today stood by his decision not to suspend the senior Tory MP
arrested on suspicion of rape.
The party is under mounting pressure, including from the alleged victim, to strip the
ex-minister of the Conservative whip.
But Mr Spencer said it was right to allow the police to conclude their investigation before
taking any action, while also stressing the need to protect the identity of the accuser.
The former parliamentary researcher in her 20s has alleged she was assaulted and forced to
have sex.
What does "forced to have sex" means?
@Dr.
Robert Morgan , it's "a triumph of the Natural, Racial Order" that confuses the plans of
the globo. The very globohomo is contingent upon the qualities of the Nordic race. It has
evolved to seek efficiency, and now – under the guidance of Christianity – it is
employing it in its own self-destruction. But as they near the end, their efforts become
discordant, muffled, inefficient.
> "Ted Kaczynski"
By the way, why do you prefer calling him his real name instead of "the Unabomber"? "Ted"
is so much more boring, and the in "Kaczynski" is mispronounced as by Americans while it
should be in Polish. The Unabomber has a ring to it.
Shamir now confesses to be a Mossad Psyop who pretended to be a hero of the Goyim. The
choosen ones raping and pimping gentile children and women is nothing to him. Criticism is
New Puretanism. A surrogate for the word Antisemitism as Derschowitz uses it for his accuser?
Calling Robert Maxell a KGB Agent i and other are struggling to understand if you are
trolling or trutly a Mossad apologet. The worst is you are friends with Gilad Atzmon
hopefully he is as bluffed by your (new?) behaviour and views as we are.
Anyway, just noticed more ammo lying on the ground right here at UR. Andy Flick-Chick, his
2020-02-13 article, The Philippines Are Choosing New Allies: Pres. Duterte, hugely
popular there, "sexually molested by a priest when he was a child, he holds a grudge against
Christianity."
@Dr.
Robert Morgan he principle of the pursuit of individual happiness trumps any search for
the efficiency of the collective.
I would concede that the history of technological intelligent life on this planet has been
aimed at the discovery of the correct proportion between efficiency and race. But not more.
Simply put, what I am observing to-day is the death of race-denialists in the Occident and
the triumph of racists in the Orient. The latter are more efficient, too.
A little video celebrating the unity of the Man and the Machine. Those visions are not
Checharian and not bucolic.
Adûnâi: "If it were indeed calculating the most efficient society, it would
probably try to mix and match, and as homosexualism is not exactly important, it would be
discounted as a Western obstacle." I would say, if there is no reason ruling the system, it
turns into idiocracy."
You have to keep in mind that the focus of technique when evaluating efficiency is
necessarily quite narrow. For instance, having a horse is more efficient (in some ways) than
walking, while having an automobile is still more efficient than having a horse. So an
evaluation of efficiency is both relative and contextual. Someone might object, for example,
that automobiles aren't really more efficient than walking, because by using automobiles, you
have to accept that tens of thousands of people are going to die annually in car accidents.
That's true, but still, the judgement of society (i.e., the "group mind" that I've referred
to) has been that using automobiles is worth it, i.e., more "efficient". And there can be
little doubt that, overall, a society that has the technology necessary to produce and use
automobiles would defeat a society at a more primitive technological level in the contest of
survival between them.
But generally, one cannot determine in advance "the most efficient society" any more than
one can determine in advance "the fittest animal". Whatever form of social organization is
most efficient must emerge gradually, as man does his dance of death with technology.
Humanity is like a blind man groping his way down a corridor. Nobody knows where
technological development will lead, and its development cannot be steered. Attempts to allow
ideology to steer technology only result in inferior technology.
As for "homosexualism", thinking about it some more, I'd say it's just another side effect
of female empowerment. Due to the development of scientific birth control methods women are
now participating in work and politics on equal footing with men, and there are social
consequences that weren't foreseen: e.g., more men are raised without a father in the home;
more men who, in their work life, will necessarily have a woman as their "boss"; decoupling
sex from its natural function of reproduction leads to regarding sexuality as a matter of
"lifestyle choice". Given basic human psychology, I'd say these trends favor an increase in
"homosexualism". Certainly they are quite destructive of patriarchy.
Adûnâi: "A lack of will is a lack of life. I emphasise the role of the
individual in history. If the system is so smart, why does it allow the vector to turn
towards disorder* for a period?"
Individual will has nothing to do with technique. It can't control it. Just to stick with
the example of birth control technologies, you cannot "will" away the fact that they empower
women, and at the same time disempower men. To use the technique at all, you just have to
accept this, just as with the use of automobiles, a society accepts that the cost is tens of
thousands of lives every year.
Disorder arises, and empires fall, precisely because all the consequences of a given
technological configuration aren't foreseen; in fact, they're not even foreseeable. Shit
happens, as the saying goes.
Adûnâi: "By the way, why do you prefer calling him his real name instead of "the
Unabomber"? "
Because it's his ideas that are important, not his relatively ineffectual bombs.
Adûnâi: "Simply put, what I am observing to-day is the death of race-denialists
in the Occident and the triumph of racists in the Orient. The latter are more efficient,
too."
This is the question to be decided in the future, by the result. I agree that the West,
precisely because of its Christian worldview, tends to confuse what it regards as moral
superiority with technological superiority. But then, if the prize is survival itself, morals
can change. Also, there's a time honored Christian tradition of hypocrisy that must be taken
into account. Only the event of the matter will show which form of technological organization
is more efficient.
Kinda sad that people are so often especially motivated by childhood trauma; the
simplicity, irrationality and disproportionate responses that are understandable in the
childish mind are unnaturally preserved throughout adulthood. A little girl gets abused by a
pervert uncle, and years later her supposed reason and free will convinces her that men are
evil, old men especially, traditional families and patriarchal society are the enemy, and she
was "born" a lesbian. So pretty much everybody in her sphere of influence ends up paying for
the act of one degenerate.
Up to this article, I took him to be honest, regardless of how muddy his background was.
Maybe he's testing his audience, but this is laughable.
Of course, if you're opposed to a superficially feminized, #metoo, gotcha culture, you may
sympathize at first.
But he's covering up for a zio-criminal entity that hasn't yet been unraveled. He's
actually trying the line that Epstein was some cavalier 70s Don Juan simply born a bit too
late.
Whores will be whores. Don't care about them, as they squirmed around Weinstein and
Epstein. Pretending Epstein is all about whores however, just turned Israel Shamir into a
whore in his own right. Pat yourself on the back, but we still don't know shit about Epstein,
the intelligence angle that is.
Maybe Israel can get his friend Assange on the ball?
ll eyes are on the declining number of unemployed. The May and June jobs reports chronicle
the reabsorption of 5.3 million who lost their jobs in the COVID-19 pandemic. Twelve million
jobs to go to reach pre-pandemic employment.
Yet prior to the pandemic, there were 18 million Americans missing from the economy. These
persons were neither employed nor seeking employment -- nor retirees, students or in-home
caregivers -- and therefore were excluded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics count of the
workforce. In order that America emerge from the pandemic stronger than before, a concerted
initiative by federal and state governments to move them back into the economy -- using
existing resources -- must begin now.
...
Research on the social determinants of health finds that employment has a
very strong correlation with positive health outcomes. To exist as a non-participant in
the economy is thus an invitation to dire health outcomes including premature death.
What's more, these individuals are needed as contributors to our national commonweal,
fueling increased economic and social progress. And people engaged in productive activities
are much less likely to engage in negative and destructive behaviors.
... The USDA's food stamp program has a robustly funded, though underutilized, employment
and training grant. States use the excuse of USDA's partial match requirement as a reason to
opt out.
The USA and GB actually implement caste system. That's what job quota means.
Notable quotes:
"... It might seem divisive to compare different groups, but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we're to help the worst off, we have to know who they are. We should help everyone who needs it -- but it is vital to be able to compare groups to know who's falling behind, relative to their peers. In the UK, Bangladeshi-Brits earn 20 percent less than whites on average, for instance, but those with Indian heritage are likely to earn 12 percent more. Black Britons on average earn 9 percent less, but Chinese earn 30 percent more. What these differences tell us is that employers aren't systematically discriminating between people on the basis of their skin color, and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality. ..."
"... Poor Chinese girls (that is to say, those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white children. ..."
"... But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma, every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle class and 57 percent are female. The least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys. Just 13 percent of them go on to higher education, less than any black or Asian group. ..."
"... Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate based at Princeton University, came up with the phrase 'deaths of despair' when he looked at the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism, depression and drug abuse. Suicides among whites, he found, was soaring and those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low-educated. His recently-published book on the subject ( Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , co-written with Anne Case) tells the devastating story of what he calls 'the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century'. ..."
You can argue about the merits of pulling down statues, but it's hard to make the case that mass protests serve no useful purpose.
At the very least, they provoke debate and draw attention to uncomfortable topics that it might otherwise be easier to ignore. The
recent protests have forced everyone to have difficult discussions about race, class, poverty and attainment. Any serious examination
of the statistics shows that we're pretty far from equal, but what the figures also show is that it's wrong-headed and damaging to
lump very different groups together.
In these discussions politicians often lazily assume that all BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) people are the same, and
that all white groups are equally privileged. But a proper look at the data shows not just that there are striking difference within
BAME groups, but that the very worst-performing group of all are white working-class boys -- the forgotten demographic .
It might seem divisive to compare different groups, but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we're to help
the worst off, we have to know who they are. We should help everyone who needs it -- but it is vital to be able to compare groups
to know who's falling behind, relative to their peers. In the UK, Bangladeshi-Brits earn 20 percent less than whites on average,
for instance, but those with Indian heritage are likely to earn 12 percent more. Black Britons on average earn 9 percent less, but
Chinese earn 30 percent more. What these differences tell us is that employers aren't systematically discriminating between people
on the basis of their skin color, and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality.
Ucas, the British university admissions service, can provide unique insight into these issues: it is the only outfit in the
world to gather detailed information on all university applicants, including their age, gender, neighborhood and school type. This
is collected along with data on who applied for which courses and who was accepted, and it is renewed in huge detail every year.
Much of the data shows predictable results: there is a gap between rich and poor, as you might expect in a UK state system where
the best schools tend to be located in the most expensive areas. But there are surprising discoveries too: nearly half the children
eligible for free school meals in inner London go on to higher education, but in the country outside London as a whole it is just
26 percent.
Black African British children outperform white children, whereas black Caribbean children tend to do worse. Poor Chinese
girls (that is to say, those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white children.
But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma,
every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle
class and 57 percent are female. The least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys. Just 13 percent of them
go on to higher education, less than any black or Asian group.
This is a trend that can also be seen in the GCSE data; only 17 percent of white British pupils eligible for free school meals
achieve a strong pass in English and maths. Students categorized as Bangladeshi, Black African and Indian are more than twice as
likely to do so. In 2007, the state sector saw 23 percent of black students go on to higher education; this was true for 22 percent
of whites. So about the same. But at the last count, in 2018, the gap had widened to 11 points (41 percent for black students, 30
percent for whites). The children of the white working class are falling away from their peers, in danger of becoming lost.
Going to university is not the golden ticket it once was, but it requires stupefying naivety to believe that seven out of eight
poor white boys take a sober look at the economics of higher education and choose to set up their own businesses instead. The trail
of hard evidence runs cold once they leave school, but the prospects for those who can barely read and write are dreadful and we
can get some idea of the consequences by looking at the 'left behind' areas where unemployment, crime and 'deaths of despair' are
significantly higher than the national average.
Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate based at Princeton University, came up with the phrase 'deaths of despair' when he looked at
the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism, depression and drug abuse. Suicides among whites, he found, was soaring and
those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low-educated. His recently-published book on the subject (
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism , co-written
with Anne Case) tells the devastating story of what he calls 'the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century'.
Yet while white working-class males are the largest disadvantaged minority, their cause is the least fashionable. In the intersectional
pyramid of victimhood, white males are at the bottom, tarnished by ideas of 'toxic masculinity' and 'white privilege' despite the
fact that in Britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true privilege. It's worrying, then, that any who attempt
'positive action' on behalf of poor white boys face a hostile reaction. Last year, Dulwich and Winchester colleges turned down a
bequest of more than Ł1 million ($1.25 million) because the donor, Sir Bryan Thwaites, wanted the money ring-fenced for scholarships
for white working-class boys. Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility,
described Thwaites's offer as 'obnoxious'.
When Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield, tried to ask an 'Equalities' question about working-class white boys in parliament
earlier this year, he was turned down by the Table Office because they do not have any 'protected characteristics'. The concept of
'protected characteristics' was wheeled into UK law by Harriet Harman's Equality Act, 10 years ago, and the Tories, then in opposition,
took the rare step of voting for it. The nine protected characteristics include 'race', 'sex' and 'sexual orientation', but the Table
Office is not alone in interpreting these as 'non-white', 'female' and 'gay'.
Under the Equality Act, 'positive discrimination' remains technically unlawful, but the barely indistinguishable concept of 'positive
action' is explicitly legal. Firms cannot have quotas, but they can set targets. Employers cannot refuse to look at job applications
from people who lack protected characteristics, but by stating that 'applications are particularly welcome' from BAME, female or
LBGTQ+ candidates they send a message that some need not apply.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
In 2016 the BBC pledged that half its workforce and leadership would be female by 2020 despite less than 40 percent of Britain's
full-time workers being women. It also set an 8 percent target for LGBT employees, although only around 2 percent of the population
identify as LGBT. This target has been comfortably exceeded, as has been the target of having 15 percent of employees from a BAME
background. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests last month, the corporation raised this target to 20 per cent.
The BBC admits that people from 'low and intermediate income households' are hugely underrepresented in its workforce. But what
does it do about it? Earlier this month Oxford University proudly reported that it was making 'steady progress' in its efforts to
make its campuses 'representative of wider society'. Of its most recent intake of British students, only 14 percent came from the
poorest 40 percent of households.
This fits a pattern: at a push, we can hear acknowledgement of the 'poor white male' problem. But that's as far as it ever goes.
The underperformance of white boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving. When figures come out showing the stunning
attainment gaps between boys and girls, the interest lasts for about a day. 'It always got a few headlines,' says Mary Curnock Cook,
the former head of Ucas. 'Where it never got any traction at all was in policy-making in government. I began to think that the subject
of white boys is just too difficult for them, given the politicization of feminism and women's equality.'
When I asked a teacher why white working-class boys have fallen so far behind, he gave me a short answer: girls are better behaved
and immigrant parents are stricter. This is a generalization but nonetheless interesting: if it is the case that parenting is the
problem, then it's not clear how much the UK government can do. Perhaps the reluctance to discuss the subject stems from fear that
such a discussion would lead to difficult territory about family structure, quality of parenting and -- in short -- culture. Perhaps
politicians think it better to let the problem fester, and the children suffer, than to risk discussing it.
Last month, the British government announced that its commission on racial inequality would include an examination into the underperformance
of working-class white boys at schools. Will it look deep into the causes? It might look at recent studies that suggest poor reading
levels in schools is a huge part of the problem. And it might ask whether 'positive action' in the name of diversity has left white
working-class boys behind.
The Washington Post
Simon Denyer; Akiko Kashiwagi; Min Joo Kim
July 8, 2020
In Japan, a country with a long fascination with robots, automated assistants have offered
their services as bartenders, security guards, deliverymen, and more, since the onset of the
coronavirus pandemic. Japan's Avatarin developed the "newme" robot to allow people to be
present while maintaining social distancing during the pandemic.
The telepresence robot is
essentially a tablet on a wheeled stand with the user's face on the screen, whose location and
direction can be controlled via laptop or tablet. Doctors have used the newme robot to
communicate with patients in a coronavirus ward, while university students in Tokyo used it to
remotely attend a graduation ceremony.
The company is working on prototypes that will allow
users to control the robot through virtual reality headsets, and gloves that would permit users
to lift, touch, and feel objects through a remote robotic hand.
A robot that neutralizes aerosolized forms of the coronavirus could soon be coming to a supermarket
near you. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory team partnered with Ava
Robotics to develop a device that can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000-square-foot
space in 30 minutes.
"This is such an exciting idea to use the solution as a hands-free, safe way to neutralize dorms,
hallways, hospitals, airports -- even airplanes," Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, told Yahoo Finance's
"The
Ticker."
The key to disinfecting large spaces in a short amount of time is the UV-C light fixture
designed
at MIT
. It uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light that eliminates microorganisms by breaking down
their DNA. The UV-C light beam is attached to Ava Robotic's mobile base and can navigate a warehouse
in a similar way as a self-driving car.
"The robot is controlled by some powerful algorithms that compute exactly where the robot has to go
and how long it has to stay in order to neutralize the germs that exist in that particular part of the
space," Rus said.
This robot can kill roughly 90% of COVID-19 on surfaces in a 4,000 square foot space in 30
minutes. (Courtesy: Alyssa Pierson, MIT CSAIL)
More
Currently, the robot is being tested at the Greater Boston Food Bank's shipping area and focuses on
sanitizing products leaving the stockroom to reduce any potential threat of spreading the coronavirus
into the community.
"Here, there was a unique opportunity to provide additional disinfecting power to their current
workflow, and help reduce the risks of COVID-19 exposure," said Alyssa Pierson, CSAIL research
scientist and technical lead of the UV-C lamp assembly.
But Rus explains implementing the robot in other locations does face some challenges. "The light
emitted by the robot is dangerous to humans, so the robot cannot be in the same space as humans. Or,
if people are around the robot, they have to wear protective gear," she added.
While Rus didn't provide a specific price tag, she said the cost of the robot is still high, which may
be a hurdle for broad distribution. In the future, "Maybe you don't need to buy an entire robot set,
you can book the robot for a few hours a day to take care of your space," she said.
McKenzie Stratigopoulos is a producer at Yahoo Finance. Follow
her on Twitter:
@mckenziestrat
During the pandemic, readers may recall several of our pieces describing what life would be
like in a post corona world.
From restaurants to
flying to gambling to hotels to
gyms to interacting with people to even
housing trends - we highlighted how social distancing would transform the economy.
As the transformation becomes more evident by the week, we want to focus on automation and
artificial intelligence - and how these two things are allowing hotels, well at least one in
California, to accommodate patrons with contactless room service.
Hotel Trio in Healdsburg, California, is surrounded by wineries and restaurants in
Healdsburg/Sonoma County region, recently hired a new worker named "Rosé the Robot" that
delivers food, water, wine, beer, and other necessities, reported
Sonoma Magazine .
"As Rosé approaches a room with a delivery, she calls the phone to let the guest know
she's outside. A tablet-sized screen on Rosé's head greets the guest as they open the
door, and confirms the order. Next, she opens a lid on top of her head and reveals a storage
compartment containing the ordered items. Rosé then communicates a handful of questions
surrounding customer satisfaction via her screen. She bids farewell, turns around and as she
heads back toward her docking station near the front desk, she emits chirps that sound like a
mix between R2D2 and a little bird," said Sonoma Magazine.
Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmospheric Research Group in San Francisco,
said robots would be integrated into the hotel experience.
"This is a part of travel that will see major growth in the years ahead," Harteveldt
said.
Rosé is manufactured by Savioke, a San Jose-based company that has dozens of robots
in hotels nationwide.
The tradeoff of a contactless environment where automation and artificial intelligence
replace humans to mitigate the spread of a virus is permanent
job loss .
I think the difference is owning of stock. If a person owns anough money to maintin the
current standard of living without employment this person belong to upper middle class.
Without working class votes they can't win. And those votes are lost
It's helpful that you told us who you were, in so few words. The Dems didn't lose
working-class votes in 2016: the median income of a Hillary voter was less than that
of a Trump voter [or maybe it was average? In any case, not much difference.] What the Dems
lost, was "white non-college-educated" voters. They retained working class voters of
color.
But hey, they don't count as working-class voters to you. Thanks for playing.
1) White collar are, by definition, working class, because they don't own the means of
production. What I see is an opposition between blue collars and white collars, that are two
wings of the working class, not that democrats are going against the working class.
For some reason, the main divide in politics today is a sort of culture war, and republicans
and other right wing parties managed to present the traditionalist side of the culture war as
the "working class" one, and therefore the other side as the evil cosmopolitan prosecco
sipping faux leftish but in reality very snobbish one, so that they pretend that they are the
working class party because of their traditionalist stance.
But they aren't: already the fact that they blame "cosmopolitans" shows that they think in
terms of nationalism (like Trump and his China virus), which is a way to deflect the
attention from class conflict.
So comparatively the Dems are still the working class party, and the fact that some working
class guys vote for trump sows that they suffer from false consciousness, not that the Dems
are too right wing (the dems ARE too right wing, but this isn't the reason some working class
guys are voting Trump).
2) Neoliberalism and free markets are not the same thing, and furthermore neoliberalism
and capitalism are not the same thing; at most neoliberalism is a form of unadultered
capitalism. However since neoliberalism basically means "anti new deal", and new deal
economies were still free market and still capitalist (we can call them social democratic,
but in this sense social democracy is a form of controlled capitalism), it follows that the
most economically succesful form of capitalism and free markets to date is not
neoliberalism.
It's helpful that you told us who you were, in so few words. 43% of the US are non-voters.
The median household income of non-voters is less than half of the median income of a Clinton
voter (which was higher than the overall US median, albeit by less than the Trump median
was). Clinton didn't lose in 2016 because of who voted as much as who didn't ; every
serious analysis (and countless centrist screeds) since Trump's installation has told us
that. Losing the working class doesn't require that the Republicans gain them; if the working
class drops out, that shifts the electoral playing field further into the favor of politics
who cater to the remaining voting blocks. Democrats playing Republican-lite while mouthing
pieties about how they're totally not the party of the rich will always fare worse in that
field than Republicans playing Republicans while mouthing pieties about how they ARE the
party of the rich, but also of giving everyone a chance to make themselves rich. I know it's
been de rigour for both Dems and the GOP to ignore the first half of Clinton's
deplorable quote, but it truly was just as important as the half both sides freely remember.
The Democrats have become a party of C-suite diversity, and they have abandoned the working
class. And when their best pick for President's plenty bold plan for solving police violence
is to encourage LEOs to shoot people in the leg instead of the chest (something that could
only be said by a grifter or someone with more knowledge of Hollywood than ballistics
or anatomy), the prospect of keeping the non-white portions of the working class from
continuing to drop out is looking bleak.
MisterMr@49:
The traditional threading of that needle is to expand class-based analysis to more
accurately reflect real-world political and economic behavior. In the past (and in some
countries who updated the applicable definitions, still), the most relevant additional class
was the petty bourgeoisie; in the modern US, however, the concept of the
professional-managerial class is the most useful frame of reference.
"The traditional threading of that needle is to expand class-based analysis to more
accurately reflect real-world political and economic behavior. In the past (and in some
countries who updated the applicable definitions, still), the most relevant additional class
was the petty bourgeoisie; in the modern US, however, the concept of the
professional-managerial class is the most useful frame of reference."
Sure, but one has to adopt a logicwhen building "class" groups. One relrvant dimension is
educational attainment, which is IMHO where the "professional-managerial" class comes
from.
But, not everyone with a degree is a manager, and "professional" normally implies a level of
income that is higher that that of an average rank and file white collar.
So the question is whether this "new class" is really managers, or just white collar
workers who work in services instead than in industrial production.
Furthermore, as technology increases, it is natural that a larger share of people will work
in services and a smaller share in industry, for the same reason that increased agricultural
productivity means less agricultural jobs.
There are a great many unstated assumptions baked into this comment, but I'll take a shot
at a foundational one. You suggest PMC is a distinction without difference vis a vis middle
class appears to suggest that you've bought into a commonly accepted "truth" that can't
withstand close scrutiny, and your claim that economic status is not a useful distinguisher
only further drives it home. What is the cutoff between middle class and rich? I've seen far
too many well-educated idiots with professional degrees make ridiculous claims like $150k
household income representing a solidly middle-class income. That's in the upper 15% of
national incomes, but it's being called middle class. 240% of the national median household
income, but it's "middle class". And to pre-empt cost-of-living arguments, it's 175% of the
median household income in Manhattan. So when you say PMC is not a useful concept, and that
income is not a useful class distinction, I need to ask you where you draw your lines, or if
you're asserting that class has no economic aspect at all. If you're arguing that households
in the upper quintile and bottom quintile don't have different concerns, outlooks, values,
and lifestyles – that someone in either could be working class or middle class
(but I assume not upper class? Arguments like what yours appears to be typically don't start
the upper class anywhere below the 1% ) is hard to treat as serious. If that is an assertion
you'd stand by, what that tells me is that you're using private definitions of working and
middle class, and they're essentially unintelligible.
@MisterMr White collar are, by definition, working class, because they don't own the means of
production
That's not the definition. For example: despite not owning any means of production,
lumpenproletariat is not part of the working class.
What I see is an opposition between blue collars and white collars, that are two wings
of the working class
If this is the way you feel, that's fine. It is, however, a controversial view. An
alternative (and quite convincing, imo) view is that "white collars" belong to the
'professional-managerial class', with entirely different interests.
Anyhow, a bourgeois democracy (aka 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie') does not and can not
represent interests of the working class; this is indeed "by definition". Any benefits
encountered by the working class are coincidental.
And in the current circumstance, the struggle between the remains of domestic bourgeoisie
and global finance capitalism, the former faction is definitely – obviously –
better aligned with interests of the domestic working class.
Orange Watch 07.08.20 at 11:01 pm (no link)
steven t johnson@98:
There are a great many unstated assumptions baked into this comment, but I'll take a shot
at a foundational one. You suggest PMC is a distinction without difference vis a vis middle
class appears to suggest that you've bought into a commonly accepted "truth" that can't
withstand close scrutiny, and your claim that economic status is not a useful distinguisher
only further drives it home. What is the cutoff between middle class and rich? I've seen far
too many well-educated idiots with professional degrees make ridiculous claims like $150k
household income representing a solidly middle-class income. That's in the upper 15% of
national incomes, but it's being called middle class. 240% of the national median household
income, but it's "middle class". And to pre-empt cost-of-living arguments, it's 175% of the
median household income in Manhattan. So when you say PMC is not a useful concept, and that
income is not a useful class distinction, I need to ask you where you draw your lines, or if
you're asserting that class has no economic aspect at all. If you're arguing that households
in the upper quintile and bottom quintile don't have different concerns, outlooks, values,
and lifestyles – that someone in either could be working class or middle class
(but I assume not upper class? Arguments like what yours appears to be typically don't start
the upper class anywhere below the 1% ) is hard to treat as serious. If that is an assertion
you'd stand by, what that tells me is that you're using private definitions of working and
middle class, and they're essentially unintelligible.
"... That is the reality of 'normal', where everything has been devalued to its lowest denominator – its cold, hard, economic value of cash. Yes, devalued – because our society demands that everything has only a cash figure. ..."
"... For the working class, these narratives of 'the middle', of being mediocre, do not work for us, because we start from a position of disadvantage and our narrative around success starts with change. Because who we are is never good enough – we are instead told and taught to 'aspire' to join the ranks of the middle class and achieve the things its members take as theirs. Property. Profits. Expensive wine. Insider knowledge of which brand of jam makes them a better person. ..."
That is the reality of
'normal', where everything has been devalued to its lowest denominator – its cold, hard, economic value of cash. Yes, devalued
– because our society demands that everything has only a cash figure. Therefore 'normal' is always framed by the middle
classes, because they have power, and language, and education – and yes, money – which allows what appears normal to them to
be considered normal for everyone. If you are working class, you don't get to frame your interpretation of normal; normal sits
in the middle and becomes mediocre, never radical or challenging.
That 'normal' works for the middle classes because it's
theirs – most of them are living their lives today the same ways they were eight weeks ago, before Covid struck. Many are
existing in even more comfortable contentedness than usual.
I hate this mediocre
position. It speaks to me of having no aspirations to challenge, to think differently, to shake things up. It is the thought
process, and actions, of the middle class – who see no benefit in change because they are doing okay.
For the working class,
these narratives of 'the middle', of being mediocre, do not work for us, because we start from a position of disadvantage and
our narrative around success starts with change. Because who we are is never good enough – we are instead told and taught to
'aspire' to join the ranks of the middle class and achieve the things its members take as theirs. Property. Profits. Expensive
wine. Insider knowledge of which brand of jam makes them a better person.
Covid-19 has shown us VERY
CLEARLY that it is the working class whose lives are in such precarity and who are always first in line to be killed or thrown
onto the dole queues. It is the working class who suffer most from anything that is negative – whether it's man-made, like a
rotten economic system, or a health pandemic – and benefit least from anything positive.
As governments and bosses all over the world try to tempt us back into the
"old normal"
and
whisper snake-oil encouragements such a
s "Don't worry, it won't all be the same things
will improve,"
let us grab that message with both hands, our feet and our heads. Let's appropriate it and tell them
clearly: no, it bloody well won't be the same. We don't want that 'normal'. As it was never normal for us – it was a living
nightmare.
Dr Lisa McKenzie is
a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire and became politicized through the 1984
miners' strike with her family. At 31, she went to the University of Nottingham and did an undergraduate degree in
sociology. Dr McKenzie lectures in sociology at the University of Durham and is the author of 'Getting By: Estates,
Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.' She's a political activist, writer and thinker. Follow her on Twitter
@redrumlisa
.
"... The consequences of the short-sighted politics and policies of the Thatcher era have been profound in those communities that suffered, and have shaped the narrative of the working class over the past 40 years, as people who are slow to change and are left behind. ..."
"... The consequence of this has been that the social, political and cultural influence of the working class has also diminished. Working-class people are now barely represented outside of low-paid, low-skilled work centered in the limited space of the service sector, healthcare, retail and distribution centers. ..."
"... Even the government's own appointed Social Mobility Commission acknowledges that class inequality and class prejudice is entrenched in our society. But it has no real solutions, and simply trots out the usual unimaginative tropes of raising aspiration for young working-class people. ..."
"... Working-class people need their own 'New Deal', which not only recognises the even greater inequalities caused by Covid-19 and the economic disaster that is on its way, but acknowledges the economic, social, political and cultural attack they have sustained for over 40 years. ..."
The consequences of the short-sighted politics and policies of the Thatcher era have been
profound in those communities that suffered, and have shaped the narrative of the working class
over the past 40 years, as people who are slow to change and are left behind.
Even former chancellors
are warning of a return to a 1980s level of unemployment and recession – although
none of them accepts responsibility for the structures they defended that caused that
unemployment. Nor do they take responsibility for their inability to think honestly or even
creatively about the failure of capitalism.
... ... ...
The consequence of this has been that the social, political and cultural influence of the working
class has also diminished. Working-class people are now barely represented outside of low-paid,
low-skilled work centered in the limited space of the service sector, healthcare, retail and
distribution centers.
Even the government's own appointed Social Mobility Commission acknowledges that class
inequality and class prejudice is entrenched in our society. But it has no real solutions, and
simply trots out the usual unimaginative tropes of raising aspiration for young working-class
people.
So I'll help it out. Working-class people need their own 'New Deal', which not only recognises the even greater inequalities caused by Covid-19 and the economic disaster that is
on its way, but acknowledges the economic, social, political and cultural attack they have
sustained for over 40 years.
The New Deal for working-class people would recognise that access to good, safe and
affordable housing is needed immediately.
It would recognise that the welfare-benefits system that's supposed to catch those who need
support is cruel, humiliating and keeps people in poverty, rather than lifting them out.
Dr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in
Nottinghamshire and became politicized through the 1984 miners' strike with her family. At 31,
she went to the University of Nottingham and did an undergraduate degree in sociology. Dr
McKenzie lectures in sociology at the University of Durham and is the author of 'Getting By:
Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.' She's a political activist, writer and
thinker. Follow her on Twitter @redrumlisa .
An estimated $24 billion of Venezuelan public money has been looted, and the Trump administration has used at least $601 million
of it to construct a militarized wall on the US-Mexico border.
By Ben Norton
In his new book "The Room Where It Happened," former Trump administration national security advisor John Bolton boasted
that the British government "was delighted to cooperate on steps they could take" to assist in Washington's coup efforts, "for
example freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England, so the regime could not sell the gold to keep itself going."..
####
Remember that Juan Guan is recognized by 50 UN states as interim President of Venezuela. But it's not the number that counts,
but who those countries are. It is an effective loading of more votes per country though the unofficial Law of the Jungle system
that the democratic West employs.
"... This would be bad news for anyone with a serious health condition, but it would be especially bad news for the oldest pre-Medicare age group, people between the ages of 55 and 64. This group currently faces average premiums of close to $10,000 a year per person for insurance purchased through the ACA exchanges. Insurers could easily charge people with serious health conditions two or three times this amount if the Trump administration wins its case. ..."
"... The 55 to 64 age group will also be hard hit because they are far more likely to have serious health issues than younger people. Just 18 percent of the people in the youngest 18 to 34 age group have a serious health condition, compared to 44 percent of those in the 55 to 64 age group, as shown in the figure above. ..."
Older Workers Targeted in Trump's Lawsuit to End Obamacare
By DEAN BAKER
The Trump administration is supporting a lawsuit which seeks to overturn the Affordable
Care Act (ACA) in its entirety. The implication is that a large share of the older workers
now able to afford health insurance as a result of the ACA will no longer be able to afford
it if the Trump administration wins its lawsuit.
Furthermore, if the suit succeeds it will both end the expansion of Medicaid, which has
insured tens of millions of people, and again allow discrimination against people with
serious health conditions. Ending this discrimination was one of the major goals of the ACA.
The issue is that insurers don't want to insure people who are likely to have health issues
that cost them money. While they are happy to insure healthy people with few medical
expenses, people with heart disease, diabetes, or other health conditions are a bad deal for
insurers.
Before the ACA, insurers could charge outlandish fees to cover people with health
conditions, or simply refuse to insure them altogether. The ACA required insurers to cover
everyone within an age bracket at the same price, regardless of their health. If the Trump
administration has its way, we would go back to the world where insurers could charge people
with health issues whatever they wanted, or alternatively, just deny them coverage.
This would be bad news for anyone with a serious health condition, but it would be
especially bad news for the oldest pre-Medicare age group, people between the ages of 55 and
64. This group currently faces average premiums of close to $10,000 a year per person for
insurance purchased through the ACA exchanges. Insurers could easily charge people with
serious health conditions two or three times this amount if the Trump administration wins its
case.
And, since a Trump victory would eliminate the ACA subsidiaries, people in this age group
with health conditions could be looking to pay $20,000 to $30,000 a year for insurance, with
no help from the government. That will be especially hard since many people with serious
health conditions are unable to work full-time jobs, and some can't work at all.
[Graph]
The 55 to 64 age group will also be hard hit because they are far more likely to have
serious health issues than younger people. Just 18 percent of the people in the youngest 18
to 34 age group have a serious health condition, compared to 44 percent of those in the 55 to
64 age group, as shown in the figure above.
The ACA has many inadequacies, but it has allowed tens of millions to get insurance who
could not otherwise. Donald Trump wants to take this insurance away.
"Restaurant Of The Future" - KFC Unveils Automated Store With Robots And Food Lockers
by Tyler Durden Fri,
06/26/2020 - 22:05 Fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has debuted the "restaurant of
the future," one where automation dominates the storefront, and little to no interaction is
seen between customers and employees, reported NBC News .
After the chicken is fried and sides are prepped by humans, the order is placed on a
conveyor belt and travels to the front of the store. A robotic arm waits for the order to
arrive, then grabs it off the conveyor belt and places it into a secured food
locker.
A KFC representative told NBC News that the new store is located in Moscow and was built
months before the virus outbreak. The representative said the contactless store is the future
of frontend fast-food restaurants because it's more sanitary.
Disbanding human cashiers and order preppers at the front of a fast-food store will be the
next big trend in the industry through 2030. Making these restaurants contactless between
customers and employees will lower the probabilities of transmitting the virus.
Automating the frontend of a fast-food restaurant will come at a tremendous cost, that is,
significant job loss . Nationwide (as of 2018), there were around 3.8 million employed at
fast-food restaurants. Automation and artificial intelligence are set displace millions of jobs
in the years ahead.
As for the new automated KFC restaurant in Moscow, well, it's a glimpse of what is coming to
America - this will lead to the widespread job loss that will force politicians to unveil
universal basic income .
A bit off topic, but, personally, I'd really appreciate it if the Current Affairs-Jacobin
crowd would drop the childish open-borders fantasy stuff.
Marx himself figured out what the immigration game was all about back in the mid-1800s,
why do those who purport to represent the working class seem so intent on unlearning what was
patently obvious back then and continues to be so, today?
Yes, I get we all like to meet different people, learn up close about different cultures,
cuisines, and all that, but let's be clear-eyed that there's a cost to those things. It comes
in the form of rising rents/property prices and gentrification, disinvestment in the labor
force (why train workers when you can just import replacements?), degradation in local
environment.
Also, can we stop strip-mining the human capital of other countries?
Let's focus more on creating a right to 'stay in place' instead of 'freedom of movement'
fantasy stuff which sounds more like a right to tourism or something weird like that.
"I have regretfully come to the conclusion that The Hill, owned by one of Trump's close
personal friends, puts on Rising mainly for the purpose of trying to trick leftists into
softening on Trump & see nationalist racists as preferable to moderate Democrats"
Wow that is flat out ridiculous how stupid does he think people are?
Have you talked to people in public lately? They can't understand how you can be against
both republicans and democrats. Then spend the next hour trying to convince you to vote
democrat. Orrrrr they storm off in a fit.
Neoliberalism's support of very open boarders for both finance and labor arbitrage is
assumed to be always good because the American and English nomenklatura and their
apparatchiks implicitly. very often without any real thought, believe in the ideology of
neoliberalism. So, while there is often manipulation by whatever hidden authority is doing
it, most of the time there is no need. The writers have brainwashed themselves into
ignorance. 2+2=5
One of the groups that suffers most from open borders is African Americans. If Blacks in
Los Angeles, for example, lacked a college degree, they could nevertheless earn decent wages
in various sectors including construction and janitorial work, as two examples. Illegal
immigration ended that.
Borders are a problem only when capitalism prevails. Note the problems/objections you
cited having to do with wages, property prices, and other "market" features that would not
apply under socialism. When people rule themselves cooperatively and share the wealth that
presently is stolen from them and used against them, the problem of borders will cease to be
a problem.
The problem I have is that, even assuming you're correct, the utopian socialist crew
somehow thinks that open borders is compatible, in the actual capitalist world we live in,
with forwarding the interests of the working class. It's just not.
Certainly 'open borders' are not compatible with anyone's interests because they're a
contradiction in terms. The capitalists see the border (the real border, not the mythical
'open border') as a kind of valve which can be opened or shut as their interests require. It
also provides for ways of further disadvantaging certain portions of the working class and
thus reducing their wages and eliminating their rights. So the institution of the border
turns out to be a kind of variable form of coercion, as well as a myth to build racist and
classist politics on.
The media is more fascinating by the day if you try not to take it seriously. Really.
Trying to deconstruct who is the real audience, what is the underlying message (aka dog
whistle), how is the media doing plausible deniability, who is the real source (who is the
piece written to serve) and what is the motivation for the piece could take whole PhDs to
figure out sometimes.
And it's hard because I have biases, like everyone I guess, which can get in the way.
Every few days I get a lightbulb moment on something and that is fascinating.
But at the bottom of every media pronouncement is the money, so follow the money and the
power. Not so easy sometimes because the real hallmark of the powerful is the ability to pay
for invisibility. My CEO used to say that he had no real power. Now, he knew how to
operate.
Yes, this is now my approach. I still watch and read widely, but never (or hardly ever) in
the expectation that I'll either learn something or get told anything even vaguely related to
the unvarnished truth.
Much more interesting (but as you say, requiring adroit mental gymnastics and prone to all
sorts of misdirection) is trying to work out the answers to the inevitable questions:
-- Why am I being shown this at this time ?
-- What narratives are intended to be constructed by this "story"?
-- Who is trying to influence me and why, into doing (or refraining from doing) what?
-- Is it a false-flag or should it be taken at face value?
-- Is it supportive of existing norms or trying to change them (or, the old favourite
stand-by "controlled opposition")?
-- Is it organic (highly, highly unlikely) or is it the latest exciting instalment of the
ongoing oligarch v. oligarch grudge match?
-- What messaging / influencing technique is being employed (fear, guilt, appeal to ethics,
tribalism, family values et. al.)?
The last is usually the most intriguing. Is this the family-favourite Soros v. Putin title
fight? A Bill Gates v. Trump proxy war? The Clinton Democrats-in-name-only leftist faction v.
whoever Sanders constituency actually is? Globalist Internationalism capitalists v. disaster
capitalists?
I was going to write the following sentence at this point:
"Someone should publish " Top Trumps " (no irony intended) so we can
all work our way around who's who in all this
But then, can you believe it, reality trumped me because some
wisecracker beat me to it . Of course, the political power players Top Trumps pack really
needs additional categories to make it realistic. "Number of SuperPACs", "$Billions Grifted",
"Brown People in Far Away Places Blown to Pink Mist Total in Office", "Media Outlets Owned",
"MSM Actors on the Payroll" etc. etc. etc.
Thank you Clive for enunciating and listing so clearly the mental editing of reporting
that I too have been doing for decades.
My only addition: __'Who profits from this being accepted.'
There's a lot more recent papers on the issue than Marx. To put it shortly, it's almost
impossible to separate the effect of immigration on wages from the effects of "free trade"
and automatisation.
For example, in "The impact of massmigration on the Israeli labor market" in 2001 R.M.
Friedberg concluded that wages actually went up, when Russians migrated en masse to Israel,
though they did not migrate to seek employment.
Ottaviano and Peri in "Immigration and National Wages: Clarifying the theory and the
empirics" and Card in "Immigration and inequality" state that the models used to estimate the
wages are mostly too simple and very sensitive to how education levels are defined.
All economists seem to agree that in the least skilled or educated "class" the effect of
migration is lower wages or raising unemployment, if wages are the only way for
the economy to adjust.
I just don't think the issue is as clear cut as people make it to be.
Robinson is continuing a great British tradition where mediocrities from the Mother
country head for the colonies to wow the gullible colonists with their fancy ways. The guy is
such a lightweight, like fellow grifting Brits Niall Ferguson or Louise Mensch.
Robinson could refer not to Fox, but to Fox Butterfield . That has a quaint, somewhat
British-sounding aspirational upper class twit aspect that seems fitting. /s
Per wikipedia, Robinson moved with his family from the U.K. to the U.S. in 1995; he was
born in 1989. He's almost entirely the product of an American upbringing and education. He
hasn't dropped the accent because he doesn't want to. Frankly he's more of a Florida Man than
a Brit imo. (I say this as an admirer.)
I generally like Nathan Robinson -- most of the time he writes long detailed heavily
linked arguments that are worth reading and which I think most people here would agree with.
He is not liked by mainstream Democrats.
I was very disappointed with his Taibbi piece. But I tend to be disappointed by nearly
everyone at one point or another. When Robinson says he likes Taibbi, I think he is telling
the truth. He just thinks Taibbi is wrong in this case, while I think it is Robinson who is
wrong.
Why is everyone ignoring one of the most bizarre aspects of the Bernie Sanders campaign?
That his campaign staff and most prominent supporters were mostly members and supporters of a
small religious sect that comprises 1% of the US population, and they were not typical
members of this sect, but instead the most extremist ones.
Moreover this small religious sect that comprises 1% of the US population causes one half of
US terrorism deaths. Proof:
According to Wikipedia, between 2008 and 2016
right-wing terrorists caused 79 deaths
left-wing terrorists caused 7 deaths
jihadi terrorists caused 90 deaths
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#
Recent trends
Therefore Islamic terrorists actually killed MORE people than right-wing terrorists.
Furthermore, if we assume that right-wingers make up 10% of the US population, and Muslims
make up 1% of the US population, then per capita, Muslims accounted for TEN TIMES as many
terrorism deaths as right-wingers did. Furthermore Muslims accounted for ONE HUNDRED TIMES as
many terrorism deaths as non-Muslims did.
Bernie Sanders' campaign was run by Muslim extremists Faiz Shakir and Matt Duss.
But nobody seems to mind. Anyone who criticizes Islam is called a bigot. But Islam's holy
book says: "Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are ruthless to
unbelievers, merciful to one another." (Qur'an 48:29) Is that bigotry or is that not
bigotry?
In 1946 the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, praised Amin al-Husseini, the
leader of the Palestinian national movement, in the following words:
Germany and Hitler are no more, but Amin el-Husseini will fight on!
Source: Die Welt, Hamburg
https://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article107737611/Von-Deutschland-lernen-heisst-erinnern-lernen.html
Bernie Sanders represents left-wing ideas and programs that are ANATHEMA to this small sect
and ESPECIALLY to its extremist wing. Ideas like sexual freedom and religious freedom,
freedom to criticize religions, equality among religions and non-religions, and equality
between sexes, the idea that laws must be made by human beings elected by majorities through
democratic elections instead of by some divinity who is obviously merely a social construct
invented in order to exert tyrannical power over society. Those are all principles that
flatly contradict Islam and its legal code, sharia law, which CAIR has been doing its utmost
to protect from anti-sharia lagislation.
All of Bernie Sanders' most prominent supporters opposed ALL of his leftist ideas, because
they want a theocratic state where binary sexuality is the norm and criticism of their sect
is verboten.
They hopped onto the Sanders bandwagon and took control of it out of sheer opportunism,
because they see Sanders as the path firstly to liquidating Israel and thus achieving one of
the primary goals of the worldwide Islamist movement, namely to turn the Middle East into a
homogeneous Muslim region, and secondly in order to seize key political positions in the
political system of the US, DESPITE BEING SUCH A TINY MINORITY.
Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders' foreign policy adviser, is tightly linked through his family to
World Vision, a Christian charity that for decades has funded the FDLP, a Palestinian
terrorist group that is nominally secular, but in reality is Islamist. This is proved by the
fact that when some of its members killed 4 rabbis in Jerusalem a few years ago, they yelled
Allahu akbar. It was recently discovered that World Vision has financed Hamas with US
government money. Moreover Matt Duss together with Faiz Shakir, Sanders' Islamist campaign
manager, have campaigned in favor of sharia law, a legal system that claims divine authority
and is a product of 7th century Arabian society.
By contrast, 20% of Americans are secularists who -- at least in theory -- strongly oppose
the reactionary and obscurantist program of Bernie Sanders' principal supporters. But no
prominent secularist appeared among Sanders' most important backers. Now why is it that
Sanders relied principally on people who wholeheartedly oppose his program and ignored the
vastly greater number of Americans who support freedom and equality?
Proto -fascism? I rather think it might be here already, but in an American
guise.
(Sorry, I just couldn't decide where the sentences and paragraphs should be. Semicolons
were the solution.)
As the United States is its own unique blend; utopian, socialistic, religious, fascistic,
authoritarian or totalitarian, dysfunctional, increasingly hourglass shaped (oligarchy with
skilled workers, tiny middle class, and massive poor class) like any very corrupt Third-World
country; an increasingly oppressive police state trying to control a very diverse, well
educated, skilled "rightsized" people, often armed and getting more so, with a large number
retire military; everyone is angry or afraid and most know that it was laziness or stupidity
or the race/social group/Russians/Chinese/Space Elves that turned the prosperity, power, and
general competence of fifty into the economic hellscape, weakness, and near complete
incompetence of today; it is increasingly obvious that it was the wealthy with the help of
their courtiers and servants of the apparatchiks, and the intelligentsia/punditocracy.
Fear and self righteousness facing anger and desperation. What a situation to have.
Bookmarked for later. Nathan Robinson manages to insidiously smuggle Cold War propaganda
into articles that ostensibly argue against Russiagate. He appears to be the most dangerous
kind of propagandist.
Read that Taibbi piece and boy does he have links -- to back his sound and clear
narrative.
It seems like he always has a lot of research, way more than he makes his case with
Drawing fire, as a tactic for the well prepared, can be useful.
If NC wants to add a Media Whores Online section to Links or Water Cooler we won't object.
Of course this would probably inspire PropOrNot part deux. Those MSM journalists can dish it
out but not take it.
As I seem to recall MWO somewhat got the stuffing knocked out of it after 9/11. But when
it was really rolling it seemed to embodied what the internet was for and why many of us took
it up. Monica-gate followed by Bush v Gore offered a TINA media landscape begging to be
debunked.
MWO published what might have been my first blog comment, really just an email, and it was
on the Kaus affair, piling on with sarc mode set to high, another example of the 'hate' we
were apparently guilty of. It was the daily visit then that NC is now. It was important. The
creator remains a mystery, though Bartcop seems to deserve favouritism.
Looking at some of the MWO Wayback pages from 2002 took me back (though the whole of July
when the Kaus thing blew is missing). Lots of familiar names – digby, Alterman,
Marshall, Conason, Lyons, Pierce et al, all of whom I just stopped reading at some point,
probably about the same time I ceased to have any respect for the Clintons.
Color me skeptical when it comes to the wonders of Mr. Taibbi's observations. I find his
narratives full of sound and fury as often as they are sound and clear. But, like Craig
Murray or Glenn Greenwald, he can be a good read on the right topic. Sy Hersh and Thomas
Frank, however, I have a lot of time for.
By contrast I've always found that Taibbi always signifies something, but tries to do so
in a way that might enable him to avoid being cancelled or deplatformed. Sy Hersh has no such
concern. And last time I checked Thomas Frank was trying to signify to me that "maybe there
is a case for Joe Biden". With more than 40 years' experience of the man, I utterly
disagree.
"maybe there is a case for Joe Biden" is the headline and most of the article. It's
deception. Read to the last paragraph if you want to see what Frank actually thinks of Biden.
Quite a sucker punch! Though that does not fully capture the sticking and twisting of Frank's
shiv.
Yes I think Taibbi knows a lot more than he puts forward in his articles. How could he
not? Same with Frank, probably. Even Hersh censors himself, as evidenced by that recorded
phone conversation about Seth Rich.
The wonder of Mr. Taibbi's observations is that he's brave enough to keep making them.
Real journalism is rare these days because our corporate organizations have removed
journalists from the protected species list. Mr. Taibbi is just documenting the fallout from
the officially sanctioned behavior that leads to people canceling those who are discussing
actual injustice and real problems in our country. He's also trying, and failing, to show
Team Blue fans that their inability to accept reality hurts their electoral chances. For
example, the many attempts to scrub Hillary's problems from the media lead to a sense of
complacency in likely Democrat voters and made people voting for her opponent highly
motivated to turn out at the polls. Taking something like her "basket of deplorables" comment
and not discussing why it was just as problematic as Mitt Romney's "48% of people who are
voting for Obama don't pay income tax" comments was journalistic and political malpractice.
It remains to be seen whether the many attempts to shield Biden using similar tactics will
help or hurt him. Personally I think the Democrats will lose because they have rubber stamped
the reduction of voting access so much in so many states that the people who would like to
vote for them won't be able to vote. Which is a legitimately awful problem.
There are so many issues that Mr. Taibbi has discussed which bear repeating because unless
you're getting your news from sites like NC you just don't see it. A recent Useful Idiots
podcast episode that Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper did with Shahid Buttar noted that an
interview that Mr. Buttar gave which mentioned corporate democrats supporting the re-approval
of the Patriot Act under Trump was removed from YouTube and no reasons were given as to why
that occurred. Stuff like that makes me think we're living on a spectrum between Brave New
World and 1984, with class largely determining where you fall, and we have Cancel Culture
people in media running around playing the role of Fireman from Fahrenheit 451 to keep the
wrong people from asking too many questions regardless of class. As Mr. Buttar pointed out
during his UI podcast interview, the algorithms that FB and YouTube use to remove content
without due process catch all the videos of violent acts AND video evidence police abusing
citizens. That's by design. But you wouldnt even know about it without reporters like Matt
Taibbi.
Yes, thanks for taking the time to encapsulate what Taibbi represents for me.
I admire his relentless pursuit of the 'how' our world is being spun out of control.
That is a very interesting story. Call me paranoid, but IMO we are witnessing the collapse
of American society, where every institution is losing it's credibility for various reasons.
Personally, I think it is a combination of increased oppression from the threatened rulers,
resulting in increased conformity by its victims ((journalists and the public) This combined
with the privatization of information, ( ie everything becoming paywalled) is aimed at the
reduction of important information by making it unavailable. I fear all of this ends in a
veil of tears. This can only lead to fascism, where only the current accepted narrative is
permitted.
We face the criminal persecution and torture of Assange; the criminal persecution of Craig
Murray; the recent debacle at TruthDig; the demise of the Weatherunderground, the growing
numbers of pay walls and pop-ups pleading for money and email addresses all suggesting a most
unhappy outcome for the future. The consolidation and control of the major media is old
history. Reporters are becoming extinct. And there's the pollution of youtube, search
engines, and social media. Our society is devolving -- it is being dismantled, vivisected
before our eyes to no end but the end of social order.
I am not sure fascism is the result. We already live in what is technically a fascism
where State and Business share the same bed.
'The consolidation and control of the major media is old history. Reporters are becoming
extinct. And there's the pollution of youtube, search engines, and social media'
There should be a public option for the provision of information (surely up there with
food, water and shelter as an essential public good) that is not polluted. Of course it would
be derided (and feared) by the wingnuts, the Borg and finance capital as a vehicle for
progressive propaganda. Which it could well be given consistent polling indicating majority
support for many if not most progressive positions. That of course means that the Democrats
would hate it too.
Which segues into my next pipe dream: Abolish parties!
Ellsberg, like, Seymour Hersh and Thomas Frank, has been drummed out of town.
Interesting that those with a conscience are the ones "drummed out of town". Guess that
tells you everything you need to know about that "town".
As for Matt Taibbi, he is one of the VERY RARE journalists that I give the benefit of the
doubt is actually telling the truth (even though I still verify) as I usually assume most
"journalists" are lying (or trying to sell a particular story) and go from there. I also find
his podcast with Katie Halper entertaining and informative.
I read that article. I thought it was one of the best of his I've read. Hats off Matt
Taibbi. As far as I'm concerned once we lose the complexity that inhabits a serious regard
for the truth, we're done. I always appreciate being brought up short by my 'enemies.' It
means they might not be as hideous as I'd thought.
being consistently lied to by TV reporters, print media, and politicians not only breeds
cynicism, it births, welps, nurses, and rears. the limitation of news outlets until the
explosion of social media meant they could be parsed out in narrow sets of ideas and
language. Today big media is laid bare, McLuhan was so right, Today it is crucial to know
ones own biases, allow opinion and research in opposition into my field of view. As a trader,
I always searched for the refuting argument, chart, analysis that would tell me i was wrong,
saved me a lot of money. Inflaming passions today is crucial to getting buy-in, not just
voting, which is the tail trying to wag the dog. Taibbi has earned his stripes, fields
critics on twitter at least, faithfully and honestly.
I have been reading Taibbi since the eXiled. Robinson and Current Affairs I only found out
about more recently.
I view Taibbi as a real journalist with a proven track record. Current Affairs often has
some entertaining and thoughful content, but Robinson frankly seems to be more of a
lightweight, especially in comparison to Taibbi.
He specializes in "takedowns" of right wing grifters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Not exactly difficult targets. His turning on Taibbi, and more recently Krystal Ball and
Rising, has been interesting to see. I don't know if he just grew tired of writing about only
right wing types, or if he's trying to raise his own profile by attacking better-known left
media figures (probably a bit of both). Either way, Robinson's shitck has gotten decidedly
old.
Robinson's not really an investigative reporter. More like a pundit for the over-educated
left. So it's not really fair to compare him to people like Greenwald and Taibbi. He's also
quite young, and every one his age has some big blind spots and youthful hubris that will
(hopefully) shrink in time.
And of course his shtick got tired. Anyone who's job consists of basically writing 2-3
op-eds a week is gonna run out of new material real fast. In a marginally more sane world
he'd have a nice job as the regular NYT lefty op-ed guy, and be pretty good at it I
think.
In any case, he's a sincere young man who does seem to listen and learn. I mostly side
with Taibbi in this kerfuffle, but maybe I wouldn't have 10 years ago. Given the large number
of truly horrible people in the public eye these days, the vitriol towards young Nate seems a
bit excessive. Frankly, if there's anyone who could get the PMC+DSA crowd to start
questioning identitarianism, it's probably him (as I believe they constitute the near
entirety of his readership), so lets work on helping him "recognize his own privilege" re:
the working class instead of bashing him or questioning his motives.
I forgot about the attack on Krystal Ball. I didn't like that either, but another person I
generally like, Adam Johnson, did the same.
I have just gotten used to the fact that there aren't going to be people I agree with on
every important issue 100 percent of the time. This isn't irony or sarcasm -- I really am
disappointed when otherwise smart and (IMO) clearly well intentioned people have opinions I
think are wrong. But it is possible I am wrong. ( This is all painfully earnest, as corny as
it sounds. )
I think you have the correct approach. People are far too hair triggered about certain
topics. A journalist has to churn out lots of copy, even the best will occasionally get it
wrong, or just happen to express beliefs that don't match up with what i or anyone else
believes. It is I think the sort of trap that IdPol people fall into – insisting on
increasing levels of purity from those on their side, and immediately casting them out if
they dare shift one inch from the narrative.
It should be possible to read and learn from good writers, even if you disagree with them.
And it's very important that progressives learn and develop by listening to those who have
respectful and intellectually coherent reasons not to buy into every precious shibboleth. I
think its very important to have voices like Taibbi and Stoller, people who aren't afraid to
make even fellow left progressives angry by taking strong positions.
As seen on TV, Frank Figliuzzi x Greenwald mistaking Figliuzzi's shingle advertising
body-man services, for a Wurlitzer. "Figliuzzi" is "small son" in Italian, a euphemism for
abandoned orphans, also known for working on behalf of the parents that raised them: The
State. Perhaps Figliuzzi's booking agency has insight into clandestine media control. It's
hard to decipher whether Taibbi's beef is that journalists' ethical lapses are not properly
coordinated or whether the lapses are not authentic enough. Which is the same criticism
leveled at the street demonstrators without acknowledging that higher levels of coordination
and authentic anger potentiate more physical harm. Spontaneity is the x-factor in both
pursuits. Last point. When the surveillance state is conceptualized as the ever-vigilant eyes
of BLM and the feverish archiving of Journos, rather than the underworld of the Police State,
the surveillance state-less becomes a mode for positive change. Vindication by security
camera. Can one be baffled by hope?
"What the heck is the correct pejorative for a member of the intelligence commumity? "
The intelligence communities must have there own terms for these people. "Agents of
influence"? Psychological warfare specialists? Propagandists? Minitrue Goodthinker?
I think the United States needs a mandatory high school class in "How to read propaganda".
Americans are probably the most propagandized people on the planet.
Some of the CIA are analysts, like Ray McGovern, albeit politicized ones. The CIA has
different departments. The best word for the CIA is probably "disgrace" or "national
shame".
Would love to hear Taibbi explain why the NY Times spent the summer of 2016 pretending to
care that Republicans pretended to care about Clinton's email protocols.
Speaking of the fake news NY Times, here is a good 2017 analysis of its decades-long
mendacity and war propagandizing. Here is a snippet:
"The CIA's brazen intervention in the electoral process in 2016 and 2017 broke new ground
in the agency's politicization. Former CIA head Michael Morell announced in an August 2016
op-ed in the Times: "I Ran the C.I.A. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton," and former CIA boss
Michael Hayden published an op-ed in the Washington Post just days before the election,
entitled "Former CIA Chief: Trump is Russia's Useful Fool." Morell had yet another op-ed in
the Times on January 6, now openly assailing the new president. These attacks were
unrelievedly insulting to Trump and laudatory to Clinton, even portraying Trump as a traitor;
they also made clear that Clinton's more pugnacious stance toward Syria and Russia was
preferable by far to Trump's leanings toward negotiation and cooperation with Russia."
Note where so many seemingly-disreputable people end up, and why. There is money , whether
to reward for past services, or to transfer in anticipation of legal defenses needed.
Money shows up in novel ways, like book deals and in plain old propagandizing ways, like
pundit spots.
And of course there really is such a thing as "Left Wing Hate" (for some definition of
"left," I admit).
Glad to see this qualifier added. I suspect the language that is necessary to have
meaningful discussions about political ideologies with people from different political tribes
is purposely corrupted by the conservative and liberal media establishments, probably at the
behest of the CIA.
Einstein's definition of madness "Doing the same thing again and again and expecting to
get a different result"
Do you remember the last time you let the robber barons and reckless bankers run riot in
the 1920s?
No.
Do you remember the last time you used neoclassical economics in the 1920s?
No.
Do you remember how bad it was in the 1970s?
Yes.
Do you remember how bad it was in the 1930s?
No.
During the 1920s there was a great consolidation of US businesses into often single
companies that dominated every sector.
This time this has happened in the media.
About six corporations control the US media, and they make sure you hear, what they want you
to hear.
We stepped onto an old path that still leads to the same place.
1920s/2000s – neoclassical economics, high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation,
low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase
1929/2008 – Wall Street crash
1930s/2010s – Global recession, currency wars, trade wars, austerity, rising
nationalism and extremism
1940s – World war.
We forgot we had been down that path before.
I remembered where this path goes.
When the US needed an FDR, it got an Obama.
Now they've got Trump.
They've taken a more European approach this time.
Trying to maintain the status quo is not a good idea, they needed a New Deal.
Somewhat relevant. Don't threaten the narrative.
"Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (@slatestarcodex deletes his blog after a @nytimes
reporter threatens to doxx him, which could ruin his career as a psychiatrist and raises
serious safety concerns."
That said, anyone who believes the NYT was ever respectable, as in worthy of respect, not
as in "mainstay of the establishment", needs only harken back to Pulitzer's role in fanning
the Spanish-American War to understand how fundamentally depraved an institution it really
is.
His name was known to many readers of Slate Star Codex, and they were too polite to repeat
it. There is a decency and brilliance that would be sorely missed with any permanent
silencing of his unique voice and views.
Absolutely, its a brilliant blog, on so many levels. Its beyond belief that the NY would
insist on publishing his real name, when there is absolutely no reason or public interest in
doing so.
The NYT fancies itself an empire, dispensing and dispatching at will. Here is a Star Wars
quote from Obi-Wan applicable to those that the Grey Lady targets, or even purposefully
ignores:
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in
terror and were suddenly silenced.
It is quite interesting, and positive, should I say, that nobody resorted to the argument
of "lefty" thinkers destroying themselves as the perennial malaise of the left. Regarding the
confrontation between Taibbi and Robinson it looks clear they do not represent 2 variations
of the same camp: They inhabit completely different camps though, as an outsider, I am not
able to establish clearly the limits between their audiences and their supporting
platforms.
It strikes me, as very well pointed, the similarities that Lambert brougth from Taibbi in
the ADDENDUM about the, IMO very likely, Trump reelection and the 2016 elections: he can
easily run away with his errors and the liberals look poised to make similar mistakes in 2020
as they did in 2016. They learnt nothing and forgot nothing.
On this I really would like a well informed discussion on some news pieces that have seen
linked here before indicating that Trump very much dislikes voting by mail "because of fraud"
though my opinion is that he just wants the election turnout to be the smaller the
better.
Regarding the vast U.S. media propaganda machine, Chomsky famously said long ago that
propaganda was MORE necessary in democratic societies. In a totalitarian regime, the
government can control the public with force and violence, imprisoning or executing
dissidents. But in a democratic society, citizens have the power to vote and change the
government. Therefore, it is more necessary in a democratic society to control how the public
thinks. Thus propaganda is the very essence of democracy. Propaganda ids thought control in
democratic societies.
There was a time when I went to the established media to learn things. Now, it feels more
like checking in on an evolving soap opera with a baffling plot and inconsistent characters.
There's a certain grim amusement in seeing the latest plot twist but that's about all. I get
my actual information from sites like NC and specialist sites and newsletters by experts. I'm
afraid that my gut reaction to clicking on a MSM story these days is: why is this bast**d
lying to me?
Likewise. The thing is, as a teenager back in the 1980's I'd read my Chomsky and a number
of radical media writers. My eyes had been opened when I was around 15, home on holidays and
bored watching afternoon TV when a particular incident occurred in NI. I remember watching
open mouthed as the narrative was completely twisted around 180 degrees by the time of the
evening news (I won't go into the details, but it started as 'brave mourners tackle
terrorists who drove a car into a crowd saving many lives' into 'barbaric Republicans lynch
two innocent soldiers who had lost their way' over the course of about 4 hours of reporting.
But I still, up to a few years ago, as a default tended to believe what I read in the
newspapers or watched on TV, unless I had a reasonably good reason not to do so. But no more.
I don't really know whether things have gotten much worse, or I've just become more
educated/cynical.
Fast forward to 2003, very much like the terrorist attacks in Atocha train station when
Aznar phoned all the media to say "it is certain it was ETA" and so the publications in Spain
went with this story. Thereafter, only the conservative media went on with a conspiracy
theory with the Spanish police in collusion with ETA to maintain their narrative even when it
was crystal clear it was a yihaddist attack.
So, regarding the media, it is the narrative what goes first and much more important than
facts. No matter if it is a conservative or a liberal outlet, they will stick to their
narrative. This has worsened with time.
I love this quote, so let me be a stickler. The actual question is: Why is this lying
bastard lying to me?. It was originally atributed to Louis Heron of the Times and
channeled by Paxman in an interview at the end of his Newsnight career. Otherwise, I am
depressed to say that I can do nothing other than agree with your view of the MSM in general,
although there are a few journalists who appear to be doing what they should be doing even if
they may not doing it as well as they probably could. As for the rest, some of them can't
even write.
Yes, I'm not sure whether Heron actually said that (accounts differ) but I remember
thinking when I first read it decades ago that it was silly: I spent a good part of my life
preparing politicians for interviews, and, at least then, you made sure they were briefed to
put the best spin on things, which is not the same as lying. But on subjects I was familiar
with, I used to reckon that most jobbing journalists (ie not the deep specialists) would get
things factually accurate about 50% of the time, and that the problems were more related to
ignorance and preconceptions than active attempts to mislead. I don't think that's the case
now. Journalists today, by contrast, actively tell lies, often for political reasons or to
conform to groupthink.
Taibbi is a national treasure. He is a funny, engaging writer who knows where the
boundaries are involving spin, humor and articulating a precise message. The fact that he has
been so clairvoyant about hundreds of issues (Political futility, Financial Crisis, Policing,
and changes in Media) is due to his unique willingness to talk to people in all walks of life
to understand the complexity of what he is writing about. And when he does not know
something, he owns it. Connectivity to people, and his marriage to journalism all breed more
and more trust (as well as puts a target on his back).
We live in a time of fracture (capital/labor, institutional decay, and the indelible scars
of markets taking over our lives at every level) means we need people to cut through the
noise, effectively -- reminding us of our fantastic thinking and proffering uncomfortable
truths. And nowhere has this been more apparent than the NL core of the democratic party on
the Left:
1. Russiagate Maddowers versus Mate-Blumenthal
2. Syria/Bolivia/Venezuela/Chile CIA media engineers vs The Grayzone and Greenwald
3. The Warren/Sanders rift. The Warren/Warren rift.
4. The night of 1000 Knives.
5. BLM and Democratic Party.
6. And left media puts out a hit against Taibbi – with very little serious discussion
of Hate Inc..
7. Leftist Fractures – N Robinson vs Krystal Ball, Lee Fang, Taibbi and an academic
accused of "bad research"
8. Attack on the show Rising – why would the left talk to the populist right
canard.
The left are playing a role in their own demise -- often at the behest of the NL center or
in concert to a more individualistic lens, separate of that to ordinary people. Kyle Kulinski
just did a 30 minutes on this too.
All in all, the group who needs to be shattered into a thousand pieces in the wind (the NL
core of both parties) just got stronger this election cycle -- and in my mind the fractures
on the left are just starting.
It did not have to be that way. Sickening to consider when you think about the opportunity
we had in January.
Over the years I have asked many people about press coverage of subjects they knew well. I
asked if, from their perspective, the press got all, most, some or none of the story right.
The long run average response is between some and none.
Then I ask, "Why, if your personal experience says the press rarely gets it right
concerning something you know a lot about, do you believe they get it right concerning things
you know little about?"
Taibbi is correct in that piece, undeniably so, but more than that it's the entire
Sanders-based social democratic movement that's coming apart. The media is mostly a
reflection of that. I had always hoped that the movement towards social democracy Sanders
fostered could survive beyond him as a viable candidate, but I must confess I no longer think
that likely. The whole movement is imploding in on itself, and people lashing out against
Taibbi is, to me at least, just more evidence of how much of his criticism hit the mark.
Even if the current left can survive the end of Sanders as a political figure on the
national stage, I see even less of a path for it once Trump is gone. Rabid anti-Trump
sentiment is the only adhesive that keeps the different parts of it together. They saw a boom
when Trump was elected, and I can only conclude there will be a big bust when he goes away.
If they put a lot of effort into publicly shilling for Biden, then it's even more likely,
because on some level they'll be bound to carry water for him while he's in office because
they advocated for him as a leader in the first place. No, it's not just the press that's
destroying itself it's also practically all of the liberal class and most of what flies under
the banner of the left too.
I have to disagree with your assessment about the movement towards social democracy. There
isn't a specific "leader" at present, but just the sheer number of people who protested in
the streets around the country (during a pandemic I might add) in regards to police
brutality, economic inequality, a better healthcare system such as Medicare For All, are all
fighting for social justice and democracy. This is coming from people who recognize what our
system is doing to them and others.
"Rabid anti-Trump sentiment is the only adhesive that keeps the different parts of it
together."
Once again, I have to disagree. The supposed "liberal" media, many "liberal" politicians,
and supporters who base their personal opinion on whatever is popular that particular day may
have "rabid anti-Trump sentiment".
But there are plenty of people who recognize we are going through a major "social
collapse".
Some people may not want to discuss these issues because they don't want to change the
current system (they would rather attack Matt Taibbi and others than discuss the legitimate
problems we have). These problems, including an economic collapse, are not going to disappear
the day Donald Trump is out of office nor will it improve with a "more of the same" Joe Biden
administration.
At this point, I tend to believe our country will either
a) become even more authoritarian where the citizens just accept they have no civil
rights and view police and military brutality as part of "everyday life" or
b) we continue on this trajectory of collapse with a very small percentage of people
doing quite well and the vast majority wondering or already in circumstances which lead
them to question how long it will be before they are homeless, without a job, how they will
feed their family and whether they can get any healthcare if they need it or
c) we finally wake up as a majority of citizens and demand a government (executive,
congressional, and judicial) responsive to the citizens which deals with social and economic
collapse. All of those with the current ideologies of the Democratic/Republican parties
need to go as they represent either their careers or moneyed interests. Then again, maybe the
level of corruption and greed is so far gone in this country that the only trajectory is
collapse.
Taibbi has been doing good work on this. This would seem to be another example. Krystal
and Saagar: CNN viewers REVOLT after journalist correctly says 'Biden is a flawed
candidate:
"... From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason), to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple. ..."
"... It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. ..."
"... Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class. ..."
Yet another circus. The proles get to scream and holler, and when all is done, the oligarchy gets the policies it wants, the public
be damned. Our sham 'democracy' is a con to privatize power and socialize responsibility.
Although it is shocking to see such a disgusting piece of human garbage like Joe Biden get substantial numbers of people to
vote for him. Biden has never missed a chance to stab the working class in the back in service to his wealthy patrons.
The issue is not (for me) his creepiness (I wouldn't much mind if he was on my side), nor even his Alzheimer's, but his established
track record of betrayal and corruption.
From wiping out the ability of regular folks to declare bankruptcy (something supported by our founding fathers who were NOT
socialists), to shipping our industrial base to communist China (which in less enlightened days would have been termed treason),
to spending tens of trillions of dollars bailing out and subsiding the big banks (that's not a misprint), to supporting "surprise
medical billing," to opening the borders to massive third-world immigration so that wages can be driven down and reset and profits
up (As 2015 Bernie Sanders pointed out), Backstabbing Joe Biden is neoliberal scum pure and simple.
It's astonishing that so many people will just blindly accept what they are told, that Biden is. "moderate." Biden is so
far to the right, he makes Nixon look like Trotsky. Heck, he makes Calvin Coolidge look like Trotsky.
Joe Biden is a crook and a con man. He has been lying his whole life. Claimed in his 1988 Campaign to have got 3 degrees at college and finished in top half of his class. Actually only got 1 degree & finished 76th out of 85 in his class.
"... Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of "middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their outlines are already visible across the United States. ..."
"... In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable. ..."
"... Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020 (triggered by COVID-19). ..."
"... Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. ..."
"... Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. ..."
Organized labor led no mass opposition to Trump's presidency or the December 2017 tax cut or
the failed U.S. preparation for and management of COVID-19. Nor do we yet see a labor-led
national protest against the worst mass firing since the 1930s Great Depression. All of these
events, but especially the unemployment, mark an employers' class war against employees. The
U.S. government directs it, but the employers as a class inspire and benefit the most from
it.
Before the 2020 crash, class war had been redistributing wealth for decades from
middle-income people and the poor to the top 1 percent. That upward redistribution was U.S.
employers' response to the legacy of the New Deal. During the Great Depression and afterward,
wealth had been redistributed downward. By the 1970s, that was reversed. The 2020 crash will
accelerate upward wealth redistribution sharply.
With tens of millions now a "reserve army" of the unemployed, nearly every U.S. employer can
cut wages, benefits, etc. Employees dissatisfied with these cuts are easily replaced. Vast
numbers of unemployed, stressed by uncertain job prospects and unemployment benefits,
disappearing savings, and rising household tensions, will take jobs despite reduced wages,
benefits, and working conditions. As the unemployed return to work, most employees' standards
of consumption and living will drop.
Germany, France, and other European nations could not fire workers as the United States did.
Strong labor movements and socialist parties with deep social influences preclude governments
risking comparable mass unemployment; it would risk deposing them from office. Thus their
antiviral lockdowns keep most at work with governments paying 70 percent or more of pre-virus
wages and salaries.
Mass unemployment will bring the United States closer to less-developed economies. Very
large regions of the poor will surround small enclaves of the rich. Narrow bands of
"middle-income professionals," etc., will separate rich from poor. Ever-more rigid social
divisions enforced by strong police and military apparatuses are becoming the norm. Their
outlines are already visible across the United States.
Only if workers understand and mobilize to fight this class war can the trends sketched
above be stopped or reversed. U.S. workers did exactly that in the 1930s. They fought -- in
highly organized ways -- the class war waged against them then. Millions joined labor unions,
and many tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. All four
organizations worked together, in coalition, to mobilize and activate the U.S. working
class.
Weekly, and sometimes daily, workers marched across the United States. They criticized
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies and capitalism itself by intermingling reformist and
revolutionary demands. The coalition's size and political reach forced politicians, including
FDR, to listen and respond, often positively. An initially "centrist" FDR adapted to become a
champion of Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs
program. The coalition achieved those moderate socialist reforms -- the New Deal -- and paid
for them by setting aside revolutionary change.
It proved to be a good deal, but only in the short run. Its benefits to workers included a
downward redistribution of income and wealth (especially via homeownership), and thereby the
emergence of a new "middle class." Relatively well-paid employees were sufficient in number to
sustain widespread notions of American exceptionalism, beliefs in ever-rising standards of
working-class living across generations, and celebrations of capitalism as guaranteeing these
social benefits. The reality was quite different. Not capitalists but rather their critics and
victims had forced the New Deal against capitalists' resistance. And those middle-class
benefits bypassed most African Americans.
The good deal did not last because U.S. capitalists largely resented the New Deal and sought
to undo it. With World War II's end and FDR's death in 1945, the undoing accelerated. An
anti-Soviet Cold War plus anti-communist/socialist crusades at home gave patriotic cover for
destroying the New Deal coalition. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act targeted organized labor. Senate
and House committees spearheaded a unified effort (government, mass media, and academia) to
demonize, silence, and socially exclude communists, socialists, leftists, etc. For decades
after 1945 -- and still now in parts of the United States -- a sustained hysteria defined all
left-wing thought, policy, or movement as always and necessarily the worst imaginable social
evil.
Over time, the New Deal coalition was destroyed and left-wing thinking was labeled
"disloyal." Even barely left-of-center labor and political organizations repeatedly denounced
and distanced themselves from any sort of anti-capitalist impulse, any connection to socialism.
Many New Deal reforms were evaded, amended, or repealed. Some simply vanished from politicians'
knowledge and vocabulary and then journalists' too. Having witnessed the purges of leftist
colleagues from 1945 through the 1950s, a largely docile academic community celebrated
capitalism in general and U.S. capitalism in particular. The good in U.S. society was
capitalism's gift. The rest resulted from government or foreign or ideological interferences in
capitalism's wonderful invisible hand. Any person or group excluded from this American Dream
had only themselves to blame for inadequate ability, insufficient effort, or ideological
deviancy.
In this context, U.S. capitalism strode confidently toward the 21st century. The Soviet
threat had imploded. A divided Europe threatened no U.S. interests. Its individual nations
competed for U.S. favor (especially the UK). China's poverty blocked its becoming an economic
competitor. U.S. military and technological supremacy seemed insurmountable.
Amid success, internal contradictions surfaced. U.S. capitalism crashed three times. The
first happened early in 2000 (triggered by dot-com share-price inflation); next came the big
crash of 2008 (triggered by defaulting subprime mortgages); and the hugest crash hit in 2020
(triggered by COVID-19). Unprepared economically, politically, and ideologically for any of
them, the Federal Reserve responded by creating vast sums of new money that it threw at/lent to
(at historically low interest rates) banks, large corporations, etc. Three successive exercises
in trickle-down economic policy saw little trickle down. No underlying economic problems
(inequality, excess systemic debts, cyclical instability, etc.) have been solved. On the
contrary, all worsened. In other words, class war has been intensified.
What then is to be done? First, we need to recognize the class war that is underway and
commit to fighting it. On that basis, we must organize a mass base to put real political force
behind social democratic policies, parties, and politicians. We need something like the New
Deal coalition. The pandemic, economic crash, and gross official policy failures (including
violent official scapegoating) draw many toward classical social democracy. The successes of
the Democratic Socialists of America show this.
Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters
developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies. They
silenced, deflected, co-opted, and/or demonized criticisms of capitalism. Strategic decisions
made by both the U.S. New Deal and European social democracy contributed to their defeats. Both
always left and still leave employers exclusively in positions to (1) receive and dispense
their enterprises' profits and (2) decide and direct what, how, and where their enterprises
produce. Those positions gave capitalists the financial resources and power -- politically,
economically, and culturally -- repeatedly to outmaneuver and repress labor and the left.
Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element. We cannot
again leave capitalists in the exclusive positions to receive enterprise profits and make major enterprise decisions. The
new element is thus the demand to change enterprises producing goods and services. From hierarchical, capitalist organizations
(where owners, boards of directors, etc., occupy the employer position) we need to transition to the altogether different
democratic, worker co-op organizations. In the latter, no employer/employee split occurs. All workers have equal voice in
deciding what gets produced, how, and where and how any profits get used. The collective of all employees is their own employer.
As such an employer, the employees will finally protect and thus secure the reforms associated with the New Deal and social
democracy.
We could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as
a revolution. That would resolve the old debate of reform versus revolution. Revolution becomes
the only way finally to secure progressive reforms. Capitalism's reforms were generated by the
system's impacts on people and their resulting demands for change. Capitalism's resistances to
those reforms -- and undoing them after they happened -- spawned the revolution needed to
secure them. In that revolution, society moves beyond capitalism itself. So it was in the
French Revolution: demands for reform within feudal society could only finally be realized by a
social transition from feudalism to capitalism.
"... It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story. ..."
"... Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions, from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism. ..."
"... What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners, their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments, as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets. ..."
"... In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police. ..."
"... Jay Gould, a U.S. robber baron, is supposed to have claimed that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. ..."
"... I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the hot bed of labor unrest during the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor in 1905. ..."
"... Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like.. ..."
"... Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.* ..."
Yves here. Tom mentions in passing the role
of Pinkertons as goons for hire to crush early labor activists. Some employers like Ford went as far as forming private armies for
that purpose. Establishing police forces were a way to socialize this cost.
[In the 1800s] the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant
bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class.
-- Sam Mitrani
here
It's a commonplace to say the primary job of police is to "protect and serve," but that's not their goal in the way it's commonly
understood -- not in the deed, the practice of what they daily do, and not true in the original intention, in why police departments
were created in the first place. "Protect and serve" as we understand it is just the cover story.
To understand the true purpose of police, we have to ask, "What's being protected?" and "Who's being served?"
Urban police forces in America were created for one purpose -- to "maintain order" after a waves of immigrants swept into northern
U.S. cities, both from abroad and later from the South, immigrants who threatened to disturb that "order." The threat wasn't primarily
from crime as we understand it, from violence inflicted by the working poor on the poor or middle class. The threat came from unions,
from strikes, and from the suffering, the misery and the anger caused by the rise of rapacious capitalism.
What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. Who's being served? Owners,
their property, and the sources of their wealth, the orderly and uninterrupted running of their factories. The goal of police departments,
as originally constituted, was to keep the workers in line, in their jobs, and off the streets.
Looking Behind Us
The following comes from an
essay
published at the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, an academic group for teachers of labor studies, by
Sam Mitrani, Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage and author of The Rise of the Chicago Police
Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 .
According to Mitrani, "The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at
least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the
new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system's offspring,
the working class."
Keep in mind that there were no police departments anywhere in Europe or the U.S. prior to the 19th century -- in fact, "anywhere
in the world" according to Mitrani. In the U.S., the North had constables, many part-time, and elected sheriffs, while the South
had slave patrols. But nascent capitalism soon created a large working class, and a mass of European immigrants, "yearning to be
free," ended up working in capitalism's northern factories and living in its cities.
"[A]s Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the
ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose
order on the new working class neighborhoods ." [emphasis added]
America of the early and mid 1800s was still a world without organized police departments. What the
Pinkertons were to strikes , these
"thousands of armed men" were to the unruly working poor in those cities.
Imagine this situation from two angles. First, from the standpoint of the workers, picture the oppression these armed men must
have represented, lawless themselves yet tasked with imposing "order" and violence on the poor and miserable, who were frequently
and understandably both angry and drunk. (Pre-Depression drunkenness, under this interpretation, is not just a social phenomenon,
but a political one as well.)
Second, consider this situation from the standpoint of the wealthy who hired these men. Given the rapid growth of capitalism during
this period, "maintaining order" was a costly undertaking, and likely to become costlier. Pinkertons, for example, were hired at
private expense, as were the "thousands of armed men" Mitrani mentions above.
The solution was to offload this burden onto municipal budgets. Thus, between 1840 and 1880, every major northern city
in America had created a substantial police force, tasked with a single job, the one originally performed by the armed men paid by
the business elites -- to keep the workers in line, to "maintain order" as factory owners and the moneyed class understood it.
"Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867,
1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the
U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly
presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization , by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder
of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today,
poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers."
That "thin blue line protecting civilization" is the same blue line we're witnessing today. Yes, big-city police are culturally
racist as a group; but they're not just racist. They dislike all the "unwashed." A
recent study that reviewed "all the data
available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyze[d] it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race"
revealed the following remarkable pattern:
" Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder : in rural areas outside the
South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately
black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police
at nearly identical rates."
As they have always been, the police departments in the U.S. are a violent force for maintaining an order that separates and protects
society's predator class from its victims -- a racist order to be sure, but a class-based order as well.
Looking Ahead
We've seen the violence of the police as visited on society's urban poor (and anyone else, poor or not, who happens to be the
same race and color as the poor too often are), and we've witnessed the violent reactions of police to mass protests challenging
the racism of that violence.
But we've also seen the violence of police during the mainly white-led Occupy movement (one instance
here ; note that while the officer involved
was fired, he was also compensated $38,000 for "suffering he experienced after the incident").
So what could we expect from police if there were, say, a national, angry, multiracial rent strike with demonstrations? Or a student
debt s trike? None of these possibilities are off the table, given the
economic damage -- most of it still unrealized -- caused by the current Covid crisis.
Will police "protect and serve" the protesters, victims of the latest massive
transfer of wealth
to the already massively wealthy? Or will they, with violence, "maintain order" by maintaining elite control of the current predatory
system?
If Mitrani is right, the latter is almost certain.
Possible solutions? One, universal public works system for everyone 18-20. [Avoiding armed service because that will never
happen, nor peace corp.] Not allow the rich to buy then or their children an out. Let the billionaires children work along side
those who never had a single family house or car growing up.
Two, eliminate suburban school districts and simply have one per state, broken down into regional areas. No rich [or white]
flight to avoid poor systems. Children of differing means growing up side by side. Of course the upper class would simply send
their children to private schools, much as the elite do now anyway.
Class and privilege is the real underlying issue and has been since capital began to be concentrated and hoarded as the article
points out. It has to begin with the children if the future is to really change in a meaningful way.
I would add items targeted as what is causing inequality. Some of these might be:
1). Abolish the Federal Reserve. It's current action since 2008 are a huge transfer of wealth from us to the wealthy. No more
Quantitative Easing, no Fed buying of stocks or bonds.
2). Make the only retirement and medical program allowed Congress and the President, Social Security and Medicare. That will
cause it to be improved for all of us.
3). No stock ownership allowed for Congress folk while serving terms. Also, rules against joining those leaving Congress acting
as lobbyists.
4). Something that makes it an iron rule that any law passed by Congress and the President, must equally apply to Congress
and the President. For example, no separate retirement or healthcare access, but have this more broadly applied to all aspects
of legislation and all aspects of life.
I think you'd also have to legalize drugs and any other thing that leads creation of "organized ciminal groups." Take away
the sources that lead to the creation of the well-armed gangs that control illegal activities.
Unfortunately, legalising drugs in itself, whatever the abstract merits, wouldn't solve the problem. Organised crime would
still have a major market selling cut-price, tax-free or imitation drugs, as well, of course, as controlled drugs which are not
allowed to be sold to just anybody now. Organised crime doesn't arise as a result of prohibitions, it expands into new areas thanks
to them, and often these areas involve smuggling and evading customs duties. Tobacco products are legal virtually everywhere,
but there's a massive criminal trade in smuggling them from the Balkans into Italy, where taxes are much higher. Any time you
create a border, in effect, you create crime: there is even alcohol smuggling between Sweden and Norway. Even when activities
are completely legal (such as prostitution in many European countries) organised crime is still largely in control through protection
rackets and the provision of "security."
In effect, you'd need to abolish all borders, all import and customs duties and all health and safety and other controls which
create price differentials between states. And OC is not fussy, it moves from one racket to another, as the Mafia did in the 1930s
with the end of prohibition. To really tackle OC you'd need to legalise, oh, child pornography, human trafficking, sex slavery,
the trade in rare wild animals, the trade in stolen gems and conflict diamonds, internet fraud and cyberattacks, and the illicit
trade in rare metals, to name, as they say, but a few. As Monty Python well observed, the only way to reduce the crime rate (and
hence the need for the police) is to reduce the number of criminal offences. Mind you, if you defund the police you effectively
legalise all these things anyway.
I dunno, ending Prohibition sure cut down on the market for bootleg liquor. It's still out there, but the market is nothing
like what it once was.
Most people, even hardcore alcoholics, aren't going to go through the hassle of buying rotgut of dubious origin just to save
a few dimes, when you can go to the corner liquor store and get a known product, no issues with supply 'cause your dealer's supplier
just got arrested.
For that matter, OC is still definitely out there, but it isn't the force that it was during Prohibition, or when gambling
was illegal.
As an aside, years ago, I knew a guy whose father had worked for Meyer Lansky's outfit, until Prohibition put him and others
out of a job. As a token of his loyal service, the outfit gave him a (legal) liquor store to own and run.
Yes, but in Norway, for example, you'd pay perhaps $30 for a six-pack of beer in a supermarket, whereas you'd pay half that
to somebody selling beers out of the back of a car. In general people make too much of the Prohibition case, which was geographically
and politically very special, and a a stage in history when OC was much less sophisticated. The Mob diversified into gambling
and similar industries (higher profits, fewer risks). These days OC as a whole is much more powerful and dangerous, as well as
sophisticated, than it was then, helped by globalisation and the Internet.
I think ending prohibitions on substances, would take quite a bite out of OC's pocketbook. and having someone move trailers
of ciggarettes of bottles of beer big deal. That isn't really paying for the lifestyle.and it doesn't buy political protection.
An old number I saw @ 2000 . the UN figured(guess) that illegal drugs were @ 600 billion dollars/year industry and most of that
was being laundered though banks. Which to the banking industry is 600 billion in cash going into it's house of mirrors. Taking
something like that out of the equation EVERY YEAR is no small thing. And the lobby from the OC who wants drugs kept illegal,
coupled with the bankers who want the cash inputs equals a community of interest against legalization
and if the local police forces and the interstate/internationals were actually looking to use their smaller budgets and non-bill
of rights infringing tactics, on helping the victim side of crimes then they could have a real mission/ Instead of just abusing
otherwise innocent people who victimize no one.
so if we are looking for "low hanging fruit" . ending the war on drugs is a no brainer.
"What's being protected? The social order that feeds the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. " – Neuberger
In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization,
by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. – Mitrani
I think this ties in, if only indirectly, with the way so many peaceful recent protests seemed to turn violent after the police
showed up. It's possible I suppose the police want to create disorder to frighten not only the protestors with immediate harm
but also frighten the bourgeois about the threate of a "dangerous mob". Historically violent protests created a political backlash
that usually benefited political conservatives and the wealthy owners. (The current protests may be different in this regard.
The violence seems to have created a political backlash against conservatives and overzealous police departments' violence. )
My 2 cents.
Sorry, but the title sent my mind back to the days of old -- of old Daley, that is, and his immortal quote from 1968: "Gentlemen,
let's get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve
disorder."
LOL!!! great quote. Talk about saying it the way it is.
It kind of goes along with, "Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural
areas outside the South, predominately white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities,
disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men
are killed by police at nearly identical rates."
I bang my head on the table sometimes because poor white men and poor men of color are so often placed at odds when they increasingly
face (mostly) the same problems. God forbid someone tried to unite them, there might really be some pearl clutching then.
yeah, like Martin Luther King's "poor people's campaign". the thought of including the poor ,of all colors .. just too much
for the status quo to stomach.
The "mechanism" that keeps masses in line . is one of those "invisible hands" too.
Great response! I am sure you have more to add to this. A while back, I was researching the issues you state in your last paragraph.
Was about ten pages into it and had to stop as I was drawn out of state and country. From my research.
While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive
and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. This distraction of a class level lower than
the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income
in the US. For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.
Sennett and Cobb (1972) observed that class distinction sets up a contest between upper and lower class with the lower social
class always losing and promulgating a perception amongst themselves the educated and upper classes are in a position to judge
and draw a conclusion of them being less than equal. The hidden injury is in the regard to the person perceiving himself as a
piece of the woodwork or seen as a function such as "George the Porter." It was not the status or material wealth causing the
harsh feelings; but, the feeling of being treated less than equal, having little status, and the resulting shame. The answer for
many was violence.
James Gilligan wrote "Violence; Reflections on A National Epidemic." He worked as a prison psychiatrist and talked with many
of the inmates of the issues of inequality and feeling less than those around them. His finding are in his book which is not a
long read and adds to the discussion.
A little John Adams for you.
" The poor man's conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind
takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded.
In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.
He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable
."
likbez, June 19, 2020 at 3:18 pm
That's a very important observation.
Racism, especially directed toward blacks, along with "identity wedge," is a perfect tool for disarming poor white, and suppressing
their struggle for a better standard of living, which considerably dropped under neoliberalism.
In other words, by providing poor whites with a stratum of the population that has even lower social status, neoliberals manage
to co-opt them to support the policies which economically ate detrimental to their standard of living as well as to suppress the
protest against the redistribution of wealth up and dismantling of the New Deal capitalist social protection network.
This is a pretty sophisticated, pretty evil scheme if you ask me. In a way, "Floydgate" can be viewed as a variation on the same
theme. A very dirty game indeed, when the issue of provision of meaningful jobs for working poor, social equality, and social
protection for low-income workers of any color is replaced with a real but of secondary importance issue of police violence against
blacks.
This is another way to explain "What's the matter with Kansas" effect.
John Anthony La Pietra, June 19, 2020 at 6:20 pm
I like that one! - and I have to admit it's not familiar to me, though I've been a fan since before I got to play him in a
neighboring community theater. Now I'm having some difficulty finding it. Where is it from, may I ask?
run75441, June 20, 2020 at 7:56 am
JAL:
Page 239, "The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States."
Read the book "Violence: Reflections of A National Epidemic" . Not a long read and well documented.
MLK Jr. tried, and look what happened to him once he really got some traction. If the Rev. William Barber's Poor People's Campaign
picks up steam, I'm afraid the same thing will happen to him.
I wish it were only pearl-clutching that the money power would resort to, but that's not the way it works.
Yeah – that quote struck me too, never seen it before. At times when they feel so liberated to 'say the quiet part out loud',
then as now, you know the glove is coming off and the vicious mailed fist is free to roam for victims.
Those times are where you know you need to resist or .well, die in many cases.
That's something that really gets me in public response to many of these things. The normal instinct of the populace to wake
from their somnambulant slumber just long enough to ascribe to buffoonery and idiocy ala Keystone Cops the things so much better
understood as fully consciously and purposefully repressive, reactionary, and indicating a desire to take that next step to crush
fully. To obliterate.
Many responses to this – https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1273809160128389120
– are like, 'the police are dumb', 'out of touch', 'a lot of dumb gomer pyles in that room, yuk yuk yuk'. Or, 'cops/FBI are
so dumb to pursue this antifa thing, its just a boogieman' thinking that somehow once the authorities realize 'antifa' is a boogieman,
their attitudes towards other protesters will somehow be different 'now that they realize the silliness of the claims'.
No, not remotely the case – to a terrifyingly large percentage of those in command, and in rank & file they know exactly where
it came from, exactly how the tactics work, and have every intention of classifying all protesters (peaceful or not) into that
worldview. The peaceful protesters *are* antifa in their eyes, to be dealt with in the fully approved manner of violence and repression.
In most countries, the police are there solely to protect the Haves from the Have-Nots. In fact, when the average frustrated
citizen has trouble, the last people he would consider turning to are the police.
This is why in the Third World, the only job of lower social standing than "policeman" is "police informer".
The anti-rascist identity of the recent protests rests on a much larger base of class warfare waged over the past 40 years
against the entire population led by a determined oligarchy and enforced by their political, media and militarized police retainers.
This same oligarchy, with a despicable zeal and revolting media-orchestrated campaign–co-branding the movement with it's usual
corporate perpetrators– distorts escalating carceral and economic violence solely through a lens of racial conflict and their
time-tested toothless reforms. A few unlucky "peace officers" may have to TOFTT until the furor recedes, can't be helped.
Crowding out debt relief, single payer health, living wages, affordable housing and actual justice reform from the debate that
would benefit African Americans more than any other demographic is the goal.
The handful of Emperors far prefer kabuki theater and random ritual Seppuku than facing the rage of millions of staring down
the barrel of zero income, debt, bankruptcy, evictions and dispossession. The Praetorians will follow the money as always.
I suppose we'll get some boulevards re-named and a paid Juneteenth holiday to compensate for the destruction 100+ years of
labor rights struggle, so there's that..
Homestead, Ludlow, Haymarket, Matewan -- the list is long
Working men and women asking for justice gunned down by the cops. There will always be men ready to murder on command as long
as the orders come from the rich and powerful. We are at a moment in history folks were some of us, today mostly people of color,
are willing to put their lives on the line. It's an ongoing struggle.
So how can a tier of society(the police) . be what a society needs ? When as this story and many others show how and why the
police were formed. To break heads. When they have been "the tool" of the elite forever. When so many of them are such dishonest,
immoral, wanna be fascists. And the main direction of the US is towards a police state and fascists running the show . both
republican and democrat. With technology being the boot on the neck of the people and the police are there to take it to the streets.
Can those elusive "good apples" turn the whole rotten barrel into sweet smelling apple pie? That is a big ask.
Or should the structure be liquidated, sell their army toys. fill the ranks with people who are not pathological liars and
abusers and /or racists; of one sort or another. Get rid of the mentality of overcompensation by uber machismo. and make them
watch the andy griffith show. They ought to learn that they can be respected if they are good people, and that they are not respected
because they seek respect through fear and intimidation.
Is that idiot cry of theirs, .. the whole yelling at you; demanding absolute obedience to arbitrary ,assinine orders, really
working to get them respect or is it just something they get off on?
When the police are shown to be bad, they strike by work slowdown, or letting a little chaos loose themselves. So the people
know they need them So any reform of the police will go through the police not doing their jobs . but then something like better
communities may result. less people being busted and harassed , or pulled over for the sake of a quota . may just show we don't
need so much policing anyway. And then if the new social workers brigade starts intervening in peoples with issues when they are
young and in school maybe fewer will be in the system. Couple that with the police not throwing their family in jail for nothing,
and forcing them to pay fines for breaking stupid laws. The system will have less of a load, and the new , better cops without
attitudes will be able to handle their communities in a way that works for everyone. Making them a net positive, as opposed to
now where they are a net negative.
Also,
The drug war is over. The cops have only done the bidding of the organized criminal elements who make their bread and butter
because of prohibition.
Our representatives can legally smoke pot , and grow it in their windowboxes in the capital dc., but people in many places
are still living in fear of police using possession of some substance,as a pretext to take all their stuff,throw them in jail.
But besides the cops, there are the prosecutors . they earn their salaries by stealing it from poor people through fines for things
that ought to be legal. This is one way to drain money from poor communities, causing people to go steal from others in society
to pay their court costs.
And who is gonna come and bust down your door when you can't pay a fine and choose to pay rent and buy your kids food instead
. the cops. just doing their jobs. Evil is the banality of business as usual
The late Kevin R C O'Brien noted that in every case where the Police had been ordered to "Round up the usual suspects" they
have done so, and delivered them where ordered. It did not matter who the "Usual suspects" were, or to what fate they were
to be delivered. They are the King's men and they do the King's bidding.
To have a reasonable discussion, I think that it should be recognized that modern police are but one leg of a triad. The first
of course is the police who appear to seem themselves as not part of a community but as enforcers in that community. To swipe
an idea from Mao, the police should move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Not be a patrolling shark that attacks
who they want at will knowing that there will be no repercussions against them. When you get to the point that you have police
arresting children in school for infractions of school discipline – giving them a police record – you know that things have gotten
out of hand.
The next leg is the courts which of course includes prosecutors. It is my understanding that prosecutors are elected to office
in the US and so have incentives to appear to be tough on crime"" . They seem to operate more like 'Let's Make a Deal' from what
I have read. When they tell some kid that he has a choice of 1,000 years in prison on trumped up charges or pleads guilty to a
smaller offence, you know that that is not justice at work. Judges too operate in their own world and will always take the word
of a policeman as a witness.
And the third leg is the prisons which operate as sweatshops for corporate America. It is in the interest of the police and
the courts to fill up the prisons to overflowing. Anybody remember the Pennsylvania "kids for cash" scandal where kids lives were
being ruined with criminal records that were bogus so that some people could make a profit? And what sort of prison system is
it where a private contractor can build a prison without a contract at all , knowing that the government (California in
this case) will nonetheless fill it up for a good profit.
In short, in sorting out police doctrine and methods like is happening now, it should be recognized that they are actually
only the face of a set of problems.
How did ancient states police? Perhaps Wiki is a starting point of this journey. Per Its entry, Police, in ancient Greece,
policing was done by public owned slaves. In Rome, the army, initially. In China, prefects leading to a level of government
called prefectures .
I spent some time in the Silver Valley of northern Idaho. This area was the
hot bed of labor unrest during
the 1890's. Federal troops controlled the area 3 separate times,1892, 1894 and 1899. Twice miners hijacked trains loaded them
with dynamite and drove them to mining company stamping mills that they then blew up. Dozens of deaths in shoot outs. The entire
male population was herded up and placed in concentration camps for weeks. The end result was the assassination of the Governor
in 1905.
Interestingly this history has been completely expunged. There is a mining museum in the town which doesn't mention a word
on these events. Even nationwide there seems to be a complete erasure of what real labor unrest can look like..
Yeah, labor unrest does get swept under the rug. Howard zinn had examples in his works "the peoples history of the United States"
The pictched battles in upstate new york with the Van Rennselear's in the 1840's breaking up rennselearwyk . the million acre
estate of theirs . it was a rent strike.
People remembering , we have been here before doesn't help the case of the establishment so they try to not let it happen.
We get experts telling us . well, this is all new we need experts to tell you what to think. It is like watching the
footage from the past 100 years on film of blacks marching for their rights and being told.. reform is coming.. the more things
change, the more things stay the same. Decade after decade. Century after century. Time to start figuring this out people. So,
the enemy is us. Now what?
Doubtless the facts presented above are correct, but shouldn't one point out that the 21st century is quite different from
the 19th and therefore analogizing the current situation to what went on before is quite facile? For example it's no longer necessary
for the police to put down strikes because strike actions barely still exist. In our current US the working class has diminished
greatly while the middle class has expanded. We are a much richer country overall with a lot more people–not just those one percenters–concerned
about crime. Whatever one thinks of the police, politically an attempt to go back to the 18th century isn't going to fly.
" the 21st century is quite different from the 19th "
From the Guardian: "How Starbucks, Target, Google and Microsoft quietly fund police through private donations"
More than 25 large corporations in the past three years have contributed funding to private police foundations, new report
says.
These foundations receive millions of dollars a year from private and corporate donors, according to the report, and are
able to use the funds to purchase equipment and weapons with little public input. The analysis notes, for example, how the
Los Angeles police department in 2007 used foundation funding to purchase surveillance software from controversial technology
firm Palantir. Buying the technology with private foundation funding rather than its public budget allowed the department to
bypass requirements to hold public meetings and gain approval from the city council.
The Houston police foundation has purchased for the local police department a variety of equipment, including Swat equipment,
sound equipment and dogs for the K-9 unit, according to the report. The Philadelphia police foundation purchased for its police
force long guns, drones and ballistic helmets, and the Atlanta police foundation helped fund a major surveillance network of
over 12,000 cameras.
In addition to weaponry, foundation funding can also go toward specialized training and support programs that complement
the department's policing strategies, according to one police foundation.
"Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon
money into police forces with little to no oversight," said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.
Maybe it is just me, but things don't seem to be all that different.
While it is true, this is a new century. Knowing how the present came to be, is entirely necessary to be able to attempt any
move forward.
The likelihood of making the same old mistakes is almost certain, if one doesn't try to use the past as a reference.
And considering the effect of propaganda and revisionism in the formation of peoples opinions, we do need " learning against learning"
to borrow a Jesuit strategy against the reformation, but this time it should embrace reality, rather than sow falsehoods.
But I do agree,
We have never been here before, and now is a great time to reset everything. With all due respect to "getting it right" or at
least "better".
and knowing the false fables of righteousness, is what people need to know, before they go about "burning down the house".
You know it's not as though white people aren't also afraid of the police. Alfred Hitchcock said he was deathly afraid of police
and that paranoia informed many of his movies. Woody Allen has a funny scene in Annie Hall where he is pulled over by a cop and
is comically flustered. White people also get shot and killed by the police as the rightwingers are constantly pointing out.
And thousands of people in the streets tell us that police reform is necessary. But the country is not going to get rid of
them and replace police with social workers so why even talk about it? I'd say the above is interesting .not terribly relevant.
Straight-up fact: The police weren't created to preserve and protect. They were created to maintain order, [enforced] over
certain subjected classes and races of people, including–for many white people, too–many of our ancestors, too.*
And the question that arises from this: Are we willing to the subjects in a police state? Are we willing to continue to let
our Black and brown brothers and sisters be subjected BY such a police state, and to half-wittingly be party TO it?
Or do we want to exercise AGENCY over "our" government(s), and decide–anew–how we go out our vast, vast array of social ills.
Obviously, armed police officers with an average of six months training–almost all from the white underclass–are a pretty f*cking
blunt instrument to bring to bear.
On our own heads. On those who we and history have consigned to second-class citizenship.
Warning: this is a revolutionary situation. We should embrace it.
*Acceding to white supremacy, becoming "white" and often joining that police order, if you were poor, was the road out of such
subjectivity. My grandfather's father, for example, was said to have fled a failed revolution in Bohemia to come here. Look back
through history, you will find plenty of reason to feel solidarity, too. Race alone cannot divide us if we are intent on the lessons
of that history.
"... Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted. ..."
"... Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated . Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time. ..."
"... Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor to keep themselves going. ..."
"... Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.) ..."
"... But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black people, after all. ..."
"... Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss. ..."
"... Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay. ..."
"... We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free labor looks different. ..."
"... It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything to protect their right to abuse cheap labor. ..."
"... At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. ..."
"... I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. ..."
"... Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks. Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism. ..."
"... Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. ..."
"... They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called " Blue Collar ." ..."
"... "That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place." ..."
"... The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models ..."
Anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for corporations that ultimately take workers for granted.
Former injured Amazon employees join labor organizers and community activists to demonstrate and hold a press conference
outside of an Amazon Go store to express concerns about what they claim is the company's "alarming injury rate" among warehouse
workers on December 10, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On April 2, 1865, in the dying days of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln wandered the streets of burnt out Richmond,
the former Confederate capital. All of a sudden, Lincoln found himself surrounded by scores of emancipated men and women. Here's
how the historian James McPherson describes the moving episode in his magisterial book
Battle Cry of Freedom :
Several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real. "I know I am free," shouted an old woman, "for I have seen Father
Abraham and felt him." Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: "Don't
kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter."
Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator has survived the century and a half since then largely intact. But there have been cracks
in this image, mostly caused by questioning academics who decried him as an overt white supremacist. This view eventually entered
the mainstream when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote misleadingly in her
lead essay
to the "1619 Project" that Lincoln "opposed black equality."
Today, we find Lincoln statues
desecrated . Neither has the memorial
to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry , one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent protests unscathed.
To many on the left, history seems like the succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be served if we scrap
the past and start from a blank slate. As a result, Lincoln's appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost to time.
Ironically, this will only help the cause of Robert E. Lee -- and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane labor
to keep themselves going.
***
The main idea driving the "1619 Project" and so much of recent scholarship is that the United States of America originated in
slavery and white supremacy. These were its true founding ideals. Racism, Hannah-Jones writes, is in our DNA.
Such arguments don't make any sense, as the historian Barbara Fields clairvoyantly argued in a
groundbreaking essay from 1990. Why would Virginia planters in the 17th century import black people purely out of hate? No, Fields
countered, the planters were driven by a real need for dependable workers who would toil on their cotton, rice, and tobacco fields
for little to no pay. Before black slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured servant is bound for a number
of years to his master, i.e. he can't pack up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.)
After 1776 everything changed. Suddenly the new republic claimed that "all men are created equal" -- and yet there were millions
of slaves who still couldn't enjoy this equality. Racism helped to square our founding ideals with the brute reality of continued
chattel slavery: Black people simply weren't men.
But in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the North also weren't truly human. Such unholy antebellum
figures as the social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond
urged that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too. Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source
did not stop at black people, after all.
Always remember Barbara Fields's formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give
this bleak reality a spiritual gloss.
The true cause of the Civil War -- and it bears constant
repeating for all the doubters -- was whether slavery would expand its reach or whether
"free labor" would reign supreme. The latter was the dominant
ideology of the North: Free laborers are independent, self-reliant, and eventually achieve economic security and independence by
the sweat of their brow. It's the American Dream. But if that is so, then the Civil War ended in a tie -- and its underlying conflict was never really settled.
***
Michael Lind argues in his new book The New Class War
that many powerful businesses in America today continue to rely on the work of quasi indentured servants. Hungry for unfree, cheap
workers, corporations in Silicon Valley and beyond employ tens of thousands of foreign workers through the H-2B visa program. These
workers are bound to the company that provided them with the visa. If they find conditions at their jobs unbearable, they can't switch
employers -- they would get deported first. In turn, this source of cheap labor effectively underbids American workers who could
do the same job, except that they would ask for higher pay.
America's wealth rests on this mutual competition between workers -- some nominally "free," others basically indentured -- whether
it be through unjust visa schemes or other unfair managerial practices.
Remember that the next time you read a public announcement by the Amazons of this world that they remain committed to "black lives
matter" and similar identitarian causes.
Fortunately, very few Americans hold the same racial resentments in their hearts as their ancestors did even just half a century
ago. Rarely did we agree as much than when the nation near unanimously condemned the death of George Floyd at the hands of a few
Minneapolis police officers. This is in keeping with another fortunate trend: Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings
of young black men declined by 79% percent .
But anti-racism as an ideology serves a perfect function for our corporations, even despite the evidence that people in this country
have grown much less bigotted than they once were: As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are
encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments in everything that their fellow workers say or do.
We're getting turned into rats. Naturally, this is no fertile soil for solidarity. And with so many jobs precarious and subcontracted
out on a temporary basis, there is preciously little that most workers can do to fight back this insidious managerial control. Free
labor looks different.
And so, through a surprising back door, the true cause for which Robert E. Lee chose to betray his country might still be coming
out on top, whether we remove his statues or not -- namely, the steady supply to our ruling corporations of unfree workers willing
to hustle for scraps.
It's time to follow Abraham Lincoln's urging and get off our knees again. We should assert our rights as American citizens to
live free from economic insecurity and mutual resentment. The vast majority of us harbor no white supremacist views, period. Instead,
we have so many more things in common, and we know it.
Another anecdote from the last days of the Civil War, also taken from Battle Cry of Freedom, might prove instructive here: The
surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 essentially ended the
Civil War. The ceremony was held with solemn respect for Lee, though one of Grant's adjutants couldn't help himself but have a subtle
dig at Lee's expense:
After signing the papers, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker,
a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded,
"We are all Americans."
Gregor Baszak is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a writer. His articles have appeared
in Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Spectator USA, Spiked, and elsewhere. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @gregorbas1.
It's a bit off-topic but this is a big reason I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary this year, he was the only
candidate talking about how businesses demand that cheap labor, illegal labor, replace American labor. For this, the corporate
media called him a racist, an anti-semite, a dangerous radical. None of his opponents aside from Elizabeth Warren had anything
to run on aside from pseudo-woke touchy-feely bs. And somehow, with the media insisting that Joe Biden was the only one who could
beat Trump, we ended up with the one candidate who was neither good on economics, good for American workers, or offering platitudes
about wokeness.
It's hard to come out of the 2020 primaries without realizing that the corporations that run our mainstream media will do anything
to protect their right to abuse cheap labor.
Racism is very real. If it weren't it couldn't be used to "divide and conquer" the working calss. we can walk and chew gum
and the same time: oppose racism, and also oppose exploitive labor practices.
What kind of polemic, unsupported statement is "black fast food workers are the ones who gave us the fight for $15"? How about
it was a broad coalition of progressives (of all colors)? Moreover, $15 minimum wage is a poor, one-size-fits-all band-aid that
I doubt even fits ONE scenario. Tackling the broader shareholder capitalism model of labor arbitrage (free trade/mass immigration),
deunionization, and monopolistic hurdles drafted by corporations is where it actually matters. And on that, we are seeing the
inklings of a populist left-right coalition -- if corporate-funded race hustlers could only get out of the way.
That's the problem. We CAN'T chew gum and walk at the same time. Every minute focusing on racial friction is a minute NOT talking
about neoliberal economics. What's the ratio of air time, social media discussion, or newspaper inches are devoted to race vis-a-vis
the economic system that has starved the working class -- which is disproportionately black and brown? 10 to 1? 100 to 1? 1000
to 1? If there are no decent working class jobs for young black and brown men, then it makes it nearly impossible to raise families.
Let's be clear: Systemic racism is real, but it is far less impactful than economic injustices and family dissolution.
Class really isn't the primary issue for black people.
That's a frankly ridiculous statement. At this point in history, to the extent that black people suffer any meaningful oppression
at all, its down to disproportionate poverty rates, not their racial background. No one--except a few neurotic, high-strung corporate
HR PMC types--cares about "microaggressions". Even unjust police shootings of blacks are likely down to class and not race--despite
the politically correct narrative saying otherwise.
Putting racial identity politics as an equal (or even greater) priority than class-based solidarity creates an absurd system
where an upper-middle class black woman attending Yale can act as if a working class white man is oppressing her by not acknowledging
his "white privilege", and not bowing to her every demand. It's utterly delusional to think that sort of culture is going to create
a more just or equal world.
Biden is a Rorschach test, people see whatever they want in a party apparatchik. Trump has been Shiva, the destroyer of the
traditional Republican party. How else do you explain the support among Multi-Billionaires for the Democratic party. Truly ironic.
I agree one hundred percent with your take on Biden. Let me add something else: he is a war hawk who not only voted for the
Iraq war but used his position as the chairman of an important committee to promote it. I understand that he still wants to divide
Iraq into three separate countries--a decision for Iraqis to make and not us. If we try to implement that policy, it would doubtless
lead to more American deaths--to say nothing of Iraqi deaths.
So not only is he not good for American workers, he is not good for the American soldier who is disproportionately likely not
to be from the elite classes but rather from the working and lower-middle class.
The only other Democratic candidate who opposed war-mongering besides Sanders was Tulsi Gabbard. I watched CNN commentary after
a debate in which she participated. While the other participants received lots of commentary from CNN talking heads. she got almost
nothing. She was featured in a video montage of candidates saying "Trump"; other than that, she was invisible in the post-debate
analysis.
I don't know how far it travelled outside of Democratic primary voters, but I recall Biden's campaign saying that they were
planning to be sort of a placeholder that would pass the torch to the next generation. He's insinuated that he only wants to serve
one term and saw jumping into the race as the only way to beat Trump. Not the most exciting platform for the Democrats to run
on.
As depressing as this primary was, it's good to see that the rising generation of Democrats was resistant to platitudes and demanded
actual policy proposals.
Shame the party elders fell for the same old tricks yet again. I just hope that once there are more of
us, we can have a serious policy debate in both major parties about free trade, immigration, inequality. The parties' voters aren't
all that far apart on economics, yet neither of us is being given what we want. Whichever party sincerely takes a stand for the
American working class stands to dominate American politics for a generation.
The problem with Biden's "placeholder" comments is that he specifically mentioned it for Pete Buttigeig, the McKinsey-trained
career opportunist who believes in his bones the same neoliberal economics and interventionist foreign policies as the last generation.
Same bad ideas, new woke packaging.
Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, both tops on the VP list, will do just fine in place of Buttigieg - he's slated to revive TPP
as the new USTR cabinet lead.
Because of slavery alot of bad political policy was incorporated in the founding documents. If a police officer is about to
wrongly arrest you because you are black , you do not care if his hatred stems from 400 years of discrimination against blacks.
Rather you care that he won't kill you in this encounter because of his racism.
To me, I have always thought that America's original sin was slavery. Its stain can not be completely wiped out.
And I further believe that if Native Americans would have enslaved the newly arrived Europeans, and remained the ruling majority,
white people would be discriminated against today.
So the problem is not that white people are inherently evil, or other races are inherently good. It is that because of slavery
black people are bad, white people are good.
As a nation we have never been able to wash out the stain completely. Never will. Getting closer to the promised land is the
best we are going to do. Probably take another 400 years.
In everyday encounters no one cares how discrimination began, just treat me like you want to be treated. Pretty simple.
"As a management tool, anti-racism sows constant suspicion among workers who are encouraged to detect white supremacist sentiments
in everything that their fellow workers say or do."
The author does not offer one smidgen of proof that any company uses antiracism to divide workers. It might be plausible that
it's happened, but Baszak has no data at all.
Over the last 40 years, the rate of police killings of young black men declined by 79% percent.
You think this is an accident? It came about through intense pressure on the police to stop killing Black people -- exactly
the sort of racial emphasis the author seems to be decrying. Important to note that the non-fatal mistreatment has remained high.
The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss
Baszak believes racism has no life of its own, it exists only as a tool of the bosses. This is vulgar Marxism. At least since
the decades after Bacon's Rebellion ended in 1677, poor whites have invested in white supremacy as a way of boosting their social
status. Most Southern families owned no slaves, yet most joined the Civil War cause. The psychological draw of racism, its cultural
strength, are obviated by Barszak. And I bet Barbara Fields does not consider racism an epiphenomenon of economics.
They made a movie that beautifully touches this in the 1970s with Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor called "Blue
Collar."
"That's exactly what the company wants: to keep you on their line," says Smokey, the coolest and most strategically minded
of the crew. "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young,
the black against the white -- everybody -- to keep us in our place."
The core thesis in this piece is the animating foundation of The Hill's political talk show "Rising." Composed of a populist
Bernie supporter (Krystal Ball) and populist conservative (Saagar Enjeti) as hosts, they frequently highlight the purpose of woke
cultural battles is to distract everyone for their neoliberal economic models -- a system that actually has greater deleterious
impact on black communities.
This video is one recent example of what you'll rarely see in mainstream media:
"... Old saying: A Recession is when your neighbor loses their Job. A Depression is when you lose your Job. ..."
"... A lot of mega wealthy people are cheats. They get insider info, they don't pay people and do all they can to provide the least amount of value possible while tricking suckers into buying their crap. Don't even get me started on trust fund brats who come out of the womb thinking they are Warren buffet level genius in business. ..."
"... There's a documentary about Wal-Mart that has the best title ever: The High Cost of Low Cost ..."
"... Globalism killed the American dream. We can buy cheap goods made somewhere else if we have a job here that pays us enough money. ..."
You can't just move to American cities to pursue opportunity; even the high wages paid in
New York are rendered unhelpful because the cost of housing is so high.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was vilified and ultimately murdered when he was helping organize
a Poor People's Campaign. Racial justice means economic justice.
A lot of mega wealthy people are cheats. They get insider info, they don't pay people and
do all they can to provide the least amount of value possible while tricking suckers into
buying their crap. Don't even get me started on trust fund brats who come out of the womb
thinking they are Warren buffet level genius in business.
Nailed it. As a millennial, I'm sick of being told to just "deal with it" when the cards
have always been stacked against me. Am I surviving? Yes. Am I thriving? No.
When the reserve status of the American dollar goes away, then it will become apparent how
poor the US really is. You cannot maintain a country without retention of the ability to
manufacture the articles you use on a daily basis. The military budget and all the jobs it
brings will have to shrink catastrophically.
...and sometimes you CAN'T afford to move. You can't find a decent job. You certainly
can't build a meaningful savings. You can't find an apartment. And if you have kids? That
makes it even harder. I've been trying to move for years, but the conditions have to be
perfect to do it responsibly. The American Dream died for me once I realized that no matter
the choices I made, my four years of college, my years of saving and working hard....I do NOT
have upward mobility. For me, the American Dream is dead. I've been finding a new dream. The
human dream.
This is a very truncated view. You need to expand your thinking. WHY has the system been
so overtly corrupted? It's globalism that has pushed all this economic pressure on the
millennials and the middle class. It was the elites, working with corrupt politicians, that
rigged the game so the law benefited them.
This is all reversible. History shows that capitalism can be properly regulated in a way
that benefits all. The answer to the problem is to bring back those rules, not implement
socialism.
Trump has:
- Ended the free trade deals
- Imposed Protective tarriffs to defend American jobs and workers
- Lowered corporate taxes to incentivize business to locate within us borders.
- Limited immigration to reduce the supply of low skilled labor within US borders.
The result? before COVID hit the average American worker saw the first inflation adjusted
wage increase in over 30 years!
This is why the fake news and hollywood continue to propagandize the masses into hating
Trump.
Trump is implementing economic policies good for the people and bad for the elites
Krystal Ball exposes the delusion of the American dream.
About Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of
morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show
leans into the day's political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can
predict what is going to happen.
It also sets the day's political agenda by breaking exclusive
news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the
country's most important political newsmakers.
Got my degree just as the great recession hit. Couldn't find real work for 3 years, not
using my degree... But it was work. now after 8 years, im laid off. I did everything "right".
do good in school, go to college, get a job...
I've never been fired in my life. its always,
"Your contract is up" "Sorry we cant afford to keep you", "You can make more money collecting!
but we'll give a recommendation if you find anything."
Now I'm back where i started... only
now I have new house and a family to support... no pressure.
"The gig economy is just a way for corporations to cut the cost of employees, by turning them into subcontractors. They blur
the line between employee and subcontractors by having tight rules like an employer, and since most people have a employee
mentality, the company nurtures the idea that they somehow are more like employees, then they get mostly good workers, working
hard for very little compensation. The Gig economy is just another sign of our failing way of life."
Notable quotes:
"... The gig economy would be great if we lived in a society where health care is free, food is cheap, housing is common, and nobody suffers from economic Issues Which is not what we are living in ..."
"... Neo-liberals - we support freedom and stuff. Removes mask Is actually corporation lapdogs. ..."
Unlike most developments in the employment market, the Gig Economy has received a great deal
of press attention and established itself firmly as a point of reference in the popular
consciousness. In recent years, increasing numbers of people have turned to services such as
Uber, Lyft, Deliveroo, Just Eat, TaskRabbit and Fiverr as either a side hustle or their main
source of income.
Following on from my video on neoliberalism and neoliberal capitalism, in today's episode of
What the Theory?, we look deeper into how the gig economy (or sharing economy) works and what
differentiates it from the rest of the economy. We ask whether the gig economy is truly an
opportunity for those wanting a more flexible work arrangement or whether it is simply a means
for multinational corporations to circumvent hard-won workers rights and labour laws.
Finally, we also consider whether there might be some historical precedents to the sharing
economy in the early industrial period and look at some of the challenges facing those
attempting to organise Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers and other gig economy workers into trade
unions in order to negotiate for better rates of pay and conditions.
Unregulated capitalism? You mean like child labor and passing the hat when a worker dies
in an accident? They don't want workers. They want people who are desperate.
Well, how far it all goes is something that remains to be seen. I don't think we'll get as
far as child labour but the curation of dependence is something that's definitely in
progress.
Daxton Lyon except the majority of entrepreneurs and business owners didn't come Into
their business ownership via merit. You are forgetting that most of these people are born
into a situation where they have access to capital, access to legal services and education.
Sure there are a minority of people who make it from nothing but that number is diminishingly
small.
Daxton Lyon "You don't like the gig? Do something else." Too bad the economy is currently
setup to where around half of individuals are limited to gig and don't have the resources and
money to do anything else.
Daxton Lyon "If any of you did, your panzy responses regarding corporate greed would be
squashed!" No, they wouldn't, but keep performing those red herrings and hasty,
extremely-worshipping generalizations about entrepreneurship to distract from the point; I'm
sure they'll catch on.
The gig economy would be great if we lived in a society where health care is free, food is
cheap, housing is common, and nobody suffers from economic Issues Which is not what we are
living in
Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge
By KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR – Los Angeles Times
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on
George Floyd's neck while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?
If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your
head at the cruel injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed,
maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%!
again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as
he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn't for that video
emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis
cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the
cop on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked
calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming
the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black
Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a
white student. Because you realize it's not just a supposed "black criminal" who is
targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the
cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations
with raised fists? If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social
distancing." Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that
just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger
saying, "That's putting the cause backward."
You're not wrong -- but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the
institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though
we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness -- write
articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on
CNN, support candidates who promise change -- the needle hardly budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a
significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch
helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting .
Bert Schlitz , May 31, 2020 7:14 pm
The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year. Considering 370 whites over
100 Latinos were killed by cops, many as bad as that guy in minnie. Blacks have a Trumptard
mentality. We have a ecological disaster, a economic disaster and pandemic(when th they are
spreading). Yet let's whine about one bad cop related homicide.
This may begin the breakup of the Democratic party and the blacks. The differences are just
to large.
Kaleberg , May 31, 2020 9:40 pm
It's rather sad that it takes a massive civil disturbance to get the authorities to arrest a
man videotaped killing another. You'd think that would just happen as a matter of course, but
that's how it works in this country.
THE WAY BACK -- THE ONLY WAY BACK -- BOTH ECONOMICALLY AND POLITICALLY (pardon me if I take
up a lot of space -- almost everyone else has said most of what they want to say)
The minimum wage itself should only mark the highest wage that we presume firms with highest
labor costs can pay* -- like fast food with 25% labor costs. Lower labor cost businesses --
e.g., retail like Walgreens and Target with 10-15% labor costs can potentially pay north of
$20/hr; Walmart with 7% labor costs, $25/hr!
That kind of income can only be squeezed out of the consumer market (meaning out of the
consumer) by labor union bargaining.
Raise fast food wages from $10/hr to $15/hr and prices go up only a doable 12.5%. Raise
Walgreens, Target from $10/hr to $20/hr and prices there only go up a piddling 6.25%. Keeping
the math easy here -- I know that Walgreens and Target pay more to start but that only
reinforces my argument about how much labor income is being left on the (missing) bargaining
table.
Hook up Walmart with 7% labor costs with the Teamsters Union and the wage and benefit sky
might be the limit! Don't forget (everybody seems to) that as more income shifts to lower wage
workers, more demand starts to come from lower wage workers -- reinforcing their job security
as they spend more proportionately at lower wage firms (does not work for low wage employees of
high end restaurants -- the exception that actually proves the rule).
Add in sector wide labor agreements and watch Germany appear on this side of the Atlantic
overnight.
* * * * * *
If Republicans held the House in the last (115th) Congress they would have passed
HR2723-Employee Rights Act -- mandating new union recertification/decertification paper ballots
in any bargaining unit that has had experienced "turnover, expansion, or alteration by merger
of unit represented employees exceeding 50 percent of the bargaining unit" by the date of the
enactment -- and for all time from thereafter. Trump would have signed it and virtually every
union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining
unit. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text
Democrats can make the most obvious point about what was lacking in the Republican bill by
pretending to be for a cert/recert bill that mandates union ballots only at places where there
is no union now. Republicans jumping up and down can scream the point for us that there is no
reason to have ballots in non union places and not in unionized workplaces -- and vice
versa.
* * * * * *
Biggest problem advocating the vastly attractive and all healing proposal of federally
mandated cert/recert/decert elections seems to be that nobody will discuss it as long as nobody
else discusses it -- some kind of innate social behavior I think, from deep in our (pea sized)
midbrains. How else can you explain the perfect pitch's neglect. I suspect that if I waved a
$100 bill in front of a bunch of progressives and offered it to the first one would say the
words out loud: "Regularly scheduled union elections are the only way to restore shared
prosperity and political fairness to America", that I might not get one taker. FWIW.
Another big problem when I try to talk to workers about this on the street -- just to get a
reaction -- is that more than half have no idea in the world what unions are all about. Those
who do understand, think the idea so sensible they often think action must be pending.
econ101 should tell you that the eitc is a subsidy to the corporations that hire droves of
low-paid workers, with meagre spillover to the workers themselves. More effective and
persistent improvements to social justice would come from significant increases to the minimum
wage, societal support to unionization, and other efforts to increase the threshold of what is
considered by society to be the bare minimum of compensation for work.
The concomitant decline in the value of the dollar and the terms of trade would be small
compared to the reduction in inequality.
Bernard , June 1, 2020 5:21 pm
such a third world country as America , riots are the only way to get heard for some. the
Elite have been looting us blind for decades, the Covid bail outs to Corporations by the Elites
in DC as the latest installment of Capitalist theft know as Business as Usual.
it's all about the money.
sick,sick country praising capitalism over everything else.
the comfortable white people are afraid of losing what they have. Divide and Conquer is the
Republican and now Democratic way they run America.
to the rich go the spoils. the rest, well. screw them .
the Lee Atwater idea to use coded language when St. Reagan implemented the destruction of
America society, coincided with St. Thatcher's destruction of England.
the White elites post Civil War in the South knew how to divide the poor whites and the poor
blacks.
that is how we got to where we are now.
Did you see any of the bankers go to jail for the 2008 ripoff?
not one and they got bonuses for their "deeds."
America, such a nation of Grifters, Thieves and Scam artist. like Pelosi , McConnel and all
the people in DC and the Business men who sold out our country and the American people for
"small change".
God forbid Corporations should ever have to pay for the damage they have done to America and
its" people. My RIGHT to Greed trumps your right to clean air, water, safe neighborhoods, says
Capitalism!
the Rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Everybody Knows!!!
But let's not focus on things lest some uncomfortable truths.
Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe's lots in numbers
not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to sub-contractors, otherwise known
as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to these employees without benefits; Engineering
Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits; Landscapers' workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors;
Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a 'Labor Contractor' come in from the
Central Valley to build condos; the white Contractor for the project didn't have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2.
Recall watching, sometime in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully
proclaiming to the TV audience:
American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory employees, are all
going to have to work for less
All this subcontracting, independent contractors, was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and benefits, to enhance
profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top. Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990,
Microsoft could hire programmers from India for one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates' fortune was resultant
these labor savings; the other half was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, some City and State Governments
began subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants) providing
the programmers, held the programmers' passports/visas for security.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to
nothing; the independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.
By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in 2007 to be followed
by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker benefits,
These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage of Food
Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn't have a real job before; they were gig-workers;
they can't apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers;
they don't have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent
contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent
contractors. All of these are scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims;
scams, in a race to the bottom.
Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think those states strayed?
It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either
-- UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs
in the slowly boiling pot).
In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt. Obama beat Wall Street
Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody told these voters -- because nobody seems to
remember -- what they really needed. These voter just knew by 2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere
-- anywhere else!
Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and sweetly. What do you think?
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:04 pm
Denis
Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?
SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don't want to go there just now.
Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so anti-union? I think this stuff
is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew when it comes to stuff our parents 'taught' us. MLK was
the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have
lifted them up. They did seem to take pleasure in the yanks' loss of jobs.
I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee look at me go. No doubt,
Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise probably lay with automation and the early offshoring
to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously
employed 5,000, now automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation's wealth was still derived
from car production.
Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the 'middle-class' without realizing it was
the 'disappearing middle-class'. They ignored the poor working-class vote and lost election after election.
I've come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much diminished, I think thought
all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing, there is no parity between workers and wealth; we
are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly go to the top.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:15 pm
Matthew – thanks for your comment
I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as probably those poor
souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms with what is going on.
I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to protect themselves and their
class.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 1:21 pm
EMichael, thanks for the comment
Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.
Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:
Descartes' problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his religion, Catholicism.
Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz
can't step out of this text. All things being possible, it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today's economic
problems that would fit within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.
We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today's problems from within their own dogmas/ideologies. Even if they
can't, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in the desperate hope they might work if only applied to
a greater degree. How else explain any belief that markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best
respond to housing demand?
Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less effective at providing
public goods.
7:50 AM · May 31, 2020
The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state -- racism -- had a big impact
on my own thinking 2/
For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic ends by weaponizing
white racism was treated as "shrill" and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/
Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Abstract
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that
redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps
because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors
appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity
in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately
black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally
limited the political power of the poor.
rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:07 pm
This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When I was a sprat, job shoppers
got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job
shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers; and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated uberization software
eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past, we will all need to enlist unionization and
government wage standards to protect us.
ken melvin , May 31, 2020 2:29 pm
Rick
The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of computers w/ software.
One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn't need any draftsman.
rick shapiro , May 31, 2020 2:40 pm
I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and came back as lower
paid contract employees.
Trump's threat
to deploy the military here is an excessive and dangerous one. Mark Perry reports on the reaction
from military officers to the president's threat:
Senior military officer on Trump statement: "So we're going to tell our soldiers that we're
redeploying them from the Middle East to the midwest? What do we think they're going to say,
'yeah, sure, no problem?' Guess again."
Earlier in the day yesterday, audio has leaked in which the Secretary of Defense
referred to U.S. cities as the "battlespace." Separately, Sen. Tom Cotton was
making vile remarks about using the military to give "no quarter" to looters. This is the
language of militarism.
It is a consequence of decades of endless war and the government's
tendency to rely on militarized options as their answer for every problem. Endless war has had a
deeply corrosive effect on this country's political system: presidential overreach, the
normalization of illegal uses of force, a lack of legal accountability for crimes committed in
the wars, and a lack of political accountability for the leaders that continue to wage pointless
and illegal wars. Now we see new abuses committed and encouraged by a lawless president, but this
time it is Americans that are on the receiving end. Trump hasn't ended any of the foreign wars he
inherited, and now it seems that he will use the military in an llegal mission here at home.
The military is the only American institution that young people still have any real degree of
faith in, it will be interesting to see the polls when this is all over with.
"... our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. ..."
"... The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places ..."
"... You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces. ..."
"... So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion. ..."
Dr. Cornel West said on Friday we are witnessing the failed social experiment that is
the United States of America in the protests and riots that have followed the death of George
Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. West told CNN host Anderson Cooper that what is going
on is rebellion to a failed capitalist economy that does not protect the people. West, a
professor, denounced the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is all about "black faces
in high places" but not actual change. The professor remarked even those black faces often lose
legitimacy because they ingriatiate themselves into the establishment neo-liberal Democratic
party.
"I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment," West said. "What I mean
by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been
looking at America's failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a
way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, it's criminal justice system, it's
legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties."
From commentary delivered on CNN Friday night:
DR. CORNEL WEST: And now our culture so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for
sale, you can't deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for
purpose.
So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different
levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that...
The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces in high places. Too often our
black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist
economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the
market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that
means so much to so many fellow citizens.
And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn't care for
the most part. You've got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the
driver's seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don't know what to do
because all they want to do is show more black faces -- show more black faces.
But often
times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement
emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security
[Secretary] and they couldn't deliver.
So when you talk about the masses of black people, the
precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they're the
ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get
rebellion.
Organized crime in the USA is not a myth and its connections to law enforcement also is not a
myth. They are ideal provocateurs for riots. Also they want their piece of action too ;-)
There is increasing evidence that certain gangs and other nefarious outside agitators are
engaged in deliberate property damage and vandalism during the recent protests against police
brutality--demonstrating that they are trying to hijack these protests and are not sincerely
concerned about the issue of racism against African Americans/minorities in the US or police
repression.
I wonder if William Barr or the American Regime will now finally declare these groups as
"terrorists"?
Police at Protests All Over the Country Caught Destroying Property
It is my informal observation that riots tend to collapse from exhaustion after about three
days. That's not happening this time, as every new day sees more and more house arrest orders
(called "curfew", a nice antiseptic term) across the country.
Current events bring to mind the 1933 failed fascist coup d'etat exposed by General
Smedley "War is a Racket" Butler. Instead of organizing half a million war veterans by the
VFW, today's "Business
Plot" organizers would have at their disposal one million already trained and equipped
paramilitary police forces.
In such a scenario there is no reason for local cops to know who is pulling strings; all
they have to do is follow orders, which they are more than willing to do, especially with
commanders giving them football-style pep talks before going out to break heads.
It's well-documented that the spooks have been trying to get rid of Trump since the
election, first with "Russia-gate", then arresting and/or driving out all his trusted staff,
then the impeachment. Why should anyone think the spooks have given up? How many times did
they try to kill Castro?
If the idea that a spook-led coup d'etat is in progress really has merit (I have "medium
confidence"), it will be enforced by the police, not the Army or even National Guard units.
So far, Guard units have not fired on protesters and many are not armed. I strongly suspect
the army is not reliable, and
commanders know it :
In Denver, Guard troops are carrying nonlethal weapons, including batons, tasers, and
pepper spray. "They were fully embedded with Denver PD," said Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael
Loh, Colorado's adjutant general. "The Denver police chief Paul Pazen said if we have to
use deadly force and I want my police officers to do it , and I want you to be in
support."
National Guard are recruited with boatloads of TV ads all promoting how Guardsmen are used
to help their neighbors during natural disasters. Those ads never feature Guardsmen facing
down or shooting angry protesters, and Guardsmen want to believe they are there "to help".
The police, however, are under no such illusions and affirm their willingness to kill
civilians every time they strap on their side-arm.
If Guardsmen get itchy trigger fingers and shoot civilians without orders, well that just
happens sometimes, not a big deal. But if commanders give the order to shoot and they don't,
that is a huge crisis which I assume commanders would want to avoid.
During this attempt [to put Floyd in the patrolcar], at 20:19, Mr Chauvin pulled Mr Floyd
out of the passenger side, causing him to fall to the ground, the report said.
He lay there, face down, still in handcuffs.
This suggests he was pulled out of the car by Chauvin for the express purpose of
killing him. His cool demeanor is striking. He knows he is openly killing Floyd while being
filmed but remains confident he is protected.
Two goons who work at a fancy nightclub (aka Mob Headquarters) and one ends up dead.
Smells like a mob hit; ordered and paid for by who is the right question.
This report, combined with the fact that Derek Chauvin knew and worked with the victim,
makes this homicide premeditated or at the very least a 2nd degree murder.
The fact that the other officers did not intervene makes them complicit in the act and
should be brought up on manslaughter charges and accessory to commit murder.
Charging the other officers will help slightly in tamping down the riots, although it may
be too late. The wheels have been placed in motion and this is morphing into something bigger
than George Floyd.
First responders immediately examine the victim for any signs of life, and they come
prepared with equipment to resuscitate the victim if possible. Not these men.
They got out of the ambulance and moved in fast, picked up his body like it was a huge
sack of potatoes, and THREW him on to the gurney. Obviously, they knew that he was dead, knew
that he was supposed to be dead.
They were NOT first responders in any sense, but openly armed and uniformed policemen.
It's True how this
analysis sees and describes what's occurring within the Outlaw US Empire, more than
validating Cornel West's assessment, except it misses the major component--Class--while
seeing lizard's list:
"As the world watches the US being confronted with massive riots, looting, chaos and
heightened violence, US officials, instead of reflecting on the systematic problems in their
society that led to such a crisis, have returned to their old 'blame game' against
left-wingers, 'fake news' media and 'external forces....'
"[O]bservers see a weak, irresponsible and incompetent leadership navigating the country
into a completely opposite direction, with all-out efforts to deflect public attention from
its own failure.
"Mass protests erupted in a growing numbers of cities in the US over the weekend, and at
least 40 cities have imposed curfews, while the National Guard has been activated in 14
states and Washington DC, according to US media reports ... [P]rotests across the country
continued into a sixth straight night.
"More Americans have slammed the US president for inciting hatred and racism, and US
officials, who turn a blind eye to the deep-seated issues in American society, including
racial injustice, economic woes and the coronavirus pandemic, began shifting the blame to the
former US president, extremists, and China for inflaming the social unrests."
Blaming Chinese, Russians and/or Martians isn't going to help Trump. Without doing a
thing, Biden has risen to a lead of 8-10% in the most recent polling. Trumps many mistakes
have dug him a hole that now seems to be collapsing in upon him. He's cursed worse than Midas
as everything he attempts turns out a big negative and only worsens the situation.
For example if you take a marxian definition of l class, it means people who don't own the
means of production, that easily means the bottom 80% of the population. However a large
part of this group is usually considered middle class, and is not really seen as
oppressed.
I don't think this is right; unlike 'exploited', Marx doesn't use the word 'oppression' in
any technical or unusual way, just in it's usual sense.
So a prosperous middle class person in a liberal democracy is not oppressed. A Marxist
would merely point out that they would be in a more capitalist society; one without a
universal franchise that requires the rich to seek political allies.
people of the working class don't feel they are working class, but rather identify as
blue collars
If you look into the actual details of vote tallies; you find more or less the precise
opposite. There are a key block of people who, objectively speaking, earn most of their
income from stocks that they own, in the form of pension funds. Up until recently, this block
was the victim of false consciousness; they identified as something like 'blue collar', based
on the jobs they used to do, and the communities they they used to belong to. As of the last
few elections, political activity by the Republicans and Tories has managed to overcome that,
so they now vote based on their objective class interests. Those who rely on a small lump of
capital have mostly the same class interests as those in possession of more; fewer
environmental regulations, lower minimum wages, and so forth.
Meanwhile, most of the current working class don't get to vote, because they lack
citizenship in the countries in question.
I think this relevant to how fractured the discourse is. it's a repost from my litter
watering hole.
I know it's going to be difficult to accept what I'm about to say because people get very
invested in their chosen narratives, but it's important that you at least be exposed to the
notion that it's all true.
It's true that people engaged in peaceful protests.
It's true that people engaged in lawless looting.
It's true that provocateurs have committed acts of vandalism and sometimes carry
umbrellas.
It's true that Antifa exists and that they don't advocate gently placing flowers in the
gaping hole of a long gun.
It's true that some very messed up militia minded people call themselves Boogaloo Bois, wear
Hawaiian shirts, and are showing up to add their brand of crazy to the mix.
It's true looters come in all shades and sizes.
It's true some desperate people are taking things they need.
It's true some opportunistic people are taking things they want.
It's true opportunistic government thugs suddenly shifted the Covid-19 rationale for using
contract tracing to a catch-them-rioters rationale for using contract tracing.
It's true the policy infrastructure for enacting martial law has been a long-term,
bi-partisan project.
It's true that now is the time to realize what's at stake, but instead of acting
collectively for our mutual benefit, the cognitive challenge of accepting that all these things
can be true at the same time will keep us tied to one of these things to the exclusion of all
the others.
It's hard work, I know. But I have faith in you.
Posted by b on June 1, 2020 at 16:08 UTC | Permalink
"... As we detailed last night, what's happening to America right now : rioting, looting, pillaging, Americans fighting other Americans and while the media is spinning self-serving narratives that frame the bad guy as Trump, or China, or Russia, or this political party, or that, or some social movement , hides the truth that the culprit behind the upcoming collapse of the US is just one thing, the same one that Thomas Jefferson warned the brand new nation about more than two centuries ago : ..."
"... "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The issuing power of currency shall be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. ..."
"... While we focus on events that fill our media streams, it is worth remembering Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Manuel Diez, Kimini Gray, and Michael Brown. These events, and many others throughout history, show civil unrest has deeper roots. Pew Research made a note of this in 2017: ..."
"... "The U.S. economy is in much better shape now than it was in the aftermath of the Great Recession. It cost millions of Americans, their homes, and jobs. It led him to push through a roughly $800 billion stimulus package as one of his first business orders. Since then, unemployment has plummeted from 10% in late 2009 to below 5% today, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled. ..."
"... "The one lesson that we have clearly learned since the 2008 "Great Financial Crisis," is that monetary and fiscal policy interventions do not lead to increased levels of economic wealth or prosperity. What these programs have done, is act as a wealth transfer system from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. ..."
"... "The rise in debt, which in the last decade was used primarily to fill the gap between incomes and the cost of living, has contributed to the retardation of economic growth." ..."
"... 50% of American workers did not have the ability to tap additional "savings" to offset financial hardships during the pandemic. ..."
"... It's no wonder they are in the streets rioting. ..."
"... The lack of economic improvement is clearly evident across all demographic classes. However, it has been the very policies of the Federal Reserve which created a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich. The ongoing interventions by the Federal Reserve propelled asset prices higher, but left the majority of American families behind. ..."
As we detailed last night, what's happening to America right now : rioting, looting,
pillaging, Americans fighting other Americans and while the media is spinning self-serving
narratives that frame the bad guy as Trump, or China, or Russia, or this political party, or
that, or some social movement , hides the truth that the culprit behind the upcoming collapse
of the US is just one thing, the same one that Thomas Jefferson warned the brand new nation
about more than two centuries ago :
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing
armies. The issuing power of currency shall be taken from the banks and restored to the
people, to whom it properly belongs.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency,
first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around
them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the
continent their Fathers conquered."
And as RealInvestmentAdvice.com's
Lance Roberts notes, while the murder of George Floyd was both unjust and tragic, his death
was the catalyst that lit a powder keg of dissension, which has simmered beneath the headlines
for over a decade.
While we focus on events that fill our media streams, it is worth remembering Oscar Grant,
Trayvon Martin, Manuel Diez, Kimini Gray, and Michael Brown. These events, and many others
throughout history, show civil unrest has deeper roots. Pew
Research made a note of this in 2017:
"The U.S. economy is in much better shape now than it was in the aftermath of the Great
Recession. It cost millions of Americans, their homes, and jobs. It led him to push through a
roughly $800 billion stimulus package as one of his first business orders. Since then,
unemployment has plummeted from 10% in late 2009 to below 5% today, and the Dow Jones
Industrial Average has more than doubled.
But by some measures, the country faces serious economic challenges: A steady hollowing of
the middle class and income inequality reached its highest point since 1928."
Look at the faces of those rioting. They are of every race, religion, and creed. What they
all have in common is they are of the demographic most impacted by the current economic
recession. Job losses, income destruction, financial pressures, and debt create tension in the
system until it explodes.
It has been the same in every economy throughout history. While the rich eat cake, the rest
beg on street corners for scraps. Eventually, those most disenfranchised and oppressed storm
the castle walls with "pitchforks and torches."
"As the coronavirus pandemic continues to pummel the economy, many Americans are
decreasing their retirement contributions, but some are raiding their retirement accounts to
pay for essentials. A new survey found 3-in-10 Americans dipped into the funds meant for
their golden years -- and the majority of those who have done so spent their nest egg on
groceries."
America was not prepared financially for the downturn caused by the pandemic. They are
angry, financially stressed, and the visible face of their ire has become Wall Street and the
Fed.
Since the "Financial Crisis," the role of the Federal Reserve shifted from its dual mandate
of "full employment" and "price stability" to a seeming inclusion of a "third mandate"
supporting consumer confidence via the inflation of asset prices. As Ben Bernanke stated in
2010:
"This approach eased financial conditions in the past and, so far, looks to be effective
again. Stock prices rose, and long-term interest rates fell when investors began to
anticipate the most recent action.
Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage
rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower
corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer
wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending."
Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.
Unintended Consequences
As with all things, there are always the unintended consequences which follow. For the vast
majority of Americans:
Housing did not become more affordable.
Wall Street bought massive numbers of homes at distressed prices and went into the
landlord business, which led to a rise in home prices.
Many Americans, still recovering from the "Financial Crisis" were unable to obtain
financing.
For many others, affordability due to suppressed wage growth was the issue.
Lower corporate bond rates didn't lead to more investment, but rather increased share
repurchases which benefited "C-Suite" executives at the expense of the working class.
Instead, as discussed previously, the Fed's policies led to a growing divergence between the
stock market and the economy.
To wit:
"The one lesson that we have clearly learned since the 2008 "Great Financial Crisis," is
that monetary and fiscal policy interventions do not lead to increased levels of economic
wealth or prosperity. What these programs have done, is act as a wealth transfer system from
the bottom 90% to the top 10%.
Since 2008 there have been rising calls for socialistic policies such as universal basic
incomes, increased social welfare, and even a two-time candidate for President who was a
self-admitted socialist.
Such things would not occur if "prosperity" was flourishing within the economy. "
This is simply because the stock market is not the economy.
Stocks Are Not The
Economy
The Fed's interventions and suppressed interest rates have continued to have the opposite
effect of which was intended. I have shown the following chart below
previously to illustrate this point.
From Jan 1st, 2009 through the end of March, the stock market rose by an astounding 159%, or
roughly 14% annualized. With such a large gain in the financial markets, one would expect a
commensurate growth rate in the economy.
After 3-massive Federal Reserve driven "Quantitative Easing" programs, a maturity extension
program, bailouts of TARP, TGLP, TGLF, etc., HAMP, HARP, direct bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG,
GM, bank supports, etc., all of which totaled more than $33 Trillion, cumulative real economic
growth was just 5.48%.
While monetary interventions are supposed to be supporting economic growth through increases
in consumer confidence, the outcome has been quite different.
Low, to zero, interest rates have incentivized non-productive debt, and exacerbated the
wealth gap. The massive increases in debt has actually harmed growth by diverting consumptive
spending to debt service.
"The rise in debt, which in the last decade was used primarily to fill the gap between
incomes and the cost of living, has contributed to the retardation of economic growth."
Financial Shortcomings
The recent economic downtown caused by the pandemic has once again exposed the financial
weakness that plagues the broader economy. The report by MagnifyMoney shows nearly 50% of
Americans made changes to their plans within the first month of the pandemic for basic
necessities.
What this tells you is that individuals could not survive more than ONE MONTH before tapping
retirement savings. But what about the 50-60% of individuals that didn't have a plan to start
with?
"A 2018 report from the non-profit National Institute
on Retirement Security which found that nearly 60% of all working-age Americans do not
own assets in a retirement account."
Here are some findings from that report:
Account ownership rates are closely correlated with income and wealth. More than 100
million working-age individuals (57 percent) do not own any retirement account assets,
whether in an employer-sponsored 401(k)-type plan or an IRA nor are they covered by defined
benefit ( DB )
pensions.
The typical working-age American has no retirement savings. When all working individuals
are included -- not just individuals with retirement accounts -- the median retirement
account balance is $0 among all working individuals. Even among workers who have accumulated
savings in retirement accounts, the typical worker had a modest account balance of
$40,000.
Three-fourths (77 percent) of Americans fall short of conservative retirement savings
targets for their age and income based on working until age 67 even after counting an
individual's entire net worth -- a generous measure of retirement savings.
Read those finding again.
If we use a more optimistic number of 50%, then 50% of American workers did not have the
ability to tap additional "savings" to offset financial hardships during the pandemic.
It's no wonder they are in the streets rioting.
Only The Few
While the "savings rate" suggests that individuals are "hoarding money" due to the downturn,
the reality is quite different. If American's had savings they would not be tapping into 401k
plans and begging for checks. However, Deutsche Bank recently showed the savings rate for 90%
of Americans is negative.
This is far different than the Governmental statistics suggesting the average American is
saving 33% of their income.
In actuality, if you aren't in the "Top 20%" of income earners, you probably aren't saving
much, if any, money.
The problem for the Fed is their own policies are what created the "wealth gap" to begin
with. As noted by the WSJ.
"As of December 2019 -- before
the shutdowns -- households in the bottom 20% of incomes had seen their financial assets,
such as money in the bank, stock and bond investments or retirement funds, fall by 34% since
the end of the 2007-09 recession , according to Fed data adjusted for inflation. Those in the
middle of the income distribution have seen just 4% growth." – WSJ
This isn't surprising. A recent research report by BCA confirms one of the causes of the
rising wealth gap in the U.S. The top-10% of income earners owns 88% of the stock market, while
the bottom-90% owns just 12%.
The Fed Did It
The lack of economic improvement is clearly evident across all demographic classes. However,
it has been the very policies of the Federal Reserve which created a wealth transfer mechanism
from the poor to the rich. The ongoing interventions by the Federal Reserve propelled asset
prices higher, but left the majority of American families behind.
The problem is the Fed has become trapped by its policies, and consequently, started taking
direction from Wall Street. Such has led the Federal Reserve to become a "hostage" of its own
making.
If the Fed removes any monetary accommodation, the market declines. The Fed is forced to
subsequently increase support for the financial markets, which exacerbates the wealth gap.
It's a virtual spiral from which the Fed can not extricate itself. It's a great system if
you are rich and have money invested. Not so much if you are any one else.
As we are witnessing, the United States is not immune to social disruptions. The source of
these problems is compounding due to the public's failure to appreciate "why" it is
happening. Eventually, as has repeatedly occurred throughout history, the riots will turn their focus
toward those in power.
@mark green It is interesting how both sides think they know the other side. Liberals
think that Deplorables are redneck Nascar people with zero education. Rightists think the
left are deluded commie pinkos, radical queers and pink pussy hatted idiots.
To help with your education I have protested the death of George Floyd in Cincinnati for
two days. The protests were mostly young persons and half were white. About two thousand were
in our park yesterday to hear speeches. The speeches were about systemic social change. An
end to vulture capitalism which has caused most of the problems associated with extreme
income inequity.
Also, an end to the endless insane wars fought for profit and American hegemony in places
we do not belong. No one is horrified at the violence, we are surprised it did not begin
sooner. Desperate people act in desperate ways. The system needs to change.
"... It's also true that the oligarchy will continue to preserve the system it's created in the U.S. through all available means, using its militarized police forces as its loyal street level enforcers. Change would happen very quickly if enough police turned and join with the "mobs". ..."
I think this relevant to how fractured the discourse is. it's a repost from my litter
watering hole.
I know it's going to be difficult to accept what I'm about to say because people get very
invested in their chosen narratives, but it's important that you at least be exposed to the
notion that it's all true.
It's true that people engaged in peaceful protests.
It's true that people engaged in lawless looting.
It's true that provocateurs have committed acts of vandalism and sometimes carry
umbrellas.
It's true that Antifa exists and that they don't advocate gently placing flowers in the
gaping hole of a long gun.
It's true that some very messed up militia minded people call themselves Boogaloo Bois, wear
Hawaiian shirts, and are showing up to add their brand of crazy to the mix.
It's true looters come in all shades and sizes.
It's true some desperate people are taking things they need.
It's true some opportunistic people are taking things they want.
It's true opportunistic government thugs suddenly shifted the Covid-19 rationale for using
contract tracing to a catch-them-rioters rationale for using contract tracing.
It's true the policy infrastructure for enacting martial law has been a long-term,
bi-partisan project.
It's true that now is the time to realize what's at stake, but instead of acting
collectively for our mutual benefit, the cognitive challenge of accepting that all these things
can be true at the same time will keep us tied to one of these things to the exclusion of all
the others.
It's hard work, I know. But I have faith in you.
Posted by b on June 1, 2020 at 16:08 UTC | Permalink
this analysis sees and
describes what's occurring within the Outlaw US Empire, more than validating Cornel West's assessment, except it misses
the major component--Class--while seeing lizard's list:
"As the world watches the US being confronted with massive
riots, looting, chaos and heightened violence, US officials, instead of reflecting on the systematic problems in their
society that led to such a crisis, have returned to their old 'blame game' against left-wingers, 'fake news' media and
'external forces....'
"[O]bservers see a weak, irresponsible and incompetent leadership navigating the country into a completely opposite
direction, with all-out efforts to deflect public attention from its own failure.
"Mass protests erupted in a growing numbers of cities in the US over the weekend, and at least 40 cities have imposed
curfews, while the National Guard has been activated in 14 states and Washington DC, according to US media reports ... [P]rotests
across the country continued into a sixth straight night.
"More Americans have slammed the US president for inciting hatred and racism, and US officials, who turn a blind eye
to the deep-seated issues in American society, including racial injustice, economic woes and the coronavirus pandemic,
began shifting the blame to the former US president, extremists, and China for inflaming the social unrests."
Blaming Chinese, Russians and/or Martians isn't going to help Trump. Without doing a thing, Biden has risen to a lead
of 8-10% in the most recent polling. Trumps many mistakes have dug him a hole that now seems to be collapsing in upon
him. He's cursed worse than Midas as everything he attempts turns out a big negative and only worsens the situation.
It's also true that the oligarchy will continue to preserve the system it's created in the U.S. through all
available means, using its militarized police forces as its loyal street level enforcers. Change would happen very
quickly if enough police turned and join with the "mobs". Otherwise any positive change in the prevailing structure
will be extremely incremental if at all, and will be resisted at every level until it collapses because there is nothing
left worth to exploit.
Imho the present protests, social 'unrest,' in the USA will just die out as usual, nothing will be accomplished -
what are the politcal demands? zero.. - on to the next chapter of misery and oppression.
Posted by: Noirette | Jun 1 2020 17:26 utc | 19
Indeed, and there was no other goal by stirring up these protest to the public murder of Floyd in plain daylight,
after decades of deideologization of the US masses by brainwashing through US education system, TV, Hollywood, and so
on.
Provocate the poor masses to find no way than to emotionally revolt through a brute action broadcasted to the four
corners of the US through the media, to then show the rightful protesters as disorganized anarchist riotters without any
vison or idea ( with unestimable help by white supremacists and cops infiltrated, and even by rich blonde boys stealing
surf boards as if there was no tomorrow...)so as to show the middle and upper classes that this will be the aspect of
the country in case socialist policies would be put in practice. This is to appeal once again, and possibly the last
one, to the greedy individualist allegevd "winner" to once more vote against its own interest, as after the elections
all what would not be looted by the poor would be looted by the state. Then it will come the gnashing of teeth and
regrets on not having suppoorted those poor people when they were being murdered in the streets.
But, may be, some would even be grateful of being quirurgically robed by the state ( thorugh their bank accounts and
propieties value going down the hole...) instead of by these obviously majority of needed people....needed at least of
respect....
"Antifa" only shows up and exists when it is needed, then magically disappears; same as Ali Queada and ISIS ...
This!
<> <> <> <> <>
Reposting my earlier comment on the Open Thread:
ZH reports that 6 people have died in the protests. Dozens of protesters and police have been injured. Tens of
millions of dollars in property damage, police overtime, and cost of the likely spread of coronavirus ('second wave' now
being blamed on the protesters).
All because the authorities will not appropriately charge the killers of George Floyd.
Instead, Trump and MSM turn the focus to "antifa". How convenient. MSM says nothing of the killing of 26-year old
Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia weeks before and the attempted cover-up of his killing.
How many more have to die before the authorities act appropriately? How much more destruction and silent spread of
coronavirus?
<> <> <> <> <>
The protesters say that a manslaughter charge against Chauvin is an injustice. Chauvin was a veteran officer who KNEW
WHAT HE WAS DOING when he remained on Floyd for more than 3 minutes after he had become non-responsive.
The protesters say that the other officers are accessories to murder because they did nothing to stop it.
Every reasonable person understands that the protesters have valid points. I would say that there's a consensus
that Chauvin should be charged with Second-degree murder and the other officers charged as accessories. But the
authorities drag their feet - while America burns.
a)refrain from looting and that specifically the the small properties is a stupidity that will backfire
quickly!
b) the demonstrations leaders must organize their own security
squads to prevent provocateurs from outside.
Fm these tasks the 1st one is rather difficult to reach, yes.The second one is much easier.
The nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in, say, Southeast Asian, African,
South American, countries, invariably refer to the tenuous hold on life of their working poor; they don't really have
a job. Each day they rise and go forth looking for work that pays enough that they and their family can continue to
subsist. It is, in some countries, a long-standing problem.
Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe's
lots in numbers not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to
sub-contractors, otherwise known as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to
these employees without benefits; Engineering Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits;
Landscapers' workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors; Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we
saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a 'Labor Contractor' come in from the Central Valley to build condos; the
white Contractor for the project didn't have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2. Recall watching, sometime
in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully proclaiming
to the TV audience:
American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory
employees, are all going to have to work for less
All this subcontracting, independent contractors, was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and
benefits, to enhance profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top.
Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990, Microsoft could hire programmers from India for
one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates' fortune was resultant these labor savings; the other half
was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, some City and State Governments began
subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants)
providing the programmers, held the programmers' passports/visas for security.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to nothing; the
independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.
By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in
2007 to be followed by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker
benefits,
These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage
of Food Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn't have a real job
before; they were gig-workers; they can't apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American
workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers; they don't have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million
American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently
unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent contractors. All of these are
scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims; scams, in a
race to the bottom.
Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think
those states strayed? It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no
idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either -- UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long
that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs in the slowly boiling pot).
In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt.
Obama beat Wall Street Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody
told these voters -- because nobody seems to remember -- what they really needed. These voter just knew by
2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere -- anywhere else!
Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and
sweetly. What do you think?
Matthew young
,
May 31, 2020 10:51 am
Not overnight, but a few days in 1972 when Nixon fouled the defaults and none of us knew how badly at
the time.
Reseting prices takes a long time, it is not magic and Nixon had fouled the precious metals market,
overnight. That and all the commodities market needed a restructure to adapt to our new regime.
Our way out was to export price instability to Asia. My suggestion this time is to think through the
math a bit before we all suddenly freak and do another over nighter. Think about how one might spread the
partial default over a 15 year period.
All of us, stuck with 40 years of flat earth economic planning without a clue. Now we have a year at
best to nail down the Lucas criteria and get a default done with some science behind it.
I doubt it. I figure we will all go to monetary meetup with our insurance contracts ready to be
confirmed. That is impossible and Trump will be stuck doing a volatile, overnight partial default, like
Nixon.,
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 12:02 pm
Dennis,
The states you mentioned have overwhelmingly voted Rep for the last 3 decades in their state races. One
of them has instituted right to work laws, and the other two have come very close to doing the same.
The white working class cares nothing about unions at all. They have been voting against them for
decades. It's why union rights and membership has deteriorated for 5 decades.
run75441
,
May 31, 2020 12:32 pm
EM:
Notably, I had posted the 2016 presidential election numbers numbers for MI, PA, and WI which
resulted in an "anyone but Trump or Clinton vote" and gave th election to Trump. The "anyone but Trump
or Clinton vote" resulted in a historical high for the "others" category and was anywhere from 3 to 6
times higher than previously experienced in other presidential elections. It also resulted in those
three states casting Electoral votes for a Republican presidential candidate since 1992 – MI, 1988 –
PA, and 1988 – WI. While this does defeat your comment above on those states voting Republican, it does
not take away from your other comment on Sarandon. People punished themselves with Trump in spite of
every obvious clue he demonstrated of being a loon. In this case the white working class voted against
themselves for Trump and those of Sarandon's ilk helped them along by voting for "others."
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 12:45 pm
Run, I stated in "state elections".
Y'know one other thing I have seen in MI voting is that the amount of people who voted did not cast a
voted for President also was the highest ever. Thinking these are the same people like Sarandon. It was
close to 90,000 in MI.
"87,810: Number of voters this election who cast a ballot but did not cast a vote for president. That
compares to 49,840 undervotes for president in 2012.
5 percent: Proportion of voters who opted for a third-party candidate in this election, compared to 1
percent in 2012."
Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?
SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don't want to go there just now.
Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so
anti-union? I think this stuff is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew
when it comes to stuff our parents 'taught' us. MLK was the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road
poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have lifted them up. They did
seem to take pleasure in the yanks' loss of jobs.
I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee
look at me go. No doubt, Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise
probably lay with automation and the early offshoring to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing
jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously employed 5,000, now
automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation's wealth was still
derived from car production.
Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the 'middle-class'
without realizing it was the 'disappearing middle-class'. They ignored the poor working-class vote and
lost election after election.
I've come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much
diminished, I think thought all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing,
there is no parity between workers and wealth; we are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly
go to the top.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 1:15 pm
Matthew – thanks for your comment
I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as
probably those poor souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms
with what is going on.
I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to
protect themselves and their class.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 1:21 pm
EMichael, thanks for the comment
Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.
Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:
Descartes' problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his
religion, Catholicism. Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality
of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz can't step out of this text. All things being possible,
it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today's economic problems that would fit
within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.
We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today's problems from within their own
dogmas/ideologies. Even if they can't, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in
the desperate hope they might work if only applied to a greater degree. How else explain any belief that
markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best respond to housing demand?
Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less
effective at providing public goods.
7:50 AM · May 31, 2020
The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn't have a European-style welfare state -- racism
-- had a big impact on my own thinking 2/
For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic
ends by weaponizing white racism was treated as "shrill" and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/
EMichael
,
May 31, 2020 1:53 pm
Ken,
Half the politicians are behind the curve. When George Wallace showed the GOP how to win elections
(Don't ever get outniggerred) the Dem Party failed to see and react to it. Then the Kochs of the world
stepped in with the John Birch society (fromerly the KKK) and started playing race against class, which
resulted in the white working class supporting anti-labor pols and legislation.
The election of Obama caused the racists to go totally off the reservation with the Tea Party (formerly
the KKK and the John Birch Society) and lead us to where we are now.
Of course, the corporate world followed the blueprint.
Way past time for the Dem Party to start attacking on a constant basis the racist GOP. And also to
start appealing more to workers, though the 2016 platform certainly did that to a large degree, and the
2020 platform looks to be mush more supportive of labor than ever.
"It's a detailed and aggressive agenda that includes doubling the minimum wage and tripling funding for
schools with low-income students. He is proposing the most sweeping overhaul of immigration policy in a
generation, the biggest pro-union push in three generations, and the most ambitious environmental agenda
of all time.
If Democrats take back the Senate in the fall, Biden could make his agenda happen. A primary is about
airing disagreements, but legislating is about building consensus. The Democratic Party largely agrees on
a suite of big policy changes that would improve the lives of millions of Americans in meaningful ways.
Biden has detailed, considered plans to put much of this agenda in place. But getting these plans done
will be driven much more by the outcome of the congressional elections than his questioned ambition.
A big minimum wage increase
Biden's commitment to raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $15 an hour is one of
the least talked-about plans at stake in the 2020 election.
In the 2016 cycle when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders disagreed about raising the minimum wage to
$15 per hour, the debate was the subject of extensive coverage. By the 2020 cycle, all the major
Democratic candidates were on board, so it didn't come up much. But it's significant that this is no
longer controversial in Democratic Party circles. If the party is broadly comfortable with the wage hike
as a matter of both politics and substance, Democrats in Congress are likely to make it happen if it's at
all possible.
Noji Olaigbe, left, from the Fight for $15 minimum wage movement, speaks during a McDonald's workers'
strike in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 23, 2019. David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News
Service/Getty Images
The $15-an-hour minimum wage increase is also a signature issue for Biden. He endorsed New York's
version of it in the fall of 2015, back when he was vice president and his boss Barack Obama was pushing a
smaller federal raise.
A big minimum wage hike polls well, it aligns with Biden's thematic emphasis on "the dignity of work,"
and it's a topic on which he's genuinely been a leader. It reflects his political sensibilities, which are
moderate but in a decidedly more populist mode than Obama's technocratic one.
Biden has a big Plan A to support organized labor, and a Plan B that's still consequential and
considerably more plausible politically.
Beyond a general disposition to be a good coalition partner to organized labor, the centerpiece of his
union agenda is support for the PRO Act, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.
That bill, were it to become law, would be the biggest victory for unions and collective bargaining
since the end of World War II -- overriding state "right to work" laws, barring mandatory anti-union
briefings from management during organizing campaigns, imposing much more meaningful financial penalties
on companies that illegally fire workers for pro-union activity, and allowing organizing through a
streamlined card check process. Separately, Biden and House Democrats have lined up behind a Public
Service Freedom to Negotiate Act that would bolster public sector workers' collective bargaining rights. "
One of the big issues here is Biden not committing to killing the filibuster, in addition to Dem
Senators not in agreement either. That would be a disaster for any legislation.
Makes sense not to run on ending the filibuster now, as there is a chance trump can win and teh GOP
keeps the Senate. But if the opposite happens and Biden wins and Dems take the Senate, they will have to
pivot quickly to getting rid of the filibuster. Apply any and all possible pressure to those Dem Senators
who do not agree with that. Threaten them with losing committee posts; primary opponents; the kitchen
sink.
Yes, it poses a risk in the event the Reps get a trifecta again, but it is time to flood progressive
legislation into law, and getting rid of the filibuster is the only way.
And if they can hit the trifecta and bring this platform to fruition, they won't have to worry about a
GOP trifecta for a long, long time. Possibly forever.
Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Abstract
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic
models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income
distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and
the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences
between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the
US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who
are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the
growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.
rick shapiro
,
May 31, 2020 2:07 pm
This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When
I was a sprat, job shoppers got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had
no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers;
and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated
uberization software eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past,
we will all need to enlist unionization and government wage standards to protect us.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:29 pm
Rick
The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of
computers w/ software. One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn't need any draftsman.
rick shapiro
,
May 31, 2020 2:40 pm
I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and
came back as lower paid contract empoyees.
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:46 pm
Rick
Die biden
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 2:52 pm
beiden
The both
ken melvin
,
May 31, 2020 3:05 pm
EMichael
Minimum wage, the row about the $600, all such things endanger the indentured servant economic model
so favored in the south. Keep them poor and hungry and they will work for next to nothing. 'Still they
persist.' On PBS, a black woman cooking for a restaurant said that she was being paid less than $4/hr.
Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge
By KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR – Los Angeles Times
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck
while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?
If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your head at the cruel
injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly
wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%! again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes
accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it
wasn't for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those
Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the cop
on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and
devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who
asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping
in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it's not just a
supposed "black criminal" who is targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists?
If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social distancing." Then you notice the black
faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station
on fire and you wag a finger saying, "That's putting the cause backward."
You're not wrong -- but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional
racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional
things to raise public and political awareness -- write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic,
explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change -- the needle hardly
budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher
rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from
voting .
run75441
,
May 31, 2020 9:39 pm
anne:
If you rcomments are not appearing they are going to spam, Just let me know and I will fish them out
of spam. Just approved 4 of yours.
Bert Schlitz
,
May 31, 2020 7:14 pm
The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year. Considering 370 whites over 100 Latinos
were killed by cops, many as bad as that guy in minnie. Blacks have a Trumptard mentality. We have a
ecological disaster, a economic disaster and pandemic(when th they are spreading). Yet let's whine about
one bad cop related homicide.
This may begin the breakup of the Democratic party and the blacks. The differences are just to large.
Kaleberg
,
May 31, 2020 9:40 pm
It's rather sad that it takes a massive civil disturbance to get the authorities to arrest a man
videotaped killing another. You'd think that would just happen as a matter of course, but that's how it
works in this country.
Post Comment
Leave a Reply
Cancel reply
Your email address will not be published.
Required
fields are marked
*
Artificial intelligence (AI) just seems to get smarter and smarter. Each iPhone learns your face, voice, and
habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster
chips, more data, and better algorithms. But some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than
the core innovations
their inventors claim
-- and some of the gains may not exist at all, says Davis Blalock, a computer science graduate
student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blalock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches
to improving neural networks -- software architectures that loosely mimic the brain. "Fifty papers in," he says, "it
became clear that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was."
The researchers evaluated 81 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming
unneeded connections. All claimed superiority in slightly different ways. But they were rarely compared properly -- and
when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements
over a 10-year period.
The result
, presented in March at the
Machine Learning and Systems conference, surprised Blalock's Ph.D. adviser, MIT computer scientist John Guttag, who
says the uneven comparisons themselves may explain the stagnation. "It's the old saw, right?" Guttag said. "If you
can't measure something, it's hard to make it better."
Researchers are waking up to the signs of shaky progress across many subfields of AI. A
2019 meta-analysis
of information retrieval
algorithms used in search engines concluded the "high-water mark was actually set in 2009."
Another study
in 2019 reproduced seven neural
network recommendation systems, of the kind used by media streaming services. It found that six failed to outperform
much simpler, nonneural algorithms developed years before, when the earlier techniques were fine-tuned, revealing
"phantom progress" in the field. In
another paper
posted on arXiv in
March, Kevin Musgrave, a computer scientist at Cornell University, took a look at loss functions, the part of an
algorithm that mathematically specifies its objective. Musgrave compared a dozen of them on equal footing, in a task
involving image retrieval, and found that, contrary to their developers' claims, accuracy had not improved since
2006. "There's always been these waves of hype," Musgrave says.
SIGN UP FOR OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER
Get more great content like this delivered right to you!
Required fields are indicated by an asterisk(*)
Gains in machine-learning algorithms can come from fundamental changes in their architecture, loss function, or
optimization strategy -- how they use feedback to improve. But subtle tweaks to any of these can also boost performance,
says Zico Kolter, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies image-recognition models trained to
be immune to "
adversarial
attacks
" by a hacker. An early adversarial training method known as projected gradient descent (PGD), in which a
model is simply trained on both real and deceptive examples, seemed to have been surpassed by more complex methods.
But in a
February arXiv paper
, Kolter and his colleagues found that
all of the methods performed about the same when a simple trick was used to enhance them.
Old dogs, new tricks
After modest tweaks, old image-retrieval algorithms perform as well as new ones, suggesting little actual
innovation.
Contrastive
(2006)
ProxyNCA
(2017)
SoftTriple
(2019)
0
25
50
75
100
Accuracy score
Original performance
Tweaked performance
(GRAPHIC) X. LIU/
SCIENCE
; (DATA) MUSGRAVE
ET AL
., ARXIV: 2003.08505
"That was very surprising, that this hadn't been discovered before," says Leslie Rice, Kolter's Ph.D. student.
Kolter says his findings suggest innovations such as PGD are hard to come by, and are rarely improved in a
substantial way. "It's pretty clear that PGD is actually just the right algorithm," he says. "It's the obvious thing,
and people want to find overly complex solutions."
Other major algorithmic advances also seem to have stood the test of time. A big breakthrough came in 1997 with an
architecture called long short-term memory (LSTM), used in language translation. When properly trained, LSTMs
matched
the performance of supposedly more advanced
architectures developed 2 decades later. Another machine-learning breakthrough came in 2014 with generative
adversarial networks (GANs), which pair networks in a create-and-critique cycle to sharpen their ability to produce
images, for example.
A 2018
paper
reported that with enough computation, the original GAN method matches the abilities of methods from later
years.
Kolter says researchers are more motivated to produce a new algorithm and tweak it until it's state-of-the-art
than to tune an existing one. The latter can appear less novel, he notes, making it "much harder to get a paper
from."
Guttag says there's also a disincentive for inventors of an algorithm to thoroughly compare its performance with
others -- only to find that their breakthrough is not what they thought it was. "There's a risk to comparing too
carefully."
It's also hard work
: AI researchers use different data sets, tuning methods, performance metrics, and baselines.
"It's just not really feasible to do all the apples-to-apples comparisons."
Some of the overstated performance claims can be chalked up to the explosive growth of the field, where papers
outnumber experienced reviewers. "A lot of this seems to
be growing pains
," Blalock says. He urges reviewers to insist on better comparisons to benchmarks and says better
tools will help. Earlier this year, Blalock's co-author, MIT researcher Jose Gonzalez Ortiz, released software called
ShrinkBench that makes it easier to compare pruning algorithms.
Researchers point out that even if new methods aren't fundamentally better than old ones, the tweaks they
implement can be applied to their forebears. And every once in a while, a new algorithm will be an actual
breakthrough. "It's almost like a venture capital portfolio," Blalock says, "where some of the businesses are not
really working, but some are working spectacularly well."
The time of greatest equality for Athens and greatest prosperity for the Athenian poor was
the height of Athens's empire, under Pericles. And the Athenian elite hated it, for that very
reason. You can read about it in Plato, or in pseudo-Xenophon aka The Old Oligarch.
Just as the best time for the American working and lower middle class was the 30 years
after WWII, les trente glorieuses, at the height of the American empire.
It may well be that empire eventually spoiled things for American democracy, by giving too
much power to the rich, but Athenian democracy declined and died not because of Athenian
empire, but because external forces killed it, military defeat at the hands of greater
powers, Macedon and Rome.
Eagerly awaiting links and your take on Minneapolis.
I have been struck by the appropriateness of the protesters' targets: a store in a chain
owned by the former governor (a Democrat) where they prototyped racist "security measures",
and the police precinct that caused all this. Those were exceptional choices for sending the
message.
We are seeing the corrupt Democrat party's electoral coalition fray before our eyes, one
group at a time. First the left, then women, now AA voters. What's next for these clowns?
What do the local cops have against Auto Zone? Bad coffee?
These 'riots' are not a real threat yet. When the 'insurgents' get organized and begin
attacking ten percent suburbs, then the Status Quo can worry.
Infiltration of protest movements by agent provocateurs posing as protesters goes back at
least as far as COINTELPRO and was a key tactic in dismantling OWS.
If a crowd goes along (instead of questioning his actions, like the man in the pink tank
top) and joins in the melee, the cops have their evidence.
Appropriateness of targets went out the window at some point after this started. Talked to
a neighbor whose small business on Minneapolis' Lake Street got hit. Says the video just
showed skinny kids looking for money. Was not happy the cops vacated the area and didn't even
pretend to protect anything.
It might have been better if people could have confined their attention to the abusive
Target chain (by the way, Target is no longer owned by the Dayton family, cf. former governor
Mark Dayton), or to CVS chain pharmacies. Instead we lost institutions like century-old
independent pharmacies burned to the ground.
There's a lack of understanding. People don't understand who did this to them. They get
frustrated and they go out and break things. Maybe they grab things. But I wish they could
figure out who their enemies really are.
"But I wish they could figure out who their enemies really are."
When you're poor, the authorities don't care about you, you have minimal education and
limited access to information, and when the mainstream media is out and out propaganda for
the upper classes, that is much easier said than done.
Its not like there's a genuine workers or even genuine modern civil rights movement to
help tell them who said enemies are.
To be fair, the Minneapolis police just don't kill black people and try to get away with
it. They have been known to kill blonde, white women as well and try to get away with it-
That's one shooting I've never understood. Shooting the unarmed blonde Australian woman
with the muzzle (blast) inches from the face/eyes/ear of your partner while inside a car is
an excellent way to permanently scar/blind/deafen them and maybe damage your own hearing,
too. WTF?
Into the night the protests grew and took on a socialist tone when people started to
communalize the goods offered at a local Target market known for its extensive
survival.
That's a funny way of describing a group of thugs smashing then burning a Target
store after stealing every single piece of high price electronics, clothing, jewelry
and furniture from a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the murder crime
whatsoever. I wonder how the McDonald's was guilty, did its poor working class staff
cheer the cop on and celebrate as they lost their only source of income in an
economically shaky time?
Are we gonna talk about the "peaceful protesters" who assaulted an old lady in
wheelchair by trying to rip her out of it before they cried knife and emptied a fire
extinguisher into her face when she tried to defend herself? Or is that just not worth
bring up?
You know, I'm tired of this leftist BS, I'm tired of how blacks get a free ride to
riot, loot and commit race crimes every goddamn day of the week. None of you seem to
give two f**ks whenever blacks commits a drive by shooting that gets a little girl
killed or when some teen walks into a place and empties an uzi down a crowded street
that leaves several injured and dead.
Brings back memories of the leftist protests in Hamburg against the gathering of the
bilderburg group, protests I might add that include burning down working class stores,
working class cars, vandalizing working class homes and stealing everything not on fire
or nailed down from working class peoples workplaces. (Thank commie pigs for
victimizing the working class to protect your overprivileged upper class champagne
socialist lifestyle.)
Its almost as if communists and blacks don't care about black lives or police
violence but were just looking for an excuse to riot and commit crimes like arson,
theft and assault like beating up every white person in sight like they did in
Baltimore. Again I already know you don't give a f**k when its a white person
since not a single one o you got up in arms over an unarmed Dillon Taylor getting
gunned down by a black cop.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/usf/unarmed-white-man-killed-by-black-cop-heres-how-the-media-reacted
But if your endgame is to pull a Charles Manson and kickstart Helter Skelter, well
congrats, you are getting your wish. Keep doing this stuff, the more your side rampage
and calls for whites to be killed, the more black pilled whites there are with guns and
the needed fear to use them preemptively.
Posted by: Mighty Whitey | May 30 2020 0:00 utc |
122
My point was that, if what I read in the Washington Post about Floyd initially
resisting arrest is correct -- and the truth is likely to come out in trials of the
policemen -- the white working and middle classes will not support a revolution over
his killing. My further point was that, if you want a revolution, you should wait a
month or two until there are mass evictions.
There has been many studies done looking at police brutality and shootings. Black
officers kill whites and blacks. White officers kill whites and blacks. But dealing
with urban blacks is no cakewalk and probably the hardest beat in policing bar none.
Anyone been to Baltimore lately or south-side Chicago. Didn't think so.
Bring these cops to justice, that is fine. But their faces...pure evil? I think
not.
Posted by: Nemesiscalling | May 30 2020 1:05 utc |
134
It is worth noting that the two coppers who brought down the arsehole Christchurch
mosque butcher, did so without guns. There was footage of the unarmed takedown on the
web shortly after it happened, but that no longer seems to be available, all the
available vids now show the prick being held down while other armed coppers late to the
scene surround them pointing guns. afaik the pair of off duty (they had come to town
for a training course) coppers who performed the unarmed arrest haven't been awarded
honours.
Yes it is in the interests of elites to keep us divided, but that doesn't mean we
must ignore these police shooting outrages, what is required is concerted effort to
raise awareness among amerika's whitefellas that being scared of another human just
because he/she is a different colour, is palpably stupid. It is mostly fright that
causes this race hatred in amerika.
Over the course of my existence I have noticed that the most racist of humans are
those who have had the least amount of contact with other races.
Well, The Class War's been ongoing for 3,000 years, and the US Treasury's undergone
a continuous robbing since 1913. We both know and agree the #1 enemy are the Financial
Parasites wherever they may reside along with their Neoliberal Doctrine. Friedman,
Reagan and Thatcher are all dead, so we can't try them for their crimes, but weren't
they merely carrying out the wishes of those who put them into office? Aren't those
Parasites the ones we need to deal with?
Just finished watching Four
Horsemen , which asks the right questions in its closing 10 minutes if you
don't have the time to watch all 90.
George Floyd died Monday. Monday night protests began, cops fired on protesters with
tear gas, rubber bullets,
people called for arrest of 4 police that murdered Floyd.
Some homes broken into in St. Paul Cathedral Hill district.
Protests/damage/looting were not just a few blocks but many miles long, spanned N.
to S. and East to West in St. Paul and included some suburbs. Not just a few areas but
many.
It's not a civil war until the *other* civilians start shooting at the rioters. At this point, it's just the usual police repression.
Now given that thousands of people who previously never owned a firearm have now acquired them - although it is unclear how
many of them will be concealed carriers, given the variance in state laws - it's only a matter of time before some people start
shooting. Like the Korean shop owners in LA notably did during the Rodney King riots IIRC.
But it won't be a civil war until a significant number of people on both sides are actually shooting.
There's a guy named Selco Begovic who survived the civil war in Bosnia. He writes articles for prepper Web sites and he has
book out. He has vividly
described conditions of life in a civil war. Most people in the US are not going to handle that sort of thing well. Try this one
as it pertains to b's post.
The true enemies of humanity are corporations, so the violence is not a "civil war", but revolt. Along those lines, it's not "looting"
but sabotage. And the "police" are not peace-keepers but militarized enforcers.
It's a complete waste of time engaging in electoral "politics." Politicians are corporate whores doing their master's bidding,
as are the "police."
Just finished listening to the latest interview
given by Michael Hudson , "Defining a Tyrant," whose focus is on the necessity of applying debt forgiveness to those residing
within the Outlaw US Empire as the economic affects of COVID-19 will be much worse than we've already seen. Those who want to
get to the current moment can begin listening at the 40 minute mark (yes, it's just audio). You'll need to note that the unemployment
numbers as I've been writing for awhile now are greatly understated, although the host Gary Null does allude to that reality as
NYC itself is emptying out--imagine Wall Street sitting in the middle of a ghost metropolis. As you'll learn, Trump's MAGA Mantra
is 100% hollow without enacting a wide ranging debt write-off--even if factories could be put back into business, the Outlaw US
Empire's economy would still remain very uncompetitive because of the issue of debt service and privatized health care--issues
I've written about before.
And so the main topic: Civil War. Or, is it? Reality demands it be named Class War, for that's what it is in reality. Hudson
maps out how its done and by whom while naming the abettors. The Popular Forces number 280 million, not including those too young/old/infirm
to bear arms. The Forces of Reaction minus the paid forces of coercion number well under 100,000. Even adding in police and military,
it's still 280 million to perhaps 10 million. And even if only half of the 280 million stand up, that's 140 million. The rallying
cry ought to be It's better to die standing up for your rights versus groveling on your knees. Too bad all of the above's too
large for one Tweet.
The way they provoked the violence on smashing shop windows with forehammer is exactly what was witnessed inParis when apparent
"black block" types did the same and then got back in their policevan.
I note that in France Riot police is clad in robocop armour and that this armour is a weapon in itself,it deshumanizes the man
inside to himself,and to others.A strike of his arm is much more powerful than if he were dressed as your american cop on patrol,probably
they give them steroid or something to be able to move rapidly with all the weight.They must feel like the Hulk!
Now it would be a sign of peaceful government if just any political party would make a ban on those outfits.
So the medical examiner concluded that there was no evidence of choking or suffocation, and instead was the result of his "restraint"
exacerbating underlying conditions, and suggesting there was the possibility of intoxication or drugs, which is the basis for
the pre-determination that Chauvin will only be charged with 3rd degree murder, which of course they'll try to whittle down to
manslaughter (the coincidental charge.)
Let me see if I've got this straight: a man that is being restrained by the neck, who eventually dies from no other action,
who repeatedly pleads that "I can't breath," who onlookers see and record that the man can not in fact breath, and the medical
examiner finds no evidence of choking or strangulation.
Further, Officer Chauvin, in close physical contact with the eventual corpse of his victim, must surely have felt the life
ebbing from George Floyd. No way no how this mother fucker gets charged with anything other than 1st degree murder. His accomplices
get charged with accessory to 1st degree murder.
"War is a Racket" -Smedley Butler 1933
"Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break the Silence" -MLK 1967
"Art Truth and Politics" -Harold Pinter 2005
What has changed in 100 yrs of uSSa Empire? Foreign policy? Domestic policy?
Economic policy? All have become worse.
The u$$a Regime lies, cheats, steals, rapes, murders, tortures, overthrows, bombs,
invades, destroys, and loots with impunity Global wide.
How a citizen of this Rogue nation can feel good about that is beyond hypocrisy.
This Regime and the humans behind this sickening system must be replaced.
The Military Surveilance Police state must end. The Humans behind this system must be replaced
by any means necessary. Both the safety of the world and domestically rely on their removal.
When finished "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" and coming to terms with the truly Evil nature of the human beings operating
and supporting this system- perhaps you will becomea full human being. Get Up Stand Up.
The difference between ignorance and delusions are substantial.
Ignorance being the lack of knowledge. Delusion being the presence of false
knowledge. Where do you stand?
I don't need protection from the police.
But We ALL need protection FROM the police state.
Will you fight to defend yourself, your family, your neighbor or fellow human being
against a cruel vile corrupt system? Selfishness and greed are no excuse for complacency.
What is worth defending- your property or your virtues?
I have long been disgusted by the u$$a regimes domestic and foreign policies. Which means I have long been disgusted by my
fellow citizens (human beings) which support and operate this vile system.
Revolution-
Complacency and passive complicit citizens Or values, humaneness and justice?
Where do you stand? When do you stand for a meaningful life of society?
The white working and lower middle classes will not support violent rioting by blacks over a black issue. This is not a way to
start a revolution.
What's more, the latest reporting I read in the Washington Post is that Floyd initially resisted arrest. The early reporting
that he did not resist arrest was apparently incorrect.
Moreover, the medical evidence suggests that he died not from asphyxiation or a broken neck, but because of comorbidities.
Floyd had a lengthy criminal record.
If you want a revolution in the U.S., wait a month or two until there are mass evictions.
This is a warning to anybody who would dare to revolt against the coming misery conditions of life while the oligarchs continue
enriching themselves and looting every penny available.
This is a secondary gain from the pandemic, as we were accustomed to multiple declared state of alarm throughout the world,
they thinks that going a step further would not cause any shock....
There have been equally violent revolts in France and Chile continuously during the past year, and in France again in the banlieus,
and then curfew was not declared...
This is the land of the free....There you have your fascist state turning on yourselves...
When they came for the Venezuelans, seized their assets and embassies, I did nothing; when they came for the Iranians and murdered
Soleimani, I said nothing; when they came for the communists in the Odessa House of Unions, I did not move a finger; when they
slaughtered people at the four cardinal points of the world, I did continue living my "American Dream" as if the thing would not
go with me...until I did awaken to find myself in the same nightmare....
I've suggested in the past that civil war was unlikely in the US because that would requires a significant percentage of the electorate
to actually take sides and shoot someone - and most of the population is so anti-gun these days that such a scenario was unlikely,
especially over political issues that aren't usually considered as *directly* adversely affecting most of the population, at least
in their minds. It would also require some direct organization on both sides and I don't see anyone capable of that on the national
scene.
What I can easily see happening, however, is the sort of multi-city, large-scale rioting that occurred in the Sixties and in
other parts of the world, leading to a declaration of martial law in at least some, possibly many, larger cities, if not nation-wide
(a lot of rural areas would likely not be affected.) Economic issues and issues of social repression are usually the causes of
large-scale violence historically in most countries. Most "political" issues usually boil down to either ethnic or economic or
repression issues.
The US doesn't have really that much ethnic issues, except in the Southwest over Latino immigration. The US has racial, economic
and repression issues, however. Most of the time they just simmer, with local limited outbreaks of violence. But in cases of blatant
repression, or under severe economic pressure, they can explode into wider-scale violence.
And we've got both on the horizon. The impact of the pandemic (and the government's clueless response, thanks to Trump and
previous Presidents) on the economy is likely to produce extreme economic pressure, especially on the middle class and the poor.
Adding the extreme militarization of the US police over the last several decades, and this is a recipe for large-scale violence
that continues for more than a few days or a week. Once police over-reaction and the appearance of the National Guard to control
rioting results in the sort of deaths like in the well-known Kent State incident, then like in Ukraine we could start to see cops
and National Guard fatalities from snipers. Next we could see things like the 1985 Philadelphia police bombing of the MOVE headquarters
and the use of armed drones (Connecticut has a law banning armed drones - but not for police.) The next step beyond that is curfew,
and the next step beyond that is martial law.
The next step beyond that is not civil war - it's explicit fascism. And that ends in revolution - which then usually recycles
into either more fascism or "modified: fascism (see France in the 1800's.)
Bottom line: It's not going to get better. One of the many things preppers have been warning against is national repression.
They warned against natural disasters like hurricanes and no one listened until Katrina. They warned against pandemics and no
one listened - until today. They've been warning against national repression - like the Selco article I linked to. Better listen
this time.
Please understand that communism is a utopia, a religious dogma, completely discredited by
the history.
While Marx critique of capitalism and the idea of class struggle survived the test of
time, the idea of communism with its central postulate about future hegemonic role of
proletariat proved to be false. Which means the communism is yet another utopia, a religious
cult, if you wish.
Bolshevism as it existed in the USSR in a form of Stalinism and than "Brezhnev developed
socialism" was really a cruel and bloodthirsty religious cult (less bloodthirsty in the
latter form, but still). No questions about it.
Although I do not understand details, it look like China Communist Party also degenerated
into hypocritical religious cult, not that dissimilar from CPSU. That might well makes
Chinese society somewhat unstable and vulnerable to the color revolution. As soon as
intelligence services change flag like KGB did, that would be it.
On the contrary neoliberalism (which probably should be understood as Trotskyism for the
rich -- financial oligarchy of all countries unite) is the only derivative of Marxism that
survived as a widespread social system. It managed to survive the major crisis of 2008 as a
social system almost intact, despite the fact that the neoliberal ideology was completely
discredited. Its resilience after 2008 is simply amazing.
Moreover, Neoliberalism does enjoy unweaving support of probably 20% of the USA society --
PMC or "professional and managerial class" which IMHO includes a part of brainwashed working
class and small business owners. Which is a factor that essentially guarantees its longevity
and survival after the current shock, despite all our wishes for the contrary. In other
words, class struggle does exist, but it is almost always uphill battle, and the max
achievable are some watered down reforms. That essentially the idea of social democracy and
the USA the New Deal.
As Warren Buffett aptly said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the
rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
And we should not mix Trump "national neoliberalism" with fascism. It is a completely
different social phenomena, a social system that does not require mass mobilization and a
mass Party. It does has some common features (the role on intelligence agencies, the role of
propaganda, etc,) but still the differences are more prononced then similarities. Sheldon
Wolin called it "inverted totalitarism" ( https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism/
)
Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of
American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he
calls "inverted totalitarianism."
Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of
Wolin's, said in an email to me: "Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on
democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive -- even distinctively
American -- analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He
was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call
neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he
took to be poisoning democracy at its root."
Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his
last book, "Democracy Incorporated," details our peculiar form of corporate
totalitarianism. "One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be
described as democratic," he writes in that book, "surely not in the highly managed,
money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the
class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media."
Money quote: ""Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring
and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd." --
that's definition of a serf -- a neoliberal serf
I feel a lot of people just use the term neoliberalism as a term of a specific abuse of
labor via debt slavery. .
1. Hayek's book 'The Road to Serfdom' uses an erroneous metaphor. He argues that if we
allow gov regulation, services and spending to continue then we will end up serfs. However,
serfs are basically the indentured or slave labourers of private citizens and landowners not
of the state. Only in a system of private capital can there be serfs. Neo liberalism creates
serfs not a public system.
2. According to Hayek all regulation on business should be eliminated and only labour
should be regulated to make it cheap and contain it so that private investors can have their
returns guaranteed. Hence the purpose of the state is to pass laws to suppress workers.
These two things illustrate neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labour.
As a matter of semantics, neo-liberalism delivered on the promise of freedom...for
capitalists to be free of ethical accountability, social responsibility, and government
regulation and taxes. And people can't understand why i'm a socialist.
By Peter Dorman, professor of economics at The Evergreen State College. Originally
published at Econospeak
Donald Trump, cheering on
his "warriors" who demand that states lift their lockdown and distancing orders (where they
have them), would have you believe this is about bringing the economy back to life so ordinary
people can get their jobs and normal lives back. Elitist
liberals who work from home and have country estates to retreat to don't care, but "real"
people do.
The reality is different. The shuttering of stores, restaurants, hotels and workplaces
didn't begin with government orders and won't end with them. If the rate of new infection
and death is too high, a lot of people won't go along. Not everyone, but enough to make a huge
economic difference. Ask any small business owner what it would mean for demand to drop by
25-50%. Lifting government orders won't magically restore the economic conditions of
mid-winter. So what's it about? Even as it makes a big PR show of supporting state by state
"liberation" in America, the Trump administration is
advising state governments on how to remove workers from unemployment insurance once orders
are lifted. Without government directives, employers can demand workers show up, and if they
refuse they no longer qualify. And why might workers refuse? Perhaps because their workplaces
are still unsafe and they have vulnerable family members they want to keep from getting
infected? Not good enough -- once the state has been "liberated".
How should we respond to this travesty? First, of course, by telling the truth that an
anti-worker, anti-human campaign is being conducted under the guise of defending workers. If
the Democrats weren't themselves such a tool of business interests we might hear that narrative
from them, but the rest of us are free to speak out and should start doing it, loudly, wherever
we can.
Second, one of the laws of the land is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which
gives workers the right to
refuse imminently hazardous work. This hasn't been used very often, nor is there much case
law around it, but the current pandemic is a good reason to pull it out of storage.
If there are public interest law firms looking for something useful to do during distancing,
they could advertise their willingness to defend workers who need to stay home until work is
safe -- while still getting their paycheck. If employers thought the choice was between public
support for workers sitting out the pandemic or their support for them we might hear less about
"liberation".
They want to throw people off of unemployment while using the virus threat to stop any
serious protests against that. It is literally biological warfare against working people.
Same class war as before, but now with CBW.
Taught it for years. This is the biggest net and is the # 1 Cited Violation for 1910/1926
and MSHA–ever.
OSHA 654 5(a)1 The General Duty Clause.
OSHA Laws & Regulations OSH Act of 1970
OSH Act of 1970
Table of Contents
General Duty Clause
Complete OSH Act Version ("All-in-One")
SEC.
5.
Duties
(a)
Each employer --
(1)
29 USC 654
shall furnish to each of his employees employment and a place of employment which are free
from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical
harm to his employees;
(2)
shall comply with occupational safety and health standards promulgated under this Act.
(b)
Each employee shall comply with occupational safety and health standards and all rules,
regulations, and orders issued pursuant to this Act which are applicable to his own actions
and conduct.
Quick Take –Two way street.
Employers mus t mitigate hazards. Employees must comply with mitigation.
No Employer Mitigation=Breaking the Law=No Employee requirement to work in Unsafe
Conditions.
"Lifting all boats" was always a lie. It was simply a way to sell trickle down by claiming
that the objectively observable inequality it produced would somehow help everyone,
eventually, sort of. There was not and has never been a plan by the Conservative Movement to
lift all boats. Only a plan to feign interest in doing so.
I agree with most of your comment except the "smarter" part.
They don't seem smart to me, they openly plunder and loot and spit in the populace's
faces. They don't even pretend to believe in or work for a "common good" anymore, really.
That is the story of the 21st Century in the US, starting with Baby Bush II. (Okay, I get
that the Obama crew seemed "smart" or sophisticated to the PMC and comfortable liberals, but
how smart were they if they led to the open Kleptocratic Disruption of Trumpism and the God
Emperor?)
What the Elites have that the proles don't is in-group solidarity. (And a captured Media
establishment.) They protect their own, while the hoi polloi fight one another for
scraps.
What is the death rate among the working age population?
Seem like a tough hill to die on given the curve has flattened, hospitals are not
overflowing, and the economy is teetering on the edge of depression.
No one has a vaccine, this isn't going away any time soon. It's time to focus on
protecting the most vulnerable instead of pretending this effects everyone equally.
Allow states to cut benefits? Come on, UI benefits are taxed for pete's sake. 'Available
to work' basically means you have start at 8am the next day which is doesn't align with any
reality of hiring except in low end service sector jobs.
The other really significant thing is that 're-opening' doesn't necessarily mean returning
to business. For example, Musk insists on re-opening Tesla the assumption being that sales
are there to be had if they re-open. But if not no sales, no need for employees back down the
drain we go.
Same for restaurants. retail, hotels, transit and white collar jobs – attorneys,
architects, CPAs
The poorest and the most desperate actually. Some people still have not received any money
from the state or federal governments. The quarantine started about two months ago. So no
job, no income, no money, and no joke. No matter how shrewd or smart you are sometimes you
are not making the decisions. Reality makes them for you.
Well till the markets crashes again and they need to save the assets of the
wealthiest.
I just got a text from a buddy who is an electrician. His company just told him they are
not expecting to take any major work till second quarter of next year. They will only be
taking emergency calls. This is in Chicago.
Granted, it's a union site, but one point that they make is how union saturation raises
the wages for all workers within a given region.
In Appalachia, I was offered $15hr. to work as an electrician. In Chicagoland, starting
wages were close to or more than double that. Guess where I went in order to establish a
salary history? And no, the cost of living is really not too different between those two
places, but opportunities sure were.
(moderators: in response to an "Eat the Rich!" comment, I posted a link with recipes: I
apologize for this. Admittedly, it was in poor taste.)
apenultimate
on Thu, 05/14/2020 - 9:50am The past week's unemployment claims came out today, and add
another 2.98 million to the pile. This brings total unemployment claims for the past 8 weeks
(two months or so) to 36.5 million.
Determining unemployment percentages depends on what data you use. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) shows the employment numbers for the United States in August 2019 as ~157
million ( https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat08.htm ). Admittedly,
that's not March 2020 statistics, but employment numbers would not change all that much in half
of a year.
The St. Louis Federal Reserve has a different set of statistics that show 205.5 million
Americans employed in March 2020 ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
). (They show the August 2019 period with employment at 206 million.)
Why the huge difference? I have no idea. But going forward, I'll use both to determine
unemployment numbers. Remember that in early March 2020, unemployment was already around
3%.
Using the BLS statistics, we get an unemployment rate of 23.16% for the past 8 weeks. Add on
the previous 3% of people unemployed, and you reach 26.16% unemployment.
Using the St. Louis Fed statistics, we get an unemployment rate of 17.76% for the past 8
weeks. Add on the previous 3% of people unemployed, and you reach 20.76% unemployment.
The peak rate of unemployment during The Great Depression was 24.9%. The peak rate of
unemployment during the the Great Recession in 2008 was 10%.
According to BLS statistics, we are already greater than Great Depression unemployment
numbers.
According to the St. Louis Fed, we are already more than double Great Recession numbers and
only about 4 percentage points away from Great Depression peaks.
The Labor Department last week reported April unemployment for the United states at 14.7%,
but this according to their own admission was undercounting the real rates. Be careful of any
numbers coming out of the mainstream media or government sources.
Some jobs will definitely come back, but many will not. For example, JC Penny's reported
that they are permanently closing 200 of their 850 nationwide stores. Those jobs will not be
coming back. There are weekly reports of many cafes, restaurants, and small businesses
shuttering their doors for good. Those jobs will not be coming back.
Even for the companies that do not shut down, it may be a long haul before economic activity
has picked up enough to bring workers back. In most cases, it will not be a quick recovery.
Hang on for a very rough ride. 2 users have voted.
• Headline April 2020 Unemployment Really Was Around 20%, Not 15%
• Bureau of Labor Statistics Disclosed Erroneous Unemployment Surveying for a Second
Month
• About 7.5 Million People in the April Household Survey Were Misclassified as Employed
Instead of Unemployed, per the BLS
• Headline April U.3 Unemployment at 14.7%, Should Have Been 19.5%
• The BLS Had Disclosed the Same Surveying Error Last Month; Where Headline March 2020 U.3
Was 4.4%, It Should Have Been 5.3%
• Per the BLS, Headline Data Will Not Be Corrected: "To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc
actions are taken to reclassify survey responses."
• Nonetheless, Headline April Unemployment Soared to Historic Highs from March: U.3 from
4.4% to 14.7%, U.6 from 8.7% to 22.8% and ShadowStats from 22.9% to 35.4%
• More Realistic, Those Same Unemployment Numbers, Corrected: U.3 from 5.3 % to 19.5%, U.6
from 9.6% to 27.7% and ShadowStats from 23.7% to 39.6%
• April 2020 Payrolls Collapsed by an Unprecedented 20.5 Million Jobs
• Annual Growth in April 2020 Money Supply Measures Soared to Historic Highs
• U.S. Economic Activity Has Collapsed to Great Depression Levels, with the Federal
Reserve Creating Unlimited Money
stated in the very beginning of this video, that of people who were employed in February of
this year, nearly 40% of those earning $40,000 or less have become unemployed. This is an
unprecedented human tragedy that Congress in all their bailouts now totalling about $8 Trillion
have seen fit to throw a one time pittance of $1,200. With mountains of cash going to
corporations and lobbyists, Congress insultingly gave real suffering Americans a few pennies
and in effect told them that their lives do not matter to Washington DC.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned that
around half of the world's workforce, or 1.6 billion workers, are at imminent risk of losing
their livelihood because of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. In its latest
report, the UN agency stated that those hardest hit by the financial effects of the Covid-19
outbreak have been 'informal economy' workers, including the self-employed and those on a
short-term contract.
"The first month of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in a drop of 60 percent in
the income of informal workers globally," the ILO said of the economic damage already
caused by the pandemic.
The deepening crisis in many parts of the world has left more than 436 million businesses
facing financial hardship and possible closure, the ILO stated, which will inevitably hurt
workers. The report listed the worst-hit sectors as manufacturing, accommodation and food
services, wholesale and retail trade, and real estate.
"For millions of workers, no income means no food, no security and no future," ILO
Director-General Guy Ryder said of the stark impact of an economic dip.
He added that, according to ILO data, there is expected to be a "massive" rise in
poverty levels worldwide, unless governments recognize the need to reconstruct their economies
around better working practices and "not a return to the pre-pandemic world of precarious
work for the majority."
Since the novel coronavirus emerged in China late last year, over 3.1 million cases have
been confirmed around the world, and more than 216,000 people have died. Drastic lockdowns to
limit its spread have taken a dire toll on the global economy, prompting market turmoil and
numerous projections of the heavy recession to strike this year.
"... Polls of life satisfaction taken since the outbreak began have reflected a rapid erosion as 33 million Americans have joined the unemployment rolls over the last months. NY Gov Andrew Cuomo said during a recent daily briefing that NY is seeing a spike in drug and alcohol abuse as people sit around all day with nothing to do and nowhere to go. ..."
"... But of course the tremendous levels of financial uncertainty coupled with the unique characteristics of this crisis make it pretty much impossible to model - any research is really an educated guess, at best. ..."
"... "Unemployment is going to have a very important impact on deaths of despair." ..."
"... His proposed strategies including investing more resources in helping unemployed people find meaningful work, and/or training the armies of contact tracers that de Blasio has now promised to hire to spot people at risk of self-harm. ..."
Doctors ,
scientists policymakers and even 'non-experts' posting on social media have argued that
shuttering the health-care system to all non-emergency care risks sparking other public health
crises from a spike in heart attacks and advanced cancer diagnoses, to so-called "deaths of
despair."
In some
areas, a spike in suicides has already been recorded since the start of the outbreak. And
now, a newly published paper released Friday has attempted to quantify deaths that might occur
because of the mental-health ramifications of widespread economic chaos caused by the crisis.
The research - which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed - found the isolation, grief and economic
hardship related to COVID-19 are conspiring to supercharge America's already-burgeoning
mental-health crisis, likely setting the stage for tens of thousands of suicides down the
line.
Specifically, the researchers tabulated that as many as 75k additional "deaths of despair"
could be caused by the outbreak and the economy-crushing measures implemented to stop the
spreads. "Deaths of despair" typically refer to suicides and substance-abuse-related deaths,
according to
Bloomberg .
The research was carried out by the Well Being Trust and researchers affiliated with the
American Academy of Family Physicians. One of the report's authors said he hopes the research
is eventually proven to be incorrect.
"I hope in 10 years people look back and say, 'Wow, they way overestimated it,'" said John
Westfall, director of the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and
Primary Care, who co-wrote the report.
But the sizable spike in suicides, overdoses etc since the last major crisis (the financial
crisis) is reason to be concerned.
Even as the American economy rebounded after the last recession, suicides and overdoses cut
into Americans' life expectancy. Mental health experts worry that the economic uncertainty and
social isolation of the pandemic will make things worse at a time when the health care system
is already overwhelmed. The suicide rate in the US has already been rising for two decades, and
in 2018 hit its highest level since 1941, Bloomberg reported, citing a piece published by JAMA
Psychiatry (a prestigious medical journal) back in April.
"There's a paradox," said Jeffrey Reynolds, president of a Long Island-based nonprofit
social services agency, the Family and Children's Association. " Social isolation protects us
from a contagious, life-threatening virus, but at the same time it puts people at risk for
things that are the biggest killers in the United States: suicide, overdose and diseases
related to alcohol abuse."
Polls of life satisfaction taken since the outbreak began have reflected a rapid erosion as
33 million Americans have joined the unemployment rolls over the last months. NY Gov Andrew
Cuomo said during a recent daily briefing that NY is seeing a spike in drug and alcohol abuse
as people sit around all day with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
"One of the main things people should take away from this paper is that employment
matters," said Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer at the Well Being Trust and a clinical
psychologist who worked on the paper. "It matters for our economic livelihood, and for our
mental and emotional health."
But of course the tremendous levels of financial uncertainty coupled with the unique
characteristics of this crisis make it pretty much impossible to model - any research is really
an educated guess, at best.
Still, the researchers believe it's a useful warning, and something important for policy
makers to keep in mind.
"It's useful to have a wake-up call," said Ken Duckworth, chief medical officer at the
National Alliance on Mental Illness. "Unemployment is going to have a very important impact
on deaths of despair."
Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer at the Well Being Trust and a clinical psychologist
who worked on the paper, proposed several solutions that could be enacted to, uh, depress the
number of suicides.
His proposed strategies including investing more resources in helping unemployed people find
meaningful work, and/or training the armies of contact tracers that de Blasio has now promised
to hire to spot people at risk of self-harm.
I'm sure this has been mentioned, but Angus Deaton talking about his "Deaths of Despair" work
Boston
review article
JC: In the book you focus on these deaths of despair: 158,000 in 2018, about 100,000 of
which are above and beyond what we would normally expect, an excess that is almost entirely
among white non-Hispanic men and women without a college degree. The category covers three
different causes of death: alcohol, opioids, and suicide. Could you talk about why you
group them together?
AD: Initially, "deaths of despair" was a label of convenience. It helped express the
sense that these deaths were sort of caused by your own hand -- unlike COVID-19, say.
...
these previous drug epidemics -- in the United States after the Civil War, or in China
when the empire was disintegrating -- tended to arise during periods of social
disintegration. The simplified story is that some bad Big Pharma manufacturers started
pushing opioids on all of us. But in reality, Purdue Pharmaceuticals and other companies
went to places where there was already lots of despair. They were looking for despair. They
were looking for regions where you could harass doctors into prescribing these drugs.
Our claim in the book is that without this underlying despair -- pain, morbidity, people
not going to church, people's lives coming apart -- there wouldn't have been this open
field for opioids. On the other hand, if the FDA had not been so much in the hands of the
industry, and if we were not operating a rent-seeking, capitalistic health care system,
then we wouldn't have got those efforts to capitalize on the despair. Other countries
didn't get them to anything like the same extent.
...
JC: One of the issues that you emphasize in the book is the generational aspect of
deaths of despair: how it keeps getting worse for younger generations. The idea that this
is a process that is worsening over time resonates strongly with Raj Chetty's account of
the fading American dream. I am thinking of the study by Chetty and colleagues about
absolute mobility, guided by the question: Are you going to do better than your parents?
When I was born in 1951, there was a 90 percent chance of doing better than your parents.
If you were born in 1980, chances had fallen to 50 percent.
...
The Democrats largely decided to abandon the working class and build a coalition of
educated elites and minorities (including working-class minorities), and the Republicans
basically followed business and religious organizations.
And the health care crises make things worse. Health care costs were 5 percent of GDP
back in 1970, and now they're 18 percent of GDP. Everything is heaping up on these
people.
...
The pillars that structured working-class life seem to have gone, or at least been
eroded. And we see the fundamental force of that in the labor market. Decent wages and jobs
help to bring respectability and meaning into life. We're not against some of the
explanations that focus more on social norms. I think the birth control pill was very
important, changing the norms about when and whether you could have children, whether you'd
live together without being married. We write about how the pill was very socially
divisive. For women who could get educated, it enormously enhanced opportunities to have
relationship fulfilment and children as well as really good jobs. But for many
working-class women for whom college was not an option, it did the opposite.
But declining wages were an incredibly important part of the loss.
...
But there's a much more negative scenario, too, which economic historian Robert Allen
writes about. In the early nineteenth century in Britain, real wages stagnated for fifty
years. Handloom weavers were being replaced by machines in factories in the Industrial
Revolution, and wages could only rise when they were all gone, and the way of life and
around handloom weaving had been destroyed.
[c1ue note: the putting out system was a major cause of the above]
...
A lot of evidence suggests that in recessions, mortality rates typically go down. The
Great Depression was a very good time for life expectancy. But suicides do go up. It's not
a simple story. They say in New York that what would normally be filling hospital beds
would normally be filling with traffic and construction accidents, and there aren't
any.
By
Richard D. Wolff,
Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, and Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School
University, NYC. Wolff's weekly show, Economic Update, is syndicated on over 100 radio stations and goes
to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV and his two recent books with Democracy at Work are
Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism both available at
democracyatwork.info
.
We are entering an even Greater Depression than the 1930s, with hundreds of millions thrown out of work
across the world. Capitalism is a broken, unstable system that is beyond repair – but there are
alternatives.
Ninety-one years after the start of the Great Depression (capitalism's worst downturn until now), we are
entering an even Greater Depression. The 1930s were so awful that leaders of capitalist economies ever
since have said they had learned how to avoid any future depressions. All promised to take the steps
needed to avoid them. Those promises have all been broken. Capitalism remains intrinsically unstable.
Read more
Richard D. Wolff: Viruses like Covid-19 are a part of
nature we must accept. But Capitalism-2020 must be destroyed
That instability is revealed in its recurring cycles, recessions, downturns, depressions, crashes,
etc. They have plagued capitalism wherever it has settled in as the prevailing economic system. Now that
the whole world's prevailing economic system is capitalism, we suffer
global
instability. To date, capitalist instability has resisted every effort (monetary and fiscal policies,
Keynesian economics, privatization, deregulation, etc.) to overcome or stop it. And now it is here yet
again.
Across the world, hundreds of millions of workers are unemployed. The tools, equipment, and raw
materials in their factories, offices and stores sit idle, gathering dust and rust. The goods and
services they might have produced do not now emerge to help us through these awful times. Perishable
plants and animals that cannot now be processed are destroyed even as scarcities multiply.
Workers lose their jobs if and when employers – mostly private capitalists – fire them. Employers hire
workers when workers add more value to what the employer sells than the value of those workers' wages.
Hiring then adds to profits. Employers fire workers when they add less than the value of the wages paid
to them. Firing then reduces losses. Employers protect and reproduce their enterprises by maximizing
profits and minimizing losses.
Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is "the bottom line" of
capitalists, and thus of capitalism. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their
profits are high and punished when they are not.
No-one wants unemployment. Workers want their jobs back; employers want the workers back producing
profitable output; governments want the tax revenues that depend on workers and capitalist employers
actively collaborating to produce.
Yet the capitalist system has regularly produced economic downturns everywhere for three centuries –
on average, every four to seven years. We have had three crashes so far this century: 'dot.com' in 2000,
'sub-prime mortgage' in 2008, and now 'corona' in 2020. That averages out at one crash just under every
seven years – capitalism's 'norm'. Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it.
It is a basic contradiction of their system.
Today's massive US capitalist crisis – over 30 million unemployed and counting, a quarter of the
workforce – shows dramatically that maximizing profit is not maximizing society's well-being. First and
foremost, consider that the unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of
their production. A portion of the wealth produced by those still employed must be
redistributed
to sustain the unemployed. Society thus suffers the usually intense struggles
over the shares of profits versus wages that will be redistributed to the unemployed. These struggles,
both public – over tax structures, for example – and private – for instance, over household budgets – can
be profoundly destabilizing for societies.
Redistribution struggles could be alleviated if, for example, public employment replaced private
unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could
immediately be rehired by the state to do useful social work.
Then any government paying unemployment benefits would instead pay wages, obtain in return real goods
and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired
by private employers in the US. A similar alternative (not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the
unemployed into worker co-ops performing socially useful work under contract with the government.
This last alternative is the best, because it would develop a new worker co-op sector of the US
economy. That would provide the US public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the
worker co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc.
On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what
mix of capitalist and worker co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely
those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
"... First of all, because Stoics believe that our true good resides in our own character and actions, they would frequently remind themselves to distinguish between what's "up to us" and what isn't. Modern Stoics tend to call this "the dichotomy of control" and many people find this distinction alone helpful in alleviating stress. What happens to me is never directly under my control, never completely ..."
"... Marcus likes to ask himself, "What virtue has nature given me to deal with this situation?" That naturally leads to the question: "How do other people cope with similar challenges?" Stoics reflect on character strengths such as wisdom, patience and self-discipline, which potentially make them more resilient in the face of adversity. They try to exemplify these virtues and bring them to bear on the challenges they face in daily life, during a crisis like the pandemic. They learn from how other people cope. Even historical figures or fictional characters can serve as role models. ..."
"... fear does us more harm than the things of which we're afraid. ..."
"... Finally, during a pandemic, you may have to confront the risk, the possibility, of your own death. Since the day you were born, that's always been on the cards. Most of us find it easier to bury our heads in the sand. Avoidance is the No1 most popular coping strategy in the world. We live in denial of the self-evident fact that we all die eventually. ..."
"... "All that comes to pass", he tells himself, even illness and death, should be as "familiar as the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn". Marcus Aurelius, through decades of training in Stoicism, in other words, had taught himself to face death with the steady calm of someone who has done so countless times already in the past. ..."
T he Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last famous
Stoic philosopher of antiquity. During the last 14 years of his life he faced one of the worst
plagues in European history. The Antonine Plague, named after him, was probably caused by a
strain of the smallpox virus. It's estimated to have killed up to 5 million people, possibly
including Marcus himself.
="rich-link__link u-faux-block-link__overlay" aria-label="'What it means to be an American':
Abraham Lincoln and a nation divided"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/11/abraham-lincoln-verge-book-ted-widmer-interview">
From AD166 to around AD180, repeated outbreaks occurred throughout the known world. Roman
historians describe the legions being devastated, and entire towns and villages being
depopulated and going to ruin. Rome itself was particularly badly affected, carts leaving the
city each day piled high with dead bodies.
In the middle of this plague, Marcus wrote a book, known as The Meditations, which records
the moral and psychological advice he gave himself at this time. He frequently applies Stoic
philosophy to the challenges of coping with pain, illness, anxiety and loss. It's no stretch of
the imagination to view The Meditations as a manual for developing precisely the mental
resilience skills required to cope with a pandemic.
First of all, because Stoics believe that our true good resides in our own character and
actions, they would frequently remind themselves to distinguish between what's "up to us" and
what isn't. Modern Stoics tend to call this "the dichotomy of control" and many people find
this distinction alone helpful in alleviating stress. What happens to me is never directly
under my control, never completely up to me, but my own thoughts and actions are
– at least the voluntary ones. The pandemic isn't really under my control but
the way I behave in response to it is.
Much, if not all, of our thinking is also up to us. Hence, "It's not events that upset us
but rather our opinions about them." More specifically, our judgment that something is really
bad, awful or even catastrophic, causes our distress.
This is one of the basic psychological principles of Stoicism. It's also the basic
premise of modern cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the leading evidence-based form of
psychotherapy. The pioneers of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck, both describe Stoicism as
the philosophical inspiration for their approach. It's not the virus that makes us afraid but
rather our opinions about it. Nor is it the inconsiderate actions of others, those ignoring
social distancing recommendations, that make us angry so much as our opinions about them.
Many people are struck, on reading The Meditations, by the fact that it opens with a chapter
in which Marcus lists the qualities he most admires in other individuals, about 17 friends,
members of his family and teachers. This is an extended example of one of the central practices
of Stoicism.
Marcus likes to ask himself, "What virtue has nature given me to deal with this
situation?" That naturally leads to the question: "How do other people cope with similar
challenges?" Stoics reflect on character strengths such as wisdom, patience and
self-discipline, which potentially make them more resilient in the face of adversity. They try
to exemplify these virtues and bring them to bear on the challenges they face in daily life,
during a crisis like the pandemic. They learn from how other people cope. Even historical
figures or fictional characters can serve as role models.
With all of this in mind, it's easier to understand another common slogan of Stoicism:
fear does us more harm than the things of which we're afraid. This applies to
unhealthy emotions in general, which the Stoics term "passions" – from pathos ,
the source of our word "pathological". It's true, first of all, in a superficial sense. Even if
you have a 99% chance, or more, of surviving the pandemic, worry and anxiety may be ruining
your life and driving you crazy. In extreme cases some people may even take their own
lives.
In that respect, it's easy to see how fear can do us more harm than the things of which
we're afraid because it can impinge on our physical health and quality of life. However, this
saying also has a deeper meaning for Stoics. The virus can only harm your body – the
worst it can do is kill you. However, fear penetrates into the moral core of our being. It can
destroy your humanity if you let it. For the Stoics that's a fate worse than death.
Finally, during a pandemic, you may have to confront the risk, the possibility, of your
own death. Since the day you were born, that's always been on the cards. Most of us find it
easier to bury our heads in the sand. Avoidance is the No1 most popular coping strategy in the
world. We live in denial of the self-evident fact that we all die eventually. The
Stoics believed that when we're confronted with our own mortality, and grasp its implications,
that can change our perspective on life quite dramatically. Any one of us could die at any
moment. Life doesn't go on forever.
We're told this was what Marcus was thinking about on his deathbed. According to one
historian, his circle of friends were distraught. Marcus calmly asked why they were weeping for
him when, in fact, they should accept both sickness and death as inevitable, part of nature and
the common lot of mankind. He returns to this theme many times throughout The Meditations.
"All that comes to pass", he tells himself, even illness and death, should be as
"familiar as the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn". Marcus Aurelius, through decades of
training in Stoicism, in other words, had taught himself to face death with the steady calm of
someone who has done so countless times already in the past.
Donald Robertson is cognitive behavioural therapist and the author of several books on
philosophy and psychotherapy, including Stoicism and the Art of Happiness and How to Think Like
a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
It goes without saying that the consequences to workers are damaging to catastrophic.
Normally, being unemployed for more than six months is a near-insurmountable barrier to getting
hired again. Perhaps coronavirus will create a better new normal on this front, of companies
taking a more understanding view of crisis-induced resume gaps.
By Cheryl Carleton,
Assistant Professor of Economics, Villanova University. Originally published at The
Conversation
The labor market is changing rapidly with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
When
the economy starts to open up again, employers will need to consider rehiring or replacing
workers, or hiring workers with a different mix of skills. The cost of replacing an employee is
high for employers, and being out of work is harmful for workers, who may be replaced with
artificial intelligence or contractors and risk losing their skills.
There is no denying that the U.S. was experiencing a tight
labor market and a low rate of unemployment before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. For
some fields, particularly health care and services deemed essential by local governments, the
labor market continues to be tight.
A sudden massive loss of demand for their goods and services is forcing companies to make
quick decisions, and some employers may underestimate the cost to replace good employees.
Knowing these costs may encourage them to keep more of their workers on the payroll.
Where Are the Costs?
There are costs involved in losing a worker and replacing them, such as completing paperwork
when they leave, advertising the open position, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates and
training the new worker.
Once a new worker is hired, others must also spend time training them, and it will take some
time for the new worker to achieve the same level of productivity as the worker who left.
Another cost is the loss in social capital . Social capital is
the relationships between individuals at work that take time to build and add to the
productivity of the firm.
The Center for American Progress drilled in deeper. They found the costs of replacing
workers who earn less than US$30,000 per year to be 16% of annual salary, or $3,200 for an
individual earning $20,000 per year.
For those earning $30,000 to $50,000 per year, it is estimated to cost about 20% of annual
salary, or $8,000 for an individual earning $40,000. For highly educated executive positions,
replacement costs are estimated to be 213% of annual salary – $213,000 for a CEO earning
$100,000 per year.
The much
higher cost for replacing CEOs is partly due to the fact that they require higher levels of
education, greater training, and firms may lose clients and institutional knowledge with such
turnovers.
Employee Alternatives
This high cost of losing and replacing workers has important implications for organizations,
consumers and workers, especially now with
an estimated 15 million unemployed .
For those workers where the costs to replace them are high, firms will try to accommodate
them. Strategies may include maintaining pay, increasing benefits and retraining. These actions
are also costly, so firms will
weigh them against the cost of simply
hiring new workers .
This means businesses face high costs to replace workers in the future, and high costs to
retain current workers, leading to higher costs for consumers who buy the firms' goods and
services.
While the above consequences might sound great for workers that organizations choose to
keep, these are not the only ways in which firms can respond.
The high cost of replacing workers, along with the increased uncertainty about the economy
may cause businesses to use
more automation and robots . Though such switches may entail a significant upfront cost,
once they are made the firms then have more control over their production processes.
Another alternative for firms is to hire fewer permanent employees and turn instead
to contract workers . With
contract workers, employers are not responsible for benefits, and they can more simply increase
or decrease the number of workers as needed.
While this may increase employment for some workers, it will decrease it for others and it
has serious implications for the availability of health and pension benefits as well as
unemployment benefits, as the current crisis has revealed.
Businesses might also consider limiting the scope of what some workers do to limit the cost
of replacing them. If the scope of a worker's job is limited, then fewer areas will be impacted
by the individual leaving, and the costs to train a replacement will be lower. For workers,
however, it means fewer opportunities to gain experience.
For example, instead of training workers on several or all parts of the production process,
the business may limit them to one specific aspect. It will then be less costly for the firm to
replace them and the worker will have less experience to add to their resume. This also means
less bargaining power for employees.
Some Win, But Others Lose
The high cost of losing and then hiring new workers along with increased restrictions on
hiring nonresidents might mean higher wages and increased benefits for some workers.
However, the high degree of uncertainty in the current labor market, along with the
potential increase in contract
workers and
automation means that some workers will not realize these potential gains, and all of us as
consumers will most likely end up paying higher prices for the goods and services we buy.
In Continental Europe the 'all together' theme is barely holding, and momentum is in the
opposite direction In fact migrant communities are growing afraid of backlash and eventual
anti-migrant campaigns, even eventual quasi-ethnic-cleansing
With social welfare systems strained to the breaking point given lockdown unemployment,
there is regret and anger building about public funds spent on migrant waves in recent
years
The lockdowns are often barely being enforced in migrant communities, for fear of riotous
explosion by youthful troublemakers if enforcement is attempted, as noted in the first
comment above by jbwilson24 re France French officials have explicitly said so, in effect
'just leave migrant areas alone'
Last weekend in Belgium, an age-19 youth of migrant heritage, confronted by police when
with others, tried to speed away on a scooter but in his haste hit a police vehicle head-on
and died, leading to two days of rioting and 100 or so arrests When a police vehicle was
attacked by a mob, at least one police firearm was removed by a rioter
As people watch these videos of migrant-origin youths rioting, whilst local people receive
heavy monetary fines for lockdown violations, emotions run high as lockdowns continue, or
with another wave in the autumn, it may get quite dramatic politically
This is sad for those of us with migrant-heritage friends, who think positively of a
certain degree of 'organic' (not forced or induced or manipulated) immigration
I am amazed that how many immigrants who migrated from a nation state, still love their
nation but hate when us nationalist. It's such a hypocrisy. The number one rule of any
migrant is to adapt the new country and culture and not the other way round. This whole PC
culture is going out of hands everywhere. I think every one should be forced to watch the
southpark to understand the irony of what we are becoming.
For anyone running for office in modern
America, accusations of sexual assault are par for the course. But when it comes to weighing up these accusations, the US’
mainstream paper of record applies some very uneven standards.
Take Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. If doubts weren’t already raised by his fondness for
sniffing women,
the emergence last month of a sexual assault allegation against the former vice president could have caused a major headache for
his campaign.
Yet amid the coronavirus pandemic, and given the political leanings of most media outlets, the scandal barely registered.
The
Intercept ran a story in March on how Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, claimed that in 1993 Biden pushed her against a
wall, groped her, and penetrated her with his fingers. Reade had spoken up about the alleged incident a year earlier, but was
met with accusations that she was doing Russia’s bidding. The US media was still doing ‘Russiagate’ back then, remember?
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the
progressive agenda.
George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are
living it right now.
Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member
of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its "resistance" is undermining
an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the
proper president would be elected -- the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology.
Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy-
or girlfriend, or co-workers.
But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the
strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett
Kavanaugh.
In Orwell's world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry,
rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven
guilty. Instead, regimented ideology -- the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of
one's life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality -- warps everything from the use of
language to private life.
Oceania's Rules
Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long
sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his
nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when
Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the
so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the
Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election
year.
Rejecting Kavanaugh proved a hard task given that he had a long record of judicial opinions
and writings -- and there was nothing much in them that would indicate anything but a sharp
mind, much less any ideological, racial, or sexual intolerance. His personal life was
impeccable, his family admirable.
Kavanaugh was no combative Robert Bork, but congenial, and he patiently answered all the
questions asked of him, despite constant demonstrations and pre-planned street-theater
interruptions from the Senate gallery and often obnoxious grandstanding by "I am Spartacus"
Democratic senators.
So Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed unless a bombshell revelation derailed the vote. And
so we got a bombshell.
Weeks earlier, Senator Diane Feinstein had received a written allegation against Kavanaugh
of sexual battery by an accuser who wished to remain anonymous. Feinstein sat on it for nearly
two months, probably because she thought the charges were either spurious or unprovable. Until
a few days ago, she mysteriously refused to release the
full text of the redacted complaint , and she has said she does not know whether the very
accusations that she purveyed are believable. Was she reluctant to memorialize the accusations
by formally submitting them to the Senate Judiciary Committee, because doing so makes Ford
subject to possible criminal liability if the charges prove demonstrably untrue?
The gambit was clearly to use the charges as a last-chance effort to stop the nomination --
but only if Kavanaugh survived the cross examinations during the confirmation hearing. Then, in
extremis , Feinstein finally referenced the charge, hoping to keep it anonymous, but, at the
same time, to hint of its serious nature and thereby to force a delay in the confirmation.
Think something McCarthesque, like "I have here in my hand the name . . ."
Delay would mean that the confirmation vote could be put off until after the midterm
election, and a few jeopardized Democratic senators in Trump states would not have to go on
record voting no on Kavanaugh. Or the insidious innuendos, rumor, and gossip about Kavanaugh
would help to bleed him to death by a thousand leaks and, by association, tank Republican
chances at retaining the House. (Republicans may or may not lose the House over the
confirmation circus, but they most surely will lose their base and, with it, the Congress if
they do not confirm Kavanaugh.)
Feinstein's anonymous trick did not work. So pressure mounted to reveal or leak Ford's
identity and thereby force an Anita-Hill–like inquest that might at least show old white
men Republican senators as insensitive to a vulnerable and victimized woman.
The problem, of course, was that, under traditional notions of jurisprudence, Ford's
allegations simply were not provable. But America soon discovered that civic and government
norms no longer follow the Western legal tradition. In Orwellian terms, Kavanaugh was now at
the mercy of the state. He was tagged with sexual battery at first by an anonymous accuser, and
then upon revelation of her identity, by a left-wing, political activist psychology professor
and her more left-wing, more politically active lawyer.
Newspeak and Doublethink
Statue of limitations? It does not exist. An incident 36 years ago apparently is as fresh
today as it was when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford 15.
Presumption of Innocence? Not at all. Kavanaugh is accused and thereby guilty. The accuser
faces no doubt. In Orwellian America, the accused must first present his defense, even though
he does not quite know what he is being charged with. Then the accuser and her legal team pour
over his testimony to prepare her accusation.
Evidence? That too is a fossilized concept. Ford could name neither the location of the
alleged assault nor the date or time. She had no idea how she arrived or left the scene of the
alleged crime. There is no physical evidence of an attack. And such lacunae in her memory
mattered no longer at all.
Details? Again, such notions are counterrevolutionary. Ford said to her therapist 6 years
ago (30 years after the alleged incident) that there were four would-be attackers, at least as
recorded in the therapist's notes.
But now she has claimed that there were only two assaulters: Kavanaugh and a friend. In
truth, all four people -- now including a female -- named in her accusations as either
assaulters or witnesses have insisted that they have no knowledge of the event, much less of
wrongdoing wherever and whenever Ford claims the act took place. That they deny knowledge is at
times used as proof by Ford's lawyers that the event 36 years was traumatic.
An incident at 15 is so seared into her lifelong memory that at 52 Ford has no memory of any
of the events or details surrounding that unnamed day, except that she is positive that
17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, along with four? three? two? others, was harassing her. She has no
idea where or when she was assaulted but still assures that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge
were drunk, but that she and the others (?) merely had only the proverbial teenage "one beer."
Most people are more likely to know where they were at a party than the exact number of
alcoholic beverages they consumed -- but not so much about either after 36 years.
Testimony? No longer relevant. It doesn't matter that Kavanaugh and the other alleged
suspect both deny the allegations and have no memory of being in the same locale with Ford 36
years ago. In sum, all the supposed partiers, both male and female, now swear, under penalty of
felony, that they have no memory of any of the incidents that Ford claims occurred so long ago.
That Ford cannot produce a single witness to confirm her narrative or refute theirs is likewise
of no concern. So far, she has singularly not submitted a formal affidavit or given a
deposition that would be subject to legal exposure if untrue.
Again, the ideological trumps the empirical. "All women must be believed" is the testament,
and individuals bow to the collective. Except, as in Orwell's Animal Farm, there are
ideological exceptions -- such as Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, Sherrod Brown, and Joe Biden.
The slogan of Ford's psychodrama is "All women must be believed, but some women are more
believable than others." That an assertion becomes fact due to the prevailing ideology and
gender of the accuser marks the destruction of our entire system of justice.
Rights of the accused? They too do not exist. In the American version of 1984 , the accuser,
a.k.a. the more ideologically correct party, dictates to authorities the circumstances under
which she will be investigated and cross-examined: She will demand all sorts of special
considerations of privacy and exemptions; Kavanaugh will be forced to return and face cameras
and the public to prove that he was not then, and has never been since, a sexual assaulter.
In our 1984 world, the accused is considered guilty if merely charged, and the accuser is a
victim who can ruin a life but must not under any circumstance be made uncomfortable in proving
her charges.
Doublespeak abounds. "Victim" solely refers to the accuser, not the accused, who one day was
Brett Kavanaugh, a brilliant jurist and model citizen, and the next morning woke up transformed
into some sort of Kafkaesque cockroach. The media and political operatives went in a nanosecond
from charging that she was groped and "assaulted" to the claim that she was "raped."
In our 1984, the phrase "must be believed" is doublespeak for "must never face
cross-examination."
Ford should be believed or not believed on the basis of evidence , not her position, gender,
or politics. I certainly did not believe Joe Biden, simply because he was a U.S. senator, when,
as Neal Kinnock's doppelganger, he claimed that he came from a long line of coal miners -- any
more than I believed that Senator Corey Booker really had a gang-banger Socratic confidant
named "T-Bone," or that would-be senator Richard Blumenthal was an anguished Vietnam combat vet
or that Senator Elizabeth Warren was a Native American. (Do we need a 25th Amendment for
unhinged senators?) Wanting to believe something from someone who is ideologically correct does
not translate into confirmation of truth.
Ford supposedly in her originally anonymous accusation had insisted that she had sought
"medical treatment" for her assault. The natural assumption is that such a term would mean
that, soon after the attack, the victim sought a doctor's or emergency room's help to address
either her physical or mental injuries -- records might therefore be a powerful refutation of
Kavanaugh's denials.
But "medical treatment" now means that 30 years after the alleged assault, Ford sought
counseling for some sort of "relationship" or "companion" therapy, or what might legitimately
be termed "marriage counseling." And in the course of her discussions with her therapist about
her marriage, she first spoke of her alleged assault three decades earlier. She did not then
name Kavanaugh to her therapist, whose notes are at odds with Ford's current
version.
Memory Holes
Then we come to Orwell's idea of "memory holes," or mechanisms to wipe clean inconvenient
facts that disrupt official ideological narratives.
Shortly after Ford was named, suddenly her prior well-publicized and self-referential
social-media revelations vanished, as if she'd never held her minor-league but confident
pro-Sanders, anti-Trump opinions . And much of her media and social-media accounts were erased
as well.
Similarly, one moment the New York Times -- just coming off an embarrassing lie in reporting
that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had ordered new $50,000 office drapes on the government dime
-- reported that Kavanaugh's alleged accomplice, Mark Judge, had confirmed Ford's allegation.
Indeed, in a sensational scoop, according to the Times , Judge told the Judiciary Committee
that he does remember the episode and has nothing more to say. In fact, Judge told the
committee the very opposite: that he does not remember the episode . Forty minutes later, the
Times embarrassing narrative vanished down the memory hole.
The online versions of some of the yearbooks of Ford's high school from the early 1980s
vanished as well. At times, they had seemed to take a perverse pride in the reputation of the
all-girls school for underage drinking, carousing, and, on rarer occasions, "passing out" at
parties. Such activities were supposed to be the monopoly and condemnatory landscape of the
"frat boy" and spoiled-white-kid Kavanaugh -- and certainly not the environment in which the
noble Ford navigated. Seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh was to play the role of a falling-down
drunk; Ford, with impressive powers of memory of an event 36 years past, assures us that as a
circumspect 15-year-old, she had only "one beer."
A former teenage friend of Ford's sent out a flurry of social-media postings, allegedly
confirming that Ford's ordeal was well known to her friends in 1982 and so her assault
narrative must therefore be confirmed. Then, when challenged on some of her incoherent details
(schools are not in session during summertime, and Ford is on record as not telling anyone of
the incident for 30 years), she mysteriously claimed that she no longer could stand by her
earlier assertions, which likewise soon vanished from her social-media account. Apparently, she
had assumed that in 2018 Oceania ideologically correct citizens merely needed to lodge an
accusation and it would be believed, without any obligation on her part to substantiate her
charges.
When a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, followed Ford seven days later to allege another
sexual incident with the teenage Kavanaugh, at Yale 35 years ago, it was no surprise that she
followed the now normal Orwellian boilerplate : None of those whom she named as witnesses could
either confirm her charges or even remember the alleged event. She had altered her narrative
after consultations with lawyers and handlers. She too confesses to underage drinking during
the alleged event. She too is currently a social and progressive political activist. The only
difference from Ford's narrative is that Ramirez's accusation was deemed not credible enough to
be reported even by the New York Times , which recently retracted false stories about witness
Mark Judge in the Ford case, and which falsely reported that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had
charged the government for $50,000 office drapes.
As in 1984 , "truths" in these sorts of allegations do not exist unless they align with the
larger "Truth" of the progressive project. In our case, the overarching Truth mandates that, in
a supposedly misogynist society, women must always be believed in all their accusations and
should be exempt from all counter-examinations.
Little "truths" -- such as the right of the accused, the need to produce evidence,
insistence on cross-examination, and due process -- are counterrevolutionary constructs and the
refuge of reactionary hold-outs who are enemies of the people. Or in the words of Hawaii
senator Mazie Hirono:
Guess who's perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It's the men in this country. And
I just want to say to the men in this country, "Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing,
for a change."
The View 's Joy Behar was more honest about the larger Truth: "These white men, old by the
way, are not protecting women," Behar exclaimed. "They're protecting a man who is probably
guilty." We thank Behar for the concession "probably."
According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now guilty
of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17. And that reality reminds us that we are no
longer in America . We are already living well into the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell
warned us about long ago.
All Comments 30
NiggaPleeze , 10 seconds ago
National Review? Really? Does it get more evil than them?
Debt Slave , 16 seconds ago
According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now
guilty of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17.
Well half the country are idiots but the important thing to remember in our democracy is
that the idiots have the right to vote. And here we are today.
No wonder the founders believed that democracy was a stupid idea. But we know better than
they did, right?
Jkweb007 , 37 seconds ago
It is hard for me to believe 50% when in America you are presumed innocent till proven
guilty. Is this the spanish inquizition or salem witch trials. If he floats he was innocent.
I am shocked that people in congress would make statements, she must be believed, I believe
he is guilty. These are people who represent and stand for the constitution that many died in
the defense of life liberty and the persuit of happiness. It may be time for that mlilitia
that our founding fathers endorsed. If Kavanaugh is rebuked for these accusation our freedom,
free speech may be next.
One more confirmation that the so called "social justice warriors" -like last night's
goons' who shamefully interrupted Senator Cruz's night out with his wife at a private
restaurant- are Orwell's projected fascists!
opport.knocks , 20 minutes ago
Bush 2 was in the big chair when he and his cabinet started the USA down the full
Orwellian path (Patriot Act, post 911). Kavanaugh and his wife were both members of that
government team.
If there is any reason to dismiss him, that would be it, not this post-pubescent sex
crap.
If I was a cynical person, I would say this whole exercise is to deflect attention away
from that part of his "swampy" past.
Aubiekong , 23 minutes ago
We lost the republic when we allowed the liberals to staff the ministry of
education...
CheapBastard , 15 minutes ago
My neighbor is a high school teacher. I asked her if she was giving students time off to
protest this and she looked at me and said, "Just the opposite. I have given them a 10 page
seminar paper to write on the meaning of Due Process."
So there IS hope.
my new username , 23 minutes ago
This is criminal contempt for the due lawful process of the Congress.
These are unlawful attempts and conspiracies to subvert justice.
So we need to start arresting, trying, convicting and punishing the criminals.
BlackChicken , 23 minutes ago
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of
the progressive agenda.
This needs to end, not later, NOW.
Be careful what you wish for leftists, I'll dedicate my remaining years to torture you
with it.
Jus7tme , 22 minutes ago
>>the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell warned us about long ago.
I think Orwell was in 1949 was warning about a fascist totalitarian hell, not a socialist
one, but nice try rewriting history.
Duc888 , 29 minutes ago
WTF ever happened to "innocent until PROVEN guilty"?
CheapBastard , 19 minutes ago
Schumer said before the confirmation hearings even began he would not let Kavanaugh become
SC justice no matter what.
Dems are so tolerant, open minded and respectful of due process, aren't they.
"... Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner, or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted. "It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said. ..."
"... Bloomberg dubbed the phenomenon the 'Pence Effect' after the US vice president who previously admitted that he would never dine alone with any woman other than his wife. ..."
"... All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say. ..."
"... hiring a woman on Wall Street has become an "unknown risk," according to one wealth advisor, who said there is always a concern that a woman might take something said to her in the wrong way. ..."
"... The unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement on Wall Street could be the stifling of women's progress and a sanitization of the workplace to the point of not even being able to have a private meeting with the door closed. ..."
"... Another irony is that while men may think they are avoiding one type of scandal, could find themselves facing another: Discrimination complaints. ..."
"... "A Wall Street rule for the #MeToo era: Avoid women at all cost." https://t.co/TCGk9UzT4R "Secular sharia" has arrived, as I predicted here: https://t.co/TTrWY6ML34 pic.twitter.com/YpEz78iamJ ..."
"... "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison told Bloomberg. ..."
Two female reporters for Bloomberg interviewed 30 Wall Street executives and found that while it's true that women might be
afraid to speak up for fear of losing their careers, men are also so afraid of being falsely accused that they won't even have dinner,
or even one-to-one business meetings with a female colleague. They worry that a simple comment or gesture could be misinterpreted.
"It's creating a sense of walking on eggshells," one Morgan Stanley executive said.
Bloomberg dubbed the phenomenon the 'Pence Effect' after the US vice president who previously admitted that he would never
dine alone with any woman other than his wife. British actor Taron Egerton recently also said he now
avoided being alone with women for fear
of finding himself in #MeToo's crosshairs.
I remember when a woman I was friendly/kind with perceived me as someone who wanted "more." She wrote me a message about how
she was uncomfortable. I'm gay. https://t.co/7z0X7Dwzkp
All these extreme strategies being adopted by men to avoid falling victim to an unjust #MeToo scandal are creating a kind
of "gender segregation" on Wall Street, the reporters say.
Hurting women's progress?
The most ironic outcome of a movement that was supposed to be about women's empowerment is that now, even hiring a woman on
Wall Street has become an "unknown risk," according to one wealth advisor, who said there is always a concern that a woman might
take something said to her in the wrong way.
With men occupying the most senior positions on Wall Street, women need male mentors who can teach them the ropes and help them
advance their careers, but what happens when men are afraid to play that role with their younger female colleagues? The unintended
consequence of the #MeToo movement on Wall Street could be the stifling of women's progress and a sanitization of the workplace to
the point of not even being able to have a private meeting with the door closed.
Another irony is that while men may think they are avoiding one type of scandal, could find themselves facing another: Discrimination
complaints.
"If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,
those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint," Stephen Zweig, an
employment attorney with FordHarrison told Bloomberg.
Not all men are responding to the #MeToo movement by fearfully cutting themselves off from women, however. "Just try not to be
an asshole," one said, while another added: "It's really not that hard."
It might not be that simple, however. It seems there is no escape from the grip of the #MeToo movement. One of the movements most
recent victims of the viral hashtag movement is not a man, but a song -- the time-honored classic 'Baby It's Cold Outside' -- which
is being banished from American radio
stations because it has a "rapey" vibe.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has launched a fund to support sick healthcare workers and their families, but some blame him for the dire working conditions facing the state's caregivers after nine years of hospital budget cuts. Cuomo announced the state is working on a "Covid-19 Heroes Compensation Fund" to support healthcare workers and their families who have been diagnosed with the coronavirus during his daily briefing on Friday. It was heralded by his growing Democratic fan club as a generous, thoughtful move from a politician who cares about the "frontline workers." ..."
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has launched a fund to support sick healthcare workers
and their families, but some blame him for the dire working conditions facing the state's
caregivers after nine years of hospital budget cuts. Cuomo announced the state is working on a
"Covid-19 Heroes Compensation Fund" to support healthcare workers and their families who
have been diagnosed with the coronavirus during his daily briefing on Friday. It was heralded
by his growing Democratic fan club as a generous, thoughtful move from a politician who cares
about the "frontline workers."
Absent from the lovefest was any mention of how the governor had - just the previous day -
deferred 2 percent pay raises to some 80,000 state workers for 90 days, and potentially for
longer. Many of those affected are healthcare workers in the state's prisons and mental health
facilities.
Union leaders were outraged. "It's inexcusable to require our workers to literally face
death to ensure the state keeps running and then turn around and deny those very workers their
much-deserved raise in this time of crisis, " Civil Service Employees Association president
Mary Sullivan told the Times Union, while NY Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent
Association chief Michael Powers called the postponement a "slap in the face" to workers
facing "some of the most dangerous conditions in the state."
While Cuomo is being praised for his leadership amid the coronavirus outbreak, the problems
he is scrambling to solve are largely of his own making. Although aware of a 2015 report
highlighting the desperately-depleted state stockpile of ventilators, he didn't take any
actions on it, and has spent his tenure shuttering and downsizing hospitals across the state,
mostly those serving low-income clients. The state has eliminated 20,000 hospital beds in the
last two decades, at least half under his leadership.
The New York state budget passed at the beginning of the month included deep cuts to
Medicaid and may have rendered the state ineligible for $6 billion in federal aid, infuriating
liberal lawmakers who were less enchanted with the new #Resistance hero. State Senator Gustavo
Rivera (D-Bronx) told the New York Daily News that Cuomo's latest budget "only offered harsh
austerity for the poorest and most vulnerable" New Yorkers.
The state's Democrat-controlled senate called on Cuomo to tax the wealthy - New York has the
highest economic inequality in the country, and a tax on the richest .01 percent has upwards of
90 percent approval among voters - only to be turned down by the politician who has earned the
nickname "Governor One Percent."
The latest cost-cutting moves resulted in New York City deprived on $200 million in sales
tax revenue when the big apple is at the epicenter of the US coronavirus outbreak.
The pandemic has hospitals so understaffed that NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation has
apparently been reduced to contracting dodgy medical-temp agencies - one, Kansas-based
disaster-staffing group Krucial Staffing, was sued earlier this week for luring out-of-state
medical professionals to work in city hospitals under false pretenses, promising them cushy
posts with ample protective equipment and no Covid-19 exposure - to fill vacancies. The suit
alleges Krucial's misrepresentation of working conditions placed healthcare workers' medical
licenses and lives in danger.
It's unclear how many medical workers have contracted and died of the disease in the state,
as New York, along with several other states, does not tract infections among medical staff.
According to a BuzzFeed News review of the reports by 12 states, which made their data public,
at least 5,400 nurses and doctors tested positive nationwide, while dozens have succumbed to
the lethal illness. Among them, Kious Kelly, an assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West,
whose death from the coronavirus on March 24 sparked protests among the personnel and led to
the hospital eventually allowing workers to receive tests – but only those already
showing symptoms.
Some 7,887 New Yorkers have died with coronavirus since the beginning of the outbreak, the
majority of them - 5,820 - in New York City.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American
Mainstream Media
User Settings:
Version?
Social Media?
Read Aloud w/
Show Word Counts
No Video Autoplay
No Infinite Scrolling
Save
Cancel
Email This Page to Someone
Remember My
Information
=>
List of Bookmarks
◄
►
◄
►
▲
▼
Remove from Library
B
Show
Comment
Next New Comment
Next
New Reply
Read More
Reply
Agree/Disagree/Etc.
More...
This Commenter
This Thread
Hide Thread
Display All Comments
AgreeDisagreeThanksLOLTroll
These buttons register your public Agreement, Disagreement, Thanks, LOL, or Troll with the selected
comment. They are ONLY available to recent, frequent commenters who have saved their Name+Email using the
'Remember My Information' checkbox, and may also ONLY be used three times during any eight hour period.
Email Comment
Ignore
Commenter
Follow Commenter
Add to
Library
Toggle All
Bookmark
ToC
▲
▼
Search Text
Case
Sensitive
Exact Words
Include Comments
Search
Clear
Cancel
Imagine if the congress approved a measure to form a public-private
partnership between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Can you imagine that?
Now imagine if a panicky and ill-informed
Congress gave the Fed a blank check to bail out all of its crooked crony corporate and Wall Street friends,
allowing the Fed to provide more than $4.5 trillion to underwater corporations that ripped off Mom and Pop
investors by selling them bonds that were used to goose their stock prices so fatcat CEOs could make off
like bandits. Imagine if all that red ink from private actors was piled onto the national debt pushing
long-term interest rates into the stratosphere while crushing small businesses, households and ordinary
working people.
Now try to imagine the impact this would
have on the nation's future. Imagine if the Central Bank was given the green-light to devour the Treasury,
control the country's "purse strings", and use nation's taxing authority to shore up its trillions in
ultra-risky leveraged bets, its opaque financially-engineered ponzi-instruments, and its massive speculative
debts that have gone pear-shaped leaving a gaping black hole on its balance sheet?
Well, you won't have to imagine this
scenario for much longer, because the reality is nearly at hand. You see, the traitorous, dumbshit
nincompoops in Congress are just a hairs-breadth away from abdicating congress's crucial power of the purse,
which is not only their greatest strength, but also allows the congress to reign in abuses of executive
power by controlling the flow of funding. The power of the purse is the supreme power of government which is
why the founders entrusted it to the people's elected representatives in congress. Now these imbeciles are
deciding whether to hand over that authority to a privately-owned banking cartel that has greatly expanded
the chasm between rich and poor, incentivized destructive speculation on an industrial scale, and repeatedly
inflated behemoth asset-price bubbles that have inevitably blown up sending stocks and the real economy into
freefall. The idea of merging the Fed and the Treasury first appeared in its raw form in an article by
former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen in the Financial Times. Here's a short excerpt from the
piece:
"The Fed could ask Congress for the
authority to buy limited amounts of investment-grade corporate debt The Fed's intervention could help
restart that part of the corporate debt market, which is under significant stress.
Such a programme
would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed
while still
providing needed liquidity to an essential market." (
Financial
Times
)
The Fed is not allowed to buy corporate
debt, because it is not within its mandate of "price stability and full employment". It's also not allowed
to arbitrarily intervene in the markets to pick winners and losers, nor is it allowed to bailout
poorly-managed crybaby corporations who were gaming the system to their own advantage when the whole deal
blew up in their faces. That's their problem, not the Fed's and not the American taxpayer's.
But notice how Bernanke emphasizes how
"Such a programme would have to be carefully calibrated to minimize the credit risk taken by the Fed". Why
do you think he said that?
He said it because he anticipates an
arrangement where the new Treasury-Fed combo could buy up to "$4.5 trillion of corporate debt" (according to
Marketwatch and BofA). And the way this will work, is the Fed will select the bonds that will be purchased
and the credit risk will be heaped onto the US Treasury. Apparently Bernanke and Yellen think this is a
"fair" arrangement, but others might differ on that point.
Keep in mind, that in the last week
alone, investors pulled a record $107 billion out of corporate bonds which is a market which has been in a
deep-freeze for nearly a month. The only activity is the steady surge of redemptions by frantic investors
who want to get their money back before the listing ship heads for Davey Jones locker. This is the market
that Bernanke wants the American people to bail out mainly because he doesn't want to submerge the Fed's
balance sheet in red ink. He wants to find a sucker who will take the loss instead. That's where Uncle Sam
comes in, he's the target of this subterfuge. This same theme pops up in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Check it out:
"At least Treasury has come around
to realizing it needs a facility to provide liquidity for companies. But as we write this, Mr. Mnuchin
was still insisting that Treasury have control of most of the money to be able to ladle out directly to
companies it wants to help. This is a recipe for picking winners and losers, and thus for bitter
political fights and months of ugly headlines charging favoritism. The far better answer is for Treasury
to use money from Congress to replenish the Exchange Stabilization Fund to back the Fed in creating a
facility or special-purpose vehicles under Section 13(3) to lend the money to all comers. "(
"Leaderless
on the Econom"
, Wall Street Journal)
I can hardly believe the author is bold
enough to say this right to our faces. Read it carefully: They are saying "We want your money, but not your
advice. The Fed will choose who gets the cash and who doesn't. Just put your trillions on the counter and
get the hell out."
Isn't that what they're saying? Of
course it is. And the rest of the article is even more arrogant:
"The Fed can charge a
non-concessionary rate, but the vehicles should be open to those who think they need the money, not
merely to those Treasury decides are worthy." (Huh? So the Treasury should have no say so in who gets
taxpayer money??) The looming liquidity crisis is simply too great for that kind of bureaucratic,
politicized decision-making. (Wall Street Journal)
Get it? In other words, the folks at
Treasury are just too stupid or too prejudiced to understand the subtleties of a bigass bailout like this.
Is that arrogance or what?
This is the contempt these people have
for you and me and everyone else who isn't a part of their elitist gaggle of reprobates. Here's a clip from
another article at the WSJ that helps to show how the financial media is pushing this gigantic handout to
corporate America:.
"The Federal Reserve, Treasury
Department and banking regulators deserve congratulations for their bold, necessary actions to provide
liquidity to the U.S. financial system amid the coronavirus crisis. But more remains to be done. We thus
recommend: (1) immediate congressional action . to authorize the Treasury to use the Exchange
Stabilization Fund to guarantee prime money-market funds, (2) regulatory action to effect temporary
reductions in bank capital and liquidity requirements (NOTE–So now the banks don't need to hold capital
against their loans?) .. additional Fed lending to banks and nonbanks .(Note -by "nonbanks", does the
author mean underwater hedge funds?)
We recommend that the Fed take
further actions as lender of last resort. First, it should re-establish the Term Auction Facility, used
in the 2008 crisis, allowing depository institutions to borrow against a broad range of collateral at an
auction price (Note–They want to drop the requirement for good Triple A collateral.) Second, it should
consider further exercising its Section 13(3) authority to provide additional liquidity to nonbanks,
potentially including purchases of corporate debt through a special-purpose vehicle" (
"Do
More to Avert a Liquidity Crisis"
, Wall Street Journal
)
This isn't a bailout, it's a joke, and
there's no way Congress should approve these measures, particularly the merging of the US Treasury with the
cutthroat Fed. That's a prescription for disaster! The Fed needs to be abolished not embraced as a state
institution. It's madness!
And look how the author wants to set up
an special-purpose vehicle (SPV) so the accounting chicanery can be kept off the books which means the
public won't know how much money is being flushed down the toilet trying to resuscitate these insolvent
corporations whose executives are still living high on the hog on the money they stole from credulous
investors. This whole scam stinks to high heaven!
Meanwhile America's working people will
get a whopping $1,000 bucks to tide them over until the debts pile up to the rafters and they're forced to
rob the neighborhood 7-11 to feed the kids. How fair is that?
And don't kid yourself: This isn't a
bailout, it's the elitist's political agenda aimed at creating a permanent underclass who'll work for
peanuts just to eek out a living.
In 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve bailed out the global banking system to the tune of $16 Trillion. But
American citizens were left to pay usurious rates of interest on $1 Trillion of credit card debt. And
American students had lost years of economic opportunity but their $1 Trillion dollars of debt could not be
discharged through bankruptcy.
This time the banks should stand behind the debtors at the government
troth.
It's hard to understand how holiday cruise shipping can be regarded as an essential business.
It is almost as hard to understand why a "Globalist Enterprise" should be spared its fate through the
generosity of of one country. Even harder to understand, why would that one country should bail out a
business, which had employed both tax-avoidance schemes as well as strategy import substitution and foreign
investment to improve its profits at the expense of that country.
Nationalism is better that globalism. The current crisis was not caused by globalism; but globalism has
drained from our country the means to respond to the crisis with the medicines and equipment that would
reduce its severity.
Not a single cent of government aid should go toward a person or an entity outside the United States and
it territories. Conditions should be placed upon such aid, so that the companies receiving it, must
domesticate their supply chains, and must produce and develop their products within the United States.
@anachronism
Make the universities discharge the student debt. It was their scam all along. They can begin by retrenching
their schools of the humanities and at least halving their administrative staff. And end building and sports
programs. The fat hangs heavy on that particular pig.
The student and the university should share responsibility equally. In
the future, the institution should be made a co-signor on any student loan; and the obligation to repay
the loan should be joint and several for both the institution and the student.
Bankruptcy provides the ex-student with the chance to start over and to escape the burden; but not
without consequences. This will discourage the ex-student, who is doing well financially and has the
means to service the debt, from just walking away.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding
values
. It is separate from the newsroom.
Most American restaurants do not offer paid sick leave. Workers who fall sick face a simple
choice: Work and get paid or stay home and get stiffed. Not surprisingly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
reported in 2014 that fully 20 percent of food service workers had come to work at least once in the previous year "
while
sick with vomiting or diarrhea
."
As the new coronavirus spreads across the United States, the time has come for restaurants,
retailers and other industries that rely on low-wage labor to abandon their parsimonious resistance to paid sick leave.
Companies that do not pay sick workers to stay home are endangering their workers, their customers and the health of the
broader public.
Studies show
that paying for sick employees to stay home significantly reduces the spread of the seasonal flu. There's
every reason to think it would help to check the new coronavirus, too.
Class-neutral, race-based policies in the United States include affirmative action in
hiring, government set-asides for specified groups in contracting, and gerrymandering of
congressional districts to create majority-minority districts likely to elect a member of a
racial minority as a representative. In most cases the beneficiaries of these policies tend to
be members of the affluent elite within a particular racial or ethnic group. For technocratic
neoliberalism, the goal is to ensure that there is the proper racial and gender balance within
the overclass, the balance that presumably would result from a perfect meritocracy. If pure
meritocracy does not yet exist, then a simulacrum will be created. But as the British socialist
thinker Ralph Miliband put it, "access to positions of power by members of the subordinate
classes does not change the fact of domination; it only changes the personnel."
The assumption that contemporary North America and Europe already have near-classless
societies, to be made perfectly classless by a few low-cost policy interventions, also compels
neoliberals to attribute the problems of the native white Western working class not to the
class system but rather to personal shortcomings, which a number of unfortunate individuals are
alleged to share.
The most important personal shortcoming is alleged to be a lack of adequate job skills. The
theory of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) was popular during the bubble years before
the Great Recession. SBTC theory explained rising inequality by asserting that the
"left-behind" members of the working class had inferior and outmoded skills not needed by the
"creative class" or the "digital elite" in the new "global knowledge economy."
The premise has been that U.S. corporations like Apple did not offshore production to China
to take advantage of low-wage, unfree workers and state subsidies of various kinds. No, it is
often implied, the poor Chinese workers migrating from rural areas to make iPhones in sweatshop
factories in southern China in degrading conditions for a pittance had superior STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Math) skills unmatched among ignorant American or European
workers. Provide these "left-behind" workers in the West with appropriate skills ("human
capital" in the pseudoeconomic jargon of neoliberalism) and their earnings will increase.
On the basis of SBTC theory, school curricula in the U.S. and elsewhere have been
reconfigured to focus on STEM skills. For a generation, the conventional wisdom has held that
the "jobs of the future" are "knowledge economy" jobs like software coding. But is this really
true?
For working-class Americans and Europeans, the jobs of the future are mostly low-wage jobs,
many of them in health care. In most of these jobs, the low wages are caused not by a lack of
university education, which is not needed, nor by a lack of vocational skills, but by a lack of
bargaining power on the part of workers.
♦♦♦
Somewhat bolder proposals to help the working class, which also avoid any heretical
questioning of the labor market effects of deunionization, offshoring, and mass immigration,
include more redistribution of income in the form of cash transfers or tax breaks and more
opportunities for working-class citizens to start their own businesses.
Redistributionist proposals range from expanding tax subsidies to wage earners, like
America's earned income tax credit (EITC), to the old but periodically revived idea of a
universal basic income (UBI), which would allow all citizens to live at a minimally adequate
level without working. While some minor forms of enhanced redistribution to mollify
discontented voters will undoubtedly be tried in many Western countries, proposals for massive
cash transfers are doomed for a number of reasons.
Purchasing political acquiescence from workers who have stagnant or declining incomes with
substantial amounts of cash requires an economically dynamic sector of the economy to make the
bribes affordable. In some versions, radical redistributionism posits the permanent existence
of high intellectual-property rents flowing from the rest of the world to tech tycoons, along
with global financial rents flowing to money managers. These rents, it is assumed, will be so
high and sustainable that the tycoons and money managers will gladly share them with the rest
of the population in the nation-states in which they happen to reside.
At the local level, something like this system has long existed in tech centers like San
Francisco and financial entrepôts like New York and London. Local rentier interests are
coddled by governments in return for their contribution to revenues. But while it may work in a
few hub cities, the policy cannot be scaled up to the level of the ordinary nation-state, much
less a continental nation-state like the United States, with a third of a billion
inhabitants.
It is no coincidence that Reaganism-Clintonism and Thatcherism-Blairism flourished in an era
of prolonged asset bubbles. For a time, it is possible for stock market booms and real estate
bubbles to fund public services and redistribution while allowing the wealthy to keep most of
their gains. But the financial industry is volatile and global innovation rents quickly
disappear, as a result of lapsing patents, intellectual property theft, foreign success in
indigenous innovation, and the commoditization of former cutting-edge industries.
♦♦♦
Recently a rival approach to reform, antimonopolism, has attracted growing attention and
support among American progressives. Based on a revival of the long-moribund small-producer
republicanism of William Jennings Bryan, Louis Brandeis, and Wright Patman, this school blames
inequality and a host of other social ills on increasing "concentration" or "monopoly" and
proposes a radical antitrust policy as a panacea. Breaking up large firms into smaller ones, it
is claimed, will increase opportunities for Americans to exit the labor market by transitioning
from wage earners to small business owners. Those who continue to sell their labor for wages
will have their bargaining power increased, and the monopsony wage-setting power of employers
reduced, by a government policy of breaking up big employers into a greater number of smaller
ones -- so it is said.
Praising small business is certain to be an applause line in most Western democracies, given
popular nostalgia for old-fashioned small-town and rural life. But multiplying the number of
small firms will not help the wage-earning majority, because small firms pay poorly. In the
U.S., large firms with over five hundred workers in 2007 employed 44 percent of all workers but
only 28 percent of low-wage workers. Firms with fewer than ten workers employed only 20 percent
of the workforce but 42 percent of low-wage workers.
Some of the new antimonopolists have suggested that breaking up big firms can increase the
bargaining power of workers. But the idea that janitors will be in a better position to bargain
for higher wages if Facebook is broken into three or four or five giant successor firms is
implausible, to say the least.
♦♦♦
The cure-alls of education, redistribution, and antimonopolism enjoy broad elite support
from the center-left to the center-right, in part, no doubt, because they do not question the
commitment of post-1970s neoliberalism to liberalized policies about trade, immigration, and
organized labor. Redistribution, for example, is not necessarily a left-wing idea. On the
contrary, labor liberals and social democrats have usually opposed proposals for post-tax
transfers of cash to individuals, in favor of measures that increase the ability of workers to
bargain for higher pretax wages, like limits on immigration and offshoring, collective
bargaining at the firm or sectoral level, and public job guarantees and socialized in-kind
benefits like universal health care ("de-commodification").
Conversely, cash transfers and ideas of universal capitalism have a long and distinguished
pedigree on the free market right. From Milton Friedman in the 1960s to Charles Murray in the
1990s, libertarians have proposed using some form of a basic income as a substitute, not a
supplement, for most or all other social insurance and antipoverty programs.
But like the panaceas of education and redistribution, anti-monopolism does not question the
premises of economic neoliberalism. Indeed, the antimonopolists claim, with some justification,
that they are even more fervent devotees of markets than conventional neoliberals.
Worst of all, three of these schools of thought seek to respond to working-class populist
rebellions by offering workers the chance to become something other than workers, as though
there were something shameful and retrograde about being an ordinary wage earner. Many
champions of education as a panacea want to turn wage earners into professionals. Advocates of
universal capitalism want to turn wage earners into investors. Antimonopolists want to turn
wage earners into small business owners.
In the 1930s, Keynes speculated about the euthanasia of the rentier class. These reformers
propose the euthanasia of the working class. The neoliberal utopia is a workerless
paradise.
♦♦♦
What about socialism -- the genuine kind with state ownership of the means of production? In
theory, the option of democratic socialism need not be discredited by the horrors wrought by
Marxist-Leninist dictatorships in rural nations like twentieth-century Russia and China.
Democratic socialism is discredited for other reasons. One is the greater track record of
the mixed economy, with a blend of markets, public enterprises, and nonprofit provision, over
both the pure free market economy and state socialism. A case can be made for socializing some
enterprises or industries, but socializing everything can only be justified by dogmatic
ideology.
The other argument against democratic socialism is the fact that socializing most or all of
the economy by itself would not address the problem of checking the power of the managerial
elite, which mere elections, however free, would be unlikely to constrain. Empowering organized
labor by means like tripartite business-labor-government bargaining can provide real checks on
the managerial overclass, without sacrificing the dynamism of the mixed economy.
♦♦♦
The American writer Daniel McCarthy has aptly called approaches like the ones I have
criticized in this essay "palliative liberalism." However popular these miracle cures may be
among the managerial elite and the overclass intelligentsia, as remedies for working-class
distress in the deindustrialized heartlands of the Western world the panaceas of
redistributionism, education, and antimonopolism are like prescriptions of aspirin for cancer.
They may ameliorate the symptoms, but they do not cure the disease -- the imbalance of power,
within Western nation-states, between the overclass and the working class as a whole, including
many exploited immigrant workers who labor for the affluent in the metropolitan hubs.
If banana republicanism is to be avoided as the fate of the Western democracies, reformers
in America and Europe will have to do far more than buy off the population with a subsidy here
or an antitrust lawsuit there. Indeed, if a package of minor, ameliorative reforms is handed
down from the mountaintops of Davos or Aspen by a claque of benevolent billionaires and the
technocrats and the politicians and intellectuals whom the billionaires subsidize, with little
or no public participation or debate, the lack of voice and agency of most citizens will be
made apparent in the most humiliating way.
What the racially and religiously diverse working-class majorities in the Western nations
need is what they once possessed and no longer have: countervailing power. In the absence of
mass-membership institutions comparable to the older grassroots parties, labor unions, and
religious organizations, which can provide ordinary citizens with the collective power to check
the abuses of the managerial elite, palliative reform at most can create oligarchy with a human
face.
Aristotle, Niccolň Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies
in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests
of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not
our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to
pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control
public debate and stifle dissent.
Neoliberalism
, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the
taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and
austerity -- the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests -- are presented to
the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite
the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human
life.
The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender.
They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about
immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy
to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender,
religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public,
to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the
oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial
differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald
Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power,
Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution.
The United States stood on the cusp of revolution -- a fact President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged in
his private correspondence -- amid the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s. Roosevelt responded by
aggressively curbing the power of the oligarchs. The federal government dealt with massive unemployment by
creating 12 million jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), making the government the largest
employer in the country. It legalized unions, many of which had been outlawed, and through the National
Labor Relations Act empowered organizing. It approved banking regulations, including the Emergency Banking
Act, the Banking Act and the Securities Act, all in 1933, to prevent another stock market crash. The Federal
Emergency Relief Administration provided the equivalent in today's money of $9.88 billion for relief
operations in cities and states. The Democratic president heavily taxed the rich and corporations. (The
Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was still taxing the highest earners at 91%.)
Roosevelt's administration instituted programs such as Social Security and a public pension program. It
provided financial assistance to tenant farmers and migrant workers. It funded arts and culture. It created
the United States Housing Authority and instituted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established
the minimum wage and set a limit on mandatory work hours. This heavy government intervention lifted the
country out of the Great Depression. It also made Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented fourth
term, and the Democratic Party wildly popular among working and middle-class families. The Democratic Party,
should it resurrect such policies, would win every election in a landslide.
But the New Deal was the bęte noire of the oligarchs. They began to undo Roosevelt's New Deal even before
World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had
not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs
control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con
artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He,
like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic -- class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the
oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite
violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will
leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate.
The Democratic Party elites will use any mechanism, no matter how nefarious and undemocratic, to prevent
Sanders from obtaining the nomination. The
New York Times
interviewed
93 of the more than 700 superdelegates, appointed by the party and permitted to vote in the
second round if no candidate receives the required 1,991 delegates to win in the first round. Most of those
interviewed said they would seek to prevent Sanders from being the nominee if he did not have a majority of
delegates in the first count, even if it required drafting someone who did not run in the primaries --
Sen. Sherrod Brown
of Ohio was mentioned --
and even if it led to Sanders' supporters abandoning the party in disgust. If Sanders fails to obtain 1,991
delegates before the convention, which appears likely, it seems nearly certain he will be blocked by the
party from becoming the Democratic candidate. The damage done to the Democratic Party, if this happens, will
be catastrophic. It will also all but ensure that Trump wins a second term.
As I wrote in
my Feb. 17 column
,
"The New Rules of the Games," "Sanders' democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His
political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an
accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists
and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget,
for 'Medicare for All,' abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private
prisons, a return of
Glass-Steagall
,
raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt,
eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as
a revolutionary agenda."
"Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil
fuel and arms industries," I continued. "He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial
elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars,
defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle
East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the
nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and
businesses. He does not promise to halt the government's wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not
intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do
not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not
support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the
climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an
enlightened moderate."
The Democratic Party leaders are acutely aware that in a functioning democracy, one where the rich do not
buy elections and send lobbyists to Washington and state capitals to write laws and legislation, one where
the danger of oligarchic rule is understood and part of the national debate, they would be out of a job.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the
Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans,
authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not
oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil
liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform
our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized
our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the world's prisoners, although the
United States has only 5% of the world's population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political
face of the oligarchy.
The leaders of the Democratic Party -- the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer,
Tom Perez
-- would rather implode the party and the
democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against
despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit,
betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible.
Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the party's nominee,
will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.
What will we do if the oligarchs in the Democratic Party once again steal the nomination from Sanders?
Will we finally abandon a system that has always been gamed against us? Will we turn on the oligarchic state
to build parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power? Will we
organize unions, third parties and militant movements that speak in the language of class warfare? Will we
form community development organizations that provide local currencies, public banks and food cooperatives?
Will we carry out strikes and sustained civil disobedience to wrest power back from the oligarchs to save
ourselves and our planet?
In 2016 I did not believe
that the Democratic elites would permit Sanders to be the nominee and feared, correctly, they would use him
after the convention to herd his followers into the voting booths for Hillary Clinton. I do not believe this
animus against Sanders has changed in 2020. The theft this time may be more naked, and for this reason more
revealing of the forces involved. If all this plays out as I expect and if those on the left continue to put
their faith and energy into the Democratic Party, they are not simply willfully naive but complicit in their
own enslavement. No successful political movement will be built within the embrace of the Democratic Party,
nor will such a movement be built in one election cycle. The struggle to end oligarchic rule will be hard
and bitter. It will take time. It will require self-sacrifice, including sustained protest and going to
jail. It will be rooted in class warfare. The oligarchs will stop at nothing to crush it. Open, nonviolent
revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope. Oligarchic rule must be destroyed. If we fail, our
democracy, and finally our species, will become extinct.
The problem with the idea of privilege is that very few people are really privileged, a white male dude certainly isn't privileged
just because he is white and male, although a black dudette could be in a worse position.
It is important to stress that actual privilege starts quite high on the totem pole, most people are not privileged.
"... Between an oligarchy in technocratic form and outsider populism, Lind predicts that oligarchs with money and connections will win nine times out of 10. But as they turn narrow and nepotistic, the ruling class will further lose their connection to reality. ..."
"... To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. ..."
"... Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt. ..."
"... Many on the left have been incapable of coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of "Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists." ..."
"... To Lind, the case is much more straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on Social Security) and right on immigration. ..."
"... Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the working class set sector-wide wages. ..."
"... This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from the ground up. ..."
"... But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent populist backlash on itself. ..."
"... American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms; they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are capitalistically run enterprises. ..."
"... In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist (albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism." ..."
"... A cursory glance at the recent impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability of the vital center from polar extremes. ..."
A FEW DAYS AFTER Donald Trump's electoral upset in 2016, Club for Growth co-founder Stephen
Moore told an
audience of Republican House members that the GOP was "now officially a Trump working class
party." No longer the party of traditional Reaganite conservatism, the GOP had been converted
instead "into a populist America First party." As he uttered these words, Moore says, "the
shock was palpable" in the room.
The Club for Growth had long dominated Republican orthodoxy by promoting low tax rates and
limited government. Any conservative candidate for political office wanting to reap the
benefits of the Club's massive fundraising arm had to pay homage to this doctrine. For one of
its formerly leading voices to pronounce the transformation of this orthodoxy toward a more
populist nationalism showed just how much the ground had shifted on election night.
To writer Michael Lind, Trump's victory, along with Brexit and other populist stirrings
in Europe, was an outright declaration of "class war" by alienated working-class voters against
what he calls a "university-credentialed overclass" of managerial elites. The title of
Lind's new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite ,
leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, though he's adamant that he's not some sort of
guru for a " smarter
Trumpism ," as some have labeled him.
Lind cautions against a turn to populism, which he believes to be too
personality-centered and intellectually incoherent -- not to mention, too demagogic -- to help
solve the terminal crisis of "technocratic neoliberalism" with its rule by self-righteous and
democratically unaccountable "experts" with hyperactive Twitter handles. Only a return to what
Lind calls "democratic pluralism" will help stem the tide of the populist revolt.
The New Class War is a breath of fresh air. Many on the left have been incapable of
coming to terms with Hillary Clinton's defeat. The result has been the stifling climate of a
neo-McCarthyism, in which the only explanation for Trump's success was an unholy alliance of
"Putin stooges" and unrepentant "white supremacists."
To Lind, the case is much more
straightforward: while the vast majority of Americans supports Social Security spending and
containing unskilled immigration, the elites of the bipartisan swamp favor libertarian free
trade policies combined with the steady influx of unskilled migrants to help suppress wage
levels in the United States. Trump had outflanked his opponents in the Republican primaries and
Clinton in the general election by tacking left on the economy (he refused to lay hands on
Social Security) and right on immigration.
The strategy has since been successfully repeated in the United Kingdom by Boris Johnson,
and it looks, for now, like a foolproof way for conservative parties in the West to capture or
defend their majorities against center-left parties that are too beholden to wealthy,
metropolitan interests to seriously attract working-class support. Berating the latter as
irredeemably racist certainly doesn't help either.
What happened in the preceding decades to produce this divide in Western democracies? Lind's
narrative begins with the New Deal, which had brought to an end what he calls "the first class
war" in favor of a class compromise between management and labor. This first class war is the
one we are the most familiar with: originating in the Industrial Revolution, which had produced
the wretchedly poor proletariat, it soon led to the rise of competing parties of organized
workers on the one hand and the liberal bourgeoisie on the other, a clash that came to a head
in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Then, in the 1930s, while the world was writhing from the
consequences of the Great Depression, a series of fascist parties took the reigns in countries
from Germany to Spain. To spare the United States a similar descent into barbarism, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, in which the working class would find a seat at
the bargaining table under a government-supervised tripartite system where business and
organized labor met seemingly as equals and in which collective bargaining would help the
working class set sector-wide wages.
This class compromise ruled unquestioned for the first decades of the postwar era. It was
made possible thanks to the system of democratic pluralism, which allowed working-class and
rural constituencies to actively partake in mass-membership organizations like unions as well
as civic and religious institutions that would empower these communities to shape society from
the ground up.
But then, amid the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" set
in that sought to reverse the class compromise. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the
newly emboldened managerial class was "global labor arbitrage" in which production is
outsourced to countries with lower wage levels and laxer regulations; alternatively, profits
can be maximized by putting downward pressure on domestic wages through the introduction of an
unskilled, non-unionized immigrant workforce that competes for jobs with its unionized domestic
counterparts. By one-sidedly canceling the class compromise that governed the capitalist
societies after World War II, Lind concludes, the managerial elite had brought the recent
populist backlash on itself.
Likewise, only it can contain this backlash by returning to the bargaining table and
reestablishing the tripartite system it had walked away from. According to Lind, the new class
peace can only come about on the level of the individual nation-state because transnational
treaty organizations like the EU cannot allow the various national working classes to escape
the curse of labor arbitrage. This will mean that unskilled immigration will necessarily have
to be curbed to strengthen the bargaining power of domestic workers. The free-market orthodoxy
of the Club for Growth will also have to take a backseat, to be replaced by government-promoted
industrial strategies that invest in innovation to help modernize their national economies.
Under which circumstances would the managerial elites ever return to the bargaining table?
"The answer is fear," Lind suggests -- fear of working-class resentment of hyper-woke,
authoritarian elites. Ironically, this leaves all the agency with the ruling class, who first
acceded to the class compromise, then canceled it, and is now called on to forge a new one lest
its underlings revolt.
Lind rightly complains all throughout the book that the old mass-membership based
organizations of the 20th century have collapsed. He's coy, however, about who would
reconstitute them and how. At best, Lind argues for a return to the old system where party
bosses and ward captains served their local constituencies through patronage, but once more
this leaves the agency with entities like the Republicans and Democrats who have a combined
zero members. As the third-party activist Howie Hawkins remarked cunningly elsewhere ,
American parties are not organized parties built around active members and policy platforms;
they are shifting coalitions of entrepreneurial candidate campaign organizations. Hence, the
Democratic and Republican Parties are not only capitalist ideologically; they are
capitalistically run enterprises.
Thus, they would hardly be the first options one would think of to reinvigorate the forces
of civil society toward self-rule from the bottom up.
The key to Lind's fraught logic lies hidden in plain sight -- in the book's title. Lind does
not speak of "class struggle ," the heroic Marxist narrative in which an organized
proletariat strove for global power; no, "class war " smacks of a gloomy, Hobbesian
war of all against all in which no side truly stands to win.
In the epigraph to the book, Lind cites approvingly the 1949 treatise The Vital
Center by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who wrote that "class conflict, pursued to
excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free
society." Schlesinger was just one among many voices who believed that Western societies after
World War II were experiencing the "end of ideology." From now on, the reasoning went, the
ideological battles of yesteryear were settled in favor of a more disinterested capitalist
(albeit New Deal–inflected) governance. This, in turn, gave rise to the managerial forces
in government, the military, and business whose unchecked hold on power Lind laments. The
midcentury social-democratic thinker Michael Harrington had it right when he wrote that "[t]he
end of ideology is a shorthand way of saying the end of socialism."
Looked at from this perspective, the break between the postwar Fordist regime and
technocratic neoliberalism isn't as massive as one would suppose. The overclass antagonists of The New Class War believe that they derive their power from the same "liberal order"
of the first-class peace that Lind upholds as a positive utopia. A cursory glance at the recent
impeachment hearings bears witness to this, as career bureaucrats complained that President
Trump unjustifiably sought to change the course of an American foreign policy that had been
nobly steered by them since the onset of the Cold War. In their eyes, Trump, like the Brexiteers or the French yellow vest protesters, are vulgar usurpers who threaten the stability
of the vital center from polar extremes.
A more honest account of capitalism would also acknowledge its natural tendencies to
persistently contract and to disrupt the social fabric. There is thus no reason to believe why
some future class compromise would once and for all quell these tendencies -- and why
nationalistically operating capitalist states would not be inclined to confront each other
again in war.
Reagan was a free-trader and a union buster. Lind's people jumped the Democratic ship
to vote for Reagan in (lemming-like) droves. As Republicans consolidated power over labor
with cheap goods from China and the meth of deficit spending Democrats struggled with
being necklaced as the party of civil rights.
The idea that people who are well-informed ought not to govern is a sad and sick cover
story that the culpable are forced to chant in their caves until their days are done, the
reckoning being too great.
Relatively simple automation often beat more complex system. By far.
Notable quotes:
"... My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators. ..."
"... I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell. ..."
"... One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good then the government might need to be more active. ..."
"... "Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine. ..."
"... You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. ..."
"... I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and globalization. ..."
"... I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV. ..."
"... Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources, on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question. ..."
"... The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations. ..."
"... But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection, and requires an annual subscription to use? ..."
"... Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software can't overcome basic hardware limits. ..."
"... When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot". ..."
"... The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility. It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate. ..."
"... And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble. ..."
Part I , "Automation Armageddon:
a Legitimate Worry?" reviewed the history of automation, focused on projections of gloom-and-doom.
"It smells like death," is how a friend of mine described a nearby chain grocery store. He tends to exaggerate and visiting France
admittedly brings about strong feelings of passion. Anyway, the only reason we go there is for things like foil or plastic bags that
aren't available at any of the smaller stores.
Before getting to why that matters – and, yes, it does matter – first a tasty digression.
I live in a French village. To the French, high-quality food is a vital component to good life.
My daughter counts eight independent bakeries on the short drive between home and school. Most are owned by a couple of people.
Counting high-quality bakeries embedded in grocery stores would add a few more. Going out of our way more than a minute or two would
more than double that number.
Typical Bakery: Bread is cooked at least twice daily
Despite so many, the bakeries seem to do well. In the half-decade I've been here, three new ones opened and none of the old ones
closed. They all seem to be busy. Bakeries are normally owner operated. The busiest might employ a few people but many are mom-and-pop
operations with him baking and her selling. To remain economically viable, they rely on a dance of people and robots. Flour arrives
in sacks with high-quality grains milled by machines. People measure ingredients, with each bakery using slightly different recipes.
A human-fed robot mixes and kneads the ingredients into the dough. Some kind of machine churns the lumps of dough into baguettes.
The baker places the formed baguettes onto baking trays then puts them in the oven. Big ovens maintain a steady temperature while
timers keep track of how long various loaves of bread have been baking. Despite the sensors, bakers make the final decision when
to pull the loaves out, with some preferring a bien cuit more cooked flavor and others a softer crust. Finally, a person uses
a robot in the form of a cash register to ring up transactions and processes payments, either by cash or card.
Nobody -- not the owners, workers, or customers -- think twice about any of this. I doubt most people realize how much automation
technology is involved or even that much of the equipment is automation tech. There would be no improvement in quality mixing and
kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase in cost. The baguette forming machines churn out exactly
what a person would do by hand, only faster and at a far lower cost. We take the thermostatically controlled ovens for granted. However,
for anybody who has tried to cook over wood controlling heat via air and fuel, thermostatically controlled ovens are clearly automation
technology.
Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented
it, didn't think so; he sold the patent for cheap. The person who bought the patent built it into NCR, a seminal company laying the
groundwork of the modern computer revolution.
Would these bakeries be financially viable if forced to do all this by hand? Probably not. They'd be forced to produce less output
at higher cost; many would likely fail. Bread would cost more leaving less money for other purchases. Fewer jobs, less consumer spending
power, and hungry bellies to boot; that doesn't sound like good public policy.
Getting back to the grocery store my friend thinks smells like death; just a few weeks ago they started using robots in a new
and, to many, not especially welcome way.
As any tourist knows, most stores in France are closed on Sunday afternoons, including and especially grocery stores. That's part
of French labor law: grocery stores must close Sunday afternoons. Except that the chain grocery store near me announced they are
opening Sunday afternoon. How? Robots, and sleight-of-hand. Grocers may not work on Sunday afternoons but guards are allowed.
Not my store but similar.
Dimanche means Sunday. Aprés-midi means afternoon.
I stopped in to get a feel for how the system works. Instead of grocers, the store uses security guards and self-checkout kiosks.
When you step inside, a guard reminds you there are no grocers. Nobody restocks the shelves but, presumably for half a day, it
doesn't matter. On Sunday afternoons, in place of a bored-looking person wearing a store uniform and overseeing the robo-checkout
kiosks sits a bored-looking person wearing a security guard uniform doing the same. There are no human-assisted checkout lanes open
but this store seldom has more than one operating anyway.
I have no idea how long the French government will allow this loophole to continue. I thought it might attract yellow vest protestors
or at least a cranky store worker – maybe a few locals annoyed at an ancient tradition being buried – but there was nobody complaining.
There were hardly any customers, either.
The use of robots to sidestep labor law and replace people, in one of the most labor-friendly countries in the world, produced
a big yawn.
Paul Krugman and
Matt Stoller argue convincingly that
it's the bosses, not the robots, that crush the spirits and souls of workers. Krugman calls it "automation obsession" and Stoller
points out predictions of robo-Armageddon have existed for decades. The well over
100+ examples I have of major
automation-tech ultimately led to more jobs, not fewer.
Jerry Yang envisions some type of forthcoming automation-induced dystopia. Zuck and the tech-bros argue for a forthcoming Star
Trek style robo-utopia.
My guess is we're heading for something in-between, a place where artisanal bakers use locally grown wheat, made affordable thanks
to machine milling. Where small family-owned bakeries rely on automation tech to do the undifferentiated grunt-work. The robots in
my future are more likely to look more like cash registers and less like Terminators.
It's an admittedly blander vision of the future; neither utopian nor dystopian, at least not one fueled by automation tech. However,
it's a vision supported by the historic adoption of automation technology.
I have no real disagreement with a lot of automation. But how it is done is another matter altogether. Using the main example
in this article, Australia is probably like a lot of countries with bread in that most of the loaves that you get in a supermarket
are typically bland and come in plastic bags but which are cheap. You only really know what you grow up with.
When I first went to Germany I stepped into a Bakerie and it was a revelation. There were dozens of different sorts and types
of bread on display with flavours that I had never experienced. I didn't know whether to order a loaf or to go for my camera instead.
And that is the point. Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead
of enabling a richer lifestyle.
We are all familiar with crapification and I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing.
"I contend that it is automation that enables this to become a thing."
As does electricity. And math. Automation doesn't necessarily narrow choices; economies of scale and the profit motive do.
What I find annoying (as in pollyannish) is the avoidance of the issue of those that cannot operate the machinery, those that
cannot open their own store, etc.
I gave a guest lecture to a roomful of young roboticists (largely undergrad, some first year grad engineering students) a decade
ago. After discussing the economics/finance of creating and selling a burgerbot, asked about those that would be unemployed by
the contraption. One student immediately snorted out, "Not my problem!" Another replied, "But what if they cannot do anything
else?". Again, "Not my problem!". And that is San Josie in a nutshell.
A capitalist market that fails to account for the cost of a product's negative externalities is underpricing (and incentivizing
more of the same). It's cheating (or sanctioned cheating due to ignorance and corruption). It is not capitalism (unless that is
the only reasonable outcome of capitalism).
The author's vision of "appropriate tech" local enterprise supported by relatively simple automation is also my answer to the
vexing question of "how do I cope with automation?"
In a recent posting here at NC, I said the way to cope with automation of your job(s) is to get good at automation. My remark
caused a howl of outrage: "most people can't do automation! Your solution is unrealistic for the masses. Dismissed with prejudice!".
Thank you for that outrage, as it provides a wonder foil for this article. The article shows a small business which learned
to re-design business processes, acquire machines that reduce costs. It's a good example of someone that "got good at automation". Instead of being the victim of automation, these people adapted. They bought automation, took control of it, and operated it
for their own benefit.
Key point: this entrepreneur is now harvesting the benefits of automation, rather than being systematically marginalized by
it. Another noteworthy aspect of this article is that local-scale "appropriate" automation serves to reduce the scale advantages
of the big players. The availability of small-scale machines that enable efficiencies comparable to the big guys is a huge problem.
Most of the machines made for small-scale operators like this are manufactured in China, or India or Iran or Russia, Italy where
industrial consolidation (scale) hasn't squashed the little players yet.
Suppose you're a grain farmer, but only have 50 acres (not 100s or 1000s like the big guys). You need a combine – that's a
big machine that cuts grain stalk and separate grain from stalk (threshing). This cut/thresh function is terribly labor intensive,
the combine is a must-have. Right now, there is no small-size ($50K or less) combine manufactured in the U.S., to my knowledge.
They cost upwards of $200K, and sometimes a great deal more. The 50-acre farmer can't afford $200K (plus maint costs), and therefore
can't farm at that scale, and has to sell out.
So, the design, production, and sales of these sort of small-scale, high-productivity machines is what is needed to re-distribute
production (organically, not by revolution, thanks) back into the hands of the middle class.
If we make possible for the middle class to capture the benefits of automation, and you solve 1) the social dilemmas of concentration
of wealth, 2) the declining std of living of the mid- and lower-class, and 3) have a chance to re-design an economy (business
processes and collaborating suppliers to deliver end-user product/service) that actually fixes the planet as we make our living,
instead of degrading it at every ka-ching of the cash register.
Point 3 is the most important, and this isn't the time or place to expand on that, but I hope others might consider it a bit.
Regarding the combine, I have seen them operating on small-sized lands for the last 50 years. Without exception, you have one
guy (sometimes a farmer, often not) who has this kind of harvester, works 24h a day for a week or something, harvesting for all
farmers in the neighborhood, and then moves to the next crop (eg corn). Wintertime is used for maintenance. So that one person/farm/company
specializes in these services, and everybody gets along well.
Marcel – great solution to the problem. Choosing the right supplier (using combine service instead of buying a dedicated combine)
is a great skill to develop. On the flip side, the fellow that provides that combine service probably makes a decent side-income
from it. Choosing the right service to provide is another good skill to develop.
One counter-argument might be that while hoping for the best it might be prudent to prepare for the worst. Currently, and for
a couple of decades, the efficiency gains have been left to the market to allocate. Some might argue that for the common good
then the government might need to be more active.
What would happen if efficiency gains continued to be distributed according to the market? According to the relative bargaining
power of the market participants where one side, the public good as represented by government, is asking for and therefore getting
almost nothing?
As is, I do believe that people who are concerned do have reason to be concerned.
"Too much automation is really all about narrowing the choices in your life and making it cheaper instead of enabling a
richer lifestyle." Many times the only way to automate the creation of a product is to change it to fit the machine.
Some people make a living saying these sorts of things about automation. The quality of French bread is simply not what it
used to be (at least harder to find) though that is a complicated subject having to do with flour and wheat as well as human preparation
and many other things and the cost (in terms of purchasing power), in my opinion, has gone up, not down since the 70's.
As some might say, "It's complicated," but automation does (not sure about "has to") come with trade offs in quality while
price remains closer to what an ever more sophisticated set of algorithms say can be "gotten away with."
This may be totally different for cars or other things, but the author chose French bread and the only overall improvement,
or even non change, in quality there has come, if at all, from the dark art of marketing magicians.
/ from the dark art of marketing magicians, AND people's innate ability to accept/be unaware of decreases in quality/quantity
if they are implemented over time in small enough steps.
You've gotta' get out of Paris: great French bread remains awesome. I live here. I've lived here for over half a decade
and know many elderly French. The bread, from the right bakeries, remains great. But you're unlikely to find it where tourists
might wander: the rent is too high.
As a general rule, if the bakers have a large staff or speak English you're probably in the wrong bakery. Except for one of
my favorites where she learned her English watching every episode of Friends multiple times and likes to practice with me, though
that's more of a fluke.
It's a difficult subject to argue. I suspect that comparatively speaking, French bread remains good and there are still bakers
who make high quality bread (given what they have to work with). My experience when talking to family in France (not Paris) is
that indeed, they are in general quite happy with the quality of bread and each seems to know a bakery where they can still get
that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it so special.
I, on the other hand, who have only been there once every few years since the 70's, kind of like once every so many frames
of the movie, see a lowering of quality in general in France and of flour and bread in particular though I'll grant it's quite
gradual.
The French love food and were among the best farmers in the world in the 1930s and have made a point of resisting radical change
at any given point in time when it comes to the things they love (wine, cheese, bread, etc.) , so they have a long way to fall,
and are doing so slowly; but gradually, it's happening.
I agree with others here who distinguish between labor saving automation and labor eliminating automation, but I don't
think the former per se is the problem as much as the gradual shift toward the mentality and "rightness" of mass production and
globalization.
I was exposed to that conflict, in a small way, because my father was an investment manager. He told me they were considering
investing in a smallish Swiss pasta (IIRC) factory. He was frustrated with the negotiations; the owners just weren't interested
in getting a lot bigger – which would be the point of the investment, from the investors' POV.
I thought, but I don't think I said very articulately, that of course, they thought of themselves as craftspeople – making
people's food, after all. It was a fundamental culture clash. All that was 50 years ago; looks like the European attitude has
been receding.
Incidentally, this is a possible approach to a better, more sustainable economy: substitute craft for capital and resources,
on as large a scale as possible. More value with less consumption. But how we get there from here is another question.
I have been touring around by car and was surprised to see that all Oregon gas stations are full serve with no self serve allowed
(I vaguely remember Oregon Charles talking about this). It applies to every station including the ones with a couple of dozen
pumps like we see back east. I have since been told that this system has been in place for years.
It's hard to see how this is more efficient and in fact just the opposite as there are fewer attendants than waiting customers
and at a couple of stations the action seemed chaotic. Gas is also more expensive although nothing could be more expensive than
California gas (over $5/gal occasionally spotted). It's also unclear how this system was preserved–perhaps out of fire safety
concerns–but it seems unlikely that any other state will want to imitate just as those bakeries aren't going to bring back their
wood fired ovens.
I think NJ is still required to do all full-serve gas stations. Most in MA have only self-serve, but there's a few towns that
have by-laws requiring full-serve.
In the 1980s when self-serve gas started being implemented, NIOSH scientists said oh no, now 'everyone' will be increasingly
exposed to benzene while filling up. Benzene is close to various radioactive elements in causing damage and cancer.
It was preserved by a series of referenda; turns out it's a 3rd rail here, like the sales tax. The motive was explicitly to
preserve entry-level jobs while allowing drivers to keep the gas off their hands. And we like the more personal quality.
Also, we go to states that allow self-serve and observe that the gas isn't any cheaper. It's mainly the tax that sets the price,
and location.
There are several bakeries in this area with wood-fired ovens. They charge a premium, of course. One we love is way out in
the country, in Falls City. It's a reason to go there.
Unless I misunderstood, the author of this article seems to equate mechanization/automation of nearly any type with robotics.
"Is the cash register really a robot? James Ritty, who invented it, didn't think so;" – Nor do I.
To me, "robot" implies a machine with a high degree of autonomy. Would the author consider an old fashioned manual typewriter
or adding machine (remember those?) to be robotic? How about when those machines became electrified?
I think the author uses the term "robot" over broadly.
Agree. Those are just electrified extensions of the lever or sand timer.
It's the "thinking" that is A.I.
Refuse to allow A.I.to destroy jobs and cheapen our standard of living.
Never interact with a robo call, just hang up.
Never log into a website when there is a human alternative.
Refuse to do business with companies that have no human alternative.
Never join a medical "portal" of any kind, demand to talk to medical personnel. Etc.
Sabotage A.I. whenever possible. The Ten Commandments do not apply to corporations.
During a Chicago hotel stay my wife ordered an extra bath towel from the front desk. About 5 minutes later, a mini version
of R2D2 rolled up to her door with towel in tow. It was really cute and interacted with her in a human-like way. Cute but really
scary in the way that you indicate in your comment.
It seems many low wage activities would be in immediate risk of replacement.
But sabotage? I would never encourage sabotage; in fact, when it comes to true robots like this one, I would highly discourage
any of the following: yanking its recharge cord in the middle of the night, zapping it with a car battery, lift its payload and
replace with something else, give it a hip high-five to help it calibrate its balance, and of course, the good old kick'm in the
bolts.
Stop and Shop supermarket chain now has robots in the store. According to Stop and Shop they are oh so innocent! and friendly!
why don't you just go up and say hello?
All the robots do, they say, go around scanning the shelves looking for: shelf price tags that don't match the current price,
merchandise in the wrong place (that cereal box you picked up in the breakfast aisle and decided, in the laundry aisle, that you
didn't want and put the box on a shelf with detergent.) All the robots do is notify management of wrong prices and misplaced merchandise.
The damn robot is cute, perky lit up eyes and a smile – so why does it remind me of the Stepford Wives.
S&S is the closest supermarket near me, so I go there when I need something in a hurry, but the bulk of my shopping is now
done elsewhere. Thank goodness there are some stores that are not doing this: The area Shoprites and FoodTown's don't – and they
are all run by family businesses. Shoprite succeeds by have a large assortment brands in every grocery category and keeping prices
really competitive. FoodTown operates at a higher price and quality level with real butcher and seafood counters as well as prepackaged
assortments in open cases and a cooked food counter of the most excellent quality with the store's cooks behind the counter to
serve you and answer questions. You never have to come home from work tired and hungry and know that you just don't want to cook
and settle for a power bar.
A robot is a machine -- especially one programmable by a computer -- capable of carrying out a complex series of actions
automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded
Those early cash registers were perhaps an early form of analog computer. But Wiki reminds that the origin of the term is a
work of fiction.
The term comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning "forced labor";the word 'robot' was first used to denote a fictional humanoid
in a 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum's Universal Robots) by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek
Perhaps I didn't qualify "autonomous" properly. I didn't mean to imply a 'Rosie the Robot' level of autonomy but the ability
of a machine to perform its programmed task without human intervention (other than switching on/off or maintenance & adjustments).
If viewed this way, an adding machine or typewriter are not robots because they require constant manual input in order to function
– if you don't push the keys, nothing happens. A computer printer might be considered robotic because it can be programmed to
function somewhat autonomously (as in print 'x' number of copies of this document).
"Robotics" is a subset of mechanized/automated functions.
When I first got out of grad school I worked at United Technologies Research Center where I worked in the robotics lab. In
general, at least in those days, we made a distinction between robotics and hard automation. A robot is programmable to do multiple
tasks and hard automation is limited to a single task unless retooled. The machines the author is talking about are hard automation.
We had ASEA robots that could be programmed to do various things. One of ours drilled, riveted and sealed the skin on the horizontal
stabilators (the wing on the tail of a helicopter that controls pitch) of a Sikorsky Sea Hawk.
The same robot with just a change
of the fixture on the end could be programmed to paint a car or weld a seam on equipment. The drilling and riveting robot was
capable of modifying where the rivets were placed (in the robot's frame of reference) based on the location of precisely milled
blocks build into the fixture that held the stabilator.
There was always some variation and it was important to precisely place
the rivets because the spars were very narrow (weight at the tail is bad because of the lever arm). It was considered state of
the art back in the day but now auto companies have far more sophisticated robotics.
But what happens when the bread machine is connected to the internet, can't function without an active internet connection,
and requires an annual subscription to use?
That is the issue to me: however we define the tools, who will own them?
You know, that is quite a good point that. It is not so much the automation that is the threat as the rent-seeking that anything
connected to the internet allows to be implemented.
Until 100 petaflops costs less than a typical human worker total automation isn't going to happen. Developments in AI software
can't overcome basic hardware limits.
The story about automation not worsening the quality of bread is not exactly true. Bakers had to develop and incorporate a
new method called autolyze (
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2017/09/29/using-the-autolyse-method
) in the mid-20th-century to bring back some of the flavor lost with modern baking. There is also a trend of a new generation
of bakeries that use natural yeast, hand shaping and kneading to get better flavors and quality bread.
But it is certainly true that much of the automation gives almost as good quality for much lower labor costs.
When I started doing robotics, I developed a working definition of a robot as: (a.) Senses its environment; (b.) Has goals
and goal-seeking logic; (c.) Has means to affect environment in order to get goal and reality (the environment) to converge. Under
that definition, Amazon's Alexa and your household air conditioning and heating system both qualify as "robot".
How you implement a, b, and c above can have more or less sophistication, depending upon the complexity, variability, etc.
of the environment, or the solutions, or the means used to affect the environment.
A machine, like a typewriter, or a lawn-mower engine has the logic expressed in metal; it's static.
The addition of a computer (with a program, or even downloadable-on-the-fly programs) to a static machine, e.g. today's
computer-controlled-manufacturing machines (lathes, milling, welding, plasma cutters, etc.) makes a massive change in utility.
It's almost the same physically, but ever so much more flexible, useful, and more profitable to own/operate.
And if you add massive databases, internet connectivity, the latest machine-learning, language and image processing and
some nefarious intent, then you get into trouble.
Sometimes automation is necessary to eliminate the risks of manual processes. There are parenteral (injectable) drugs that
cannot be sterilized except by filtration. Most of the work of filling, post filling processing, and sealing is done using automation
in areas that make surgical suites seem filthy and people are kept from these operations.
Manual operations are only undertaken to correct issues with the automation and the procedures are tested to ensure that they
do not introduce contamination, microbial or otherwise. Because even one non-sterile unit is a failure and testing is destructive
process, of course any full lot of product cannot be tested to state that all units are sterile. Periodic testing of the automated
process and manual intervention is done periodically and it is expensive and time consuming to test to a level of confidence that
there is far less than a one in a million chance of any unit in a lot being non sterile.
In that respect, automation and the skills necessary to interface with it are fundamental to the safety of drugs frequently
used on already compromised patients.
Agree. Good example. Digital technology and miniaturization seem particularly well suited to many aspect of the medical world.
But doubt they will eliminate the doctor or the nurse very soon. Insurance companies on the other hand
"There would be no improvement in quality mixing and kneading the dough by hand. There would, however, be an enormous increase
in cost." WRONG! If you had an unlimited supply of 50-cents-an-hour disposable labor, mixing and kneading the dough by hand would
be cheaper. It is only because labor is expensive in France that the machine saves money.
In Japan there is a lot of automation, and wages and living standards are high. In Bangladesh there is very little automation,
and wages and livings standards are very low.
Are we done with the 'automation is destroying jobs' meme yet? Excessive population growth is the problem, not robots. And
the root cause of excessive population growth is the corporate-sponsored virtual taboo of talking about it seriously.
Posted by: juliania | Feb 12 2020 5:15 utc | 39
(Artificial Intelligence)
The trouble with Artificial Intelligence is that it's not intelligent.
And it's not intelligent because it's got no experience, no imagination and no
self-control.
Many of these crimes grew out of shortcomings in the military's management of the deployments that
experts say are still present: a heavy dependence on cash transactions, a hasty award process for high-value
contracts, loose and harried oversight within the ranks, and a regional culture of corruption that
proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there.
Notable quotes:
"... "this thing going on" ..."
"... a regional culture of corruption that proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there. ..."
The Fraud of War: U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have stolen tens of millions through
bribery, theft, and rigged contracts.
U.S. Army Specialist Stephanie Charboneau sat at the center of a complex trucking network in Forward
Operating Base Fenty near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that distributed daily tens of thousands
of gallons of what troops called "liquid gold": the refined petroleum that fueled the international
coalition's vehicles, planes, and generators.
A prominent sign in the base read: "The Army Won't Go If The Fuel Don't Flow." But Charboneau,
31, a mother of two from Washington state, felt alienated after a supervisor's harsh rebuke. Her
work was a dreary routine of recording fuel deliveries in a computer and escorting trucks past a
gate. But it was soon to take a dark turn into high-value crime.
Troops were selling the U.S. military's fuel to Afghan locals on the side, and pocketing the proceeds.
She began an affair with a civilian, Jonathan Hightower, who worked for a Pentagon contractor that
distributed fuel from Fenty, and one day in March 2010 he told her about "this thing going on"
at other U.S. military bases around Afghanistan, she recalled in a recent telephone interview.
Troops were selling the U.S. military's fuel to Afghan locals on the side, and pocketing the proceeds.
When Hightower suggested they start doing the same, Charboneau said, she agreed.
In so doing, Charboneau contributed to thefts by U.S. military personnel of at least $15 million
worth of fuel since the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. And eventually she became one of at
least 115 enlisted personnel and military officers convicted since 2005 of committing theft, bribery,
and contract-rigging crimes valued at $52 million during their deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq,
according to a comprehensive tally of court records by
the Center for Public Integrity.
Many of these crimes grew out of shortcomings in the military's management of the deployments that
experts say are still present: a heavy dependence on cash transactions, a hasty award process for
high-value contracts, loose and harried oversight within the ranks, and a regional culture of
corruption that proved seductive to the Americans troops transplanted there.
Charboneau, whose Facebook posts reveal a bright-eyed woman with a shoulder tattoo and a huge grin,
snuggling with pets and celebrating the 2015 New Year with her children in Seattle Seahawks jerseys,
now sits in Carswell federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, serving a seven-year sentence for her crime.
"... Of course, some may argue that one's class is based largely on her own experience and perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, "White Collar: The American Middle Classes," just because people "are not 'class conscious' at all times and in all places does not mean 'there are no classes' or that 'in America everybody is middle class.' " Although subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities. ..."
"... The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization, Mills explained, "refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of: income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness, outlook, or organized activity." ..."
In America, the term "middle class" has long been used to describe the
majority of wage and salary earners, from those receiving a median annual income of around
$50,000 to those who earn three or four times that amount. Whether Democrat or Republican,
politicians from across the political aisle claim to represent the middle class -- that
vast-yet-amorphous segment of the population where the managers and the managed all seem to fit
together.
The term has always been somewhat problematic when it comes to politics. As Joan C. Williams
observes in her 2017 book, "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America," a
"central way we make class disappear is to describe virtually everyone as 'middle class.' " The
majority of Americans see themselves as middle class, including those in the top 10% earning
several times the average income. According to Williams, a close friend of hers who
"undoubtedly belonged to the top 1%" once referred to herself as middle class, a perspective
that the author describes as "class cluelessness."
This cluelessness was also evident in a New York Times article last summer
titled "What Middle Class Families Want Politicians to Know," which included interviews with a
number of purportedly middle class families with household incomes of up to $400,000 (only one
of the interviewees earned less than $100,000, with the average around $200,000).
The fact that people who earn a quarter-million dollars annually place themselves in the
same category as those earning $70,000 tells us just how politically useless the term "middle
class" has become in contemporary America. Even when we take into account geographic factors
and fluctuations in the cost of living, there is little rational justification for categorizing
a $60,000-a-year blue-collar worker with a lawyer or doctor earning in excess of $200,000.
Of course, some may argue that one's class is based largely on her own experience and
perspective, but this confuses psychological feelings with concrete social and economic
realities. As C. Wright Mills pointed out in his classic study, "White Collar: The American
Middle Classes," just because people "are not 'class conscious' at all times and in all places
does not mean 'there are no classes' or that 'in America everybody is middle class.' " Although
subjective feelings are no doubt important, to accept that everyone who identifies as middle
class must be middle class is to disregard objective economic realities.
One's class consciousness (or lack thereof) has important implications for one's political
attitudes, and in America class consciousness has always been somewhat lacking compared to
other countries. The United States has never had a true aristocratic class or feudal property
relations like those in Europe, and in the 19th century, the "middle class" essentially
stood for small capitalists and propertied farmers. Between the mid-19th century and mid-20th
century, the country was transformed, in Mills' analysis, from a "nation of small capitalists
into a nation of hired employees" -- a trend that sociologists call "proletarianization."
In the post-World War II era, thanks to the struggle of labor and the policies of the New
Deal, which aimed to reduce inequality and mediate class tensions, many in the working class
became comfortably middle class. In other words, the proletariat turned into a kind of "petty
bourgeois," adopting the same values and attitudes as their employers, while accepting the
status quo after a few adjustments. Ironically, this ended up undercutting more radical labor
movements while preserving the economic system, which eventually came back to bite working
people and their children.
The new middle class flourished until the capitalist class decided to revolt against the
legacy of the New Deal toward the end of the 20th century. In the contemporary era, many who
would have been middle-class in the postwar years have effectively been proletarianized once
again, and economic inequality has returned pre-Great Depression heights. Proletarianization,
Mills explained, "refers to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-workers in terms of:
income, property, skill, prestige or power, irrespective of whether or not the people involved
are aware of these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in consciousness,
outlook, or organized activity."
The proletarianization of the middle class over the past 50 years has had an enormously
detrimental effect on communities across the country, but it has taken quite a while for many
working people in America to recognize their new situation in terms of consciousness and
outlook. The enduring popularity of the term "middle class" reflects this state of affairs.
In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has deliberately chosen to use "working
class" over "middle class." Not surprisingly, that candidate is Sen. Bernie Sanders. "I am a
candidate of the working class," Sanders recently declared on Facebook. "I come from the
working class. That is my background, that's who I am. I fought for the working class as a
mayor, a Congressman and a Senator. And that is the kind of president that I will be." Sanders,
whose campaign is 100% grassroots-funded, wrote
in a column last week for the Des Moines Register, " our campaign is focused on making sure
the government stops representing billionaires and start representing us -- the working class
of this country."
Though it may seem like a somewhat trivial distinction, when we look at the rest of the
Democratic field, it's clear that Sanders has indeed distinguished himself from the other top
candidates. For example, Sanders' opponent Joe Biden frequently speaks of the middle class but
rarely the working class. "This country wasn't built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs and hedge
fund managers. It was built by the American middle class," Biden declares on his campaign
website, where he says that the middle class "isn't a number," but a "set of values." (In a way
this is correct, but not in the sense that Biden seems to think.)
On the more progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren's website, where she lists her numerous plans,
one searches in vain for any references to the working class, though there are plenty to the
middle class.
How much this actually matters is, of course, debatable, but the term "working class"
undoubtedly has far more implications and political significance than "middle class," which,
like many overused words in the political lexicon, has lost all meaning. By using "working
class" instead, Sanders appears to be trying to increase class consciousness in America, where
those in the ruling class have often demonstrated the highest level of class consciousness
(never failing to use their abundant resources to protect and advance their own interests).
The more young and working-class people come to recognize their own situation and place in
the 21st century American economy, the more they seem to embrace "socialist" policies that are
rejected by "middle class" sensibilities.
In the Democratic primaries, only one candidate has made raising levels of class
consciousness part of his campaign strategy, and in an election that could very well be
determined by working-class voters, this may be the strategy to defeat Trump.
Little u.s. has been preaching human rights while mounting wars and lying. Albright
thought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it. !!! it was worth killings and
maiming.
Over $7 trillion spent while homelessness is rampant. Healthcare is unaffordable for
the 99% of the population.
The u.s. will leave Iraq and Syria aka Saigon 1975 or horizontal. It's over.
Searching for friends. Now, after Russiagate here is little pompous: "we want to be
friends with Russia." Sanctions much excepting we need RD180 engines, seizure of diplomatic
properties. Who are you kidding?
"... a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are a sign of loneliness. ..."
"... And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the WWW all by themselves. ..."
"... The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to practice it is galling. ..."
"... Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation. ..."
"... So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church. ..."
George Monbiot on human loneliness and its toll. I agree with his observations. I have been cataloguing them in my head for
years, especially after a friend of mine, born in Venice and a long-time resident of Rome, pointed out to me that dogs are
a sign of loneliness.
A couple of recent trips to Rome have made that point ever more obvious to me: Compared to my North Side neighborhood in Chicago,
where every other person seems to have a dog, and on weekends Clark Street is awash in dogs (on their way to the dog boutiques
and the dog food truck), Rome has few dogs. Rome is much more densely populated, and the Italians still have each other, for good
or for ill. And Americans use the dog as an odd means of making human contact, at least with other dog owners.
But Americanization advances: I was surprised to see people bring dogs into the dining room of a fairly upscale restaurant
in Turin. I haven't seen that before. (Most Italian cafes and restaurants are just too small to accommodate a dog, and the owners
don't have much patience for disruptions.) The dogs barked at each other for while–violating a cardinal rule in Italy that mealtime
is sacred and tranquil. Loneliness rules.
And the cafes and restaurants on weekends in Chicago–chockfull of people, each on his or her own Powerbook, surfing the
WWW all by themselves.
That's why the comments about March on Everywhere in Harper's, recommended by Lambert, fascinated me. Maybe, to be less lonely,
you just have to attend the occasional march, no matter how disorganized (and the Chicago Women's March organizers made a few
big logistical mistakes), no matter how incoherent. Safety in numbers? (And as Monbiot points out, overeating at home alone is
a sign of loneliness: Another argument for a walk with a placard.)
In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct
us to stand on our own two feet.
With different imagery, the same is true in this country. The preaching of self-reliance by those who have never had to
practice it is galling.
Katherine: Agreed. It is also one of the reasons why I am skeptical of various evangelical / fundi pastors, who are living
at the expense of their churches, preaching about individual salvation.
So you have the upper crust (often with inheritances and trust funds) preaching economic self-reliances, and you have divines
preaching individual salvation as they go back to the house provided by the members of the church.
"... "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." ..."
"... Recently I read Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his thoughts about dying from cancer. ..."
For the longest time, I believed that there's only one purpose of life: And that is to be happy. Right? Why else go through all
the pain and hardship? It's to achieve happiness in some way. And I'm not the only person who believed that. In fact, if you look
around you, most people are pursuing happiness in their lives.
That's why we collectively buy shit we don't need, go to bed with people we don't love, and try to work hard to get approval of
people we don't like.
Why do we do these things? To be honest, I don't care what the exact reason is. I'm not a scientist. All I know is that it has
something to do with history, culture, media, economy, psychology, politics, the information era, and you name it. The list is endless.
Just a few short years ago, I did everything to chase happiness.
You buy something, and you think that makes you happy.
You hook up with people, and think that makes you happy.
You get a well-paying job you don't like, and think that makes you happy.
You go on holiday, and you think that makes you happy.
But at the end of the day, you're lying in your bed (alone or next to your spouse), and you think: "What's next in this endless
pursuit of happiness?"
Well, I can tell you what's next: You, chasing something random that you believe makes you happy.
It's all a façade. A hoax. A story that's been made up.
Did Aristotle lie to us when he said:
"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."
I think we have to look at that quote from a different angle. Because when you read it, you think that happiness is the main goal.
And that's kind of what the quote says as well.
But here's the thing: How do you achieve happiness?
Happiness can't be a goal in itself. Therefore, it's not something that's achievable. I believe that happiness is merely a byproduct
of usefulness. When I talk about this concept with friends, family, and colleagues, I always find it difficult to put this into words.
But I'll give it a try here. Most things we do in life are just activities and experiences.
You go on holiday.
You go to work.
You go shopping.
You have drinks.
You have dinner.
You buy a car.
Those things should make you happy, right? But they are not useful. You're not creating anything. You're just consuming or doing
something. And that's great.
Don't get me wrong. I love to go on holiday, or go shopping sometimes. But to be honest, it's not what gives meaning to life.
What really makes me happy is when I'm useful. When I create something that others can use. Or even when I create something I
can use.
For the longest time I foud it difficult to explain the concept of usefulness and happiness. But when I recently ran into a quote
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the dots connected.
Emerson says:
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some
difference that you have lived and lived well."
And I didn't get that before I became more conscious of what I'm doing with my life. And that always sounds heavy and all. But
it's actually really simple.
It comes down to this: What are you DOING that's making a difference?
Did you do useful things in your lifetime? You don't have to change the world or anything. Just make it a little bit better than
you were born.
If you don't know how, here are some ideas.
Help your boss with something that's not your responsibility.
Take your mother to a spa.
Create a collage with pictures (not a digital one) for your spouse.
Write an article about the stuff you learned in life.
Help the pregnant lady who also has a 2-year old with her stroller.
Call your friend and ask if you can help with something.
Build a standing desk.
Start a business and hire an employee and treat them well.
That's just some stuff I like to do. You can make up your own useful activities.
You see? It's not anything big. But when you do little useful things every day, it adds up to a life that is well lived. A life
that mattered.
The last thing I want is to be on my deathbed and realize there's zero evidence that I ever existed.
Recently I read
Not Fade Away by Laurence Shames and Peter Barton. It's about Peter Barton, the founder of Liberty Media, who shares his
thoughts about dying from cancer.
It's a very powerful book and it will definitely bring tears to your eyes. In the book, he writes about how he lived his life
and how he found his calling. He also went to business school, and this is what he thought of his fellow MBA candidates:
"Bottom line: they were extremely bright people who would never really anything, would never add much to society, would leave
no legacy behind. I found this terribly sad, in the way that wasted potential is always sad."
You can say that about all of us. And after he realized that in his thirties, he founded a company that turned him into a multi-millionaire.
Another person who always makes himself useful is Casey Neistat
. I've been following him for a year and a half now, and every time I watch his
YouTube show , he's doing something.
He also talks about how he always wants to do and create something. He even has a tattoo on his forearm that says "Do More."
Most people would say, "why would you work more?" And then they turn on Netflix and watch back to back episodes of Daredevil.
A different mindset.
Being useful is a mindset. And like with any mindset, it starts with a decision. One day I woke up and thought to myself: What
am I doing for this world? The answer was nothing.
And that same day I started writing. For you it can be painting, creating a product, helping elderly, or anything you feel like
doing.
Don't take it too seriously. Don't overthink it. Just DO something that's useful. Anything.
Darius Foroux writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance. His ideas and work have been featured
in TIME, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Observer, and many more publications. Join
his free weekly newsletter.
This article was originally published on October 3, 2016, by Darius Foroux, and is republished here with permission. Darius Foroux
writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance.
"... Neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality. ..."
"... This apocalyptic populism was rooted in a profound discontent for the empty promises of a neoliberal ideology that made capitalism and democracy synonymous, and markets the model for all social relations. In addition, the Democratic proponents of neoliberalism, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in the dismantling of the social contract, widening economic inequality, and burgeoning landscapes of joblessness, misery, anger and despair. ..."
"... Liberal democracies across the globe appeared out of touch with not only the misery and suffering caused by neoliberal policies, they also produced an insular and arrogant group of politicians who regarded themselves as an enlightened political formation that worked " on behalf of an ignorant public ." ..."
"... As a regime of affective management, neoliberalism created a culture in which everyone was trapped in his or her own feelings, emotions and orbits of privatization. One consequence was that legitimate political claims could only be pursued by individuals and families rather than social groups. ..."
Talk of a looming recession is heating up as the global economy slows and President Trump's tiff with China unsettles financial
markets. As world trade contracts, stock markets drop, the manufacturing sector in the United States is
in decline for the first time in a decade , and farmers and steel workers continue losing their income and jobs.
Rumors of a coming recession accentuate fears about the further deterioration of conditions faced by workers and the poor, who
are already suffering from precarious employment, poverty, lack of meaningful work and dwindling pensions. A global economic slump
would make living standards for the poor even worse. As
Ashley Smith points out
, levels of impoverishment in the United States are already shocking, with "four out of every ten families [struggling] to meet the
costs of food, housing, health care, and utilities every month."
Just as the 2008 global economic crisis revealed the failures of liberal democracy and the scourge of neoliberalism, a new economic
recession in 2019 could also reveal how institutions meant to serve the public interest and offer support for a progressive politics
now serve authoritarian ideologies and a ruling elite that views democracy as the enemy of market-based freedoms and white nationalism.
What has not been learned from the 2008 crisis is that an economic crisis neither unites those most affected in favor of a progressive
politics nor does it offer any political guarantees regarding the direction of social change. Instead, the emotions that fueled massive
public anger toward elites and globalization gave rise to the celebration of populist demagogues and a right-wing tsunami of misdirected
anger, hate and violence toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslims and people of color.
The 2008 financial crisis wreaked havoc in multiple ways. Yet there was another crisis that received little attention: a crisis
of agency. This crisis centered around matters of identity, self-determination and collective resistance, which were undermined in
profound ways, giving rise to and legitimating the emergence of authoritarian populist movements in many parts of the world, such
as United States, Hungary, Poland and Brazil.
At the heart of this shift was the declining belief in the legitimacy of both liberal democracy and its pledges about trickle-down
wealth, economic security and broadening equal opportunities preached by the apostles of neoliberalism. In many ways, public faith
in the welfare state, quality employment opportunities, institutional possibilities and a secure future for each generation collapsed.
In part, this was a consequence of the post-war economic boom giving way to massive degrees of inequality, the off-shoring of wealth
and power, the enactment of cruel austerity measures, an expanding regime of precarity, and a cut-throat economic and social environment
in which individual interests and needs prevailed over any consideration of the common good. As liberalism aligned itself with corporate
and political power, both the Democratic and Republican Parties embraced financial reforms that increased the wealth of the bankers
and corporate elite while doing nothing to prevent people from losing their homes, being strapped with chronic debt, seeing their
pensions disappear, and facing a future of uncertainty and no long-term prospects or guarantees.
Neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality.
In an age of economic anxiety, existential insecurity and a growing culture of fear, liberalism's overheated emphasis on individual
liberties "made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed," as
noted by Pankaj Mishra. In this instance, neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely
by economic inequality. The latter was the outcome of a growing cultural and political polarization that made "it possible for haters
to come out from the margins, form larger groups and make political trouble." This toxic polarization and surge of right-wing populism
produced by casino capitalism was accentuated with the growth of fascist groups that
shared a skepticism
of international organizations, supported a militant right-wing nationalism, and championed a surge of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
and anti-democratic values.
This apocalyptic populism was rooted in a profound discontent for the empty promises of a neoliberal ideology that made capitalism
and democracy synonymous, and markets the model for all social relations. In addition, the Democratic proponents of neoliberalism,
such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in the dismantling of the social contract, widening economic inequality, and
burgeoning landscapes of joblessness, misery, anger and despair.
At the same time, they enacted policies that dismantled civic culture and undermined a wide range of democratic institutions that
extended from the media to public goods such as public and higher education. Under such circumstances, democratic narratives, values
and modes of solidarity, which traded in shared responsibilities and shared hopes, were replaced by a market-based focus on a regressive
notion of hyper-individualism, ego-centered values and a view of individual responsibility that eviscerated any broader notion of
social, systemic, and corporate problems and accountability.
Ways of imagining society through a collective ethos became fractured, and a comprehensive understanding of politics as inclusive
and participatory morphed into an anti-politics marked by an investment in the language of individual rights, individual choice and
the power of rights-bearing individuals.
Under the reign of neoliberalism, language became thinner and more individualistic, detached from history and more self-oriented,
all the while undermining viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics bring people together as collective agents and
critically engaged citizens. Neoliberal language is written in the discourse of economics and market values, not ethics. Under such
circumstances, shallowness becomes an asset rather than a liability. Increasingly, the watered-down language of liberal democracy,
with its over-emphasis on individual rights and its neoliberal coddling of the financial elite, gave way to a regressive notion of
the social marked by rising authoritarian tendencies, unchecked nativism, unapologetic expressions of bigotry, misdirected anger
and the language of resentment-filled revolt. Liberal democracies across the globe appeared out of touch with not only the misery
and suffering caused by neoliberal policies, they also produced an insular and arrogant group of politicians who regarded themselves
as an enlightened political formation that worked "
on behalf of an ignorant public ."
The ultimate consequence was to produce later what Wolfgang Merkel describes as "a rebellion of the disenfranchised." A series
of political uprisings made it clear that neoliberalism was suffering from a crisis of legitimacy further accentuated by the Brexit
vote in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump, support for the National Rally (
formerly known as the
National Front ) in France, and the emergence of powerful right-wing populist movements across the globe.
What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists.
As a regime of affective management, neoliberalism created a culture in which everyone was trapped in his or her own feelings,
emotions and orbits of privatization. One consequence was that legitimate political claims could only be pursued by individuals and
families rather than social groups. In this instance, power was removed from the social sphere and placed almost entirely in
the hands of corporate and political demagogues who used it to enrich themselves for their own personal gain.
Power was now used to produce muscular authority in order "to secure order, boundaries, and to divert the growing anger of a declining
middle and working-class," Wendy Brown observes . Both
classes increasingly came to blame their economic and political conditions that produced their misery and ravaged ways of life on
"'others': immigrants, minority races, 'external' predators and attackers ranging from terrorists to refugees." Liberal-individualistic
views lost their legitimacy as they refused to indict the underlying structures of capitalism and its winner-take-all ethos.
Functioning largely as a ruthless form of social Darwinism, economic activity was removed from a concern with social costs, and
replaced by a culture of cruelty and resentment that disdained any notion of compassion or ethical concern for those deemed as "other"
because of their class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. This is a culture marked by gigantic hypocrisies, "the
gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events," widespread viciousness, "great concentrations of wealth," "surveillance overkill,"
and the "unceasing despoliation of biospheres for profit."
George Monbiot sums up well some of the more toxic elements of neoliberalism, which remained largely hidden since it was in the
mainstream press less as an ideology than as an economic policy. He
writes :
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose
democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains
that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical
to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimized, public services should be privatized. The organization of labor and collective
bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and
losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone.
Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets
what they deserve.
In the neoliberal worldview, those who are unemployed, poor consumers or outside of the reach of a market in search of insatiable
profits are considered disposable. Increasingly more people were viewed as anti-human, unknowable, faceless and symbols of fear and
pathology. This included undocumented immigrants in the United States and refugees in Europe, as well as those who were considered
of no value to a market society, and thus eligible to be deprived of the most basic rights and subject to the terror of state violence.
Marking selected groups as disposable in both symbolic and material forms, the neoliberal politics of disposability became a machinery
of political and social death -- producing spaces where undesirable members are abused,
put in cages
, separated from their children and subject to a massive violation of their human rights. Under a neoliberal politics of disposability,
people live in spaces of ever-present danger and risk where nothing is certain; human beings considered excess are denied a social
function and relegated to what Étienne Balibar calls the "death zones
of humanity." These are the 21st century workstations designed for the creation and process of elimination; a death-haunted mode
of production rooted in the "absolute triumph of irrationality."
Economic and cultural nationalism has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism
into a war machine.
Within this new political formation, older forms of exploitation are now matched, if not exceeded, by a politics of racial and
social cleansing, as entire populations are removed from ethical assessments, producing zones of social abandonment. In this new
world, there is a merging of finance capital and a war culture that speaks to a moral and political collapse in which the welfare
state is replaced by forms of economic nationalism and a
burgeoning carceral state .
Furthermore, elements of this crisis can be seen in the ongoing militarization of everyday life as more and more institutions
take on the model of the prison. Additionally, there is also the increased arming of the police, the criminalization of a wide range
of behaviors related to social problems, the rise of the surveillance state, and the ongoing war on youth, undocumented immigrants,
Muslims and others deemed enemies of the state.
Under the aegis of a neoliberal war culture, we have witnessed increasing immiseration for the working and middle classes, massive
tax cuts for the rich, the outsourcing of public services, a full-fledged attack on unions, the defunding of public goods, and the
privatization of public services extending from health and education to roads and prisons. This ongoing transfer of public resources
and services to the rich, hedge fund managers, and corporate elite was matched by the corporate takeover of the commanding institutions
of culture, including the digital, print and broadcast media. What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism
is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists and its flip side, which amounts to a full-fledged political attack on independent
digital, online and oppositional journalists.
While it is generally acknowledged that neoliberalism was responsible for the worldwide economic crisis of 2008, what is less
acknowledged is that structural crisis produced by a capitalism on steroids was not matched by subjective crisis and consequently
gave rise to new reactionary political populist movements. As economic collapse became visceral, people's lives were upended and
sometimes destroyed. Moreover, as the social contract was shredded along with the need for socially constructed roles, norms and
public goods, the "social" no longer occupied a thick and important pedagogical space of solidarity, dialogue, political expression,
dissent and politics.
As public spheres disappeared, communal bonds were weakened and social provisions withered. Under neoliberalism, the social sphere
regresses into a privatized society of consumers in which individuals are atomized, alienated, and increasingly removed from the
variety of social connections and communal bonds that give meaning to the degree to which societies are good and just.
Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.
People became isolated, segregated and unable "
to negotiate democratic dilemmas in a democratic
way " as power became more abstract and removed from public participation and accountability. As the neoliberal net of privilege
was cast wider without apology for the rich and exclusion of others, it became more obvious to growing elements of the public that
appeals to liberal democracy had failed to keep its promise of a better life for all. It could no longer demand, without qualification,
that working people should work harder for less, and that democratic participation is exclusively about elections. What could not
be hidden from many disenfranchised groups was that ruling elites produced what
Adam Tooze describes
as "a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even [more dangerous]."
As the global crisis has intensified since 2008, elements of a political and moral collapse at the heart of an authoritarian society
are more obvious and find their most transparent expression of ruthlessness, greed and unchecked power in the rule of Donald Trump.
As Chris Hedges points out :
The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded
power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism.
Wars and military "virtues" are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic
kitsch . Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages.
The slide into authoritarianism was made all the easier by the absence of a broad-based left mass movement in the United States,
which failed to provide both a comprehensive vision of change and an alignment of single-issue groups and smaller movements into
one mass movement. Nancy Fraser
rightly observes that following Occupy, "potential links between labour and new social movements were left to languish. Split
off from one another, those indispensable poles of a viable left were miles apart, waiting to be counterposed as antithetical."
Since the 1970s, there has been a profound backlash by economic, financial, political and religious fundamentalists and their
allied media establishments against labor, an oppositional press, people of color and others who have attempted to extend the workings
of democracy and equality.
As the narrative of class and class struggle disappeared along with the absence of a vibrant socialist movement, the call for
democracy no longer provided a unifying narrative to bring different oppressed groups together. Instead, economic and cultural nationalism
has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism into a war machine. Under
such circumstances, politics is imagined as a form of war, repelling immigrants and refugees who are described by President Trump
as "invaders," "vermin" and "rapists." The emergence of neoliberalism as a war machine is evident in the current status of the Republican
Party and the Trump administration, which wage assaults on anything that does not mimic the values of the market. Such assaults take
the form of fixing whole categories of people as disposable, as enemies, and force them into conditions of extreme precarity -- and
in increasingly more instances, conditions of danger. Neoliberal capitalism radiates violence, evident in its endless instances of
mass shooting, such as those that took place most recently in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. This should not be surprising for
a society that measures power by the speed that it removes itself from any sense of ethical and social responsibility. As Beatrix
Campbell puts it ,
The richest society on the planet is armed. And it invests in one of the largest prison systems in the world. Violence circulates
between state and citizen. Drilled to kill, doomed to die: mastery and martyrdom is the heartbreaking dialectic of the manufacture
of militarized, violent masculinity . The making and maintaining of militarised masculinities is vital to these new modes of armed
conflict that are proliferating across the flexible frontiers of globalized capitalism, between and within states.
What has become clear is that
the neoliberal agenda has been a spectacular failure . Moreover, it has mobilized on a global level the violent political, social,
racial and economic energies of a resurgent fascist politics. Across the globe, right-wing modes of governance are appearing in which
the line collapses between "outside foreign enemies" such as refugees and undocumented immigrants, on the one hand, and on the other,
inside "dangerous" or "treasonous" classes such as critical journalists, educators and dissidents.
As neoliberal economies increasingly resort to violence and repression, fear replaces any sense of shared responsibilities, as
violence is not only elevated to an organizing principle of society, but also expands a network of extreme cruelty. Imagining politics
as a war machine, more and more groups are treated as excess and inscribed in an order of power as disposable, enemies, and [forced]
into conditions of extreme precarity. This is a particularly vicious form of state violence that undermines and constrains agency,
and subjects individuals to zones of abandonment, as evident in the growth of immigrant jails and an expanding carceral complex in
the United States and other countries, such as Hungary.
As neoliberalism's promise of social mobility and expanding economic progress collapsed, it gave way to an authoritarian right-wing
populism looking for narratives on which to pin the hatred of governing elites who, as Paul Mason
notes , "capped health and welfare
spending, [imposed] punitive benefit withdraws [that] forced many families to rely on food banks [and] withdraw sickness and disability
benefits from one million former workers below retirement age."
Across the globe, a series of uprisings have appeared that signal new political formations that rejected the notion that there
was no alternative to neoliberal hegemony. This was evident not only with the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the
United Kingdom, but also with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and support for popular movements such as the National Rally
in France. Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.
In the United States, both major political parties were more than willing to turn the economy over to the bankers and hedge fund
managers while producing policies that shaped radical forms of industrial and social restructuring, all of which caused massive pain,
suffering and rage among large segments of the working class and other disenfranchised groups. Right-wing populist leaders across
the globe recognized that national economies were in the hands of foreign investors, a mobile financial elite and transnational capital.
In a masterful act of political diversion, populist leaders attacked all vestiges of liberal capitalism while refusing to name neoliberal
inequities in wealth and power as a basic threat to their societies. Instead of calling for an acceleration of the democratic ideals
of popular sovereignty and equality, right-wing populist leaders, such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Hungary's Viktor Orbán defined democracy
as the enemy of those who wish for unaccountable power. They also diverted genuine popular anger into the abyss of cultural chauvinism,
anti-immigrant hatred, a contempt of Muslims and a targeted attack on the environment, health care, education, public institutions,
social provisions and other basic life resources. As Arjun Appadurai
observes , such authoritarian leaders
hate democracy, capture the political emotions of those treated as disposable, and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions
of neoliberal capitalism.
In this scenario, we have the resurgence of a fascist politics that capitalizes on the immiseration, fears and anxieties produced
by neoliberalism without naming the underlying conditions that create and legitimate its policies and social costs. While such populists
comment on certain elements of neoliberalism such as globalization, they largely embrace those ideological and economic elements
that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a political, corporate and financial elite, thus reinforcing in the end an extreme
form of capitalism. Moreover, right-wing populists may condemn globalization, but they do so by blaming those considered outside
the inclusive boundaries of a white homeland even though
the same forces victimize them . At the same
time, such leaders mobilize passions that deny critical understanding while simultaneously creating desires and affects that produce
toxic and hypermasculine forms of identification.
Authoritarian leaders hate democracy and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.
In this instance, an oppressive form of education becomes central to politics and is
used as a tool of power in the struggle over
power, agency and politics. What is at stake here is not simply a struggle between authoritarian ideas and democratic ideals, but
also a fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional
accounts of power possible. This is evident, for example, in Trump's constant attack on the critical media, often
referring to them as "'the enemy of the people' pushing 'Radical Left Democrat views,'" even as journalists are subject to expulsion,
mass jailing and assassination across the world by some of Trump's allies.
Waging war on democracy and the institutions that produce it, neoliberalism has tapped into a combination of fear and cathartic
cruelty that has once again unleashed the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially the historically distinct registers of extreme
nationalism, nativism, white supremacy, racial and ethnic cleansing, voter suppression, and an attack on a civic culture of critique
and resistance. The result is a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism, in which the principles and practices
of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the
fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of a fascist past.
Neoliberal fascism hollows out democracy from within, breaks down the separation of power while increasing the power of the presidency,
and saturates cultural and social life with its ideology of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and regressive notions
of freedom and individual responsibility.
What needs to be acknowledged is that neoliberalism as an extreme form of capitalism has produced the conditions for a fascist
politics that is updated to serve the interest of a concentrated class of financial elite and a rising tide of political demagogues
across the globe.
The mass anger fueling neoliberal fascism is a diversion of genuine resistance into what amounts to a pathology, which empties
politics of any substance. This is evident also in its support of a right-wing populism and its focus on the immigrants and refugees
as "dangerous outsiders," which serves to eliminate class politics and camouflage its own authoritarian ruling class interests and
relentless attacks on social welfare.
A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy.
In the face of a looming global recession, it is crucial to understand the connection between the rise of right-wing populism
and neoliberalism, which emerged in the late 1970s as a commanding ideology fueling a punitive form of globalization. This historical
moment is marked by unique ideological, economic and political formations produced by ever-increasing brutal forms of capitalism,
however diverse.
Governing economic and political thinking everywhere, neoliberalism's unprecedented concentration of economic and political power
has produced a toxic state modeled after the models of finance and unchecked market forces. It has also produced a profound shift
in human consciousness, agency and modes of identification. The consequences have become familiar and include cruel austerity measures,
adulation of self-regulating markets, the liberating of capital from any constraints, deregulation, privatization of public goods,
the commodification of everyday life and the gutting of environmental, health and safety laws. It has also paved the way for a merging
of extreme market principles and the sordid and mushrooming elements of white supremacy, racial cleansing and ultranationalism that
have become specific to updated forms of fascist politics.
Such policies have produced massive inequities in wealth, power and income, while further accelerating mass misery, human suffering,
the rise of state-sanctioned violence and ever-expanding sites of terminal exclusion in the forms of walls, detention centers and
an expanding carceral state. An impending recession accentuates the antagonisms, instabilities and crisis produced by the long history
and reach of neoliberal ideologies and policies.
A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy, Islamophobia, nativism
and misogyny. In the face of such reactionary forces, it is crucial to unite various progressive forces of opposition into a powerful
anti-capitalist movement that speaks not only to the range of oppressions exacerbated by neoliberalism, but also to the need for
new narratives that speak to overturning a system steeped in the machineries of war, militarization, repression and death.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair
for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar
in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized
Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America's Addiction to
Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and
American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018) and The Terror of the Unforeseen (LARB Books, 2019). Giroux is also a member of Truthout 's Board of Directors.
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism,
to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut,
The Undoing of Thought
Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities
for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison
des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway,
only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases
that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the
medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits,
moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals
,
1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics,
intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to
be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice
of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men,
Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and
formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to
the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal
of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward
in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted
men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon
is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian
hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close
altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the
lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in
the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little
more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the
greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement,
or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily
should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the
way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation
as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The
ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were
not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success."
It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas
the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek
sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates'
devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts
Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully
pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles
sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles
espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism
by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other
'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things
were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him.
To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche.
His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and
evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real
problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all
values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated
but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of
scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated
"one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality
of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral
if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence
against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul
which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is
measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human
mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.
The Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently
described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky,
erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless
in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication,
Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given
the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly
be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands
for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues
to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm
is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief
but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée
2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this
sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives
of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent
strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century
German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that
of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned
by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit."
Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he
writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists
are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions
of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction
of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the
mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular
tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s]
some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes
the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive
worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both
books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends
to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still
had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much
attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the
measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its
current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things,
this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual
divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not
fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is
"Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular
chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science":
these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism."
The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason
and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other
absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational
animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment.
Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine
-- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill
another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about
the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged
as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce,
anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and
moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to
tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which
substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality,
the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence
in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason
went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.
It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith
is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its
end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many
anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed
with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It
is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought
itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed
as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside,
by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason
of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's
scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual
in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty
the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic"
cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting
them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment
to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded
that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced?
In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points
out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular
age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond
reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection
of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological
practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been
greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in
the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences
hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality"
and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article
on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man
who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim,
in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition
that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive
forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he
explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic
matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed
that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly
think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given
culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces
from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels
(whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.
F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other
cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological
construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the
name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and
say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than
Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than
the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read
is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The
footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller,
are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.
The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high
culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone
who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum
of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed
up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition
demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its
own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which
its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity,
is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version
of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar
to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference:
Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of
the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this."
The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism
promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is
a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change
one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the
destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's
right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural
institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children
and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does
not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars
refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common
humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand
causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity"
meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but
the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier:
Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth."
Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as
their truth.
1The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928.
This translation is still in print from Norton.
2La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in
a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book
is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)
"If minorities prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the
state law.
Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special
privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell
"discrimination"
Clowns should be increasingly used in redundancy (layoff, firing) meetings until it
becomes the norm and employers start to compete with each other to offer the best clown
redundancy experience and promote it as a benefit.
It would also create clown jobs, which would probably require more clown schools, meaning
that the tuition prices would go through the roof and young people dreaming of becoming
redundancy clowns would either have to come from wealth or take out massive clown loans to
fund their education for clown universities and grad schools. Shareholders can only take so
much top line costs and Wall Street pressure would force corporations to improve return on
investment and reduce redundancy clown labor expenses. Sadly, redundancy clowns would find
themselves training their own replacements – HB1 clowns from "low cost" countries.
Employers would respond to quality criticisms of the HB1 clown experience by publishing
survey results showing very similar almost ex-employee satisfaction with the new clowns.
Eventually, of course, redundancy clowns will be replaced by AI and robots. It's just the
future and we will need to think about how to adapt to it today by putting in place a UBI for
the inevitable redundant redundancy clowns.
"... The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. ..."
"... The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking for work even if unemployed). ..."
"... But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept. counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job. It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and 'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated. ..."
"... The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the government and courts are going after them). ..."
"... The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as well). ..."
"... The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%. ..."
The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. Here's why: the 3.7% is
the U-3 rate, per the labor dept. But that's the rate only for full time employed. What the
labor dept. calls the U-6 includes what it calls discouraged workers (those who haven't looked
for work in the past 4 weeks). Then there's what's called the 'missing labor force'–i.e.
those who haven't looked in the past year. They're not calculated in the 3.7% U-3 unemployment
rate number either. Why? Because you have to be 'out of work and actively looking for work' to
be counted as unemployed and therefore part of the 3.7% rate.
The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It
should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking
for work even if unemployed).
But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept.
counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job.
It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise
the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and
'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated.
The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security
disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment
insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the
government and courts are going after them).
The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household
surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others
working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according
to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as
well). The labor dept. just makes assumptions about that number (conservatively, I may
add) and plugs in a number to be added to the unemployment totals. But it has no real idea of
how many undocumented or underground economy workers are actually employed or unemployed since
these workers do not participate in the labor dept. phone surveys, and who can blame them.
The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I
call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%.
Finally, there's the corroborating evidence about what's called the labor force
participation rate. It has declined by roughly 5% since 2007. That's 6 to 9 million workers who
should have entered the labor force but haven't. The labor force should be that much larger,
but it isn't. Where have they gone? Did they just not enter the labor force? If not, they're
likely a majority unemployed, or in the underground economy, or belong to the labor dept's
'missing labor force' which should be much greater than reported. The government has no
adequate explanation why the participation rate has declined so dramatically. Or where have the
workers gone. If they had entered the labor force they would have been counted. And their 6 to
9 million would result in an increase in the total labor force number and therefore raise the
unemployment rate.
All these reasons–-i.e. only counting full timers in the official 3.7%;
under-estimating the size of the part time workforce; under-estimating the size of the
discouraged and so-called 'missing labor force'; using methodologies that don't capture the
undocumented and underground unemployed accurately; not counting part of the SSI increase as
unemployed; and reducing the total labor force because of the declining labor force
participation-–together means the true unemployment rate is definitely over 10% and
likely closer to 12%. And even that's a conservative estimate perhaps." Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jack Rasmus
Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, 'Central Bankers at the End of
Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression', Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs
at jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle
is @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com .
Don't panic is always a good advice. Following it is another story...
Notable quotes:
"... Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. ..."
"... Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. ..."
When you find yourself over 50 and unemployed, the thought of finding another job may seem daunting and hopeless.
It is quite easy to become discouraged because many people fear being stereotyped because of their age, the tough job market,
or the prospect of being interviewed by someone half their age. However, there are some things the older unemployed should keep in
mind while on the job search. Using the following tips will increase your chances of a short job search and create an overall more
pleasant experience.
Quit telling yourself that no one hires older workers. This is simply just not true. In some cases older
workers have to exert more effort to overcome discrimination, but this is certainly not the case for every employer. There are
even entire websites with jobs posted specifically for older workers, and a quick Google search will render you a list of those
websites. Take advantage of such resources!
Take advantage of new technology. Learn to blog and micro-blog, via Twitter, about your profession and interests.
You should even create a LinkedIn profile (a website similar to Facebook
yet has a more career oriented function) to assist it meeting people in your desired field. All of which will help you stay fine
tuned on your skills, while developing new ones. Learning to use social networking will indicate to potential employers that you
can adapt to change and learn new things, particularly technology, fairly quickly.
Use all those hard earned contacts. Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing
to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. It is completely
acceptable to reach out to former colleagues, class mates, co-workers and employers for job possibilities. Using resources like
Facebook or LinkedIn are great ways to find those long lost contacts as well. Chances are they would love to hear from you and
help you out if possible.
Don't clutter your resume. Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While
it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. This means keep
it straight to the point and relate your past experience to the skills necessary for the job you are applying for. Essentially,
don't do a history dump of every job you've ever had, instead, make each word count!
Don't act superior to the interviewer. It is likely that the people interviewing you will be younger than
you. But this does not mean you should look down upon them. Obviously they have earned their position, and if you play your cards
right, in due time, you will earn yours! Even if you've worked more years than your interviewer has been alive, it's not okay
to tell him or her that you can "teach" them anything. A better idea would be to state your experience working in a multi-generational
work place.
Use these tips to help make your job search less stressful and more positive. Whatever you do, don't throw in the towel before
you've even tried. Your experience and knowledge will be recognized. All you need is the right employer to identify it.
"... I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden hand ..."
"... It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized ..."
"... Back then Allyssa Milano and others were telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the allegation ..."
I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden
hand – same for those horrible pussy hats they came out with after Trump was elected.
It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized and ready to go when Kavanaugh was nominated (and
I'm not a fan–he's connected to Bush and the Patriot Act). They brought out Dr. Chrissy
Fraud and Julie Swetnick (who seemed quite mentally unstable with her accusations that
Kavanaugh was connected to gang rape parties).
Back then Allyssa Milano and others were
telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those
same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to
have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the
allegations.
And, of course, such accusations were barely mentioned in the MSM.
"... So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure. ..."
"... Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me." ..."
"... Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration. ..."
"... He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that." ..."
"... In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation." ..."
"... That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money. ..."
"... This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money. ..."
"... Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend. ..."
"... Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases. ..."
"... I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat. ..."
"... Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him. ..."
"... Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses. ..."
Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, when a reader was graciously driving me to the Department of Motor Vehicles (a schlepp in
the wilds of Shelby County), she mentioned she'd heard local media reports that trucks had had their weight limits lowered due to
concern that some overpasses might not be able to handle the loads. Of course, a big reason infrastructure spending has plunged in
the US is that it's become an excuse for "public-private partnerships," aka looting, when those deals take longer to get done and
produce bad results so often that locals can sometimes block them.
No problem, though. President Donald Trump promised to fix all this. The great dealmaker, the builder of eponymous buildings,
the star of "The Apprentice," Donald Trump, during his campaign, urged Americans to bet on him because he'd double what his opponent
would spend on infrastructure. Double, he pledged!
So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's
nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic
leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference
immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American
people to repair the nation's infrastructure.
The comedian Stephen Colbert described the situation best, saying Trump told the Democrats: "It's my way or no highways."
The situation, however, is no joke. Just ask the New York rail commuters held up for more than 2,000 hours over the past four
years by bridge and tunnel breakdowns. Just ask the
American Society of Civil Engineers , which gave the nation a D+ grade for infrastructure and estimated that if more than $1
trillion is not added to currently anticipated spending on infrastructure, "the economy is expected to lose almost
$4 trillion in GDP , resulting in a loss of 2.5 million jobs in 2025."
Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and
pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed
what he described as a
contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration.
He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're
talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure,"
he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that."
In August of 2016, he promised
, "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American
cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will
send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation."
In his victory speech and both of his State of the Union addresses, he pledged again to be the master of infrastructure. "We are
going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, school, hospitals. And we will put millions of
our people to work," he said the night he won.
That sounds excellent. That's exactly what
75 percent of respondents
to a Gallup poll said they wanted. That would create millions of family-supporting jobs making the steel, aluminum, concrete, pipes
and construction vehicles necessary to accomplish infrastructure repair. That would stimulate the economy in ways that benefit the
middle class and those who are struggling.
That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never
happened. He gave Americans
an Infrastructure Week
in June of 2017, though, and
at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure
Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money.
Trump finally announced
a plan in February of 2018, at a little over the 365-day mark, to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure. It went nowhere
because it managed to annoy both Democrats and Republicans.
It was to be funded by only $200 billion in federal dollars -- less than what Hillary Clinton proposed. The rest was to come from
state and local governments and from foreign money interests and the private sector. Basically, the idea was to hand over to hedge
fund managers the roads and bridges and pipelines originally built, owned and maintained by Americans. The fat cats at the hedge
funds would pay for repairs but then toll the assets in perpetuity. Nobody liked it.
That was last year. This year, by which time the words
Infrastructure Week had
become a synonym for promises not kept,
Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised
Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money.
Almost immediately, Trump
began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to
spend.
Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations
in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions --
$1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't
have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already
rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases.
Three weeks after the April 30 meeting, Trump snubbed Democrats who returned to the White House hoping the president had found
a way to keep his promise to raise $2 trillion for infrastructure. Trump dismissed them like naughty schoolchildren. He told them
he wouldn't countenance Democrats simultaneously investigating him and bargaining with him -- even though Democrats were investigating
him at the time of the April meeting and one of the investigators -- Neal -- had attended.
Promise not kept again.
Trump's reelection motto, Keep America Great, doesn't work for infrastructure. It's still a mess. It's the third year of his presidency,
and he has done nothing about it. Apparently, he's saving this pledge for his next term.
In May, he promised Louisianans
a new bridge over
Interstate 10 -- only if he is reelected. He said the administration would have it ready to go on "day one, right after the election."
Just like he said he'd produce an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his first term.
He's doubling down on the infrastructure promises. His win would mean Americans get nothing again.
The whole thing seems so stupid. The desperate need is there, the people are there to do the work, the money spent into the
infrastructure would give a major boost to the real economy, the completed infrastructure would give the real economy a boost
for years & decades to come – it is win-win right across the board. But the whole thing is stalled because the whole deal can't
be rigged to give a bunch of hedge fund managers control of that infrastructure afterwards. If it did, the constant rents that
Americans would have to pay to use this infrastructure would bleed the economy for decades to come.
I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash
which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway
charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets
to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt
again. Rinse and repeat.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, can you imagine how history would have gone
if they had been handed over to a bunch of corporations who would have built toll booths over the whole network? Would have done
wonders for the American economy I bet.
One of the things discussed at our town hall meeting the other night, was a much needed $481k public bathroom, and that was
the low bid.
It has to be ADA compliant with ramps, etc.
$48,100 seems like it'd be plenty to get 'r done, as you can build a house with a couple of bathrooms, and a few bedrooms,
a kitchen and living room for maybe $200k.
And if toll revenues don't come as high as expected, mother state will come to the rescue of those poor fund managers. I find
it amazing that Trump uses the stupid Russia, Russia, Russia! fixation of democrats as an excuse to do nothing about infrastructure.
Does this work with his electorate?
Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about
you or anyone else, but about him and only him.
Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the
suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste
thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses.
Well, fix the airports and you've still got Boeing, self-destructing as fast as it can. And Airbus can't fill all the orders
no matter how hard it tries. Guess everybody will just have to . stay home.
Are all the coal jobs back? How about the manufacturing? NAFTA been repealed and replaced with something better yet? How's
the wall coming and has Mexico sent the check yet? Soldiers back from Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria yet?
Got that tax cut for rich people and a ton of conservative judges through though, didn't he?
"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., told the Washington Post,
even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.
What a surprise. It's simply "amazing" that the insane status quo jihad that has been waged against Trump since he announced
his candidacy had real consequences for the country. Who would have thought that calling ANY president ignorant, ugly, fat, a
liar, a traitor, a cheater, an agent of Putin, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a bigot, an isolationist and an illegitimate
occupant of the White House 24/7 since he or she won the election would make actual accomplishment nearly impossible.
The mere mention of his name on college campuses has even been legitimized as a fear-inducing, "safety"-threatening "microagression."
It's just so rich that having determined to prevent Trump from doing absolutely anything he promised during the campaign by
any and all means, regardless of what the promise was or how beneficial it may have been, his numerous, bilious "critics" now
have the gonads to accuse him of not getting anything done.
With all due respect to the author of this piece, the result he laments was exactly the point of this relentless nightmare
of Trump derangement to which the nation has been subjected for three years. I tend to think that the specific promise most targeted
for destruction was his criticism of NATO and "infrastructure" was collateral damage, but that's neither here nor there.
The washington status quo has succeeded in its mission to cripple a president it could not defeat electorally, and now tries
to blame him for their success. Cutting off your nose to spite your face has always been a counterproductive strategy.
"... Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good. ..."
"... Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. ..."
"... At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes. ..."
"... The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around. ..."
Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor:
They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and
financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the
benefits of the social contract and common good.
Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism
is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to
accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling
elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either
exploit or consider disposable.
At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have
taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology
which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes.
The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They
don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords"
have a harder time kicking them around.
Once you understand this about the cheap-labor
conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember,
cheap-labour conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity
they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits those who
work for an hourly wage.
You also need to remember that voting the coalition out, which you need to do, will not
necessarily give you a neoliberal free zone; Labor needs to shed some the dogma as well.
"... A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes . What's more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides , even though the murder rate gets so much more attention. ..."
"... In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%). ..."
"... Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally , it ranks 27th. ..."
"... The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country. ..."
"... Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets. ..."
"... Evidence from the United States , Brazil , Japan , and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. ..."
"... One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher . ..."
"... The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled " deaths of despair " -- those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter. ..."
"... Trump has neglected his base on pretty much every issue; this one's no exception. ..."
Yves here. This post describes how the forces driving the US suicide surge started well before the Trump era, but explains how
Trump has not only refused to acknowledge the problem, but has made matters worse.
However, it's not as if the Democrats are embracing this issue either.
BY Rajan Menon, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New
York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention
Originally published at
TomDispatch .
We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like
Anthony Bourdain and
Kate Spade die by their own hand.
Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That's odd given the magnitude of the problem.
In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves.
In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly
seven times greater than the number
of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.
A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every
12 minutes . What's more, after decades
of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since
the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do
homicides , even
though the murder rate gets so much more attention.
In other words, we're talking about a national
epidemic of self-inflicted
deaths.
Worrisome Numbers
Anyone who has lost a close relative or friend to suicide or has worked on a suicide hotline (as I have) knows that statistics
transform the individual, the personal, and indeed the mysterious aspects of that violent act -- Why this person? Why now? Why in
this manner? -- into depersonalized abstractions. Still, to grasp how serious the suicide epidemic has become, numbers are a necessity.
According to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study , between
1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in every state in the union except Nevada, which already had a remarkably high rate. In
30 states, it jumped by 25% or more; in 17, by at least a third. Nationally, it increased
33% . In some states the upsurge was far
higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%).
Alas, the news only gets grimmer.
Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th
among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between
35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest
rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Globally , it ranks 27th.
More importantly, the trend in the United States doesn't align with what's happening elsewhere in the developed world. The World
Health Organization, for instance, reports
that Great Britain, Canada, and China all have notably lower suicide rates than the U.S.,
as do all but
six countries in the European Union. (Japan's is only slightly lower.)
World Bank statistics show that, worldwide,
the suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000 to 10.6 in 2016. It's been falling in
China ,
Japan
(where it has declined steadily for nearly a
decade and is at its lowest point in 37 years), most of Europe, and even countries like
South Korea and
Russia that
have a significantly higher suicide rate than the United States. In Russia, for instance, it has dropped by nearly 26% from a
high point of 42 per 100,000 in
1994 to 31 in 2019.
We know a fair amount about the patterns
of suicide in the United States. In 2017, the rate was highest for men between the ages of 45 and 64 (30 per 100,000) and those 75
and older (39.7 per 100,000).
The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New
Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own
guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a
higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half
of all such acts in this country.
There are gender-based differences as well.
From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of
those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last.
Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is
lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill
themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower
among people in higher-income brackets.
The Economics of Stress
This surge in the suicide rate has taken place in years during which the working class has experienced greater economic hardship
and psychological stress. Increased competition from abroad and outsourcing, the results of globalization, have contributed to job
loss, particularly in economic sectors like manufacturing, steel, and mining that had long been mainstays of employment for such
workers. The jobs still available often paid less and provided fewer benefits.
Technological change, including computerization, robotics, and the coming of artificial intelligence, has similarly begun to displace
labor in significant ways, leaving Americans without college degrees, especially those 50 and older, in
far more difficult straits when it comes to
finding new jobs that pay
well. The lack of anything resembling an
industrial policy of a sort that exists in Europe
has made these dislocations even more painful for American workers, while a sharp decline in private-sector union membership
-- down
from nearly 17% in 1983 to 6.4% today -- has reduced their ability to press for higher wages through collective bargaining.
Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted median wage has barely budged
over the last four decades (even as
CEO salaries have soared). And a decline in worker productivity doesn't explain it: between 1973 and 2017 productivity
increased by 77%, while a worker's average hourly wage only
rose by 12.4%. Wage stagnation has made it
harder for working-class
Americans to get by, let alone have a lifestyle comparable to that of their parents or grandparents.
The gap in earnings between those at the top and bottom of American society has also increased -- a lot. Since 1979, the
wages of Americans in the 10th percentile increased by a pitiful
1.2%. Those in the 50th percentile did a bit better, making a gain of 6%. By contrast, those in the 90th percentile increased by
34.3% and those near the peak of the wage pyramid -- the top 1% and especially the rarefied 0.1% -- made far more
substantial
gains.
And mind you, we're just talking about wages, not other forms of income like large stock dividends, expensive homes, or eyepopping
inheritances. The share of net national wealth held by the richest 0.1%
increased from 10% in the 1980s to 20% in 2016.
By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% shrank in those same decades from about 35% to 20%. As for the top 1%, by 2016 its share
had increased to almost 39% .
The precise relationship between economic inequality and suicide rates remains unclear, and suicide certainly can't simply be
reduced to wealth disparities or financial stress. Still, strikingly, in contrast to the United States, suicide rates are noticeably
lower and have been declining in
Western
European countries where income inequalities are far less pronounced, publicly funded healthcare is regarded as a right (not
demonized as a pathway to serfdom), social safety nets far more extensive, and
apprenticeships and worker
retraining programs more widespread.
Evidence from the United States
, Brazil ,
Japan , and
Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases,
so does the suicide rate. If so, the good news is that progressive economic policies -- should Democrats ever retake the White
House and the Senate -- could make a positive difference. A study
based on state-by-state variations in the U.S. found that simply boosting the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit by 10%
appreciably reduces the suicide rate among people without college degrees.
The Race Enigma
One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways)
than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly
higher . It increased from 11.3 per 100,000
in 2000 to 15.85 per 100,000 in 2017; for African Americans in those years the rates were 5.52 per 100,000 and 6.61 per 100,000.
Black men are
10 times more likely to be homicide victims than white men, but the latter are two-and-half times more likely to kill themselves.
The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate
effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne
Case and Angus Deaton have labeled "
deaths of despair
" -- those caused by suicides plus
opioid overdoses
and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and
its ripple effects do appear to matter.
According to a study by the
St. Louis Federal Reserve , the white working class accounted for 45% of all income earned in the United States in 1990, but
only 27% in 2016. In those same years, its share of national wealth plummeted, from 45% to 22%. And as inflation-adjusted wages have
decreased for
men without college degrees, many white workers seem to have
lost hope of success of
any sort. Paradoxically, the sense of failure and the accompanying stress may be greater for white workers precisely because they
traditionally were much
better off economically than their African American and Hispanic counterparts.
In addition, the fraying of communities knit together by employment in once-robust factories and mines has increased
social isolation
among them, and the evidence that it -- along with
opioid addiction and
alcohol abuse -- increases the risk of suicide
is strong . On top of that,
a significantly higher proportion of
whites than blacks and Hispanics own firearms, and suicide rates are markedly higher in states where gun
ownership is more widespread.
Trump's Faux Populism
The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump's election. Still,
it's reasonable to ask what he's tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White
House. In 2016, he received
64% of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28%. Nationwide, he beat Clinton in
counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.
White workers will remain crucial to Trump's chances of winning in 2020. Yet while he has spoken about, and initiated steps aimed
at reducing, the high suicide rate among
veterans , his speeches and tweets have never highlighted the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers.
More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies will only make matters
worse.
The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by the president and congressional Republicans flowed
to those on the top steps of the economic ladder. By 2027, when the Act's provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected
to have captured
81.8% of the gains. And that's not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and
the GOP
doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes -- wealth bequeathed to heirs -- through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual
to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). And who benefits most from this act of generosity? Not workers, that's for sure,
but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more will.
As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the president
proposed
cutting that program by 40% in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as
long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office
projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget
deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was
$779 billion and it is expected to
reach $1 trillion by 2020.) Inevitably, the president and congressional Republicans will then demand additional reductions in spending
for social programs.
This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also
slashed corporate taxes
from 35% to 21% -- an estimated
$1.4
trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has
no end
date . The president assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce
a wave of job creation -- all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used
for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than
$800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn't exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, of course,
since the wealthiest 10% of Americans own at least
84% of all stocks and the bottom
60% have less than
2% of them.
And the president's corporate tax cut hasn't produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in
its aftermath, more than 80% of American
companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn't changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven
unremarkable compared to President Obama's
second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow
2.3%
in 2017 and
2.9% in 2018 (though not
3.1% as the president claimed). There wasn't, however, any "unprecedented economic boom -- a boom that has rarely been seen before"
as he insisted in this year's State of the Union
Address .
Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there's nothing to celebrate on that front:
between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually
declined by 1.63% for white workers and 2.5% for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37%. And though
Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the
working class and other low-income Americans
the most .
Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you're a
white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low,
is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven't done anything for you. Never mind the president's
tweet proclaiming that "the Republican Party Will Become 'The Party of Healthcare!'"
Let me amend that: actually, they have done something. It's just not what you'd call helpful. The
percentage of uninsured
adults, which fell from 18% in 2013 to 10.9% at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to
Obamacare , had risen to 13.7% by the end of last year.
The bottom line? On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been
AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are
only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.
Trump is running on the claim that he's turned the economy around; addressing suicide undermines this (false) claim. To state
the obvious, NC readers know that Trump is incapable of caring about anyone or anything beyond his in-the-moment interpretation
of his self-interest.
Not just Trump. Most of the Republican Party and much too many Democrats have also abandoned this base, otherwise known as
working class Americans.
The economic facts are near staggering and this article has done a nice job of summarizing these numbers that are spread out
across a lot of different sites.
I've experienced this rise within my own family and probably because of that fact I'm well aware that Trump is only a symptom
of an entire political system that has all but abandoned it's core constituency, the American Working Class.
Yep It's not just Trump. The author mentions this, but still focuses on him for some reason. Maybe accurately attributing the
problems to a failed system makes people feel more hopeless. Current nihilists in Congress make it their duty to destroy once
helpful institutions in the name of "fiscal responsibility," i.e., tax cuts for corporate elites.
I'd assumed, the "working class" had dissappeared, back during Reagan's Miracle? We'd still see each other, sitting dazed on
porches & stoops of rented old places they'd previously; trying to garden, fix their car while smoking, drinking or dazed on something?
Those able to morph into "middle class" lives, might've earned substantially less, especially benefits and retirement package
wise. But, a couple decades later, it was their turn, as machines and foreigners improved productivity. You could lease a truck
to haul imported stuff your kids could sell to each other, or help robots in some warehouse, but those 80s burger flipping, rent-a-cop
& repo-man gigs dried up. Your middle class pals unemployable, everybody in PayDay Loan debt (without any pay day in sight?) SHTF
Bug-out bags® & EZ Credit Bushmasters began showing up at yard sales, even up North. Opioids became the religion of the proletariat
Whites simply had much farther to fall, more equity for our betters to steal. And it was damned near impossible to get the cops
to shoot you?
Man, this just ain't turning out as I'd hoped. Need coffee!
We especially love the euphemism "Deaths O' Despair." since it works so well on a Chyron, especially supered over obese crackers
waddling in crusty MossyOak™ Snuggies®
This is a very good article, but I have a comment about the section titled, "The Race Enigma." I think the key to understanding
why African Americans have a lower suicide rate lies in understanding the sociological notion of community, and the related concept
Emil Durkheim called social solidarity. This sense of solidarity and community among African Americans stands in contrast to the
"There is no such thing as society" neoliberal zeitgeist that in fact produces feelings of extreme isolation, failure, and self-recriminations.
An aside: as a white boy growing up in 1950s-60s Detroit I learned that if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had
to do was to hang out with black people.
" if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had to do was to hang out with black people."
amen, to that. in my case rural black people.
and I'll add Hispanics to that.
My wife's extended Familia is so very different from mine.
Solidarity/Belonging is cool.
I recommend it.
on the article we keep the scanner on("local news").we had a 3-4 year rash of suicides and attempted suicides(determined by chisme,
or deduction) out here.
all of them were despair related more than half correlated with meth addiction itself a despair related thing.
ours were equally male/female, and across both our color spectrum.
that leaves economics/opportunity/just being able to get by as the likely cause.
Actually, in the article it states:
"There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost
four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last."
which in some sense makes despair the wrong word, as females are actually quite a bit more likely to be depressed for instance,
but much less likely to "do the deed". Despair if we mean a certain social context maybe, but not just a psychological state.
Suicide deaths are a function of the suicide attempt rate and the efficacy of the method used. A unique aspect of the US is
the prevalence of guns in the society and therefore the greatly increased usage of them in suicide attempts compared to other
countries. Guns are a very efficient way of committing suicide with a very high "success" rate. As of 2010, half of US suicides
were using a gun as opposed to other countries with much lower percentages. So if the US comes even close to other countries in
suicide rates then the US will surpass them in deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Firearms
Now we can add in opiates, especially fentanyl, that can be quite effective as well.
The economic crisis hitting middle America over the past 30 years has been quite focused on the states and populations that
also tend to have high gun ownership rates. So suicide attempts in those populations have a high probability of "success".
I would just take this opportunity to add that the police end up getting called in to prevent on lot of suicide attempts, and
just about every successful one.
In the face of so much blanket demonization of the police, along with justified criticism, it's important to remember that.
As someone who works in the mental health treatment system, acute inpatient psychiatry to be specific, I can say that of the
25 inpatients currently here, 11 have been here before, multiple times. And this is because of several issues, in my experience:
inadequate inpatient resources, staff burnout, inadequate support once they leave the hospital, and the nature of their illnesses.
It's a grim picture here and it's been this way for YEARS. Until MAJOR money is spent on this issue it's not going to get better.
This includes opening more facilities for people to live in long term, instead of closing them, which has been the trend I've
seen.
One last thing the CEO wants "asses in beds", aka census, which is the money maker. There's less profit if people get better
and don't return. And I guess I wouldn't have a job either. Hmmmm: sickness generates wealth.
The New York Times has an
illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of
mandatory overwork in professional jobs. Lawyers, people in finance and other
client-centered occupations are increasingly required to be available round-the-clock, with
50-60 or more hours of work per week the norm. Among other costs, the impact on wage inequality
between men and women is severe. Since women are largely saddled with primary responsibility
for child care, even when couples ostensibly embrace equality on a theoretical level, the
workaholic jobs are allocated to men. This shows up in dramatic differences between typical
male and female career paths. The article doesn't discuss comparable issues in working class
employment, but availability for last-minute changes in work schedules and similar demands are
likely to impact men and women differentially as well.
What the article doesn't point out is that the situation it describes is a classic prisoners
dilemma.* Consider law firms. They compete for clients, and clients prefer attorneys who are
available on call, always prepared and willing to adjust to whatever schedule the client throws
at them. Assume that most lawyers want sane, predictable work hours if they are offered without
a severe penalty in pay. If law firms care about the well-being of their employees but also
about profits, we have all the ingredients to construct a standard PD payoff matrix:
There is a penalty to unilateral cooperation, cutting work hours back to a work-life balance
level. If your firm does it and the others don't, you lose clients to them.
There is a benefit to unilateral defection. If everyone else is cutting hours but you don't,
you scoop up the lion's share of the clients.
Mutual cooperation is preferred to mutual defection. Law firms, we are assuming, would
prefer a world in which overwork was removed from the contest for competitive advantage. They
would compete for clients as before, but none would require their staff to put in soul-crushing
hours. The alternative equilibrium, in which competition is still on the basis of the quality
of work but everyone is on call 24/7 is inferior.
If the game is played once, mutual defection dominates. If it is played repeatedly there is
a possibility for mutual cooperation to establish itself, but only under favorable conditions
(which apparently don't exist in the world of NY law firms). The logical solution is some
form of binding regulation.
The reason for bringing this up is that it strengthens the case for collective action rather
than placing all the responsibility on individuals caught in the system, including for that
matter individual law firms. Or, the responsibility is political, to demand constraints on the
entire industry. One place to start would be something like France's
right-to-disconnect law .
*I haven't read the studies by economists and sociologists cited in the article, but I
suspect many of them make the same point I'm making here.
The neoliberal war on labor in the USA is real. And it is especially real for It folk over 50. No country for the old
men, so to speak...
Notable quotes:
"... Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the training courses. ..."
"... Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of these grooves.* ..."
"... Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. ..."
"... The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a person in a wheelchair. ..."
"... IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B engineers. ..."
"... At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace and learn advanced material. ..."
"... That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to this day. ..."
"... Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and their schools suck at teaching it themselves. ..."
"... You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find some way to get by overseas. ..."
"... We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes, the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited amount of money they have. ..."
"... Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be homeless. They are worldly enough to leave. ..."
" He's 28 years old getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the
skilled trades as well. What then?"
I know a UK guy (ex City type) who retrained as an electrician in his early 50s.
Competent guy. Obviously no one would take him on as an apprentice, so he wired up all his
outbuildings as his project to get his certificate. But he's getting work now, word gets
around if you're any good.
Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the
training courses.
Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about
people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of
these grooves.*
I know a Haitian immigrant without a college degree who was working three jobs and then
dropped down to two jobs and went to school part time in his late 40's and earned his degree
in engineering and is a now an engineer in his early 50's.
*From Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp.330-331:
"It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something
amazing," Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate
interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. "Of course, there are some people who are
innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare." The
interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs's most poignant ruminations were about growing
old and facing the future:
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really
etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like
grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of
have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a
tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. . .
.
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look
back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and
throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to
continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to
go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere.
Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
"fluid intelligence" starts crystallizing after your 20's". Nonsense, I had
a great deal of trouble learning anything from my teen years and 20's because I didn't know
how to learn. I went for 30 years and eventually figured out a learning style that worked for
me. I have learned more and mastered more skills in the past ten years ages 49-59 than I had
in the previous 30.
You can challenge yourself like I did and after a while of doing this (6 months) you will
find it a lot easier to learn and comprehend than you did previously. (This is true only if
you haven't damaged your brain from years of smoking and drinking). I constantly challenged
myself with trying to learn math that I had trouble with in school and eventually mastered
it.
The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the
muscles of a person in a wheelchair.
IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of
American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B
engineers.
Upper age limits for almost every occupation disappeared decades ago in America because of
age discrimination laws.
I can't see how any 28 year old could possibly be too soft to go into any kind of manual
labor job.
@anonymous
Yeah, there was a recent study showing that 70 year olds can form neural connections as
quickly as teenagers.
At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still
compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and
energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard
to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace
and learn advanced material.
This is why the Chinese are basically out of date when they are 30, their companies assume
that they have kids and are not able to give 110% anymore.
eventually figured out a learning style that worked for me.
That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing
chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep
approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the
challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor
issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to
this day.
The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you
waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a
person in a wheelchair.
Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching
EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua
franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his
Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled
trades as well. What then?
do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language
hustle?
Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that
'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an
aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I
was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex,
was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around
by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english . Apparently
private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit with the middle
& upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the region?]
At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications
and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd
advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in
your back pocket and who knows?
PS: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship"
– well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where
teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores .. Also
more places visa-free
When
you left the States 35 years ago, the world was 3 billion people smaller. The labor market
has gotten a tad more competitive. I don't see any indication of a trade or other refined
skillset in this article.
People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a living: you don't
do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do it because
you're not marketable at anything else.
I think being Australian is the best citizenry you can have. The country is far from
perfect, but any lower middle class American white like myself would prefer to be lower
middle class there than in Detroit or Phoenix, where being lower income means life around the
unfettered urban underclass that is paranoia inducing.
Being from the US is not as bad as being Bangladeshi, but if you had to be white and urban
and poor you'd be better off in Sydney than Flint.
The most patriotic Americans have never been anywhere, so they have no idea whether
Australia or Tokyo are better. They have never traveled.
Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching
EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua
franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his
Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled
trades as well. What then?
do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language
hustle?
Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that
'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an
aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I
was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex,
was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around
by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english .
Apparently private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit
with the middle & upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the
region?]
At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications
and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd
advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in
your back pocket and who knows?
ps: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship"
– well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest
Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where
teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores ..
People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a
living: you don't do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do
it because you're not marketable at anything else.
well that's the beauty of it: you don't have to be good at anything other than just being
a native speaker to succeed as an EASL teacher, and thousands more potential customers are
born every day. I'd definitely advise any potential expats to become accomplished, and, even
better, qualified, in as many trades as possible. But imho the real key to success as a long
term expat is your mindset: determination and will-power to survive no matter what. If you
really want to break out of the States and see the world, and don't have inherited wealth,
you will be forced to rely on your wits and good luck and seize the opportunities that arise,
whatever those opportunities may be.
Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to
come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the
level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and
their schools suck at teaching it themselves.
You are one of those people who just like to shit on things:) and people make a lot of
money out of it, not everyone of course, like any area. But it's perfectly viable and good to
go for a long time yet. It's exactly that English is the lingua Franca that people need to be
at a high level of it. The Chinese market is still massive. The bag packer esl teachers are
the ones that give off this stigma, and 'bag packer' and 'traveller' are by now very much
regarded as dirty words in the ESL world.
Most Americans lack the initiative to move anywhere. Most will complain but will never
leave the street they were born on. Urban whites are used to adaptation being around other
cultures anyhow and being somewhat street smart, but the poor rural whites in the exurbs or
sticks whose live would really improve if they got the hell out of America will never move
anywhere.
You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find
some way to get by overseas.
Lots of people will talk about leaving America without having a clue as to how hard this
is to actually do. Australia and New Zealand are not crying out for white proles with high
school education or GED. It is much more difficult to move overseas and stay overseas than
most Americans think.
Except of course for the ruling elite. And that is because five-star hotels look the same
everywhere and money is an international language.
We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes,
the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave
and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited
amount of money they have.
Australia and NZ would rather have refugees than white people in dire circumstances.
Even immigrating to Canada, a country that I worked in, is much much harder than anyone
imagines.
Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for
blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military
and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third
worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be
homeless. They are worldly enough to leave.
But most Americans whose lives would be vastly improved overseas think they are living in
the greatest country on earth.
"... Yang promises a universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a value added tax , Yang claims that it would reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also notes that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally." ..."
"... Yang is justifying the need for such a program because of automation . Again, VDARE.com has been exploring how automation may necessitate such a program for many years . Yang also discussed this problem on Tucker Carlson's show , which alone shows he is more open to real discussion than many progressive activists. ..."
"... Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. ..."
"... it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard are giving up on him. ..."
Yang is a businessman who has worked in several fields, but was best known for founding
Venture for America , which helps college graduates become entrepreneurs.
However, he is now gaining recognition for his signature campaign promise -- $1,000 a month for every American.
Yang promises a
universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a
value added tax , Yang claims that it would
reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also
notes
that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally."
As Yang himself notes, this is not a new idea, nor one particularly tied to the Left. Indeed, it's been proposed by several prominent
libertarians because it would replace the far more inefficient welfare system.
Charles Murray called for
this policy in 2016. [ A
guaranteed income for every American, AEI, June 3, 2016]
Milton
Friedman suggested a similar policy in a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley, though
Friedman called it a
"negative income tax."
It's also been proposed by many nationalists, including, well, me. At the January 2013 VDARE.com Webinar, I
called for a "straight-up minimum income for citizens only" among other policies that would build a new nationalist majority
and deconstruct Leftist power. I've
retained that belief ever since and argued for it here for years.
However, I've also made the argument that it only works if it is for
citizens
only and is combined with a restrictive immigration policy. As I previously
argued in a piece attacking Jacobin'sdisingenuous
complaints about the "reserve army of the unemployed," you simply can't support high wages, workers' rights, and a universal
basic income while still demanding mass immigration.
Yang is also directly addressing the crises that the Trump Administration has seemly forgotten. Unlike Donald Trump himself, with
his endless boasting about "low black and Hispanic unemployment," Yang
has directly spoken about the demographic
collapse of white people because of "low birth rates and white men dying from
substance
abuse and suicide ."
Significantly, President Trump himself has never once specifically recognized the plight of white Americans.
...He wants to make
Puerto Rico a state . He
supports a path to citizenship for illegal
aliens, albeit with an 18-year waiting period and combined with
pledges to secure the border
and deport illegals who don't enroll in the citizenship program. He
wants to create a massive bureaucratic system to track
gun owners, restrict
gun ownership , and require various "training" programs for licenses. He wants to
subsidize local journalists with taxpayer
dollars...
... ... ...
Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to
Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. (Sample meme at right.) And because many of these online activists are
"far right" by Main Stream Media standards, or at least Politically Incorrect, there is much hand-waving and wrist-flapping about
the need for Yang to decry "white nationalists." So of course, the candidate has dutifully done so, claiming "racism and white nationalism
[are] a threat to the core ideals of what it means to be an American". [
Presidential candidate
Andrew Yang has a meme problem, by Russell Brandom, The Verge, March 9, 2019]
But what does it mean to be an American? As more and more of American history is described as racist, and even national
symbols and the national anthem are targets for protest, "America" certainly doesn't seem like a real country with a real identity.
Increasingly, "America" resembles a continent-sized shopping mall, with nothing holding together the warring tribes that occupy it
except money.
President Trump, of course, was elected because many people thought he could reverse this process, especially by limiting mass
immigration and taking strong action in the culture wars, for example by promoting official English. Yet in recent weeks, he has
repeatedly endorsed more legal immigration. Rather than fighting, the president is content to brag about the economy and whine about
unfair press coverage and investigations. He already seems like a lame duck.
The worst part of all of this is that President Trump was elected as a response not just to the Left, but to the failed Conservative
Establishment. During the 2016 campaign, President Trump specifically
pledged to protect
entitlements , decried foreign wars, and argued for a massive infrastructure plan. However, once in office, his main legislative
accomplishment is a tax cut any other Republican president would have pushed. Similarly, his latest budget contains the kinds of
entitlement cuts that are guaranteed to provoke Democrat attack ads. [
Trump said he wouldn't cut Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare . His 2020 budget cuts all 3, by Tara
Golshan, Vox, March 12, 2019] And the president has already backed down on withdrawing all troops from Syria, never mind Afghanistan.
Conservatism Inc., having learned nothing from candidate Donald Trump's scorched-earth path to the Republican nomination, now
embraces Trump as a man but ignores his campaign message. Instead, the conservative movement is still promoting the same tired slogans
about "free markets" even as they have appear to have lost an
entire
generation to socialism. The most iconic moment was Charlie Kirk, head of the free market activist group Turning Point USA, desperately
trying to tell his followers not to cheer for Tucker Carlson because
Carlson had suggested a nation should be treated like a
family, not simply a marketplace .
Thus, especially because of his cowardice on immigration, many of President Trump's most fervent online supporters have turned
on him in recent weeks. And the embrace of Yang seems to come out of a great place of despair, a sense that the country really is
beyond saving.
Yang has Leftist policies on many issues, but many disillusioned Trump supporters feel like those policies are coming anyway.
If America is just an economy, and if everyone in the world is a simply an American-in-waiting, white Americans might as well get
something out of this System before the bones are picked clean.
National Review ' s Theodore Kupfer just claimed the main importance of Yang's candidacy is that it will prove meme-makers
ability to affect the vote count "has been overstated" [
Rise of the pink hats,
March 12, 2019].
Time will tell, but it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard
are giving up on him.
"... Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet censorship. ..."
"The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing
but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society ." -- Karl
Marx, The Class Struggles in France
What Marx described, in his analysis of the corruption of the bourgeoisie in France
leading up to the 1848 revolution, applies with even greater force to the United States of
2019, where the bourgeoisie faces its own rendezvous with social upheaval and explosive class
battles.
That is how a Marxist understands the spectacle of Wednesday's hearing before the House
Oversight Committee, in which Michael Cohen, the former attorney and "fixer" for Donald Trump
for more than a decade, testified for six hours about how he and his boss worked to defraud
business partners and tax collectors, intimidate critics and suppress opposition to Trump's
acitvities in real estate, casino gambling, reality television and, eventually, electoral
politics.
What Cohen described was a seedier version of an operation that most Americans would
recognize from viewing films like The Godfather: Trump as the capo di tutti capi, the
unquestioned authority who must be consulted on every decision ; the children, Donald Jr.,
Ivanka and Eric, each now playing significant roles in the ongoing family criminal enterprise;
Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization, the consigliere in charge of finance,
mentioned by Cohen more than 20 times in the course of six hours of testimony as the man who
facilitated Trump's schemes to evade taxes, deceive banks or stiff business partners.
Cohen himself was an enforcer. By his own account, he threatened people on Trump's behalf at
least 500 times in a ten-year period, including business associates, politicians, journalists
and anyone seeking to file complaints or gain reimbursement after being defrauded by one or
another Trump venture. The now-disbarred lawyer admitted to tape recording clients -- including
Trump among many others -- more than 100 times during this period.
The incidents recounted by Cohen range from the farcical (Trump browbeating colleges and
even his military prep school not to release his grades or test scores), to the shabby (Trump
having his own "charitable" foundation buy a portrait of himself for $60,000), to the brazenly
criminal (deliberately inflating the value of properties when applying for bank loans while
deflating the value of the same properties as much as twenty-fold in order to evade
taxation).
One of the most remarkable revelations was Cohen's flat assertion that Trump himself did
not enter the presidential race with the expectation that he could win either the Republican
nomination or the presidency. Instead, the billionaire reality television "star" regularly told
his closest aides, the campaign would be the "greatest infomercial in political history," good
for promoting his brand and opening up business opportunities in previously closed
markets.
These unflattering details filled the pages of the daily newspapers Thursday and occupied
many hours on the cable television news. But in all that vast volume of reporting and
commentary, one would look in vain for any serious assessment of what it means, in terms of the
historical development and future trajectory of American society, that a family like the Trumps
now occupies the highest rung in the US political system.
The World Socialist Web Site rejects efforts by the Democrats and the corporate media
to dismiss Trump as an aberration, an accidental figure whose unexpected elevation to the
presidency in 2016 will be "corrected" through impeachment, forced resignation or electoral
defeat in 2020. We insist that the Trump administration is a manifestation of a protracted
crisis and breakdown of American democracy, whose course can be traced back at least two
decades to the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-99, followed by the stolen
presidential election of 2000.
The US political system, always dominated by the interests of the capitalist ruling class
that controls both of the major parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, is breaking
down under the burden of mounting social tensions, driven above all by skyrocketing economic
inequality. It is impossible to sustain the pretense that elections at two-year and four-year
intervals provide genuine popular influence over the functioning of a government so completely
subordinated to the financial aristocracy.
The figures are familiar but require restating: over the past three decades, virtually all
the increase in wealth in American society has gone to a tiny layer at the top. Three
mega-billionaires -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates -- now control more wealth than
half the American population. This process of social polarization is global: according to the
most recent Oxfam report, 26 billionaires control more wealth than the poorer half of the human
race.
These billionaires did not accumulate their riches by devising new technologies or making
new scientific discoveries that increased the wealth and happiness of humanity as a whole. On
the contrary, their enrichment has come at the expense of society. Bezos has become the world's
richest man through the emergence of Amazon as the greatest sweatshop enterprise in history,
where every possible second of labor power is extracted from a brutally exploited
workforce.
The class of billionaires as a whole, having precipitated the global financial collapse of
2008 through reckless speculation and swindling in the sale of derivatives and other obscure
financial "products," was bailed out, first by the Republican Bush, then by the Democrat Obama,
to the tune of trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, the jobs, living standards and social
conditions for the great mass of working people sharply declined.
As for Donald Trump, the real estate swindler, casino con man and reality television mogul
is a living demonstration of the truth of Balzac's aphorism: "Behind every great fortune is a
great crime."
Trump toyed with running for president on the ultra-right Reform Party ticket in 2000 after
a long stint as a registered Democrat and donor to both capitalist parties. When he decided to
run for president as a Republican in 2016, however, he had shifted drastically to the right.
His candidacy marked the emergence of a distinctly fascistic movement, as he spewed
anti-immigrant prejudice and racism more generally, while making a right-wing populist appeal
to working people, particularly in de-industrialized areas in the Midwest and Appalachia, on
the basis of economic nationalism.
As World Socialist Web Site editorial board Chairman David North explained even
before the 2016 elections:
The Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States did not emerge from an
American version of a Munich beer hall. Donald Trump is a billionaire, who made his money in
Manhattan real estate swindles, the semi-criminal operations of casino gambling, and the
bizarre world of "reality television," which entertains and stupefies its audience by
manufacturing absurd, disgusting and essentially fictional "real life" situations. The
candidacy of Donald Trump could be described as the transfer of the techniques of reality
television to politics.
The main development in the two years since Trump entered the White House is the emergence
of the American working class into major struggles, beginning with the wave of teachers'
strikes in 2018, initiated by the rank and file in defiance of the bureaucratic unions. The
reaction in the American ruling elite is a panic-stricken turn to authoritarian methods of
rule.
The billionaire in the White House is now engaged in a systematic assault on the foundations
of American democracy. He has declared a national emergency in order to bypass Congress, which
holds the constitutional "power of the purse," and divert funds from the military and other
federal departments to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.
Whether or not he is immediately successful in this effort, it is clear that Trump is
moving towards the establishment of an authoritarian regime, with or without the sanction of
the ballot box. As Cohen observed in his closing statement -- in remarks generally downplayed
by the media and ignored by the Democrats -- he is worried that if Trump loses the 2020
election, "there will never be a peaceful transition of power."
Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They
have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while
portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of
Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet
censorship.
The defense of democratic rights and genuine resistance to Trump's drive toward
authoritarian rule must come through the development of an independent political movement of
the working class, directed against both big business parties, the Democrats as much as the
Republicans, and against the profit system which they both defend.
"... While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. ..."
"... Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders' energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood" path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy. ..."
"... In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism. ..."
"... We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism. ..."
"... While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."' ..."
In Chapter 1, we traced the rise of our neoliberal conjuncture back to the crisis of liberalism during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, culminating in the Great Depression. During this period, huge transformations in capitalism proved impossible
to manage with classical laissez-faire approaches. Out of this crisis, two movements emerged, both of which would eventually shape
the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The first, and the one that became dominant in the aftermath of the crisis, was the
conjuncture of embedded liberalism. The crisis indicated that capitalism wrecked too much damage on the lives of ordinary citizens.
People (white workers and families, especially) warranted social protection from the volatilities and brutalities of capitalism.
The state's public function was expanded to include the provision of a more substantive social safety net, a web of protections for
people and a web of constraints on markets. The second response was the invention of neoliberalism. Deeply skeptical of the common-good
principles that undergirded the emerging social welfare state, neoliberals began organizing on the ground to develop a "new" liberal
govemmentality, one rooted less in laissez-faire principles and more in the generalization of competition and enterprise. They worked
to envision a new society premised on a new social ontology, that is, on new truths about the state, the market, and human beings.
Crucially, neoliberals also began building infrastructures and institutions for disseminating their new' knowledges and theories
(i.e., the Neoliberal Thought Collective), as well as organizing politically to build mass support for new policies (i.e., working
to unite anti-communists, Christian conservatives, and free marketers in common cause against the welfare state). When cracks in
embedded liberalism began to surface -- which is bound to happen with any moving political equilibrium -- neoliberals were there
with new stories and solutions, ready to make the world anew.
We are currently living through the crisis of neoliberalism. As I write this book, Donald Trump has recently secured the U.S.
presidency, prevailing in the national election over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Throughout the election, I couldn't
help but think back to the crisis of liberalism and the two responses that emerged. Similarly, after the Great Recession of 2008,
we've saw two responses emerge to challenge our unworkable status quo, which dispossesses so many people of vital resources for individual
and collective life. On the one hand, we witnessed the rise of Occupy Wall Street. While many continue to critique the movement for
its lack of leadership and a coherent political vision, Occupy was connected to burgeoning movements across the globe, and our current
political horizons have been undoubtedly shaped by the movement's success at repositioning class and economic inequality within our
political horizon. On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party
was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was
perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-,
it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.
Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering.
Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in
the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of
good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively
tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political
anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity,
political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis
candidate.
Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders'
energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood"
path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy.
Universal health care. Free higher education. Fair trade. The repeal of Citizens United. Trump offered a different response to
the crisis. Like Sanders, he railed against global trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, Trump's
victory was fueled by right neoliberalism's culture of cruelty. While Sanders tapped into and mobilized desires for a more egalitarian
and democratic future, Trump's promise was nostalgic, making America "great again" -- putting the nation back on "top of the world,"
and implying a time when women were "in their place" as male property, and minorities and immigrants were controlled by the state.
Thus, what distinguished Trump's campaign from more traditional Republican campaigns was that it actively and explicitly pitted
one group's equality (white men) against everyone else's (immigrants, women, Muslims, minorities, etc.). As Catherine Rottenberg
suggests, Trump offered voters a choice between a multiracial society (where folks are increasingly disadvantaged and dispossessed)
and white supremacy (where white people would be back on top). However, "[w]hat he neglected to state," Rottenberg writes,
is that neoliberalism flourishes in societies where the playing field is already stacked against various segments of society,
and that it needs only a relatively small select group of capital-enhancing subjects, while everyone else is ultimately dispensable.
1
In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg
argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many
concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.
We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left
neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested
in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right
and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political
philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.
While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking
with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the
chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, put it this way:
The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness
of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately
great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under
capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.4
I think that, for the first time in the history of U.S. capitalism, the vast majority of people might sense the lie of liberal,
capitalist democracy. They feel anxious, unfree, disaffected. Fantasies of the good life have been shattered beyond repair for most
people. Trump and this hopefully brief triumph of right neoliberalism will soon lay this bare for everyone to see. Now, with Trump,
it is absolutely clear: the rich rule the world; we are all disposable; this is no democracy. The question becomes: How will we show
up for history? Will there be new stories, ideas, visions, and fantasies to attach to? How can we productively and meaningful intervene
in the crisis of neoliberalism? How can we "tear a hole in the grey curtain" and open up better worlds? How can we put what we've
learned to use and begin to imagine and build a world beyond living in competition? I hope our critical journey through the neoliberal
conjuncture has enabled you to begin to answer these questions.
More specifically, in recent decades, especially since the end of the Cold War, our common-good sensibilities have been channeled
into neoliberal platforms for social change and privatized action, funneling our political energies into brand culture and marketized
struggles for equality (e.g., charter schools, NGOs and non-profits, neoliberal antiracism and feminism). As a result, despite our
collective anger and disaffected consent, we find ourselves stuck in capitalist realism with no real alternative. Like the neoliberal
care of the self, we are trapped in a privatized mode of politics that relies on cruel optimism; we are attached, it seems, to politics
that inspire and motivate us to action, while keeping us living in competition.
To disrupt the game, we need to construct common political horizons against neoliberal hegemony. We need to use our common stories
and common reason to build common movements against precarity -- for within neoliberalism, precarity is what ultimately has the potential
to thread all of our lives together. Put differently, the ultimate fault line in the neoliberal conjiuicture is the way it subjects
us all to precarity and the biopolitics of disposability, thereby creating conditions of possibility for new coalitions across race,
gender, citizenship, sexuality, and class. Recognizing this potential for coalition in the face of precarization is the most pressing
task facing those who are yearning for a new world. The question is: How do we get there? How do we realize these coalitional potentialities
and materialize common horizons?
Ultimately, mapping the neoliberal conjuncture through everyday life in enterprise culture has not only provided some direction
in terms of what we need; it has also cultivated concrete and practical intellectual resources for political interv ention and social
interconnection -- a critical toolbox for living in common. More specifically, this book has sought to provide resources for thinking
and acting against the four Ds: resources for engaging in counter-conduct, modes of living that refuse, on one hand, to conduct one's
life according to the norm of enterprise, and on the other, to relate to others through the norm of competition. Indeed, we need
new ways of relating, interacting, and living as friends, lovers, workers, vulnerable bodies, and democratic people if we are to
write new stories, invent new govemmentalities, and build coalitions for new worlds.
Against Disimagination: Educated Hope and Affirmative Speculation
We need to stop turning inward, retreating into ourselves, and taking personal responsibility for our lives (a task which is ultimately
impossible). Enough with the disimagination machine! Let's start looking outward, not inward -- to the broader structures that undergird
our lives. Of course, we need to take care of ourselves; we must survive. But I firmly believe that we can do this in ways both big
and small, that transform neoliberal culture and its status-quo stories.
Here's the thing I tell my students all the time. You cannot escape neoliberalism. It is the air we breathe, the water in which
we swim. No job, practice of social activism, program of self-care, or relationship will be totally free from neoliberal impingements
and logics. There is no pure "outside" to get to or work from -- that's just the nature of the neoliberalism's totalizing cultural
power. But let's not forget that neoliberalism's totalizing cultural power is also a source of weakness. Potential for resistance
is everywhere, scattered throughout our everyday lives in enterprise culture. Our critical toolbox can help us identify these potentialities
and navigate and engage our conjuncture in ways that tear open up those new worlds we desire.
In other words, our critical perspective can help us move through the world with what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated
hope means holding in tension the material realities of power and the contingency of history. This orientation of educated hope knows
very well what we're up against. However, in the face of seemingly totalizing power, it also knows that neoliberalism can never become
total because the future is open. Educated hope is what allows us to see the fault lines, fissures, and potentialities of the present
and emboldens us to think and work from that sliver of social space where we do have political agency and freedom to construct a
new world. Educated hope is what undoes the power of capitalist realism. It enables affirmative speculation (such as discussed in
Chapter 5), which does not try to hold the future to neoliberal horizons (that's cruel optimism!), but instead to affirm our commonalities
and the potentialities for the new worlds they signal. Affirmative speculation demands a different sort of risk calculation and management.
It senses how little we have to lose and how much we have to gain from knocking the hustle of our lives.
Against De-democratization: Organizing and Collective Coverning
We can think of educated hope and affirmative speculation as practices of what Wendy Brown calls "bare democracy" -- the basic
idea that ordinary' people like you and me should govern our lives in common, that we should critique and try to change our world,
especially the exploitative and oppressive structures of power that maintain social hierarchies and diminish lives. Neoliberal culture
works to stomp out capacities for bare democracy by transforming democratic desires and feelings into meritocratic desires and feelings.
In neoliberal culture, utopian sensibilities are directed away from the promise of collective utopian sensibilities are directed
away from the promise of collective governing to competing for equality.
We have to get back that democractic feeling! As Jeremy Gilbert taught us, disaffected consent is a post-democratic orientation.
We don't like our world, but we don't think we can do anything about it. So, how do we get back that democratic feeling? How do we
transform our disaffected consent into something new? As I suggested in the last chapter, we organize. Organizing is simply about
people coming together around a common horizon and working collectively to materialize it. In this way, organizing is based on the
idea of radical democracy, not liberal democracy. While the latter is based on formal and abstract rights guaranteed by the state,
radical democracy insists that people should directly make the decisions that impact their lives, security, and well-being. Radical
democracy is a practice of collective governing: it is about us hashing out, together in communities, what matters, and working in
common to build a world based on these new sensibilities.
The work of organizing is messy, often unsatisfying, and sometimes even scary. Organizing based on affirmative speculation and
coalition-building, furthermore, will have to be experimental and uncertain. As Lauren Berlant suggests, it means "embracing the
discomfort of affective experience in a truly open social life that no
one has ever experienced." Organizing through and for the common "requires more adaptable infrastructures. Keep forcing the existing
infrastructures to do what they don't know how to do. Make new ways to be local together, where local doesn't require a physical
neighborhood." 5 What Berlant is saying is that the work of bare democracy requires unlearning, and detaching from, our
current stories and infrastructures in order to see and make things work differently. Organizing for a new world is not easy -- and
there are no guarantees -- but it is the only way out of capitalist realism.
Getting back democratic feeling will at once require and help us lo move beyond the biopolitics of disposability and entrenched
systems of inequality. On one hand, organizing will never be enough if it is not animated by bare democracy, a sensibility that each
of us is equally important when it comes to the project of determining our lives in common. Our bodies, our hurts, our dreams, and
our desires matter regardless of our race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship, and regardless of how r much capital (economic,
social, or cultural) we have. Simply put, in a radical democracy, no one is disposable. This bare-democratic sense of equality must
be foundational to organizing and coalition-building. Otherwise, we will always and inevitably fall back into a world of inequality.
On the other hand, organizing and collective governing will deepen and enhance our sensibilities and capacities for radical equality.
In this context, the kind of self-enclosed individualism that empowers and underwrites the biopolitics of disposability melts away,
as we realize the interconnectedness of our lives and just how amazing it feels to
fail, we affirm our capacities for freedom, political intervention, social interconnection, and collective social doing.
Against Dispossession: Shared Security and Common Wealth
Thinking and acting against the biopolitics of disposability goes hand-in-hand with thinking and acting against dispossession.
Ultimately, when we really understand and feel ourselves in relationships of interconnection with others, we want for them as we
want for ourselves. Our lives and sensibilities of what is good and just are rooted in radical equality, not possessive or self-appreciating
individualism. Because we desire social security and protection, we also know others desire and deserve the same.
However, to really think and act against dispossession means not only advocating for shared security and social protection, but
also for a new society that is built on the egalitarian production and distribution of social wealth that we all produce. In this
sense, we can take Marx's critique of capitalism -- that wealth is produced collectively but appropriated individually -- to heart.
Capitalism was built on the idea that one class -- the owners of the means of production -- could exploit and profit from the collective
labors of everyone else (those who do not own and thus have to work), albeit in very different ways depending on race, gender, or
citizenship. This meant that, for workers of all stripes, their lives existed not for themselves, but for others (the appropriating
class), and that regardless of what we own as consumers, we are not really free or equal in that bare-democratic sense of the word.
If we want to be really free, we need to construct new material and affective social infrastructures for our common wealth. In
these new infrastructures, wealth must not be reduced to economic value; it must be rooted in social value. Here, the production
of wealth does not exist as a separate sphere from the reproduction of our lives. In other words, new infrastructures, based on the
idea of common wealth, will not be set up to exploit our labor, dispossess our communities, or to divide our lives. Rather, they
will work to provide collective social resources and care so that we may all be free to pursue happiness, create beautiful and/or
useful things, and to realize our potential within a social world of living in common. Crucially, to create the conditions for these
new, democratic forms of freedom rooted in radical equality, we need to find ways to refuse and exit the financial networks of Empire
and the dispossessions of creditocracy, building new systems that invite everyone to participate in the ongoing production of new
worlds and the sharing of the wealth that we produce in common.
It's not up to me to tell you exactly where to look, but I assure you that potentialities for these new worlds are everywhere
around you.
This is a constructive suggestion that is implementable even under neoliberalism. As everything is perverted under
neoliberalism that might prompt layoffs before the age of 55.
Notable quotes:
"... Older workers often struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers. Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce. ..."
"... One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers. Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers. ..."
The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why
Wall Street sent both stocks higher on Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the
two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less
enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age
of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the
U.S. economy.
But what's good for the firms isn't good for all of the workers. Older workers often
struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers.
Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back
office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect
highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce.
One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers.
Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one
idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the
age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to
accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers.
The economy can be callous toward older workers, but policy makers don't have to be. We
should think about ways of dealing with this shift in the labor market before it happens.
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle
for access to the basics
... ... ...
The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of
our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access
to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing –
just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality
or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even
guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more
to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring
an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then
maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its
day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees.
Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying
their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend
a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser.
It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's
been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some
light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42
We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always
choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in
each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19
Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet
given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through
their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10
Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic
systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not
having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy,
nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work
doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations.
I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial.
We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power,
we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we
need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think
it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism.
It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
AmyInNH -> tommydog
They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have
many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations
can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based
green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment
insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the
fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.
No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion
that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The
linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college
graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed
stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero,
as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever),
and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to
racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college
graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing
jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become
homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white
ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply
not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where
I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want,
but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling
to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed
oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of
economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that
blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have
enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit
of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no
reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless
or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many
of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23
I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of
the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly
supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until
we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What
does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization
of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill
others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power
is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability,
while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society.
A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice
prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few,
as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt,
and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the
people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15
You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side
of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly
isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53
Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out
your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension
fund go?
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government
also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency
of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by
the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership
class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument
that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building
within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power
(power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited
from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies
and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their
wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician
and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the
rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs,
like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely
on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and
for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through
the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule,
as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans
own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent
of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious
value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive
assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs
and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will
continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive
capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages
and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent
majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy
is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic
growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives
are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP
class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have
on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP
universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed
in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American
economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital
asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive
opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in
the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists
are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I
would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their
kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does
seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty
and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion
of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a
wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the
wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you
are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and
rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive
taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater
equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and
they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone
else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied
externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually
read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their
local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as
a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together
and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans
and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the
United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking
around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino
population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more
money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300
to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans
to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people
and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted
with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on
their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the
17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next
in line."
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported
by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted
from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but
much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow
(miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting
pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for
their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say,
"life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender
or both.
Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally
enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most
in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these
facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means
capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that
ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various
institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially
recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just
mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME,
unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed
to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to
office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder:
If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again,
if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block,
often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary
changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk
about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it
has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism
by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal
contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08
Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might
find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere
in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that
you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have
a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt
to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to
qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state
that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage
of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your
employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but
you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that
toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap
pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really
live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08
The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by
Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term,
O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and
distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help
put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism.
Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40
So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those
who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap
if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions,
for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist
societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus
value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't
an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were
won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements
to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful
beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even
permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to
the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic
systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via
the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity
or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation
if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to
favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't
end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure
would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this.
If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no
one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption
of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society -
one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two
tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong
to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships
across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated
capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published
in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written
by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones
and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16
Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making
profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery
by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction
is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as
the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12
I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate
that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about
it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study
for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make
it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12
As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national
and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have
nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the
same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from
their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments
to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or
credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1
vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful
and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that
capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42
"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not
have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal
government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow
on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free
to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism
eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording
device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record
it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in
the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers
(44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households
in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
I think the Internet and the infotech revolution in general have been largely negative in their impact on the world. Ian Welsh
has a blog post that largely sums up my views on the issue.
Contrary to what many people say I think large organizations like governments and corporations have significantly more power
now than before and ordinary people have less power. The Internet has made it easier to get information but you have to sift through
tons of junk to get to anything decent. For every website like Naked Capitalism there are thousands pushing nonsense or trying
to sell you stuff.
And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it? At best it makes
you more well-rounded, interesting and harder to fool but in political terms knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you more effective.
In the past people didn't have access to nearly as much information but they were more willing and able to organize and fight
against the powerful because it was easier to avoid detection/punishment (that is where stuff like widespread surveillance tech
comes in) and because they still had a vibrant civic life and culture.
I actually think people are more atomized now than in the past and the Internet and other technologies have probably fueled
this process. Despite rising populism, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Yellow Jackets in France, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and the DSA this is all a drop in the bucket compared to just the massive social movements of the 1960s much less earlier periods.
Robert Putnam argued that television, the Internet and other technologies likely helped to produce the collapse of civic life
in the United States by "individualizing" people's leisure time and personally I think Putnam is right. Civic life today is very
weak and I think the Internet is partially to blame.
And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it?
Agreed. If anything these more knowledgeable people had a greater audience prior to the internet. Whether you were a journalist,
a great economist, a great author, or a great orator you need to persist and show intellect and talent to have your message heard
wide and broad.
(This is probably a little idealistic, but I think there is truth there.)
Now you need very little of this. If your most famous asset is your attractive body you can attract a greater audience than
great scholars and politicians.
I can't speak much on authoritarianism since whatever form it takes on today is wildly different from what it was in the past.
Unfortunately, it is hard to convince many people living in western societies that they are living in an authoritarian system
because their metal images are goose-stepping soldiers and Fraktur print posters.
I suppose the way I can assure myself that we are living in an authoritarian society is by analyzing the endless propaganda
spewed from countless, high-viewership media and entertainment outlets. It is quite simple, if the media and entertainment narratives
are within a very narrow intellectual window (with lots of 600 lb. gorillas sitting in corners) than the culture and politics
are being defined by powerful people with a narrow range of interests. This is not to say that forming public opinion or preferring
particular political views is a new thing in Western media and entertainment, just that its application, IMO, is far more effective
and subtle (and becoming more-so by the day) than it ever was in, say, NAZI Germany or the Soviet Union.
I'd put my money down that most educated Germans during NAZI rule were well aware that propaganda was being utilized to "manufacture
consent" but they participated and accepted this despite the content for pragmatic/selfish reasons. Much of the NAZI propaganda
played on existing German/European cultural narratives and prejudices. Leaveraging existing ideology allowed the party to necessitate
their existence by framing the German as juxtaposed against the impure and unworthy. Again, ideologies that existed independent
of the party not within it. Goebbels and company were just good at utilizing the technology of the time to amplify these monstrosities.
I question that being the case today. It is far more complicated. Technology is again the primary tool for manipulation, but
it is possible that current technology is allowing for even greater leaps in reason and analysis. The windows for reflection and
critical thought close as soon as they are opened. Seems more like the ideology is manufactured on the fly. For example, the anti-Russia
narrative has some resonance with baby boomers, but how the hell is it effective with my generation (millennial) and younger?
The offhand references to Putin and Russian operatives from my peers are completely from left field when considering our life
experience. People in my age group had little to say about Russia three years ago. It says volumes on the subtle effectiveness
of Western media machines if you can re-create the cold war within two years for an entire generation.
In addition and related to above, the West's understanding of "Freedom of Speech" is dated by about 100 years. Governments
are no longer the sole source of speech suppression (more like filtering and manipulation), and the supremacy of the free-market
coupled with the erroneously perceived black-and-white division between public and private have convinced the public (with nearly
religious conviction) that gigantic media and entertainment organizations do not have to protect the free speech of citizens because
they are not government. Public/Private is now an enormous blob. With overlapping interests mixed in with any antagonisms. It
is ultimately dictated by capital and its power within both government and business. Cracking this nut will be a nightmare.
Yes, this is an authoritarian world, if measured by the distance between the populace and its governing powers, but it is an
authoritarianism operating in ways that we have never seen before and using tools that are terribly effective.
"... The original "New Deal," which included massive public works infrastructure projects, was introduced by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s amid the Great Depression. Its purpose was to stave off a socialist revolution in America. It was a response to a militant upsurge of strikes and violent class battles, led by socialists who were inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution ..."
"... Since the 2008 crash, first under Bush and Obama, and now Trump, the ruling elites have pursued a single-minded policy of enriching the wealthy, through free credit, corporate bailouts and tax cuts, while slashing spending on social services. ..."
"... To claim as does Ocasio-Cortez that American capitalism can provide a new "New Deal," of a green or any other variety, is to pfile:///F:/Private_html/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/Historyromote an obvious political fiction." ..."
"The original "New Deal," which included massive public works infrastructure projects,
was introduced by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s amid the Great
Depression. Its purpose was to stave off a socialist revolution in America. It was a response
to a militant upsurge of strikes and violent class battles, led by socialists who were
inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution that had occurred less than two decades before.
American capitalism could afford to make such concessions because of its economic
dominance. The past forty years have been characterized by the continued decline of American
capitalism on a world stage relative to its major rivals. The ruling class has responded to
this crisis with a social counterrevolution to claw back all gains won by workers. This has
been carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations and with the assistance
of the trade unions.
Since the 2008 crash, first under Bush and Obama, and now Trump, the ruling elites have
pursued a single-minded policy of enriching the wealthy, through free credit, corporate
bailouts and tax cuts, while slashing spending on social services.
To claim as does Ocasio-Cortez that American capitalism can provide a new "New Deal," of a
green or any other variety, is to pfile:///F:/Private_html/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/Historyromote an obvious political fiction."
Burkman told The Atlantic that he has no clue who the woman is, suggesting he represents a
different accuser.
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores referred all inquiries back to the special counsel,
however we imagine the "all survivors must be believed" standard applies.
The false flags and fake scandals are flying fast and furious in the final weeks before
the election. Let's see if Mueller is able to construct another charge against Trump. The
collusion failed. Obstruction? Failed. Got to concoct something else.
Remember, this is the guy in charge of the FBI during 911. He's good at constructing a
narrative and has a LOT to lose if the house intelligence committee stays in GOP hands.
I am shocked this man is roaming free tonight. We must believe the women, unless and until
Mueller can prove his innocence. There is too much smoke for there not to be some fire. At
this point, he should resign and begin the process of constructing his defense.
Meanwhile, on the Gateway Pundit, they are spinning this way more aggressively at
Mueller....
The Gateway Pundit obtained a copy of the charges.
What we know: The woman is a "very credible witness." Her story are corroborated. The
incident happened in 2010 in New York City. The woman is a professional.
The Mueller apologists are already trashing the accuser -- and don't even know who she
is!
OMG, this story is the best. It keeps giving. So, the phony security company, "Surefire
Intelligence", which Jacob Wohl created and then claimed he had no connection to, but was
registered to his mom's home phone number, has a guy named "Matthew Cohen" as a supposed
founder, who is supposedly ex-Mossad. The profile for "Matthew Cohen" in one place is a photo
of actor Christoph Waltz, and in another place is a photo of Jacob Wohl himself.
Now Jack Burkman, who's the one who has been promoting this story, says he was being
hoaxed by Wohl. When a reporter was talking to Wohl and brought up the fact that "Surefire
Intelligence" is registered to his mom's phone number, he hung up.
So far, no women have come forward with any allegations against Mueller, but several have
come forward with allegations saying Wohl offered them $20,000 to make up phony
allegations.
The special counsel's office confirmed to CNBC that it learned about the "scheme" from
journalists who had been approached by a woman alleging that she had been offered $20,000 by
Burkman "to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert
Mueller." -
CNBC
So con men covering Bad Bob.....as though CNBC has any credibility...
I think FBI and CIA live in strong conviction that they are Rex Mundi. They can do
whatever they want. There is no law for them at all. Typical demokratorship
Let's see. I believe all Victims. Where have I heard that before? Amazing how the Demtards
have fall guys lined up for miles to take the hit for the team. Their spin control is amazing
to watch in action. I so hope this is true. Mueller seems like an evil cat.
These counter claims sound a whole lot like the technique of inserting "confidential
informants" into the Trump Campaign to insert information - or DISINFORMATION - into the
storyline.
what if this whole Pillsbury email was manufactured to create a counter narrative that
people are paid off.....?
see, no one trusts anyone anymore......so, might as well question everything. or not
question ANYTHING and just #believewomen
Mueller is a huge snake; a guy who'll grin widely into your face as he plants evidence to
frame you from the ground up. Ask those who've been released from years of imprisonment
because of Mueller's set ups. They've got a few things to say about Robert Mueller...
A rapist? Who the hell knows but those involved at the time?
I'd put nothing past this uranium mule Mueller. Nothing. Deepest Statist Mueller's career
was made on being a silent and gruesomely pernicious bastard who'd go there for his pals. A
DC Fixer; like his devotee James Comey. Real dirty crums. And they hold a shitload of
blackmail-able secrets.
The international working classes are racists. They are misogynists. Xenophobic transphobes.
They do not think the way we want them to. Some of them actually still believe in God. And they are
white supremacists. Anti-Semites. Gun-toting, Confederate-flag-flying rednecks. Most of them
have never even heard of terms like "intersectionality," "TERF," and so on.
They do not respect the corporate media. They think that news sources like the Washington
Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and so on, are basically propaganda
outlets for the global corporations and oligarchs who own them, and thus are essentially no
different from FOX, whose pundits they believe every word of.
Their minds are so twisted by racism and xenophobia that they can't understand how global
capitalism, the graduated phase-out of national sovereignty, the privatization of virtually
everything, the debt-enslavement of nearly everyone, and the replacement of their so-called
"cultures" with an ubiquitous, smiley-faced, gender-neutral, non-oppressive,
corporate-friendly, Disney simulation of culture are actually wonderfully progressive steps
forward on the road to a more peaceful, less offensive world.
Now this has been proved in numerous studies with all kinds of charts and graphs and so on.
And not only by the corporate statisticians, and the corporate media, and liberal think tanks.
Why, just this week, Mehdi Hasan, in an exasperated
jeremiad in the pages of The Intercept , that bastion of fearless, adversarial journalism
owned by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, proved, once again, that Donald Trump was elected because
PEOPLE ARE GODDAMN RACISTS!
"... The identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. ..."
"... Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment. Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best. ..."
"... Precious time is spent fighting against those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or 'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping ..."
"... It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism. ..."
"... There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing thought, it is anathema to the very concept. ..."
"... 'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity politics. ..."
"... The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment when in reality they strengthen it. ..."
"... Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in charge keep the masses divided and distracted. ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
"... Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra. ..."
The
identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy
that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. A core principle of
socialism is the idea of an overarching supra-national solidarity that unites the international
working class and overrides any factor that might divide it, such as nation, race, or gender.
Workers of all nations are partners, having equal worth and responsibility in a struggle
against those who profit from their brain and muscle.
Capitalism, especially in its most evolved, exploitative and heartless form - imperialism -
has wronged certain groups of people more than others. Colonial empires tended to reserve their
greatest brutality for subjugated peoples whilst the working class of these imperialist nations
fared better in comparison, being closer to the crumbs that fell from the table of empire. The
international class struggle aims to liberate all people everywhere from the drudgery of
capitalism regardless of their past or present degree of oppression. The phrase 'an injury
to one is an injury to all' encapsulates this mindset and conflicts with the idea of
prioritising the interests of one faction of the working class over the entire collective.
Since the latter part of the 20th century, a liberally-inspired tendency has taken root
amongst the Left (in the West at least) that encourages departure from a single identity based
on class in favour of multiple identities based upon one's gender, sexuality, race or any other
dividing factor. Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the
shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment.
Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best.
At the time of writing there are apparently over
70 different gender options in the West, not to mention numerous sexualities - the
traditional LGBT acronym has thus far grown to LGBTQQIP2SAA
. Adding race to the mix results in an even greater number of possible permutations or
identities. Each subgroup has its own ideology. Precious time is spent fighting against
those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing
pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as
the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement
is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or
'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping "
lesbians'.
The ideology of identity politics asserts that the straight white male is at the apex of the
privilege pyramid, responsible for the oppression of all other groups. His original sin
condemns him to everlasting shame. While it is true that straight white men (as a group) have
faced less obstacles than females, non-straight men or ethnic minorities, the majority of
straight white men, past and present, also struggle to survive from paycheck to paycheck and
are not personally involved in the oppression of any other group. While most of the world's
wealthiest
individuals are Caucasian males, millions of white men exist who are both poor and
powerless. The idea of 'whiteness' is itself an ambiguous concept involving racial profiling.
For example, the Irish, Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews may look white yet have suffered more than
their fair share of famines, occupations and genocides throughout the centuries. The idea of
tying an individual's privilege to their appearance is itself a form of racism dreamed up by
woolly minded, liberal (some might say privileged) 'intellectuals' who would be superfluous in
any socialist society.
Is the middle-class ethnic minority lesbian living in Western Europe more oppressed than the
whitish looking Syrian residing under ISIS occupation? Is the British white working class male
really more privileged than a middle class woman from the same society? Stereotyping based on
race, gender or any other factor only leads to alienation and animosity. How can there be unity
amongst the Left if we are only loyal to ourselves and those most like us? Some 'white' men who
feel the Left has nothing to offer them have decided to play the identity politics game in
their search of salvation and have drifted towards supporting Trump (a billionaire with whom
they have nothing in common) or far-right movements, resulting in further alienation, animosity
and powerlessness which in turn only strengthens the position of the top 1%. People around the
world are more divided by class than any other factor.
It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than
to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism.
Fighting oppression through identity politics is at best a lazy, perverse and fetishistic form
of the class struggle led by mostly liberal, middle class and tertiary-educated activists who
understand little of left-wing political theory. At worst it is yet another tool used by the
top 1% to divide the other 99% into 99 or 999 different competing groups who are too
preoccupied with fighting their own little corner to challenge the status quo. It is ironic
that one of the major donors to the faux-left identity politics movement is the privileged
white cisgender male billionaire
George Soros , whose NGOs helped orchestrate the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine that gave
way to the emergence of far right and neo-nazi movements: the kind of people who believe in
racial superiority and do not look kindly on diversity.
There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist
thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal
culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics
have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing
thought, it is anathema to the very concept.
'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury
to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted
identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from
colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that
sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity
politics.
The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by
the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab
and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about
political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a
cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment
when in reality they strengthen it.
Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in
charge keep the masses divided and distracted. In the West you are free to choose any
gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are
not allowed to question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Identity politics is the
new opiate of the masses and prevents organised resistance against the system. Segments of the
Western Left even believe such aforementioned 'freedoms' are a bellwether of progress and an
indicator of its cultural superiority, one that warrants export abroad be it softly via NGOs or
more bluntly through colour revolutions and regime change.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the
board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a
guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. Read more
Neoliberals are a flavor of Trotskyites and they will reach any depths to hang on to power.
Notable quotes:
"... Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends. ..."
"... Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us. ..."
Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful
groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving
money to their friends.
And when the conservative "Christians" form a neoliberal government, the results are toxic for all, except themselves and their
coterie.
Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake
parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us.
"... For example, when a Republican talks about "freedom" they don't mean "freedom from want". They mean "freedom from government oppression", but only government oppression. ..."
"... Democrats act the same way about different things. When a Democrat says "diversity", they only mean diversity of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Diversity of ideas? Diversity of class? Not so much. When a Democrat says "privilege" it refers to "white" and "male". Privilege of wealth? (i.e. like the dictionary definition) That generally gets forgotten. ..."
"... -- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) ..."
"... @thanatokephaloides ..."
"... -- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) ..."
I've come to realize that there's a lot of confusion out there due to people using words with very specific definitions.
For example, when a Republican talks about "freedom" they don't mean "freedom from want".
They mean "freedom from government oppression", but only government oppression.
Private oppression? Republicans will either deny it exists, or justify it.
When a Republican is "pro-life" it only refers to birth.
Because those very same pro-life people are generally pro-war and pro-death penalty.
Democrats act the same way about different things.
When a Democrat says "diversity", they only mean diversity of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Diversity of ideas? Diversity of class? Not so much.
When a Democrat says "privilege" it refers to "white" and "male".
Privilege of wealth? (i.e. like the dictionary definition) That generally gets forgotten.
And then there is the bipartisan misuse of words, which revolves around war and wealth.
When they say "humanitarian war" they mean, um, some contradictory concepts that are meaningless, but are designed to make you feel
a certain way.
When they say "socialism" they really mean "state oppression" regardless of the economic system.
As for the many version of socialism with minimal or non-existent central governments? Or when socialist programs work? No one talks
about them.
Let's not forget substituting or mixing up "middle class" for "working class".
"Working class" now equals "poor", which isn't right.
They use "working class" as a smear too.
When you say "working class" some people
automatically insert certain words in front of it, as if it's generally understood.
When many hear discussion of outreach to "working class" voters, they silently add the words "white" and "male" and all too often
imagine them working on a factory floor or in construction. They shouldn't. According to another analysis by CAP from late last
year, just under 6 in 10 members of the working class are white, and the group is almost half female (46 percent).
The topic of the needs and interests of the working class is usually race and gender neutral. Only the dishonest or indoctrinated
can't wrap their minds around that fact.This is important because working class values don't require a race or gender lens.
a new report released today by the Center for American Progress makes a convincing argument, using extensive polling data, that
this divide does not need to exist. As it turns out, in many cases, voters -- both college educated and working class, and of
all races -- are in favor of an economic agenda that would offer them broader protections whether it comes to work, sickness or
retirement.
"The polling shows that workers across race support similar views on economic policy issues," said David Madland, the co-author
of the report, entitled "The Working-Class Push for Progressive Economic Policies." "They support a higher minimum wage, higher
taxes on the wealthy, and more spending on healthcare and retirement. There is broad support among workers for progressive economic
policy."
This shows that it's possible to make economic issues front and center in a campaign platform in a way that doesn't just talk
to working class whites and dismisses the concerns of female and minority voters. It also shows that the oft-discussed dilemma
among Democrats -- whether to prioritize college educated voters or working class ones -- may be a false choice.
Propaganda is all about false choices. To accomplish this, the media has created a world in which the working class
exist only in the margins .
With the working class largely unrepresented in the media, or represented only in supporting roles, is it any wonder that people
begin to identify in ways other than their class? Which is exactly what the
ruling class
wants .
I can't believe I used to fall for this nonsense! It takes a stupendous level of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously celebrate
the fortunes of someone from a specific identity while looking past the vast sea of people from said identity who are stuck in
gut-wrenching poverty. We pop champagnes for the neo-gentry while disregarding our own tribulations. It's the most stunning form
of logical jujitsu establishment shills have successfully conditioned us to accept; instead of gauging the health of the economy
and the vitality of our nation based on the collective whole, we have been hoodwinked to accept the elevation of a few as success
for us all.
Diversity has become a scam and nothing more than a corporate bamboozle and a federated scheme that is used to hide the true nature
of crony capitalism. We have become a Potemkin society where tokens are put on the stage to represent equality while the vast
majority of Americans are enslaved by diminishing wages or kneecapped into dependency. The whole of our politics has been turned
into an identity-driven hustle. On both sides of the aisle and at every corner of the social divide are grievance whisperers and
demagogues who keep spewing fuel on the fire of tribalism. They use our pains and suffering to make millions only to turn their
backs on us the minute they attain riches and status.
It's only when you see an article written by the ruling elite, or one that identifies with the ruling elite, that you realize
just how out-of-touch they can be. The rich really
are different - they are sociopaths.
They've totally and completely bought into their own
righteousness,
merit and virtue .
Class ascendance led me to become what Susan Jacoby classifies in her recent New York Times Op-Ed "Stop Apologizing for Being
Elite" as an "elite": a vague description of a group of people who have received advanced degrees. Jacoby urges elites to reject
the shame that they have supposedly recently developed, a shame that somehow stems from failing to stop the working class from
embracing Trumpism. Jacoby laments that, following the 2016 election, these elites no longer take pride in their wealth, their
education, their social status, and posits that if only elites embraced their upward mobility, the working class would have something
to aspire to and thus discard their fondness for Trump and his promises to save them.
That level of condescension just blows my mind. It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working
class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil, or Russia, than I do with the wealthy elite in my own country. Don't think that the wealthy
haven't figured that out too.
That is the only word you need pay attention to.
I am inferior therefore expendable.
How the lofty will fail. They will succumb to those who are lessor in their minds.
Nice post gjohn.
That is the only word you need pay attention to.
I am inferior therefore expendable.
How the lofty will fail. They will succumb to those who are lessor in their minds.
Nice post gjohn.
It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil,
or Russia, than a do with the wealthy elite in my own country.
Don't think that the wealthy haven't figured that out too.
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life.
-- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) source
@thanatokephaloides I have been a worker and an employer for most of my career. I associate with many of the same ilk.
None of us working / employer types can afford to hire the millions of under employed. Maybe a few here and there. We are not
wealthy, nor are we taking advantage of the poor. Try to put this lofty idealism into perspective.
It occurred to me some time ago that I have much more in common with a working class slob in France, or Mexico, or Brazil,
or Russia, than a do with the wealthy elite in my own country.
Don't think that the wealthy haven't figured that out too.
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.
There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among
millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life.
-- Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) source
pay $125K per kid for college if you earn more than 125K. That makes zero sense. A parent has no legal obligation to a child
after age 18, but the 18 year old must include parental income if they apply for PELL. If they are included in their parents family,
then the family must be legally obligated to pay for college. 18 can legally die, go to war, be incarcerated, and contractually
bound, but they can't have a drink or be legally entitled to the same rights and benefits as everyone else.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours." It is no wonder there is so much resentment at all levels and an economic coalition can't be formed. Somebody
is always measuring who mom loves best. At no time did Bernie say a word about means testing a GD thing. It is why he was able
to transcend labels.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours."
Especially when one considers the chances of that being true are really quite small.
Contrary to the Randian beLIEf, they didn't build what they have all by themselves. Society carried quite a bit of the freight
here.
pay $125K per kid for college if you earn more than 125K. That makes zero sense. A parent has no legal obligation to a child
after age 18, but the 18 year old must include parental income if they apply for PELL. If they are included in their parents
family, then the family must be legally obligated to pay for college. 18 can legally die, go to war, be incarcerated, and contractually
bound, but they can't have a drink or be legally entitled to the same rights and benefits as everyone else.
Since the college-educated express less support at any price, it reeks of pettiness and tit for tat. "I paid for mine, you
pay for yours." It is no wonder there is so much resentment at all levels and an economic coalition can't be formed. Somebody
is always measuring who mom loves best. At no time did Bernie say a word about means testing a GD thing. It is why he was able
to transcend labels.
That starts out on disparities in housing, but rounds abouts to the "Elite Class" and the urban gentrification by corporatist
democrats. It points out how the democratic party caters to this elite wing, and how the NIMBY-ism of the elites blocks affordable
housing laws. It ends up with some observations:
"Taking it a step further, a Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading
to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also -- as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate --
to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House."
We really can't afford the wealthy parasite class anymore nor should we suffer their think tanks that make folks worship them
and their lifestyles of indulgence and greed!
"... The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers. ..."
"... Consequently, the ruling elite have funded "black history," "women's studies," and "transgender dialogues," in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These "studies" have replaced real history with fake history. ..."
PCR's latest is really good. I love it when he gets to ripping, and doesn't stop for 2000+ words or so. It reads a lot better
than Toynbee, fersher.
The working class, designated by Hillary Clinton as "the Trump deplorables," is now the victimizer, not the victim. Marxism
has been stood on its head.
The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups
and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming
at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers.
The ruling elite favors a "conversation on race," because the ruling elite know it can only result in accusations that will
further divide society. Consequently, the ruling elite have funded "black history," "women's studies," and "transgender dialogues,"
in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These "studies" have replaced real history
with fake history.
All of America, indeed of the entire West, lives in The Matrix, a concocted [and false] reality. Western peoples are so
propagandized, so brainwashed, that they have no understanding that their disunity was created in order to make them impotent
in the face of a rapacious ruling class, a class whose arrogance and hubris has the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
History as it actually happened is disappearing as those who tell the truth are dismissed as misogynists, racists, homophobes,
Putin agents, terrorist sympathizers, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists. Liberals who complained mightily of McCarthyism
now practice it ten-fold.
The United States with its brainwashed and incompetent population -- indeed, the entirety of the Western populations are
incompetent -- and with its absence of intelligent leadership has no chance against Russia and China, two massive countries
arising from their overthrow of police states as the West descends into a gestapo state. The West is over and done with. Nothing
remains of the West but the lies used to control the people. All hope is elsewhere.
"... ' Anti-populism' is the simple ruling class formula for covering-up their real agenda, which is pro-militarist, pro-imperialist (globalization), pro-'rebels' (i.e. mercenary terrorists working for regime change), pro crisis makers and pro-financial swindlers. ..."
"... The economic origins of ' anti-populism' are rooted in the deep and repeated crises of capitalism and the need to deflect and discredit mass discontent and demoralize the popular classes in struggle. By demonizing ' populism', the elites seek to undermine the rising tide of anger over the elite-imposed wage cuts, the rise of low-paid temporary jobs and the massive increase in the reserve army of cheap immigrant labor to compete with displaced native workers. ..."
"... Demonization of independent popular movements ignores the fundamental programmatic differences and class politics of genuine populist struggles compared with the contemporary right-wing capitalist political scarecrows and clowns. ..."
"... The anti-populist ideologues label President Trump a 'populist' when his policies and proposals are the exact opposite. Trump champions the repeal of all pro-labor and work safety regulation, as well as the slashing of public health insurance programs while reducing corporate taxes for the ultra-elite. ..."
"... The media's ' anti-populists' ideologues denounce pro-business rightwing racists as ' populists' . In Italy, Finland, Holland, Austria, Germany and France anti-working class parties are called ' populist' for attacking immigrants instead of bankers and militarists. ..."
"... In other words, the key to understanding contemporary ' anti-populism' is to see its role in preempting and undermining the emergence of authentic populist movements while convincing middle class voters to continue to vote for crisis-prone, austerity-imposing neo-liberal regimes. ' Anti-populism' has become the opium (or OxyContin) of frightened middle class voters. ..."
Throughout the US and European corporate and state media, right and left, we are told that ' populism' has become
the overarching threat to democracy, freedom and . . . free markets. The media's ' anti-populism' campaign has been
used and abused by ruling elites and their academic and intellectual camp followers as the principal weapon to distract,
discredit and destroy the rising tide of mass discontent with ruling class-imposed austerity programs, the accelerating
concentration of wealth and the deepening inequalities.
We will begin by examining the conceptual manipulation of ' populism' and its multiple usages. Then we will turn
to the historic economic origins of populism and anti-populism. Finally, we will critically analyze the contemporary movements
and parties dubbed ' populist' by the ideologues of ' anti-populism' .
Conceptual Manipulation
In order to understand the current ideological manipulation accompanying ' anti-populism ' it is necessary to
examine the historical roots of populism as a popular movement.
Populism emerged during the 19 th and 20 th century as an ideology, movement and government in
opposition to autocracy, feudalism, capitalism, imperialism and socialism. In the United States, populist leaders led agrarian
struggles backed by millions of small farmers in opposition to bankers, railroad magnates and land speculators. Opposing
monopolistic practices of the 'robber barons', the populist movement supported broad-based commercial agriculture, access
to low interest farm credit and reduced transport costs.
In 19 th century Russia, the populists opposed the Tsar, the moneylenders and the burgeoning commercial
elites.
In early 20 th century India and China, populism took the form of nationalist agrarian movements seeking
to overthrow the imperial powers and their comprador collaborators.
In Latin America, from the 1930s onward, especially with the crises of export regimes, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia
and Peru, embraced a variety of populist, anti-imperialist governments. In Brazil, President Getulio Vargas's term (1951-1954)
was notable for the establishment of a national industrial program promoting the interests of urban industrial workers
despite banning independent working class trade unions and Marxist parties. In Argentina, President Juan Peron's first
terms (1946-1954) promoted large-scale working class organization, advanced social welfare programs and embraced nationalist
capitalist development.
In Bolivia, a worker-peasant revolution brought to power a nationalist party, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement
(MNR), which nationalized the tin mines, expropriated the latifundios and promoted national development during its rule
from 1952-1964.
In Peru, under President Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975), the government expropriated the coastal sugar plantations
and US oil fields and copper mines while promoting worker and agricultural cooperatives.
In all cases, the populist governments in Latin America were based on a coalition of nationalist capitalists, urban
workers and the rural poor. In some notable cases, nationalist military officers brought populist governments to power.
What they had in common was their opposition to foreign capital and its local supporters and exporters ('compradores'),
bankers and their elite military collaborators. Populists promoted 'third way' politics by opposing imperialism on the
right, and socialism and communism on the left. The populists supported the redistribution of wealth but not the expropriation
of property. They sought to reconcile national capitalists and urban workers. They opposed class struggle but supported
state intervention in the economy and import-substitution as a development strategy.
Imperialist powers were the leading anti-populists of that period. They defended property privileges and condemned nationalism
as 'authoritarian' and undemocratic. They demonized the mass support for populism as 'a threat to Western Christian civilization'.
Not infrequently, the anti-populists ideologues would label the national-populists as 'fascists' . . . even as they won
numerous elections at different times and in a variety of countries.
The historical experience of populism, in theory and practice, has nothing to do with what today's ' anti-populists'
in the media are calling ' populism' . In reality, current anti-populism is still a continuation of anti-communism
, a political weapon to disarm working class and popular movements. It advances the class interest of the ruling class.
Both 'anti's' have been orchestrated by ruling class ideologues seeking to blur the real nature of their 'pro-capitalist'
privileged agenda and practice. Presenting your program as 'pro-capitalist', pro-inequalities, pro-tax evasion and pro-state
subsidies for the elite is more difficult to defend at the ballot box than to claim to be ' anti-populist' .
' Anti-populism' is the simple ruling class formula for covering-up their real agenda, which is pro-militarist,
pro-imperialist (globalization), pro-'rebels' (i.e. mercenary terrorists working for regime change), pro crisis makers
and pro-financial swindlers.
The economic origins of ' anti-populism' are rooted in the deep and repeated crises of capitalism and the
need to deflect and discredit mass discontent and demoralize the popular classes in struggle. By demonizing ' populism',
the elites seek to undermine the rising tide of anger over the elite-imposed wage cuts, the rise of low-paid temporary
jobs and the massive increase in the reserve army of cheap immigrant labor to compete with displaced native workers.
Historic 'anti-populism' has its roots in the inability of capitalism to secure popular consent via elections. It reflects
their anger and frustration at their failure to grow the economy, to conquer and exploit independent countries and to finance
growing fiscal deficits.
The Amalgamation of Historical Populism with the Contemporary Fabricated Populism
What the current anti-populists ideologues label ' populism' has little to do with the historical movements.
Unlike all of the past populist governments, which sought to nationalize strategic industries, none of the current movements
and parties, denounced as 'populist' by the media, are anti-imperialists. In fact, the current ' populists' attack
the lowest classes and defend the imperialist-allied capitalist elites. The so-called current ' populists' support
imperialist wars and bank swindlers, unlike the historical populists who were anti-war and anti-bankers.
Ruling class ideologues simplistically conflate a motley collection of rightwing capitalist parties and organizations
with the pro-welfare state, pro-worker and pro-farmer parties of the past in order to discredit and undermine the burgeoning
popular multi-class movements and regimes.
Demonization of independent popular movements ignores the fundamental programmatic differences and class politics
of genuine populist struggles compared with the contemporary right-wing capitalist political scarecrows and clowns.
One has only to compare the currently demonized ' populist' Donald Trump with the truly populist US President
Franklin Roosevelt, who promoted social welfare, unionization, labor rights, increased taxes on the rich, income redistribution,
and genuine health and workplace safety legislation within a multi-class coalition to see how absurd the current media
campaign has become.
The anti-populist ideologues label President Trump a 'populist' when his policies and proposals are the exact
opposite. Trump champions the repeal of all pro-labor and work safety regulation, as well as the slashing of public health
insurance programs while reducing corporate taxes for the ultra-elite.
The media's ' anti-populists' ideologues denounce pro-business rightwing racists as ' populists' . In Italy, Finland,
Holland, Austria, Germany and France anti-working class parties are called ' populist' for attacking immigrants instead
of bankers and militarists.
In other words, the key to understanding contemporary ' anti-populism' is to see its role in preempting and undermining
the emergence of authentic populist movements while convincing middle class voters to continue to vote for crisis-prone,
austerity-imposing neo-liberal regimes. ' Anti-populism' has become the opium (or OxyContin) of frightened middle class
voters.
The anti-populism of the ruling class serves to confuse the 'right' with the 'left'; to sidelight the latter and promote
the former; to amalgamate rightwing 'rallies' with working class strikes; and to conflate rightwing demagogues with popular
mass leaders.
Unfortunately, too many leftist academics and pundits are loudly chanting in the 'anti-populist' chorus. They have failed
to see themselves among the shock troops of the right. The left ideologues join the ruling class in condemning the corporate
populists in the name of 'anti-fascism'. Leftwing writers, claiming to 'combat the far-right enemies of the people'
, overlook the fact that they are 'fellow-travelling' with an anti-populist ruling class, which has imposed savage cuts
in living standards, spread imperial wars of aggression resulting in millions of desperate refugees- not immigrants
–and concentrated immense wealth.
The bankruptcy of today's ' anti-populist' left will leave them sitting in their coffee shops, scratching at
fleas, as the mass popular movements take to the streets!
"... With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public's trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting freak elected by accident, "a disrupter" of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people. ..."
"... They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics -- especially entropy , the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats. ..."
"... The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called "intellectuals-yet-idiots," hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. ..."
"... Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43). ..."
"... This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for "social justice," is to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer. ..."
"... The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds . Almost nothing in America's financial life is on the level anymore, from the mendacious "guidance" statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine and education have become -- two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth ! ..."
"... Um, forgotten by Kunstler is the fact that 1965 was also the year when the USA reopened its doors to low-skilled immigrants from the Third World – who very quickly became competitors with black Americans. And then the Boom ended, and corporate American, influenced by thinking such as that displayed in Lewis Powell's (in)famous 1971 memorandum, decided to claw back the gains made by the working and middle classes in the previous 3 decades. ..."
"... "Wow – is there ever negative!" ..."
"... You also misrepresent reality to your readers. No, the black underclass is not larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated now than in the 1960's, when cities across the country burned and machine guns were stationed on the Capitol steps. The "racial divide" is not "starker now than ever"; that's just preposterous to anyone who was alive then. And nobody I've ever known felt "shame" over the "outcome of the civil rights campaign". I know nobody who seeks to "punish and humiliate" the 'privileged'. ..."
"... My impression is that what Kunstler is doing here is diagnosing the long crisis of a decadent liberal post-modernity, and his stance is not that of either of the warring sides within our divorced-from-reality political establishment, neither that of the 'right' or 'left.' Which is why, logically, he published it here. National Review would never have accepted this piece ..."
"... "Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class -- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor." ..."
"... Young black people are told by their elders how lucky they are to grow up today because things are much better than when grandpa was our age and we all know this history.\ ..."
"... It's clear that this part of the article was written from absolute ignorance of the actual black experience with no interest in even looking up some facts. Hell, Obama even gave a speech at Howard telling graduates how lucky they were to be young and black Today compared to even when he was their age in the 80's! ..."
"... E.g. Germany. Germany is anything but perfect and its recent government has screwed up with its immigration policies. But Germany has a high standard of living, an educated work force (including unions and skilled crafts-people), a more rational distribution of wealth and high quality universal health care that costs 47% less per capita than in the U.S. and with no intrinsic need to maraud around the planet wasting gobs of taxpayer money playing Global Cop. ..."
"... The larger subtext is that the U.S. house of cards was planned out and constructed as deliberately as the German model was. Only the objective was not to maximize the health and happiness of the citizenry, but to line the pockets of the parasitic Elites. (E.g., note that Mitch McConnell has been a government employee for 50 years but somehow acquired a net worth of over $10 Million.) ..."
On America's 'long emergency' of recession, globalization, and identity politics.
Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA's sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated
sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array
of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing
globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.
A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency , persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into
question our ability to carry on "normal" life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the
public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities
we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible
opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008,
despite official trumpet blasts heralding "recovery" and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.
With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is
no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis
and dysfunction and the public's trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting
freak elected by accident, "a disrupter" of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire.
A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership
is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people.
Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species
of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise
to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of "normal" life in the USA.
They chatter
about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace
problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics
-- especially entropy , the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth
on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats.
The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant of
an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure in our time to establish
a utopia on earth. By the logic of the day, "inclusion" and "diversity" are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting
down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically determined, yet so-called
cis-gendered persons (whose gender identity corresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by dint of
not being "other-gendered" -- thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry
anyone?
The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called "intellectuals-yet-idiots," hierophants trafficking in fads
and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming
human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual
despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
In case you haven't been paying attention to the hijinks on campus -- the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the
kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves -- here is the key take-away: it's not about
ideas or ideologies anymore; it's purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting!
In fact, it's intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career advancement. It's rather perverse that this passion for tyranny
is suddenly so popular on the liberal left.
Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor
pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that
unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right
of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43).
The new and false idea that something labeled "hate speech" -- labeled by whom? -- is equivalent to violence floated out of the
graduate schools on a toxic cloud of intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called "post-structuralist" philosophy,
where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain comprised of
one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down
to the proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values, in particular the search for truth. Under this
scheme, all human relations were reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their oppressors, the former generally
"people of color" and women, all subjugated by whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described "oppressed"
and "marginalized" are based on the credo that the ends justify the means (the Alinsky model).
This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for "social justice," is
to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the
social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual
boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and
administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear
puzzling to the casual observer.
I would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair
over the outcome of the civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of progressive ideology. It did not bring
about the hoped-for utopia. The racial divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black president. Today,
there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case for progress
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The recent flash points of racial conflict -- Ferguson, the Dallas police ambush, the
Charleston church massacre, et cetera -- don't have to be rehearsed in detail here to make the point that there is a great deal of
ill feeling throughout the land, and quite a bit of acting out on both sides.
The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it's worth,
is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and '65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced
considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another. And that is exactly why
a black separatism movement arose as an alternative at the time, led initially by such charismatic figures as Malcolm X and Stokely
Carmichael. Some of that was arguably a product of the same youthful energy that drove the rest of the Sixties counterculture: adolescent
rebellion. But the residue of the "Black Power" movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with
a common culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running "multiculturalism and diversity" crusade that effectively
nullifies the concept of a national common culture.
What follows from these dynamics is the deflection of all ideas that don't feed a narrative of power relations between oppressors
and victims, with the self-identified victims ever more eager to exercise their power to coerce, punish, and humiliate their self-identified
oppressors, the "privileged," who condescend to be abused to a shockingly masochistic degree. Nobody stands up to this organized
ceremonial nonsense. The punishments are too severe, including the loss of livelihood, status, and reputation, especially in the
university. Once branded a "racist," you're done. And venturing to join the oft-called-for "honest conversation about race" is certain
to invite that fate.
Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class
-- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor. Hung out to dry economically,
this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors as the poor blacks before them: absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births,
drug abuse. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped up the floor with the middle-middle class above them, foreclosing on their
homes and futures, and in their desperation many of these people became Trump voters -- though I doubt that Trump himself truly understood
how this all worked exactly. However, he did see that the white middle class had come to identify as yet another victim group, allowing
him to pose as their champion.
The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of
stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds . Almost nothing in America's financial life
is on the level anymore, from the mendacious "guidance" statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of
the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud
that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine
and education have become -- two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth !
Life in this milieu of immersive dishonesty drives citizens beyond cynicism to an even more desperate state of mind. The suffering
public ends up having no idea what is really going on, what is actually happening. The toolkit of the Enlightenment -- reason, empiricism
-- doesn't work very well in this socioeconomic hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is just
a social construct, just whatever story you feel like telling about it. On the right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some
years ago when he bragged, of the Bush II White House, that "we make our own reality." The left says nearly the same thing in the
post-structuralist malarkey of academia: "you make your own reality." In the end, both sides are left with a lot of bad feelings
and the belief that only raw power has meaning.
Erasing psychological boundaries is a dangerous thing. When the rackets finally come to grief -- as they must because their operations
don't add up -- and the reckoning with true price discovery commences at the macro scale, the American people will find themselves
in even more distress than they've endured so far. This will be the moment when either nobody has any money, or there is plenty of
worthless money for everyone. Either way, the functional bankruptcy of the nation will be complete, and nothing will work anymore,
including getting enough to eat. That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will beg someone to step up and push them
around to get their world working again. And even that may not avail.
James Howard Kunstler's many books include The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking,
Technology, and the Fate of the Nation , and the World Made by Hand novel series. He blogs on Mondays and Fridays at
Kunstler.com .
I think I need to go listen to an old-fashioned Christmas song now.
The ability to be financially, or at least resource, sustaining is the goal of many I know since we share a lack of confidence
in any of our institutions. We can only hope that God might look down with compassion on us, but He's not in the practical plan
of how to feed and sustain ourselves when things play out to their inevitable end. Having come from a better time, we joke about
our dystopian preparations, self-conscious about our "overreaction," but preparing all the same.
Look at it this way: Germany had to be leveled and its citizens reduced to abject penury, before Volkswagen could become the world's
biggest car company, and autobahns built throughout the world. It will be darkest before the dawn, and hopefully, that light that
comes after, won't be the miniature sunrise of a nuclear conflagration.
An excellent summary and bleak reminder of what our so-called civilization has become. How do we extricate ourselves from this
strange death spiral?
I have long suspected that we humans are creatures of our own personal/group/tribal/national/global fables and mythologies. We
are compelled by our genes, marrow, and blood to tell ourselves stories of our purpose and who we are. It is time for new mythologies
and stories of "who we are". This bizarre hyper-techno all-for-profit world needs a new story.
"The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it's worth,
is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and '65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced
considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another."
Um, forgotten by Kunstler is the fact that 1965 was also the year when the USA reopened its doors to low-skilled immigrants
from the Third World – who very quickly became competitors with black Americans. And then the Boom ended, and corporate American,
influenced by thinking such as that displayed in Lewis Powell's (in)famous 1971 memorandum, decided to claw back the gains made
by the working and middle classes in the previous 3 decades.
Hey Jim, I know you love to blame Wall Street and the Republicans for the GFC. I remember back in '08 you were urging Democrats
to blame it all on Republicans to help Obama win. But I have news for you. It wasn't Wall Street that caused the GFC. The crisis
actually had its roots in the Clinton Administration's use of the Community Reinvestment Act to pressure banks to relax mortgage
underwriting standards. This was done at the behest of left wing activists who claimed (without evidence, of course) that the
standards discriminated against minorities. The result was an effective repeal of all underwriting standards and an explosion
of real estate speculation with borrowed money. Speculation with borrowed money never ends well.
I have to laugh, too, when you say that it's perverse that the passion for tyranny is popular on the left. Have you ever heard
of the French Revolution? How about the USSR? Communist China? North Korea? Et cetera.
Leftism is leftism. Call it Marxism, Communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism, or what have you. The ideology is the
same. Only the tactics and methods change. Destroy the evil institutions of marriage, family, and religion, and Man's innate goodness
will shine forth, and the glorious Godless utopia will naturally result.
Of course, the father of lies is ultimately behind it all. "He was a liar and a murderer from the beginning."
When man turns his back on God, nothing good happens. That's the most fundamental problem in Western society today. Not to
say that there aren't other issues, but until we return to God, there's not much hope for improvement.
Hmm. I just wandered over here by accident. Being a construction contractor, I don't know enough about globalization, academia,
or finance to evaluate your assertions about those realms. But being in a biracial family, and having lived, worked, and worshiped
equally in white and black communities, I can evaluate your statements about social justice, race, and civil rights.
Long story short, you pick out fringe liberal ideas, misrepresent them as mainstream among liberals, and shoot them down. Casuistry,
anyone?
You also misrepresent reality to your readers. No, the black underclass is not larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated
now than in the 1960's, when cities across the country burned and machine guns were stationed on the Capitol steps. The "racial
divide" is not "starker now than ever"; that's just preposterous to anyone who was alive then. And nobody I've ever known felt
"shame" over the "outcome of the civil rights campaign". I know nobody who seeks to "punish and humiliate" the 'privileged'.
I get that this column is a quick toss-off before the holiday, and that your strength is supposed to be in your presentation,
not your ideas. For me, it's a helpful way to rehearse debunking common tropes that I'll encounter elsewhere.
But, really, your readers deserve better, and so do the people you misrepresent. We need bad liberal ideas to be critiqued
while they're still on the fringe. But by calling fringe ideas mainstream, you discredit yourself, misinform your readers, and
contribute to stereotypes both of liberals and of conservatives. I'm looking for serious conservative critiques that help me take
a second look at familiar ideas. I won't be back.
I disagree, NoahK, that the whole is incohesive, and I also disagree that these are right-wing talking points.
The theme of this piece is the long crisis in the US, its nature and causes. At no point does this essay, despite it stream
of consciousness style, veer away from that theme. Hence it is cohesive.
As for the right wing charge, though it is true, to be sure, that Kunstler's position is in many respects classically conservative
-- he believes for example that there should be a national consensus on certain fundamentals, such as whether or not there are
two sexes (for the most part), or, instead, an infinite variety of sexes chosen day by day at whim -- you must have noticed that
he condemned both the voluntarism of Karl Rove AND the voluntarism of the post-structuralist crowd.
My impression is that what Kunstler is doing here is diagnosing the long crisis of a decadent liberal post-modernity, and his stance is not that of either
of the warring sides within our divorced-from-reality political establishment, neither that of the 'right' or 'left.' Which is
why, logically, he published it here. National Review would never have accepted this piece. QED.
This malaise is rooted in human consciousness that when reflecting on itself celebrating its capacity for apperception suffers
from the tension that such an inquiry, such an inward glance produces. In a word, the capacity for the human being to be aware
of his or herself as an intelligent being capable of reflecting on aspects of reality through the artful manipulation of symbols
engenders this tension, this angst.
Some will attempt to extinguish this inner tension through intoxication while others through the thrill of war, and it has
been played out since the dawn of man and well documented when the written word emerged.
The malaise which Mr. Kunstler addresses as the problem of our times is rooted in our existence from time immemorial. But the
problem is not only existential but ontological. It is rooted in our being as self-aware creatures. Thus no solution avails itself
as humanity in and of itself is the problem. Each side (both right and left) seeks its own anodyne whether through profligacy
or intolerance, and each side mans the barricades to clash experiencing the adrenaline rush that arises from the perpetual call
to arms.
"Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class -- the lower-middle class
-- which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor."
And to whom do we hand
the tab for this? Globalization is a word. It is a concept, a talking point. Globalization is oligarchy by another name. Unfortunately,
under-educated, deplorable, Americans; regardless of party affiliation/ideology have embraced. And the most ironic part?
Russia
and China (the eventual surviving oligarchies) will eventually have to duke it out to decide which superpower gets to make the
USA it's b*tch (excuse prison reference, but that's where we're headed folks).
And one more irony. Only in American, could Christianity,
which was grew from concepts like compassion, generosity, humility, and benevolence; be re-branded and 'weaponized' to further
greed, bigotry, misogyny, intolerance, and violence/war. Americans fiddled (over same sex marriage, abortion, who has to bake
wedding cakes, and who gets to use which public restroom), while the oligarchs burned the last resources (natural, financial,
and even legal).
"Today, there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case
for progress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963."
Spoken like a white guy who has zero contact with black people. I mean, even a little bit of research and familiarity would
give lie to the idea that blacks are more pessimistic about life today than in the 1960's.
Black millenials are the most optimistic group of Americans about the future. Anyone who has spent any significant time around
older black people will notice that you don't hear the rose colored memories of the past. Black people don't miss the 1980's,
much less the 1950's. Young black people are told by their elders how lucky they are to grow up today because things are much
better than when grandpa was our age and we all know this history.\
It's clear that this part of the article was written from absolute
ignorance of the actual black experience with no interest in even looking up some facts. Hell, Obama even gave a speech at Howard
telling graduates how lucky they were to be young and black Today compared to even when he was their age in the 80's!
Here is the direct quote;
"In my inaugural address, I remarked that just 60 years earlier, my father might not have been served in a D.C. restaurant
-- at least not certain of them. There were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Very few black judges. Shoot, as Larry Wilmore
pointed out last week, a lot of folks didn't even think blacks had the tools to be a quarterback. Today, former Bull Michael Jordan
isn't just the greatest basketball player of all time -- he owns the team. (Laughter.) When I was graduating, the main black hero
on TV was Mr. T. (Laughter.) Rap and hip hop were counterculture, underground. Now, Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night, and Beyoncé
runs the world. (Laughter.) We're no longer only entertainers, we're producers, studio executives. No longer small business owners
-- we're CEOs, we're mayors, representatives, Presidents of the United States. (Applause.)
I am not saying gaps do not persist. Obviously, they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists. Don't worry -- I'm going to
get to that. But I wanted to start, Class of 2016, by opening your eyes to the moment that you are in. If you had to choose one
moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be -- what nationality,
what gender, what race, whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into -- you wouldn't choose 100
years ago. You wouldn't choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You'd choose right now. If you had to choose a time
to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, "young, gifted, and black" in America, you would choose right now. (Applause.)"
I love reading about how the Community Reinvestment Act was the catalyst of all that is wrong in the world. As someone in the
industry the issue was actually twofold. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act turned the mortgage securities market into
a casino with the underlying actual debt instruments multiplied through the use of additional debt instruments tied to the performance
but with no actual underlying value. These securities were then sold around the world essentially infecting the entire market.
In order that feed the beast, these NON GOVERNMENT loans had their underwriting standards lowered to rediculous levels. If you
run out of qualified customers, just lower the qualifications. Government loans such as FHA, VA, and USDA were avoided because
it was easier to qualify people with the new stuff. And get paid. The short version is all of the incentives that were in place
at the time, starting with the Futures Act, directly led to the actions that culminated in the Crash. So yes, it was the government,
just a different piece of legislation.
Kunstler itemizing the social and economic pathologies in the United States is not enough. Because there are other models that
demonstrate it didn't have to be this way.
E.g. Germany. Germany is anything but perfect and its recent government has screwed up with its immigration policies. But Germany
has a high standard of living, an educated work force (including unions and skilled crafts-people), a more rational distribution
of wealth and high quality universal health care that costs 47% less per capita than in the U.S. and with no intrinsic need to
maraud around the planet wasting gobs of taxpayer money playing Global Cop.
The larger subtext is that the U.S. house of cards was planned out and constructed as deliberately as the German model was.
Only the objective was not to maximize the health and happiness of the citizenry, but to line the pockets of the parasitic Elites.
(E.g., note that Mitch McConnell has been a government employee for 50 years but somehow acquired a net worth of over $10 Million.)
P.S. About the notionally high U.S. GDP. Factor out the TRILLIONS inexplicably hoovered up by the pathological health care
system, the metastasized and sanctified National Security State (with its Global Cop shenanigans) and the cronied-up Ponzi scheme
of electron-churn financialization ginned up by Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Banksters, and then see how much GDP that reflects
the actual wealth of the middle class is left over.
Right-Wing Dittoheads and Fox Watchers love to blame the Community Reinvestment Act. It allows them to blame both poor black people
AND the government. The truth is that many parties were to blame.
One of the things I love about this rag is that almost all of the comments are included.
You may be sure that similar commenting privilege doesn't exist most anywhere else.
Any disfavor regarding the supposed bleakness with the weak hearted souls aside, Mr K's broadside seems pretty spot on to me.
I think the author overlooks the fact that government over the past 30 to 40 years has been tilting the playing field ever more
towards the uppermost classes and against the middle class. The evisceration of the middle class is plain to see.
If the the common man had more money and security, lots of our current intrasocial conflicts would be far less intense.
Andrew Imlay: You provide a thoughtful corrective to one of Kunstler's more hyperbolic claims. And you should know that his jeremiad
doesn't represent usual fare at TAC. So do come back.
Whether or not every one of Kunstler's assertions can withstand a rigorous fact-check, he is a formidable rhetorician. A generous
serving of Weltschmerz is just what the season calls for.
America is stupefied from propaganda on steroids for, largely from the right wing, 25? years of Limbaugh, Fox, etc etc etc Clinton
hate x 10, "weapons of mass destruction", "they hate us because we are free", birtherism, death panels, Jade Helm, pedophile pizza, and more Clinton hate porn.
Americans have been taught to worship the wealthy regardless of how they got there. Americans have been taught they are "Exceptional" (better, smarter, more godly than every one else) in spite of outward appearances.
Americans are under educated and encouraged to make decisions based on emotion from constant barrage of extra loud advertising
from birth selling illusion.
Americans brain chemistry is most likely as messed up as the rest of their bodies from junk or molested food. Are they even
capable of normal thought?
Donald Trump has convinced at least a third of Americans that only he, Fox, Breitbart and one or two other sources are telling
the Truth, every one else is lying and that he is their friend.
Is it possible we are just plane doomed and there's no way out?
I loathe the cotton candy clown and his Quislings; however, I must admit, his presence as President of the United States has forced
everyone (left, right, religious, non-religious) to look behind the curtain. He has done more to dis-spell the idealism of both
liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, rich and poor, than any other elected official in history. The sheer amount
of mind-numbing absurdity resulting from a publicity stunt that got out of control ..I am 70 and I have seen a lot. This is beyond
anything I could ever imagine. America is not going to improve or even remain the same. It is in a 4 year march into worse, three
years to go.
Mr. Kuntzler has an honest and fairly accurate assessment of the situation. And as usual, the liberal audience that TAC is trying
so hard to reach, is tossing out their usual talking points whilst being in denial of the situation.
The Holy Bible teaches us that repentance is the first crucial step on the path towards salvation. Until the progressives,
from their alleged "elite" down the rank and file at Kos, HuffPo, whatever, take a good, long, hard look at the current national
dumpster fire and start claiming some responsibility, America has no chance of solving problems or fixing anything.
Kunstler must have had a good time writing this, and I had a good time reading it. Skewed perspective, wild overstatement, and
obsessive cherry-picking of the rare checkable facts are mixed with a little eye of newt and toe of frog and smothered in a oar
and roll of rhetoric that was thrilling to be immersed in. Good work!
aah, same old Kunstler, slightly retailored for the Trump years.
for those of you familiar with him, remember his "peak oil" mania from the late 00s and early 2010s? every blog post was about
it. every new year was going to be IT: the long emergency would start, people would be Mad Maxing over oil supplies cos prices
at the pump would be $10 a gallon or somesuch.
in this new rant, i did a control-F for "peak oil" and hey, not a mention. I guess even cranks like Kunstler know when to give
a tired horse a rest.
Kunstler once again waxes eloquent on the American body politic. Every word rings true, except when it doesn't. At times poetic,
at other times paranoid, Kunstler does us a great service by pointing a finger at the deepest pain points in America, any one
of which could be the geyser that brings on catastrophic failure.
However, as has been pointed out, he definitely does not hang out with black people. For example, the statement:
But the residue of the "Black Power" movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with a common
culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running "multiculturalism and diversity" crusade that effectively nullifies
the concept of a national common culture.
The notion of a 'national common culture' is interesting but pretty much a fantasy that never existed, save colonial times.
Yet Kunstler's voice is one that must be heard, even if he is mostly tuning in to the widespread radicalism on both ends of
the spectrum, albeit in relatively small numbers. Let's face it, people are in the streets marching, yelling, and hating and mass
murders keep happening, with the regularity of Old Faithful. And he makes a good point about academia loosing touch with reality
much of the time. He's spot on about the false expectations of what technology can do for the economy, which is inflated with
fiat currency and God knows how many charlatans and hucksters. And yes, the white working class is feeling increasingly like a
'victim group.'
While Kunstler may be more a poet than a lawyer, more songwriter than historian, my gut feeling is that America had better
take notice of him, as The American ship of state is being swept by a ferocious tide and the helmsman is high on Fentanyl (made
in China).
Re: The crisis actually had its roots in the Clinton Administration's use of the Community Reinvestment Act
Here we go again with this rotting zombie which rises from its grave no matter how many times it has been debunked by statisticians
and reputable economists (and no, not just those on the left– the ranks include Bruce Bartlett for example, a solid Reaganist).
To reiterate again : the CRA played no role in the mortgage boom and bust. Among other facts in the way of that hypothesis is
the fact that riskiest loans were being made by non-bank lenders (Countrywide) who were not covered by the CRA which only applied
to actual banks– and the banks did not really get into the game full tilt, lowering their lending standards, until late in the
game, c. 2005, in response to their loss of business to the non-bank lenders. Ditto for the GSEs, which did not lower their standards
until 2005 and even then relied on wall Street to vet the subprime loans they were buying.
To be sure, blaming Wall Street for everything is also wrong-headed, though wall Street certainly did some stupid, greedy and
shady things (No, I am not letting them off the hook!) But the cast of miscreants is numbered in the millions and it stretches
around the planet. Everyone (for example) who got into the get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme of house flipping, especially if they lied
about their income to do so. And everyone who took out a HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) and foolishly charged it up on a consumption
binge. And shall we talk about the mortgage brokers who coached people into lying, the loan officers who steered customers into
the riskiest (and highest earning) loans they could, the sellers who asked palace-prices for crackerbox hovels, the appraisers
who rubber-stamped such prices, the regulators who turned a blind eye to all the fraud and malfeasance, the ratings agencies who
handed out AAA ratings to securities full of junk, the politicians who rejoiced over the apparent "Bush Boom" well, I could continue,
but you get the picture.
"The Holy Bible teaches us that repentance is the first crucial step on the path towards salvation. Until the progressives, from
their alleged "elite" down the rank and file at Kos, HuffPo, whatever, take a good, long, hard look at the current national dumpster
fire and start claiming some responsibility, America has no chance of solving problems or fixing anything."
Pretty sure that calling other people to repent of their sin of disagreeing with you is not quite what the Holy Bible intended.
Petras did not mention that it was Carter who started neoliberalization of the USA. The subsequent election of Reagan signified
the victory of neoliberalism in this country or "quite coup". The death of New Deal from this point was just a matter
of time. Labor relations drastically changes and war on union and atomization of workforce are a norm.
Welfare state still exists but only for corporation and MIC. Otherwise the New Deal society is almost completely dismanted.
It is true that "The ' New Deal' was, at best, a de facto ' historical compromise' between the capitalist class
and the labor unions, mediated by the Democratic Party elite. It was a temporary pact in which the unions secured legal recognition
while the capitalists retained their executive prerogatives." But the key factor in this compromise was the existence of the USSR as
a threat to the power of capitalists in the USA. when the USSR disappeared cannibalistic instincts of the US elite prevailed over caution.
Notable quotes:
"... The earlier welfare 'reforms' and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East. ..."
"... In the 1940's through the 1960's, world and regional wars (Korea and Indo-China) were combined with significant welfare program – a form of ' social imperialism' , which 'buy off' the working class while expanding the empire. However, recent decades are characterized by multiple regional wars and the reduction or elimination of welfare programs – and a massive growth in poverty, domestic insecurity and poor health. ..."
"... modern welfare state' ..."
"... Labor unions were organized as working class strikes and progressive legislation facilitated trade union organization, elections, collective bargaining rights and a steady increase in union membership. Improved work conditions, rising wages, pension plans and benefits, employer or union-provided health care and protective legislation improved the standard of living for the working class and provided for 2 generations of upward mobility. ..."
"... Social Security legislation was approved along with workers' compensation and the forty-hour workweek. Jobs were created through federal programs (WPA, CCC, etc.). Protectionist legislation facilitated the growth of domestic markets for US manufacturers. Workplace shop steward councils organized 'on the spot' job action to protect safe working conditions. ..."
"... World War II led to full employment and increases in union membership, as well as legislation restricting workers' collective bargaining rights and enforcing wage freezes. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found jobs in the war economy but a huge number were also killed or wounded in the war. ..."
"... So-called ' right to work' ..."
"... Trade union officials signed pacts with capital: higher pay for the workers and greater control of the workplace for the bosses. Trade union officials joined management in repressing rank and file movements seeking to control technological changes by reducing hours (" thirty hours work for forty hours pay ..."
"... Trade union activists, community organizers for rent control and other grassroots movements lost both the capacity and the will to advance toward large-scale structural changes of US capitalism. Living standards improved for a few decades but the capitalist class consolidated strategic control over labor relations. While unionized workers' incomes, increased, inequalities, especially in the non-union sectors began to grow. With the end of the GI bill, veterans' access to high-quality subsidized education declined ..."
"... With the election of President Carter, social welfare in the US began its long decline. The next series of regional wars were accompanied by even greater attacks on welfare via the " Volker Plan " – freezing workers' wages as a means to combat inflation. ..."
"... Guns without butter' became the legislative policy of the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The welfare programs were based on politically fragile foundations. ..."
"... The anti-labor offensive from the ' Oval Office' intensified under President Reagan with his direct intervention firing tens of thousands of striking air controllers and arresting union leaders. Under Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Clinton cost of living adjustments failed to keep up with prices of vital goods and services. Health care inflation was astronomical. Financial deregulation led to the subordination of American industry to finance and the Wall Street banks. De-industrialization, capital flight and massive tax evasion reduced labor's share of national income. ..."
"... The capitalist class followed a trajectory of decline, recovery and ascendance. Moreover, during the earlier world depression, at the height of labor mobilization and organization, the capitalist class never faced any significant political threat over its control of the commanding heights of the economy ..."
"... Hand in bloody glove' with the US Empire, the American trade unions planted the seeds of their own destruction at home. The local capitalists in newly emerging independent nations established industries and supply chains in cooperation with US manufacturers. Attracted to these sources of low-wage, violently repressed workers, US capitalists subsequently relocated their factories overseas and turned their backs on labor at home. ..."
"... President 'Bill' Clinton ravaged Russia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Somalia and liberated Wall Street. His regime gave birth to the prototype billionaire swindlers: Michael Milken and Bernard 'Bernie' Madoff. ..."
"... Clinton converted welfare into cheap labor 'workfare', exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable and condemning the next generations to grinding poverty. Under Clinton the prison population of mostly African Americans expanded and the breakup of families ravaged the urban communities. ..."
"... President Obama transferred 2 trillion dollars to the ten biggest bankers and swindlers on Wall Street, and another trillion to the Pentagon to pursue the Democrats version of foreign policy: from Bush's two overseas wars to Obama's seven. ..."
"... Obama was elected to two terms. His liberal Democratic Party supporters swooned over his peace and justice rhetoric while swallowing his militarist escalation into seven overseas wars as well as the foreclosure of two million American householders. Obama completely failed to honor his campaign promise to reduce wage inequality between black and white wage earners while he continued to moralize to black families about ' values' . ..."
"... Obama's war against Libya led to the killing and displacement of millions of black Libyans and workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. The smiling Nobel Peace Prize President created more desperate refugees than any previous US head of state – including millions of Africans flooding Europe. ..."
"... Forty-years of anti welfare legislation and pro-business regimes paved the golden road for the election of Donald Trump ..."
"... Trump and the Republicans are focusing on the tattered remnants of the social welfare system: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. The remains of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- are on the chopping block. ..."
"... The moribund (but well-paid) labor leadership has been notable by its absence in the ensuing collapse of the social welfare state. The liberal left Democrats embraced the platitudinous Obama/Clinton team as the 'Great Society's' gravediggers, while wailing at Trump's allies for shoving the corpse of welfare state into its grave. ..."
"... Over the past forty years the working class and the rump of what was once referred to as the ' labor movement' has contributed to the dismantling of the social welfare state, voting for ' strike-breaker' Reagan, ' workfare' Clinton, ' Wall Street crash' Bush, ' Wall Street savior' Obama and ' Trickle-down' Trump. ..."
"... Gone are the days when social welfare and profitable wars raised US living standards and transformed American trade unions into an appendage of the Democratic Party and a handmaiden of Empire. The Democratic Party rescued capitalism from its collapse in the Great Depression, incorporated labor into the war economy and the post- colonial global empire, and resurrected Wall Street from the 'Great Financial Meltdown' of the 21 st century. ..."
"... The war economy no longer fuels social welfare. The military-industrial complex has found new partners on Wall Street and among the globalized multi-national corporations. Profits rise while wages fall. Low paying compulsive labor (workfare) lopped off state transfers to the poor. Technology – IT, robotics, artificial intelligence and electronic gadgets – has created the most class polarized social system in history ..."
"... "The collaboration of liberals and unions in promoting endless wars opened the door to Trump's mirage of a stateless, tax-less, ruling class." ..."
"... Corporations [now] are welfare recipients and the bigger they are, the more handouts they suck up ..."
"... Corporations not only continuously seek monopolies (with the aid and sanction of the state) but they steadily fine tune the welfare state for their benefit. In fact, in reality, welfare for prols and peasants wouldn't exist if it didn't act as a money conduit and ultimate profit center for the big money grubbers. ..."
"... The article is dismal reading, and evidence of the failings of the "unregulated" society, where the anything goes as long as you are wealthy. ..."
"... Like the Pentagon. Americans still don't readily call this welfare, but they will eventually. Defense profiteers are unions in a sense, you're either in their club Or you're in the service industry that surrounds it. ..."
The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period, the
capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.
Between the mid 1970's to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies for
affordable housing have been gutted. ' Workfare' (under President 'Bill' Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced
workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits to an
astronomical degree.
What started as incremental reversals during the 1990's under Clinton has snowballed over the last two decades decimating welfare
legislation and institutions.
The earlier welfare 'reforms' and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a
series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East.
In the 1940's through the 1960's, world and regional wars (Korea and Indo-China) were combined with significant welfare program
– a form of ' social imperialism' , which 'buy off' the working class while expanding the empire. However, recent decades are characterized
by multiple regional wars and the reduction or elimination of welfare programs – and a massive growth in poverty, domestic insecurity
and poor health.
New Deals and Big Wars
The 1930's witnessed the advent of social legislation and action, which laid the foundations of what is called the ' modern
welfare state' .
Labor unions were organized as working class strikes and progressive legislation facilitated trade union organization, elections,
collective bargaining rights and a steady increase in union membership. Improved work conditions, rising wages, pension plans and
benefits, employer or union-provided health care and protective legislation improved the standard of living for the working class
and provided for 2 generations of upward mobility.
Social Security legislation was approved along with workers' compensation and the forty-hour workweek. Jobs were created through
federal programs (WPA, CCC, etc.). Protectionist legislation facilitated the growth of domestic markets for US manufacturers. Workplace
shop steward councils organized 'on the spot' job action to protect safe working conditions.
World War II led to full employment and increases in union membership, as well as legislation restricting workers' collective
bargaining rights and enforcing wage freezes. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found jobs in the war economy but a huge number
were also killed or wounded in the war.
The post-war period witnessed a contradictory process: wages and salaries increased while legislation curtailed union rights via
the Taft Hartley Act and the McCarthyist purge of leftwing trade union activists. So-called ' right to work' laws effectively
outlawed unionization mostly in southern states, which drove industries to relocate to the anti-union states.
Welfare reforms, in the form of the GI bill, provided educational opportunities for working class and rural veterans, while federal-subsidized
low interest mortgages encourage home-ownership, especially for veterans.
The New Deal created concrete improvements but did not consolidate labor influence at any level. Capitalists and management still
retained control over capital, the workplace and plant location of production.
Trade union officials signed pacts with capital: higher pay for the workers and greater control of the workplace for the bosses.
Trade union officials joined management in repressing rank and file movements seeking to control technological changes by reducing
hours (" thirty hours work for forty hours pay "). Dissident local unions were seized and gutted by the trade union bosses
– sometimes through violence.
Trade union activists, community organizers for rent control and other grassroots movements lost both the capacity and the
will to advance toward large-scale structural changes of US capitalism. Living standards improved for a few decades but the capitalist
class consolidated strategic control over labor relations. While unionized workers' incomes, increased, inequalities, especially
in the non-union sectors began to grow. With the end of the GI bill, veterans' access to high-quality subsidized education declined.
While a new wave of social welfare legislation and programs began in the 1960's and early 1970's it was no longer a result of
a mass trade union or workers' "class struggle". Moreover, trade union collaboration with the capitalist regional war policies led
to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of workers in two wars – the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
Much of social legislation resulted from the civil and welfare rights movements. While specific programs were helpful, none of
them addressed structural racism and poverty.
The Last Wave of Social Welfarism
The 1960'a witnessed the greatest racial war in modern US history: Mass movements in the South and North rocked state and federal
governments, while advancing the cause of civil, social and political rights. Millions of black citizens, joined by white activists
and, in many cases, led by African American Viet Nam War veterans, confronted the state. At the same time, millions of students and
young workers, threatened by military conscription, challenged the military and social order.
Energized by mass movements, a new wave of social welfare legislation was launched by the federal government to pacify mass opposition
among blacks, students, community organizers and middle class Americans. Despite this mass popular movement, the union bosses at
the AFL-CIO openly supported the war, police repression and the military, or at best, were passive impotent spectators of the drama
unfolding in the nation's streets. Dissident union members and activists were the exception, as many had multiple identities to represent:
African American, Hispanic, draft resisters, etc.
Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Medicare, Medicaid, OSHA, the EPA and multiple poverty programs were implemented.
A national health program, expanding Medicare for all Americans, was introduced by President Nixon and sabotaged by the Kennedy Democrats
and the AFL-CIO. Overall, social and economic inequalities diminished during this period.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the American militarist empire. This coincided with the beginning of the end of social welfare
as we knew it – as the bill for militarism placed even greater demands on the public treasury.
With the election of President Carter, social welfare in the US began its long decline. The next series of regional wars were
accompanied by even greater attacks on welfare via the " Volker Plan " – freezing workers' wages as a means to combat inflation.
Guns without butter' became the legislative policy of the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The welfare programs were based
on politically fragile foundations.
The Debacle of Welfarism
Private sector trade union membership declined from a post-world war peak of 30% falling to 12% in the 1990's. Today it has sunk
to 7%. Capitalists embarked on a massive program of closing thousands of factories in the unionized North which were then relocated
to the non-unionized low wage southern states and then overseas to Mexico and Asia. Millions of stable jobs disappeared.
Following the election of 'Jimmy Carter', neither Democratic nor Republican Presidents felt any need to support labor organizations.
On the contrary, they facilitated contracts dictated by management, which reduced wages, job security, benefits and social welfare.
The anti-labor offensive from the ' Oval Office' intensified under President Reagan with his direct intervention
firing tens of thousands of striking air controllers and arresting union leaders. Under Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush
and William Clinton cost of living adjustments failed to keep up with prices of vital goods and services. Health care inflation was
astronomical. Financial deregulation led to the subordination of American industry to finance and the Wall Street banks. De-industrialization,
capital flight and massive tax evasion reduced labor's share of national income.
The capitalist class followed a trajectory of decline, recovery and ascendance. Moreover, during the earlier world depression,
at the height of labor mobilization and organization, the capitalist class never faced any significant political threat over its
control of the commanding heights of the economy.
The ' New Deal' was, at best, a de facto ' historical compromise' between the capitalist class and the labor
unions, mediated by the Democratic Party elite. It was a temporary pact in which the unions secured legal recognition while the capitalists
retained their executive prerogatives.
The Second World War secured the economic recovery for capital and subordinated labor through a federally mandated no strike
production agreement. There were a few notable exceptions: The coal miners' union organized strikes in strategic sectors and some
leftist leaders and organizers encouraged slow-downs, work to rule and other in-plant actions when employers ran roughshod with special
brutality over the workers. The recovery of capital was the prelude to a post-war offensive against independent labor-based political
organizations. The quality of labor organization declined even as the quantity of trade union membership increased.
Labor union officials consolidated internal control in collaboration with the capitalist elite. Capitalist class-labor official
collaboration was extended overseas with strategic consequences.
The post-war corporate alliance between the state and capital led to a global offensive – the replacement of European-Japanese
colonial control and exploitation by US business and bankers. Imperialism was later 're-branded' as ' globalization' . It
pried open markets, secured cheap docile labor and pillaged resources for US manufacturers and importers.
US labor unions played a major role by sabotaging militant unions abroad in cooperation with the US security apparatus: They worked
to coopt and bribe nationalist and leftist labor leaders and supported police-state regime repression and assassination of recalcitrant
militants.
' Hand in bloody glove' with the US Empire, the American trade unions planted the seeds of their own destruction at home.
The local capitalists in newly emerging independent nations established industries and supply chains in cooperation with US manufacturers.
Attracted to these sources of low-wage, violently repressed workers, US capitalists subsequently relocated their factories overseas
and turned their backs on labor at home.
Labor union officials had laid the groundwork for the demise of stable jobs and social benefits for American workers. Their collaboration
increased the rate of capitalist profit and overall power in the political system. Their complicity in the brutal purges of militants,
activists and leftist union members and leaders at home and abroad put an end to labor's capacity to sustain and expand the welfare
state.
Trade unions in the US did not use their collaboration with empire in its bloody regional wars to win social benefits for the
rank and file workers. The time of social-imperialism, where workers within the empire benefited from imperialism's pillage, was
over. Gains in social welfare henceforth could result only from mass struggles led by the urban poor, especially Afro-Americans,
community-based working poor and militant youth organizers.
The last significant social welfare reforms were implemented in the early 1970's – coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War
(and victory for the Vietnamese people) and ended with the absorption of the urban and anti-war movements into the Democratic Party.
Henceforward the US corporate state advanced through the overseas expansion of the multi-national corporations and via large-scale,
non-unionized production at home.
The technological changes of this period did not benefit labor. The belief, common in the 1950's, that science and technology
would increase leisure, decrease work and improve living standards for the working class, was shattered. Instead technological changes
displaced well-paid industrial labor while increasing the number of mind-numbing, poorly paid, and politically impotent jobs in the
so-called 'service sector' – a rapidly growing section of unorganized and vulnerable workers – especially including women and minorities.
Labor union membership declined precipitously. The demise of the USSR and China's turn to capitalism had a dual effect: It eliminated
collectivist (socialist) pressure for social welfare and opened their labor markets with cheap, disciplined workers for foreign manufacturers.
Labor as a political force disappeared on every count. The US Federal Reserve and President 'Bill' Clinton deregulated financial
capital leading to a frenzy of speculation. Congress wrote laws, which permitted overseas tax evasion – especially in Caribbean tax
havens. Regional free-trade agreements, like NAFTA, spurred the relocation of jobs abroad. De-industrialization accompanied the decline
of wages, living standards and social benefits for millions of American workers.
The New Abolitionists: Trillionaires
The New Deal, the Great Society, trade unions, and the anti-war and urban movements were in retreat and primed for abolition.
Wars without welfare (or guns without butter) replaced earlier 'social imperialism' with a huge growth of poverty and homelessness.
Domestic labor was now exploited to finance overseas wars not vice versa. The fruits of imperial plunder were not shared.
As the working and middle classes drifted downward, they were used up, abandoned and deceived on all sides – especially by the
Democratic Party. They elected militarists and demagogues as their new presidents.
President 'Bill' Clinton ravaged Russia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Somalia and liberated Wall Street. His regime gave birth to the
prototype billionaire swindlers: Michael Milken and Bernard 'Bernie' Madoff.
Clinton converted welfare into cheap labor 'workfare', exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable and condemning the next
generations to grinding poverty. Under Clinton the prison population of mostly African Americans expanded and the breakup of families
ravaged the urban communities.
Provoked by an act of terrorism (9/11) President G.W. Bush Jr. launched the 'endless' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and deepened
the police state (Patriot Act). Wages for American workers and profits for American capitalist moved in opposite directions.
The Great Financial Crash of 2008-2011 shook the paper economy to its roots and led to the greatest shakedown of any national
treasury in history directed by the First Black American President. Trillions of public wealth were funneled into the criminal banks
on Wall Street – which were ' just too big to fail .' Millions of American workers and homeowners, however, were '
just
too small to matter' .
The Age of Demagogues
President Obama transferred 2 trillion dollars to the ten biggest bankers and swindlers on Wall Street, and another trillion
to the Pentagon to pursue the Democrats version of foreign policy: from Bush's two overseas wars to Obama's seven.
Obama's electoral 'donor-owners' stashed away two trillion dollars in overseas tax havens and looked forward to global free trade
pacts – pushed by the eloquent African American President.
Obama was elected to two terms. His liberal Democratic Party supporters swooned over his peace and justice rhetoric while
swallowing his militarist escalation into seven overseas wars as well as the foreclosure of two million American householders. Obama
completely failed to honor his campaign promise to reduce wage inequality between black and white wage earners while he continued
to moralize to black families about ' values' .
Obama's war against Libya led to the killing and displacement of millions of black Libyans and workers from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The smiling Nobel Peace Prize President created more desperate refugees than any previous US head of state – including millions of
Africans flooding Europe.
'Obamacare' , his imitation of an earlier Republican governor's health plan, was formulated by the private corporate
health industry (private insurance, Big Pharma and the for-profit hospitals), to mandate enrollment and ensure triple digit profits
with double digit increases in premiums. By the 2016 Presidential elections, ' Obama-care' was opposed by a 45%-43% margin
of the American people. Obama's propagandists could not show any improvement of life expectancy or decrease in infant and maternal
mortality as a result of his 'health care reform'. Indeed the opposite occurred among the marginalized working class in the old 'rust
belt' and in the rural areas. This failure to show any significant health improvement for the masses of Americans is in stark contrast
to LBJ's Medicare program of the 1960's, which continues to receive massive popular support.
Forty-years of anti welfare legislation and pro-business regimes paved the golden road for the election of Donald Trump
Trump and the Republicans are focusing on the tattered remnants of the social welfare system: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
The remains of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- are on the chopping block.
The moribund (but well-paid) labor leadership has been notable by its absence in the ensuing collapse of the social welfare
state. The liberal left Democrats embraced the platitudinous Obama/Clinton team as the 'Great Society's' gravediggers, while wailing
at Trump's allies for shoving the corpse of welfare state into its grave.
Conclusion
Over the past forty years the working class and the rump of what was once referred to as the ' labor movement' has contributed
to the dismantling of the social welfare state, voting for ' strike-breaker' Reagan, ' workfare' Clinton, ' Wall Street crash' Bush,
' Wall Street savior' Obama and ' Trickle-down' Trump.
Gone are the days when social welfare and profitable wars raised US living standards and transformed American trade unions
into an appendage of the Democratic Party and a handmaiden of Empire. The Democratic Party rescued capitalism from its collapse in
the Great Depression, incorporated labor into the war economy and the post- colonial global empire, and resurrected Wall Street from
the 'Great Financial Meltdown' of the 21 st century.
The war economy no longer fuels social welfare. The military-industrial complex has found new partners on Wall Street and
among the globalized multi-national corporations. Profits rise while wages fall. Low paying compulsive labor (workfare) lopped off
state transfers to the poor. Technology – IT, robotics, artificial intelligence and electronic gadgets – has created the most class
polarized social system in history. The first trillionaire and multi-billionaire tax evaders rose on the backs of a miserable
standing army of tens of millions of low-wage workers, stripped of rights and representation. State subsidies eliminate virtually
all risk to capital. The end of social welfare coerced labor (including young mother with children) to seek insecure low-income employment
while slashing education and health – cementing the feet of generations into poverty. Regional wars abroad have depleted the Treasury
and robbed the country of productive investment. Economic imperialism exports profits, reversing the historic relation of the past.
Labor is left without compass or direction; it flails in all directions and falls deeper in the web of deception and demagogy.
To escape from Reagan and the strike breakers, labor embraced the cheap-labor predator Clinton; black and white workers united to
elect Obama who expelled millions of immigrant workers, pursued 7 wars, abandoned black workers and enriched the already filthy rich.
Deception and demagogy of the labor-
If the welfare state in America was abolished, major American cities would burn to the ground. Anarchy would ensue, it would be
magnitudes bigger than anything that happened in Ferguson or Baltimore. It would likely be simultaneous.
I think that's one of the only situations where preppers would actually live out what they've been prepping for (except for
a natural disaster).
I've been thinking about this a little over the past few years after seeing the race riots. What exactly is the line between
our society being civilized and breaking out into chaos. It's probably a lot thinner than most people think.
I don't know who said it but someone long ago said something along the lines of, "Democracy can only work until the people
figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public treasury." We are definitely in this situation today.
I wonder how long it can last.
While I agree with Petras's intent (notwithstanding several exaggerations and unnecessary conflations with, for example, racism),
I don't agree so much with the method he proposes. I don't mind welfare and unions to a certain extent, but they are not going
to save us unless there is full employment and large corporations that can afford to pay an all-union workforce. That happened
during WW2, as only wartime demand and those pesky wage freezes solved the Depression, regardless of all the public works programs;
while the postwar era benefited from the US becoming the world's creditor, meaning that capital could expand while labor participation
did as well.
From then on, it is quite hard to achieve the same success after outsourcing and mechanization have happened all over the world.
Both of these phenomena not only create displaced workers, but also displaced industries, meaning that it makes more sense to
develop individual workfare (and even then, do it well, not the shoddy way it is done now) rather than giving away checks that
probably will not be cashed for entrepreneurial purposes, and rather than giving away money to corrupt unions who depend on trusts
to be able to pay for their benefits, while raising the cost of hiring that only encourages more outsourcing.
The amount of welfare given is not necessarily the main problem, the problem is doing it right for the people who truly need
it, and efficiently – that is, with the least amount of waste lost between the chain of distribution, which should reach intended
targets and not moochers.
Which inevitably means a sound tax system that targets unearned wealth and (to a lesser degree) foreign competition instead
of national production, coupled with strict, yet devolved and simple government processes that benefit both business and individuals
tired of bureaucracy, while keeping budgets balanced. Best of both worlds, and no military-industrial complex needed to drive
up demand.
The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period,
the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Corporations [now] are welfare recipients and the bigger they are, the more handouts they suck up, and welfare for
them started before 1935. In fact, it started in America before there was a USA. I do not have time to elaborate, but what were
the various companies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch West India Companies but state pampered, welfare based
entities? ~200 years ago, Herbert Spencer, if memory serves, pointed out that the British East India Company couldn't make a profit
even with all the special, government granted favors showered upon it.
Corporations not only continuously seek monopolies (with the aid and sanction of the state) but they steadily fine tune
the welfare state for their benefit. In fact, in reality, welfare for prols and peasants wouldn't exist if it didn't act as a
money conduit and ultimate profit center for the big money grubbers.
Well, the author kind of nails it. I remember from my childhood in the 50-60 ties in Scandinavia that the US was the ultimate
goal in welfare. The country where you could make a good living with your two hands, get you kids to UNI, have a house, a telly
ECT. It was not consumerism, it was the American dream, a chicken in every pot; we chewed imported American gum and dreamed.
In the 70-80 ties Scandinavia had a tremendous social and economic growth, EQUALLY distributed, an immense leap forward. In the
middle of the 80 ties we were equal to the US in standards of living.
Since we have not looked at the US, unless in pity, as we have seen the decline of the general income, social wealth fall way
behind our own.
The average US workers income has not increased since 90 figures adjusted for inflation. The Scandinavian workers income in the
same period has almost quadrupled. And so has our societies.
The article is dismal reading, and evidence of the failings of the "unregulated" society, where the anything goes as long
as you are wealthy.
Between the mid 1970's to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies
for affordable housing have been gutted. 'Workfare' (under President 'Bill' Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced
workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits
to an astronomical degree.
What does Hollywood "elite" JAP and wannabe hack-stand-up-comic Sarah Silverman think about the class struggle and problems
facing destitute Americans? "Qu'ils mangent de la bagels!", source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
Like the Pentagon. Americans still don't readily call this welfare, but they will eventually. Defense profiteers are unions
in a sense, you're either in their club Or you're in the service industry that surrounds it.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's Petras curious choice of words that sometimes don't make too much sense. We can probably
blame the maleable English language for that, but here it's too obvious. If you don't define a union, people might assume you're
only talking about a bunch of meat cutters at Safeway.
The welfare state is alive and well for corporate America. Unions are still here – but they are defined by access and secrecy,
you're either in the club or not.
The war on unions was successful first by co-option but mostly by the media. But what kind of analysis leaves out the role
of the media in the American transformation? The success is mind blowing.
America has barely literate (white) middle aged males trained to spout incoherent Calvinistic weirdness: unabased hatred for
the poor (or whoever they're told to hate) and a glorification of hedge fund managers as they get laid off, fired and foreclosed
on, with a side of opiates.
There is hardly anything more tragic then seeing a web filled with progressives (management consultants) dedicated to disempowering,
disabling and deligitimizing victims by claiming they are victims of biology, disease or a lack of an education rather than a
system that issues violence while portending (with the best media money can buy) that they claim the higher ground.
""Democracy can only work until the people figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public
treasury." We are definitely in this situation today."
Quite right: the 0.01% have worked it out & US democracy is a Theatre for the masses.
I don't know who said it but someone long ago said something along the lines of, "Democracy can only work until the people
figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public treasury."
Some French aristocrat put it as, once the gates to the treasury have been breached, they can only be closed again with gunpowder.
Anyone recognize the author?
The author doesn't get it. What we have now IS the welfare state in an intensely diverse society. We have more transfer spending
than ever before and Obamacare represents another huge entitlement.
Intellectuals continue to fantasize about the US becoming a Big Sweden, but Sweden has only been successful insofar as it has
been a modest nation-state populated by ethnic Swedes. Intense diversity in a huge country with only the remnants of federalism
results in massive non-consensual decision-making, fragmentation, increased inequality, and corruption.
The welfare state is alive and well for corporate America. Unions are still here – but they are defined by access and
secrecy, you're either in the club or not.
They are largely defined as Doctors, Lawyers, and University Professors who teach the first two. Of course they are not called
unions. Access is via credentialing and licensing. Good Day
Bernie Sanders, speaking on behalf of the MIC's welfare bird: "It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and
of NATO."
Elizabeth Warren, referring to Mossad's Estes Rockets: "The Israeli military has the right to attack Palestinian hospitals
and schools in self defense"
Barack Obama, yukking it up with pop stars: "Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming."
It's not the agitprop that confuses the sheep, it's whose blowhole it's coming out of (labled D or R for convenience) that
gets them to bare their teeth and speak of poo.
What came first, the credentialing or the idea that it is a necessary part of education? It certainly isn't an accurate indication
of what people know or their general intelligence – although that myth has flourished. Good afternoon.
For an interesting projection of what might happen in total civilizational collapse, I recommend the Dies the Fire series of
novels by SM Stirling.
It has a science-fictiony setup in that all high-energy system (gunpowder, electricity, explosives, internal combustion, even
high-energy steam engines) suddenly stop working. But I think it does a good job of extrapolating what would happen if suddenly
the cities did not have food, water, power, etc.
Spoiler alert: It ain't pretty. Those who dream of a world without guns have not really thought it through.
It has been pointed out repeatedly that Sweden does very well relative to the USA. It has also been noted that people of Swedish
ancestry in the USA do pretty well also. In fact considerably better than Swedes in Sweden
"... What happened to the old "sysadmin" of just a few years ago? We've split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams, server teams, storage teams, and network teams. There were often at least a few people, the holders of knowledge, who knew how everything worked, and I mean everything. ..."
"... Now look at what we've done. Knowledge is so decentralized we must invent new roles to act as liaisons between all the IT groups. Architects now hold much of the high-level "how it works" knowledge, but without knowing how any one piece actually does work. In organizations with more than a few hundred IT staff and developers, it becomes nearly impossible for one person to do and know everything. This movement toward specializing in individual areas seems almost natural. That, however, does not provide a free ticket for people to turn a blind eye. ..."
"... Does your IT department function as a unit? Even 20-person IT shops have turf wars, so the answer is very likely, "no." As teams are split into more and more distinct operating units, grouping occurs. One IT budget gets split between all these groups. Often each group will have a manager who pitches his needs to upper management in hopes they will realize how important the team is. ..."
"... The "us vs. them" mentality manifests itself at all levels, and it's reinforced by management having to define each team's worth in the form of a budget. One strategy is to illustrate a doomsday scenario. If you paint a bleak enough picture, you may get more funding. Only if you are careful enough to illustrate the failings are due to lack of capital resources, not management or people. A manager of another group may explain that they are not receiving the correct level of service, so they need to duplicate the efforts of another group and just implement something themselves. On and on, the arguments continue. ..."
What happened to the old "sysadmin" of just a few years ago? We've split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams,
server teams, storage teams, and network teams. There were often at least a few people, the holders of knowledge, who knew how everything
worked, and I mean everything. Every application, every piece of network gear, and how every server was configured -- these
people could save a business in times of disaster.
Now look at what we've done. Knowledge is so decentralized we must invent new roles to act as liaisons between all the IT
groups. Architects now hold much of the high-level "how it works" knowledge, but without knowing how any one piece actually does
work. In organizations with more than a few hundred IT staff and developers, it becomes nearly impossible for one person to do and
know everything. This movement toward specializing in individual areas seems almost natural. That, however, does not provide a free
ticket for people to turn a blind eye.
Specialization
You know the story: Company installs new application, nobody understands it yet, so an expert is hired. Often, the person with
a certification in using the new application only really knows how to run that application. Perhaps they aren't interested in
learning anything else, because their skill is in high demand right now. And besides, everything else in the infrastructure is
run by people who specialize in those elements. Everything is taken care of.
Except, how do these teams communicate when changes need to take place? Are the storage administrators teaching the Windows
administrators about storage multipathing; or worse logging in and setting it up because it's faster for the storage gurus to
do it themselves? A fundamental level of knowledge is often lacking, which makes it very difficult for teams to brainstorm about
new ways evolve IT services. The business environment has made it OK for IT staffers to specialize and only learn one thing.
If you hire someone certified in the application, operating system, or network vendor you use, that is precisely what you get.
Certifications may be a nice filter to quickly identify who has direct knowledge in the area you're hiring for, but often they
indicate specialization or compensation for lack of experience.
Resource Competition
Does your IT department function as a unit? Even 20-person IT shops have turf wars, so the answer is very likely, "no."
As teams are split into more and more distinct operating units, grouping occurs. One IT budget gets split between all these groups.
Often each group will have a manager who pitches his needs to upper management in hopes they will realize how important the team
is.
The "us vs. them" mentality manifests itself at all levels, and it's reinforced by management having to define each team's
worth in the form of a budget. One strategy is to illustrate a doomsday scenario. If you paint a bleak enough picture, you may
get more funding. Only if you are careful enough to illustrate the failings are due to lack of capital resources, not management
or people. A manager of another group may explain that they are not receiving the correct level of service, so they need to duplicate
the efforts of another group and just implement something themselves. On and on, the arguments continue.
Most often, I've seen competition between server groups result in horribly inefficient uses of hardware. For example, what
happens in your organization when one team needs more server hardware? Assume that another team has five unused servers sitting
in a blade chassis. Does the answer change? No, it does not. Even in test environments, sharing doesn't often happen between IT
groups.
With virtualization, some aspects of resource competition get better and some remain the same. When first implemented, most
groups will be running their own type of virtualization for their platform. The next step, I've most often seen, is for test servers
to get virtualized. If a new group is formed to manage the virtualization infrastructure, virtual machines can be allocated to
various application and server teams from a central pool and everyone is now sharing. Or, they begin sharing and then demand their
own physical hardware to be isolated from others' resource hungry utilization. This is nonetheless a step in the right direction.
Auto migration and guaranteed resource policies can go a long way toward making shared infrastructure, even between competing
groups, a viable option.
Blamestorming
The most damaging side effect of splitting into too many distinct IT groups is the reinforcement of an "us versus them" mentality.
Aside from the notion that specialization creates a lack of knowledge, blamestorming is what this article is really about. When a project is delayed, it is all too easy to blame another group. The SAN people didn't allocate storage on time,
so another team was delayed. That is the timeline of the project, so all work halted until that hiccup was restored. Having someone
else to blame when things get delayed makes it all too easy to simply stop working for a while.
More related to the initial points at the beginning of this article, perhaps, is the blamestorm that happens after a system
outage.
Say an ERP system becomes unresponsive a few times throughout the day. The application team says it's just slowing down, and
they don't know why. The network team says everything is fine. The server team says the application is "blocking on IO," which
means it's a SAN issue. The SAN team say there is nothing wrong, and other applications on the same devices are fine. You've ran
through nearly every team, but without an answer still. The SAN people don't have access to the application servers to help diagnose
the problem. The server team doesn't even know how the application runs.
See the problem? Specialized teams are distinct and by nature adversarial. Specialized staffers often relegate
themselves into a niche knowing that as long as they continue working at large enough companies, "someone else" will take care
of all the other pieces.
I unfortunately don't have an answer to this problem. Maybe rotating employees between departments will help. They gain knowledge
and also get to know other people, which should lessen the propensity to view them as outsiders
And I feel like the Democrats get so distracted. They have been talking about sexual
harassment and stuff instead of the TAX BILL. It is so damn easy to get them to take their
eyes off the ball! and get played again and again. . . and TRAGIC given the consequences . .
.
It's the perfect "distraction". Allows them to engage in virtue-signaling and "fighting
for average Americans". It's all phony, they always "lose" in the end getting exactly what
they wanted in the first place, while not actually having to cast a vote for it.
It's all related, less safety net and more inequality means more desperation to take a
job, *ANY* job, means more women putting up with sexual harassment (and workplace bullying
and horrible and illegal workplace conditions etc.) as the price of a paycheck.
Horrible Toomey's re-election was a parallel to the Clinton/Trump fiasco. The Democrats
put up a corporate shill, Katie McGinty that no-one trusted.
"Former lobbyist Katie McGinty has spent three decades in politics getting rich off the
companies she regulated and subsidized. Now this master of the revolving-door wants
Pennsylvania voters to give her another perch in government: U.S. Senator." Washington
Examiner.
She was a Clintonite through and through, that everyone, much like $Hillary, could see
through.
To paraphrase the Beatles, you say you want a revolution but you don't really mean it. You
want more of the same because it makes you feel good to keep voting for your Senator or your
Congressman. The others are corrupt and evil, but your guys are good. If only the others were
like your guys. News flash: they are all your guys.
America is doomed. And so much the better. Despite all America has done for the world, it
has also been a brutal despot. America created consumerism, super-sizing and the Kardashians.
These are all unforgivable sins. America is probably the most persistently violent country in
the world both domestically and internationally. No other country has invaded or occupied so
much of the world, unless you count the known world in which case Macedonia wins.
This tax plan is what Americans want because they are pretty ignorant and stupid. They are
incapable of understanding basic math so they can't work out the details. They believe that
any tax cut is inherently good and all government is bad so that is also all that matters.
They honestly think they or their kids will one day be rich so they don't want to hurt rich
people. They also believe that millionaires got their money honestly and through hard work
because that is what they learned from their parents.
Just send a blank check to Goldman Sachs. Keep a bit to buy a gun which you can use to
either shoot up a McDonalds or blow your own brains out.
And some people still ask me why I left and don't want to come back. LOL
Macedonia of today is not the same are that conquered the world. They stole the name from
Greeks.
That being said, the US is ripe for a change. Every policy the current rulers enact seems
to make things better. However, I suspect a revolution would kill majority of the population
since it would disrupt the all important supply chains, so it does not seem viable.
However, a military takeover could be viable. If they are willing to wipe out the most
predatory portions of the ruling class, they could fix the healthcare system, install a
high-employment policy and take out the banks and even the military contractors. Which could
make them very popular.
Yeah, right. Have you seen our generals? They're just more of the same leeches we
have everywhere else in the 0.01%. Have you seen any of the other military dictatorships
around the world, like actually existing ones? They're all brilliantly corrupt and total
failures when it comes to running any sort of economy. Not to mention the total loss of civil
rights. Americans have this idiotic love of their military thanks to decades of effective
propaganda and think the rule of pampered generals would somehow be better than the right to
vote. Bleh.
This is a military dictatorship. The fourth and sixth amendments have been de facto
repealed. Trump cared about one thing and one thing only, namely to repeal the estate tax. He
is the ultimate con man and this was his biggest con. It is truly amazing how he accomplished
this. He has saved his family a billion $$$. He will now turn over governing to the generals
and Goldman Sachs. He may even retire. Truly amazing. One has to admire the sheer perversity
of it all. When will the American electorate get tired of being conned? The fact is they have
nothing but admiration for Trump. We live in a criminal culture, winner take all. America
loves its winners.
There is an old 2003 David Brooks column in which he mentions that
"The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which
is explicitly for the mega-upper class. Al Gore, who ran a populist campaign, couldn't even
win the votes of white males who didn't go to college, whose incomes have stagnated over the
past decades and who were the explicit targets of his campaign. Why don't more Americans want
to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves?"
Then Brooks goes on to explain
"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey
that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans
say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right
away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that
favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them."
The Republicans have conditioned people to believe government services (except for
defense/military) are run poorly and need to be "run like a business" for a profit.
The problem is that not all government services CAN be profitable (homeless care, mental
health care for the poor, EPA enforcement, OSHA enforcement). And when attempts are made to
privatize some government operations such as incarceration, the result is that the private
company tries to maximize profits by pushing for laws to incarcerate ever more people.
The history of the USA as viewed by outsiders, maybe 50 years hence, will be that of a
resource consuming nation that spent a vast fortune on military hardware and military
adventures when it had little to fear due to geography, a nation that touted an independent
press that was anything but, a nation that created a large media/entertainment industry which
helped to keep citizens in line, a nation that fostered an overly large (by 2 or 3 times per
Paul Whooley) parasitical financial industry that did not perform its prime capital
allocation task competently as it veered from bubble to bubble and a nation that managed to
spend great sums on medical care without covering all citizens.
But the USA does have a lot of guns and a lot of frustrated people.
Maybe Kevlar vests will be the fashion of the future?
The provision to do away with the estate tax, if not immediately, in the current versions
(House and Senate) is great news for the 1%, and bad for the rest of us.
And if more people are not against that (thanks for quoting the NYTImes article), it's the
failure of the rest of the media for not focusing more on it, but wasting time and energy on
fashion, sports, entertainment, etc.
he provision to do away with the estate tax . . . is great news for the 1%
I think it's even a little more extreme than that. The data is a few years old, but it is
only the top 0.6% who are affected by estate taxes in the United States. See the data at
these web sites:
The military adventures were largely in support of what Smedley Butler so accurately
called the Great "Racket" of Monroe Doctrine colonialism and rapacious extractive
"capitalism" aka "looting."
It took longer and costed the rich a bit more to buy up all the bits of government, but
the way they've done will likely be more compendious and lasting. Barring some "intervening
event(s)".
While Republicans show their true colors, im out there seeing a resurgence of civil
society. And im starting to reach Hard core Tea Party types. Jobs, Manufacturing, Actual
Policy.
"... Imagine working at HP and having to listen to Carly Fiorina bulldoze you...she is like a blow-torch...here are 4 minutes of Carly and Ralph Nader (if you can take it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC4JDwoRHtk ..."
"... My husband has been a software architect for 30 years at the same company. Never before has he seen the sheer unadulterated panic in the executives. All indices are down and they are planning for the worst. Quality is being sacrificed for " just get some relatively functional piece of shit out the door we can sell". He is fighting because he has always produced a stellar product and refuses to have shit tied to his name ( 90% of competitor benchmarks fail against his projects). They can't afford to lay him off, but the first time in my life I see my husband want to quit... ..."
"... HP basically makes computer equipment (PCs, servers, Printers) and software. Part of the problem is that computer hardware has been commodized. Since PCs are cheap and frequent replacements are need, People just by the cheapest models, expecting to toss it in a couple of years and by a newer model (aka the Flat screen TV model). So there is no justification to use quality components. Same is become true with the Server market. Businesses have switched to virtualization and/or cloud systems. So instead of taking a boat load of time to rebuild a crashed server, the VM is just moved to another host. ..."
"... I hung an older sign next to the one saying Information Technology. Somehow MIS-Information Technology seemed appropriate.) ..."
"... Then I got to my first duty assignment. It was about five months after the first moon landing, and the aerospace industry was facing cuts in government aerospace spending. I picked up a copy of an engineering journal in the base library and found an article about job cuts. There was a cartoon with two janitors, buckets at their feet and mops in their hands, standing before a blackboard filled with equations. Once was saying to the other, pointing to one section, "you can see where he made his mistake right here...". It represented two engineers who had been reduced to menial labor after losing their jobs. ..."
"... So while I resent all the H1Bs coming into the US - I worked with several for the last four years of my IT career, and was not at all impressed - and despise the politicians who allow it, I know that it is not the first time American STEM grads have been put out of jobs en masse. In some ways that old saying applies: the more things change, the more they stay the same ..."
"... Just like Amazon, HP will supposedly make billions in profit analyzing things in the cloud that nobody looks at and has no use to the real economy, but it makes good fodder for Power Point presentations. I am amazed how much daily productivity goes into creating fancy charts for meetings that are meaningless to the actual business of the company. ..."
"... 'Computers' cost as much - if not more time than they save, at least in corporate settings. Used to be you'd work up 3 budget projections - expected, worst case and best case, you'd have a meeting, hash it out and decide in a week. Now you have endless alternatives, endless 'tweaking' and changes and decisions take forever, with outrageous amounts of time spent on endless 'analysis' and presentations. ..."
"... A recent lay off here turned out to be quite embarrassing for Parmalat there was nobody left that knew how to properly run the place they had to rehire many ex employees as consultants-at a costly premium ..."
"... HP is laying off 80,000 workers or almost a third of its workforce, converting its long-term human capital into short-term gains for rich shareholders at an alarming rate. The reason that product quality has declined is due to the planned obsolescence that spurs needless consumerism, which is necessary to prop up our debt-backed monetary system and the capitalist-owned economy that sits on top of it. ..."
"... The world is heading for massive deflation. Computers have hit the 14 nano-meter lithography zone, the cost to go from 14nm to say 5nm is very high, and the net benefit to computing power is very low, but lets say we go from 14nm to 5nm over the next 4 years. Going from 5nm to 1nm is not going to net a large boost in computing power and the cost to shrink things down and re-tool will be very high for such an insignificant gain in performance. ..."
"... Another classic "Let's rape all we can and bail with my golden parachute" corporate leaders setting themselves up. Pile on the string of non-IT CEOs that have been leading the company to ruin. To them it is nothing more than a contest of being even worse than their predecessor. Just look at the billions each has lost before their exit. Compaq, a cluster. Palm Pilot, a dead product they paid millions for and then buried. And many others. ..."
"... Let's not beat around the bush, they're outsourcing, firing Americans and hiring cheap labor elsewhere: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-15/hewlett-packard-to-cut-up-to-30-000-more-jobs-in-restructuring It's also shifting employees to low-cost areas, and hopes to have 60 percent of its workers located in cheaper countries by 2018, Nefkens said. ..."
"... Carly Fiorina: (LOL, leading a tech company with a degree in medieval history and philosophy) While at ATT she was groomed from the Affirmative Action plan. ..."
"... It is very straightforward. Replace 45,000 US workers with 100,000 offshore workers and you still save millions of USD ! Use the "savings" to buy back stock, then borrow more $$ at ZIRP to buy more stock back. ..."
"... If you look on a site like LinkedIN, it will always say 'We're hiring!'. YES, HP is hiring.....but not YOU, they want Ganesh Balasubramaniamawapbapalooboopawapbamboomtuttifrutti, so that they can work him as modern day slave labor for ultra cheap. We can thank idiot 'leaders' like Meg Pasty Faced Whitman and Bill 'Forced Vaccinations' Gates for lobbying Congress for decades, against the rights of American workers. ..."
"... An era of leadership in computer technology has died, and there is no grave marker, not even a funeral ceremony or eulogy ... Hewlett-Packard, COMPAQ, Digital Equipment Corp, UNIVAC, Sperry-Rand, Data General, Tektronix, ZILOG, Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, etc, etc, etc. So much change in so short a time, leaves your mind dizzy. ..."
yeah thanks Carly ... HP made bullet-proof products that would last forever..... I still buy HP workstation notebooks, especially
now when I can get them for $100 on ebay .... I sold HP products in the 1990s .... we had HP laserjet IIs that companies would
run day & night .... virtually no maintenance ... when PCL5 came around then we had LJ IIIs .... and still companies would call
for LJ I's, .... 100 pounds of invincible Printing ! .
This kind of product has no place in the World of Planned-Obsolesence .... I'm currently running an 8510w, 8530w, 2530p, Dell
6420 quad i7, hp printers hp scanners, hp pavilion desktops, .... all for less than what a Laserjet II would have cost in 1994,
Total.
Not My Real Name
I still have my HP 15C scientific calculator I bought in 1983 to get me through college for my engineering degree. There is
nothing better than a hand held calculator that uses Reverse Polish Notation!
BigJim
HP used to make fantastic products. I remember getting their RPN calculators back in th 80's; built like tanks. Then they decided
to "add value" by removing more and more material from their consumer/"prosumer" products until they became unspeakably flimsy.
They stopped holding things together with proper fastenings and starting hot melting/gluing it together, so if it died you had
to cut it open to have any chance of fixing it.
I still have one of their Laserjet 4100 printers. I expect it to outlast anything they currently produce, and it must be going
on 16+ years old now.
Fuck you, HP. You started selling shit and now you're eating through your seed corn. I just wish the "leaders" who did this
to you had to pay some kind of penalty greater than getting $25M in a severance package.
Automatic Choke
+100. The path of HP is everything that is wrong about modern business models. I still have a 5MP laserjet (one of the first),
still works great. Also have a number of 42S calculators.....my day-to-day workhorse and several spares. I don't think the present
HP could even dream of making these products today.
nope-1004
How well will I profit, as a salesman, if I sell you something that works? How valuable are you, as a customer in my database,
if you never come back? Confucious say "Buy another one, and if you can't afford it, f'n finance it!" It's the growing trend.
Look at appliances. Nothing works anymore.
hey big brother.... if you are curious, there is a damn good android emulator of the HP42S available (Free42). really it is
so good that it made me relax about accumulating more spares. still not quite the same as a real calculator. (the 42S, by the
way, is the modernization/simplification of the classic HP41, the real hardcord very-programmable, reconfigurable, hackable unit
with all the plug-in-modules that came out in the early 80s.)
Miss Expectations
Imagine working at HP and having to listen to Carly Fiorina bulldoze you...she is like a blow-torch...here are 4 minutes
of Carly and Ralph Nader (if you can take it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC4JDwoRHtk
Miffed Microbiologist
My husband has been a software architect for 30 years at the same company. Never before has he seen the sheer unadulterated
panic in the executives. All indices are down and they are planning for the worst. Quality is being sacrificed for " just get
some relatively functional piece of shit out the door we can sell". He is fighting because he has always produced a stellar product
and refuses to have shit tied to his name ( 90% of competitor benchmarks fail against his projects). They can't afford to lay
him off, but the first time in my life I see my husband want to quit...
unplugged
I've been an engineer for 31 years - our managements's unspoken motto at the place I'm at (large company) is: "release it now,
we'll put in the quality later". I try to put in as much as possible before the product is shoved out the door without killing
myself doing it.
AGuy
Do they even make test equipment anymore?
HP test and measurement was spun off many years ago as Agilent. The electronics part of Agilent was spun off as keysight late
last year.
HP basically makes computer equipment (PCs, servers, Printers) and software. Part of the problem is that computer hardware
has been commodized. Since PCs are cheap and frequent replacements are need, People just by the cheapest models, expecting to
toss it in a couple of years and by a newer model (aka the Flat screen TV model). So there is no justification to use quality
components. Same is become true with the Server market. Businesses have switched to virtualization and/or cloud systems. So instead
of taking a boat load of time to rebuild a crashed server, the VM is just moved to another host.
HP has also adopted the Computer Associates business model (aka Borg). HP buys up new tech companies and sits on the tech and
never improves it. It decays and gets replaced with a system from a competitor. It also has a habit of buying outdated tech companies
that never generate the revenues HP thinks it will.
BullyBearish
When Carly was CEO of HP, she instituted a draconian "pay for performance" plan. She ended up leaving with over $146 Million
because she was smart enough not to specify "what type" of performance.
GeezerGeek
Regarding your statement "All those engineers choosing to pursue other opportunities", we need to realize that tech in general
has been very susceptible to the vagaries of government actions. Now the employment problems are due to things like globalization
and H1B programs. Some 50 years ago tech - meaning science and engineering - was hit hard as the US space program wound down.
Permit me this retrospective:
I graduated from a quite good school with a BS in Physics in 1968. My timing was not all that great, since that was when they
stopped granting draft deferments for graduate school. I joined the Air Force, but as an enlisted airman, not an officer. Following
basic training, I was sent to learn to operate PCAM operations. That's Punched Card Accounting Machines. Collators. Sorters. Interpreters.
Key punches. I was in a class with nine other enlistees. One had just gotten a Masters degree in something. Eight of us had a
BS in one thing or another, but all what would now be called STEM fields. The least educated only had an Associate degree. We
all enlisted simply to avoid being drafted into the Marines. (Not that there's anything wrong with the Marines, but all of us
proclaimed an allergy to energetic lead projectiles and acted accordingly. Going to Canada, as many did, pretty much ensured never
getting a job in STEM fields later in life.) So thanks to government action (fighting in VietNam, in this case) a significant
portion of educated Americans found themselves diverted from chosen career paths. (In my case, it worked out fine. I learned to
program, etc., and spent a total of over 40 years in what is now called IT. I think it was called EDP when I started the trek.
Somewhere along the line it became (where I worked) Management Information Systems. MIS. And finally the department became simply
Information Technology. I hung an older sign next to the one saying Information Technology. Somehow MIS-Information Technology
seemed appropriate.)
Then I got to my first duty assignment. It was about five months after the first moon landing, and the aerospace industry
was facing cuts in government aerospace spending. I picked up a copy of an engineering journal in the base library and found an
article about job cuts. There was a cartoon with two janitors, buckets at their feet and mops in their hands, standing before
a blackboard filled with equations. Once was saying to the other, pointing to one section, "you can see where he made his mistake
right here...". It represented two engineers who had been reduced to menial labor after losing their jobs.
So while I resent all the H1Bs coming into the US - I worked with several for the last four years of my IT career, and
was not at all impressed - and despise the politicians who allow it, I know that it is not the first time American STEM grads
have been put out of jobs en masse. In some ways that old saying applies: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you made it this far, thanks for your patience.
adr
Just like Amazon, HP will supposedly make billions in profit analyzing things in the cloud that nobody looks at and has
no use to the real economy, but it makes good fodder for Power Point presentations. I am amazed how much daily productivity goes
into creating fancy charts for meetings that are meaningless to the actual business of the company.
IT'S ALL BULLSHIT!!!!!
I designed more products in one year for the small company I work for than a $15 billion corporation did throughout their entire
design department employing hundreds of people. That is because 90% of their workday is spent preparing crap for meetings and
they never really get anything meaningful done.
It took me one week to design a product and send it out for production branded for the company I work for, but it took six
months to get the same type of product passed through the multi billion dollar corporation we license for. Because it had to pass
through layer after layer of bullshit and through every level of management before it could be signed off. Then a month later
somebody would change their mind in middle management and the product would need to be changed and go through the cycle all over
again.
Their own bag department made six bags last year, I designed 16. Funny how I out produce a department of six people whose only
job is to make bags, yet I only get paid the salary of one.
Maybe I'm just an imbecile for working hard.
Bear
You also have to add all the wasted time of employees having to sit through those presentations and the even more wasted time
on Ashley Madison
cynicalskeptic
'Computers' cost as much - if not more time than they save, at least in corporate settings. Used to be you'd work up 3
budget projections - expected, worst case and best case, you'd have a meeting, hash it out and decide in a week. Now you have
endless alternatives, endless 'tweaking' and changes and decisions take forever, with outrageous amounts of time spent on endless
'analysis' and presentations.
EVERY VP now has an 'Administrative Assistant' whose primary job is to develop PowerPoint presentations for the endless meetings
that take up time - without any decisions ever being made.
Computers stop people from thinking. In ages past when you used a slide rule you had to know the order of magnitude of the
end result. Now people make a mistake and come up with a ridiculous number and take it at face value because 'the computer' produced
it.
Any exec worht anythign knew what a given line in their department or the total should be +or a small amount. I can't count
the number of times budgets and analyses were WRONG because someone left off a few lines on a spreadsheet total.
Yes computer modeling for advanced tech and engineering is a help, CAD/CAM is great and many other applications in the tech/scientific
world are a great help but letting computers loose in corporate and finance has produced endless waste AND - worsde - thigns like
HFT (e.g. 'better' more effective ways to manipulate and cheat markets.
khnum
A recent lay off here turned out to be quite embarrassing for Parmalat there was nobody left that knew how to properly
run the place they had to rehire many ex employees as consultants-at a costly premium
Anopheles
Consultants don't come at that much of a premium becaue the company doesn't have to pay benefits, vacation, sick days, or payroll
taxes, etc. Plus it's really easy and cheap to get rid of consultants.
arrowrod
Obviously, you haven't worked as a consultant. You get paid by the hour. To clean up a mess. 100 hours a week are not uncommon.
(What?, is it possible to work 100 hours a week? Yes, it is, but only for about 3 months.)
RaceToTheBottom
HP Executives are trying hard to bring the company back to its roots: The ability to fit into one garage...
PrimalScream
ALL THAT Meg Whitman needs to do ... is to FIRE EVERYBODY !! Then have all the products made in China, process all the sales
orders in Hong Kong, and sub-contract the accounting and tax paperwork to India. Then HP can use all the profits for stock buybacks,
except of course for Meg's salary ... which will keep rising astronomically!
Herdee
That's where education gets you in America.The Government sold out America's manufacturing base to Communist China who holds
the debt of the USA.Who would ever guess that right-wing neo-cons(neo-nazis) running the government would sell out to communists
just to get the money for war? Very weird.
Really20
"Communist"? The Chinese government, like that of the US, never believed in worker ownership of businesses and never believed
that the commerical banking system (whether owned by the state, or private corporations which act like a state) should not control
money. Both countries believe in centralization of power among a few shareholders, who take the fruits of working people's labor
while contributing nothing of value themselves (money being but a token that represents a claim on real capital, not capital itself.)
Management and investors ought to be separate from each other; management should be chosen by workers by universal equal vote,
while a complementary investor board should be chosen by investors much as corporate boards are now. Both of these boards should
be legally independent but bound organizations; the management board should run the business while the investor board should negotiate
with the management board on the terms of equity issuance. No more buybacks, no more layoffs or early retirements, unless workers
as a whole see a need for it to maintain the company.
The purpose of investors is to serve the real economy, not the other way round; and in turn, the purpose of the real economy
is to serve humanity, not the other way around. Humans should stop being slaves to perpetual growth.
Really20
HP is laying off 80,000 workers or almost a third of its workforce, converting its long-term human capital into short-term
gains for rich shareholders at an alarming rate. The reason that product quality has declined is due to the planned obsolescence
that spurs needless consumerism, which is necessary to prop up our debt-backed monetary system and the capitalist-owned economy
that sits on top of it.
NoWayJose
HP - that company that sells computers and printers made in China and ink cartridges made in Thailand?
Dominus Ludificatio
Another company going down the drain because their focus is short term returns with crappy products.They will also bring down
any company they buy as well.
Barnaby
HP is microcosm of what Carly will do to the US: carve it like a pumpkin and leave the shell out to bake in the sun for a few
weeks. But she'll make sure and poison the seeds too! Don't want anything growing out of that pesky Palm division...
Dre4dwolf
The world is heading for massive deflation. Computers have hit the 14 nano-meter lithography zone, the cost to go from
14nm to say 5nm is very high, and the net benefit to computing power is very low, but lets say we go from 14nm to 5nm over the
next 4 years. Going from 5nm to 1nm is not going to net a large boost in computing power and the cost to shrink things down and
re-tool will be very high for such an insignificant gain in performance.
What does that mean
Computers (atleast non-quantum ones) have hit the point where about 80-90% of the potential for the current science has
been tap'd
This means that the consumer is not going to be put in the position where they will have to upgrade to faster systems for
atleast another 7-8 years.... (because the new computer wont be that much faster than their existing one).
If no one is upgrading the only IT sectors of the economy that stand to make any money are software companies (Microsoft,
Apple, and other small software developers), most software has not caught up with hardware yet.
We are obviously heading for massive deflation, consumer spending levels as a % are probably around where they were in
the late 70s - mid 80s, this is a very deflationary environment that is being compounded by a high debt burden (most of everyones
income is going to service their debts), that signals monetary tightening is going on... people simply don't have enough discretionary
income to spend on new toys.
All that to me screams SELL consumer electronics stocks because profits are GOING TO DECLINE , SALES ARE GOING TO DECLINE.
There is no way , no amount of buy backs will float the stocks of corporations like HP/Dell/IBM etc... it is inevitable that these
stocks will be worth 30% less over the next 5 - 8 years
But what do I know? maybe I am missing something.
In anycase a lot of pressure is being put on HP to do all it can at any cost to boost the stock valuations, because so much
of its stock is institution owned, they will strip the wallpaper off the walls and sell it to a recycling plant if it would give
them more money to boost stock valuations. That to me signals that most of the people pressuring the board of HP to boost the
stock, want them to gut the company as much as they can to boost it some trivial % points so that the majority of shares can be
dumped onto muppets.
To me it pretty much also signals something is terribly wrong at HP and no one is talking about it.
PoasterToaster
Other than die shrinks there really hasn't been a lot going on in the CPU world since Intel abandoned its Netburst architecture
and went back to its (Israeli created) Pentium 3 style pipeline. After that they gave up on increasing speed and resorted to selling
more cores. Now that wall has been hit, they have been selling "green" and "efficient" nonsense in place of increasing power.
x86 just needs to go, but a lot is invested in it not the least of which is that 1-2 punch of forced, contrived obsolesence
carried out in a joint operation with Microsoft. 15 years ago you could watch videos with no problem on your old machine using
Windows XP. Fast forward to now and their chief bragging point is still "multitasking" and the ability to process datastreams
like video. It's a joke.
The future is not in the current CPU paradigm of instructions per second; it will be in terms of variables per second. It will
be more along the lines of what GPU manufacturers are creating with their thousands of "engines" or "processing units" per chip,
rather than the 4, 6 or 12 core monsters that Intel is pushing. They have nearly given up on their roadmap to push out to 128
cores as it is. x86 just doesn't work with all that.
Dojidog
Another classic "Let's rape all we can and bail with my golden parachute" corporate leaders setting themselves up. Pile
on the string of non-IT CEOs that have been leading the company to ruin. To them it is nothing more than a contest of being even
worse than their predecessor. Just look at the billions each has lost before their exit. Compaq, a cluster. Palm Pilot, a dead
product they paid millions for and then buried. And many others.
Think the split is going to help? Think again. Rather than taking the opportunity to fix their problems, they have just duplicated
and perpetuated them into two separate entities.
HP is a company that is mired in a morass of unmanageable business processes and patchwork of antiquated applications all interconnected
to the point they are petrified to try and uncouple them.
Just look at their stock price since January. The insiders know. Want to fix HP? All it would take is a savvy IT based leader
with a boatload of common sense. What makes money at HP? Their printers and ink. Not thinking they can provide enterprise solutions
to others when they can't even get their own house in order.
Carly Fiorina: (LOL, leading a tech company with a degree in medieval history and philosophy) While at ATT she was groomed
from the Affirmative Action plan.
Alma Mater: Stanford University (B.A. in medieval history and philosophy); University of Maryland (MBA); Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Patricia Russo: (Lucent) (Dedree in Political Science). Another lady elevated through the AA plan, Russo got her bachelor's
degree from Georgetown University in political science and history in 1973. She finished the advanced management program at Harvard
Business School in 1989
Both ladies steered their corporations to failure.
Clowns on Acid
It is very straightforward. Replace 45,000 US workers with 100,000 offshore workers and you still save millions of USD
! Use the "savings" to buy back stock, then borrow more $$ at ZIRP to buy more stock back.
You guys don't know nuthin'.
homiegot
HP: one of the worst places you could work. Souless.
Pancho de Villa
Ladies and Gentlemen! Integrity has left the Building!
space junk
I worked there for a while and it was total garbage. There are still some great folks around, but they are getting paid less
and less, and having to work longer hours for less pay while reporting to God knows who, often a foreigner with crappy engrish
skills, yes likely another 'diversity hire'. People with DEEP knowledge, decades and decades, have either gotten unfairly fired
or demoted, made to quit, or if they are lucky, taken some early retirement and GTFO (along with their expertise - whoopsie! who
knew? unintended consequences are a bitch aren't they? )....
If you look on a site like LinkedIN, it will always say 'We're hiring!'. YES, HP is hiring.....but not YOU, they want Ganesh
Balasubramaniamawapbapalooboopawapbamboomtuttifrutti, so that they can work him as modern day slave labor for ultra cheap. We
can thank idiot 'leaders' like Meg Pasty Faced Whitman and Bill 'Forced Vaccinations' Gates for lobbying Congress for decades,
against the rights of American workers.
Remember that Meg 'Pasty Faced' Whitman is the person who came up with the idea of a 'lights out' datacenter....that's right,
it's the concept of putting all of your computers in a building, in racks, in the dark, and maybe hiring an intern to come in
once a month and keep them going. This is what she actually believed. Along with her other statement to the HP workforce which
says basically that the future of HP is one of total automation.....TRANSLATION: If you are a smart admin, engineer, project manager,
architect, sw tester, etc.....we (HP management) think you are an IDIOT and can be replaced by a robot, a foreigner, or any other
cheap worker.
Race to the bottom is like they say a space ship approaching a black hole......after a while the laws of physics and common
sense, just don't apply anymore.
InnVestuhrr
An era of leadership in computer technology has died, and there is no grave marker, not even a funeral ceremony or eulogy
... Hewlett-Packard, COMPAQ, Digital Equipment Corp, UNIVAC, Sperry-Rand, Data General, Tektronix, ZILOG, Advanced Micro Devices,
Sun Microsystems, etc, etc, etc. So much change in so short a time, leaves your mind dizzy.
"... Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do. ..."
"... A recent survey in England suggests that one in four women between 16 and 24 have harmed themselves, and one in eight now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder affect 26% of women in this age group. This is what a public health crisis looks like. ..."
"... Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction. ..."
"... Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as it is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement. ..."
"... It's unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It's more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is a project that explicitly aims, and has achieved, the undermining and elimination of social networks in favour of market competition ..."
"... In practice, loosening social and legal institutions has reduced social security (in the general sense rather than simply welfare payments) and encouraged the limitation of social interaction to money based activity ..."
"... All powerful institutions have a vested interest in keeping us atomized and individualistic. The gangs at the top don't want competition. They're afraid of us. In particular, they're afraid of men organising into gangs. That's where this very paper comes in ..."
"... The alienation genie was out of the bottle with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and mass migration to cities began and we abandoned living in village communities ..."
"... Neoliberalism expressly encourages 'atomisation'- it is all about reducing human interaction to markets. And so this is just one of the reasons that neoliberalism is such a bunk philosophy. ..."
"... My stab at an answer would first question the notion that we are engaging in anything. That presupposes we are making the choices. Those who set out the options are the ones that make the choices. We are being engaged by the grotesquely privileged and the pathologically greedy in an enterprise that profits them still further. It suits the 1% very well strategically, for obvious reasons, that the 99% don't swap too many ideas with each other. ..."
"... According to Robert Putnam, as societies become more ethnically diverse they lose social capital, contributing to the type of isolation and loneliness which George describes. Doesn't sound as evil as neoliberalism I suppose. ..."
"... multiculturalism is a direct result of Neoliberalism. The market rules and people are secondary. Everything must be done for business owners, and that everything means access to cheap labor. ..."
"... I'd have thought what he really wants to say is that loneliness as a phenomenon in modern Western society arises out of an intent on the part of our political and social elites to divide us all into competing against one another, as individuals and as members of groups, all the better to keep us under control and prevent us from working together to claim our fair share of resources. ..."
"... Has it occurred to you that the collapse in societal values has allowed 'neo-liberalism' to take hold? ..."
"... No. It has been the concentrated propaganda of the "free" press. Rupert Murdoch in particular, but many other well-funded organisations working in the background over 50 years. They are winning. ..."
"... We're fixated on a magical, abstract concept called "the economy". Everything must be done to help "the economy", even if this means adults working through their weekends, neglecting their children, neglecting their elderly parents, eating at their desks, getting diabetes, breaking down from stress, and giving up on a family life. ..."
"... You can make a reasonable case that 'Neoliberalism' expects that every interaction, including between individuals, can be reduced to a financial one. ..."
"... As can be seen from many of the posts, neo-liberalism depends on, and fosters, ignorance, an inability to see things from historical and different perspectives and social and intellectual disciplines. On a sociological level how other societies are arranged throws up interesting comparisons. Scandanavian countries, which have mostly avoided neo-liberalism by and large, are happier, healthier places to live. America and eastern countries arranged around neo-liberal, market driven individualism, are unhappy places, riven with mental and physical health problems and many more social problems of violence, crime and suicide. ..."
"... The people who fosted this this system onto us, are now either very old or dead. We're living in the shadow of their revolutionary transformation of our more equitable post-war society. Hayek, Friedman, Keith Joseph, Thatcher, Greenspan and tangentially but very influentially Ayn Rand. Although a remainder (I love the wit of the term 'Remoaner') , Brexit can be better understood in the context of the death-knell of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Criticism of his hypotheses on this thread (where articualted at all) focus on the existence of solitude and loneliness prior to neo liberalism, which seems to me to be to deliberately miss his point: this was formerly a minor phenomenon, yet is now writ on an incredible scale - and it is a social phenomenon particular to those western economies whose elites have most enthusiastically embraced neo liberalism. ..."
"... We all want is to: (and feel we have the right to) wear the best clothes, have the foreign holidays, own the latest tech and eat the finest foods. At the same time our rights have increased and awareness of our responsibilities have minimized. The execution of common sense and an awareness that everything that goes wrong will always be someone else fault. ..."
"... We are not all special snowflakes, princesses or worthy of special treatment, but we act like self absorbed, entitled individuals. Whether that's entitled to benefits, the front of the queue or bumped into first because its our birthday! ..."
"... Unhealthy social interaction, yes. You can never judge what is natural to humans based on contemporary Britain. Anthropologists repeatedly find that what we think natural is merely a social construct created by the system we are subject to. ..."
"... We are becoming fearful of each other and I believe the insecurity we feel plays a part in this. ..."
"... We have become so disconnected from ourselves and focused on battling to stay afloat. Having experienced periods of severe stress due to lack of money I couldn't even begin to think about how I felt, how happy I was, what I really wanted to do with my life. I just had to pay my landlord, pay the bills and try and put some food on my table so everything else was totally neglected. ..."
"... We need a radical change of political thinking to focus on quality of life rather than obsession with the size of our economy. High levels of immigration of people who don't really integrate into their local communities has fractured our country along with the widening gap between rich and poor. Governments only see people in terms of their "economic value" - hence mothers being driven out to work, children driven into daycare and the elderly driven into care homes. Britain is becoming a soulless place - even our great British comedy is on the decline. ..."
"... Quality of life is far more important than GDP I agree but it is also far more important than inequality. ..."
"... Thatcher was only responsible for "letting it go" in Britain in 1980, but actually it was already racing ahead around the world. ..."
"... Eric Fromm made similar arguments to Monbiot about the psychological impact of modern capitalism (Fear of Freedom and The Sane Society) - although the Freudian element is a tad outdated. However, for all the faults of modern society, I'd rather be unhappy now than in say, Victorian England. Similarly, life in the West is preferable to the obvious alternatives. ..."
"... Whilst it's very important to understand how neoliberalism, the ideology that dare not speak it's name, derailed the general progress in the developed world. It's also necessary to understand that the roots this problem go much further back. Not merely to the start of the industrial revolution, but way beyond that. It actually began with the first civilizations when our societies were taken over by powerful rulers, and they essentially started to farm the people they ruled like cattle. On the one hand they declared themselves protector of their people, whilst ruthlessly exploiting them for their own political gain. I use the livestock farming analogy, because that explains what is going on. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism allows psychopaths to flourish, and it has been argued by Robert Hare that they are disproportionately represented in the highest echelons of society. So people who lack empathy and emotional attachment are probably weilding a significant amount of influence over the way our economy and society is organised. Is it any wonder that they advocate an economic model which is most conducive to their success? Things like job security, rigged markets, unions, and higher taxes on the rich simply get in their way. ..."
"... . Data suggests that inequality has widened massively over the last 30 years ( https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/infographic-income-inequality-uk ) - as has social mobility ( https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-mobility-data-charts ). Homelessness has risen substantially since 1979. ..."
"... As a director and CEO of an organisation employing several hundred people I became aware that 40% of the staff lived alone and that the workplace was important to them not only for work but also for interacting with their colleagues socially . ..."
"... A thoughtful article. But the rich and powerful will ignore it; their doing very well out of neo liberalism thank you. Meanwhile many of those whose lives are affected by it don't want to know - they're happy with their bigger TV screen. Which of course is what the neoliberals want, 'keep the people happy and in the dark'. An old Roman tactic - when things weren't going too well for citizens and they were grumbling the leaders just extended the 'games'. Evidently it did the trick ..."
"... Sounds like the inevitable logical outcome of a society where the predator sociopathic and their scared prey are all that is allowed. This dynamic dualistic tautology, the slavish terrorised to sleep and bullying narcissistic individual, will always join together to protect their sick worldview by pathologising anything that will threaten their hegemony of power abuse: compassion, sensitivity, moral conscience, altruism and the immediate effects of the ruthless social effacement or punishment of the same ie human suffering. ..."
"... "Alienation, in all areas, has reached unprecedented heights; the social machinery for deluding consciousnesses in the interest of the ruling class has been perfected as never before. The media are loaded with upscale advertising identifying sophistication with speciousness. Television, in constant use, obliterates the concept under the image and permanently feeds a baseless credulity for events and history. Against the will of many students, school doesn't develop the highly cultivated critical capacities that a real sovereignty of the people would require. And so on. ..."
"... There's no question - neoliberalism has been wrenching society apart. It's not as if the prime movers of this ideology were unaware of the likely outcome viz. "there is no such thing as society" (Thatcher). Actually in retrospect the whole zeitgeist from the late 70s emphasised the atomised individual separated from the whole. Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" (1976) may have been influential in creating that climate. ..."
"... I would add that the basic concepts of the Neoliberal New world order are fundamentally Evil, from the control of world population through supporting of strife starvation and war to financial inducements of persons in positions of power. Let us not forget the training of our younger members of our society who have been induced to a slavish love of technology. ..."
"... The kind of personal freedom that you say goes hand in hand with capitalism is an illusion for the majority of people. It holds up the prospect of that kind of freedom, but only a minority get access to it. ..."
"... Problems in society are not solved by having a one hour a week class on "self esteem". In fact self-esteem and self-worth comes from the things you do. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is the bastard child of globalization which in effect is Americanization. The basic premise is the individual is totally reliant on the corporate world state aided by a process of fear inducing mechanisms, pharmacology is one of the tools. No community no creativity no free thinking. Poded sealed and cling filmed a quasi existence. ..."
"... Having grown up during the Thatcher years, I entirely agree that neoliberalism has divided society by promoting individual self-optimisation at the expensive of everyone else. ..."
"... There is no such thing as a free-market society. Your society of 'self-interest' is really a state supported oligarchy. If you really want to live in a society where there is literally no state and a more or less open market try Somalia or a Latin American city run by drug lords - but even then there are hierarchies, state involvement, militias. ..."
"... Furthermore, a society in which people are encouraged to be narrowly selfish is just plain uncivilized. Since when have sociopathy and barbarism been something to aspire to? ..."
"... Why don't we explore some of the benefits?.. Following the long list of some the diseases, loneliness can inflict on individuals, there must be a surge in demand for all sort of medications; anti-depressants must be topping the list. There is a host many other anti-stress treatments available of which Big Pharma must be carving the lion's share. Examine the micro-economic impact immediately following a split or divorce. There is an instant doubling on the demand for accommodation, instant doubling on the demand for electrical and household items among many other products and services. But the icing on the cake and what is really most critical for Neoliberalism must be this: With the morale barometer hitting the bottom, people will be less likely to think of a better future, and therefore, less likely to protest. In fact, there is nothing left worth protecting. ..."
"... Your freedom has been curtailed. Your rights are evaporating in front of your eyes. And Best of all, from the authorities' perspective, there is no relationship to defend and there is no family to protect. If you have a job, you want to keep, you must prove your worthiness every day to 'a company'. ..."
What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental
illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders,
self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest,
catastrophic figures for children's mental health in England reflect a global
crisis.
There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to
me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial
mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled
apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology.
Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere
we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme
individualism.
In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school,
at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on our own two
feet. The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year. Employment
is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing
ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to
economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations
as real opportunities contract.
Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of
isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed
all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and
drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and
to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.
As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women
routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer.
Some phones, using their "beauty" settings, do it for you without asking; now
you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia:
a war of everyone against themselves.
Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely
to quantify our social standing
Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been
replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress?
A recent survey in England suggests that one in four women between 16 and
24 have harmed themselves, and one in eight now suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder. Anxiety, depression, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder affect
26% of women in this age group. This is what a public health crisis looks like.
If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because
we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest
that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits.
This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact
of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and
injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical
pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is
a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress
of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug
addiction.
Experiments summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour last month suggest
that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social mammals will choose
the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food and contact for 22 hours will
rejoin their companions before eating. Children who experience emotional
neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences
than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as
it is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used as an
attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not
as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the
most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement.
It is not hard to see what the evolutionary reasons for social pain might
be. Survival among social mammals is greatly enhanced when they are strongly
bonded with the rest of the pack. It is the isolated and marginalised animals
that are most likely to be picked off by predators, or to starve. Just as physical
pain protects us from physical injury, emotional pain protects us from social
injury. It drives us to reconnect. But many people find this almost impossible.
It's unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression,
suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It's more surprising
to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia,
high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses,
even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has
a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears
to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances
production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.
Studies in both animals and humans suggest a reason for comfort eating: isolation
reduces impulse control, leading to obesity. As those at the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder are the most likely to suffer from loneliness, might this provide one
of the explanations for the strong link between low economic status and obesity?
Anyone can see that something far more important than most of the issues
we fret about has gone wrong. So why are we engaging in this world-eating, self-consuming
frenzy of environmental destruction and social dislocation, if all it produces
is unbearable pain? Should this question not burn the lips of everyone in public
life?
There are some wonderful charities doing what they can to fight this tide,
some of which I am going to be working with as part of my loneliness project.
But for every person they reach, several others are swept past.
This does not require a policy response. It requires something much bigger:
the reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain,
the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous.
We stand together or we fall apart.
Well its a bit of a stretch blaming neoliberalism for creating loneliness.
Yet it seems to be the fashion today to imagine that the world we live in
is new...only created just years ago. And all the suffering that we see
now never existed before. Plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social
phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness never happened in
the past, because everything was bright and shiny and world was good.
Regrettably history teaches us that suffering and deprivation have dogged
mankind for centuries, if not tens of thousands of years. That's what we
do; survive, persist...endure. Blaming 'neoliberalism' is a bit of cop-out.
It's the human condition man, just deal with it.
Some of the connections here are a bit tenuous, to say the least, including
the link to political ideology. Economic liberalism is usually accompanied
with social conservatism, and vice versa. Right wing ideologues are more
likely to emphasize the values of marriage and family stability, while left
wing ones are more likely to favor extremes of personal freedom and reject
those traditional structures that used to bind us together.
You're a little confused there in your connections between policies, intentions
and outcomes. Nevertheless, Neoliberalism is a project that explicitly
aims, and has achieved, the undermining and elimination of social networks
in favour of market competition.
In practice, loosening social and legal institutions has reduced
social security (in the general sense rather than simply welfare payments)
and encouraged the limitation of social interaction to money based activity.
That holds true when you're talking about demographics/voters.
Economic and social liberalism go hand in hand in the West. No matter
who's in power, the establishment pushes both but will do one or the other
covertly.
All powerful institutions have a vested interest in keeping us atomized
and individualistic. The gangs at the top don't want competition. They're
afraid of us. In particular, they're afraid of men organising into gangs.
That's where this very paper comes in.
The alienation genie was out of the bottle with the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution and mass migration to cities began and we abandoned
living in village communities. Over the ensuing approx 250 years we
abandoned geographically close relationships with extended families, especially
post WW2. Underlying economic structures both capitalist and marxist dissolved
relationships that we as communal primates evolved within. Then accelerate
this mess with (anti-) social media the last 20 years along with economic
instability and now dissolution of even the nuclear family (which couldn't
work in the first place, we never evolved to live with just two parents
looking after children) and here we have it: Mass mental illness. Solution?
None. Just form the best type of extended community both within and outside
of family, be engaged and generours with your community hope for the best.
Indeed, Industrialisation of our pre-prescribed lifestyle is a huge factor.
In particular, our food, it's low quality, it's 24 hour avaliability, it's
cardboard box ambivalence, has caused a myriad of health problems. Industrialisation
is about profit for those that own the 'production-line' & much less about
the needs of the recipient.
It's unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated
with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception
of threat.
Yes, although there is some question of which order things go in. A supportive
social network is clearly helpful, but it's hardly a simple cause and effect.
Levels of different mental health problems appear to differ widely across
societies just in Europe, and it isn't particularly the case that more capitalist
countries have greater incidence than less capitalist ones.
You could just as well blame atheism. Since the rise of neo-liberalism
and drop in church attendance track each other pretty well, and since for
all their ills churches did provide a social support group, why not blame
that?
While attending a church is likely to alleviate loneliness, atheism doesn't
expressly encourage limiting social interactions and selfishness. And of
course, reduced church attendance isn't exactly the same as atheism.
Neoliberalism expressly encourages 'atomisation'- it is all about
reducing human interaction to markets. And so this is just one of the reasons
that neoliberalism is such a bunk philosophy.
So why are we engaging in this world-eating, self-consuming frenzy
of environmental destruction and social dislocation, if all it produces
is unbearable pain?
My stab at an answer would first question the notion that we
are engaging in anything. That presupposes we are making the
choices. Those who set out the options are the ones that make the choices.
We are being engaged by the grotesquely privileged and the pathologically
greedy in an enterprise that profits them still further. It suits the 1%
very well strategically, for obvious reasons, that the 99% don't swap too
many ideas with each other.
We as individuals are offered the 'choice' of consumption as an alternative
to the devastating ennui engendered by powerlessness. It's no choice at
all of course, because consumption merely enriches the 1% and exacerbates
our powerlessness. That was the whole point of my post.
The 'choice' to consume is never collectively exercised as you suggest.
Sadly. If it was, 'we' might be able to organise ourselves into doing something
about it.
According to Robert Putnam, as societies become more ethnically diverse
they lose social capital, contributing to the type of isolation and loneliness
which George describes. Doesn't sound as evil as neoliberalism I suppose.
Disagree. Im British but have had more foreign friends than British. The
UK middle class tend to be boring insular social status obsessed drones.other
nationalities have this too, but far less so
Well, yes, but multiculturalism is a direct result of Neoliberalism.
The market rules and people are secondary. Everything must be done for business
owners, and that everything means access to cheap labor.
Multiculturalism isn't the only thing destroying social cohesion, too.
It was being destroyed long before the recent surges of immigrants. It was
reported many times in the 1980's in communities made up of only one culture.
In many ways, it is being used as the obvious distraction from all the other
ways Fundamentalist Free Marketers wreck live for many.
This post perhaps ranges too widely to the point of being vague and general,
and leading Monbiot to make some huge mental leaps, linking loneliness to
a range of mental and physical problems without being able to explain, for
example, the link between loneliness and obesity and all the steps in-between
without risking derailment into a side issue.
I'd have thought what he really wants to say is that loneliness as
a phenomenon in modern Western society arises out of an intent on the part
of our political and social elites to divide us all into competing against
one another, as individuals and as members of groups, all the better to
keep us under control and prevent us from working together to claim our
fair share of resources.
Are you familiar with the term 'Laughter is the best medicine'? Well, it's
true. When you laugh, your brain releases endorphins, yeah? Your stress
hormones are reduced and the oxygen supply to your blood is increased, so...
I try to laugh several times a day just because... it makes you feel
good! Let's try that, eh? Ohohoo... Hahaha... Just, just... Hahahaha...
Come on, trust me.. you'll feel.. HahaHAhaha! O-o-o-o-a-hahahahaa... Share
No. It has been the concentrated propaganda of the "free" press. Rupert
Murdoch in particular, but many other well-funded organisations working
in the background over 50 years. They are winning.
We're fixated on a magical, abstract concept called "the economy".
Everything must be done to help "the economy", even if this means adults
working through their weekends, neglecting their children, neglecting their
elderly parents, eating at their desks, getting diabetes, breaking down
from stress, and giving up on a family life.
Impertinent managers ban their staff from office relationships, as company
policy, because the company is more important than its staff's wellbeing.
Companies hand out "free" phones that allow managers to harrass staff
for work out of hours, on the understanding that they will be sidelined
if thy don't respond.
And the wellbeing of "the economy" is of course far more important than
whether the British people actually want to merge into a European superstate.
What they want is irrelevant.
That nasty little scumbag George Osborne was the apotheosis of this ideology,
but he was abetted by journalists who report any rise in GDP as "good" -
no matter how it was obtained - and any "recession" to be the equivalent
of a major natural disaster.
If we go on this way, the people who suffer the most will be the rich,
because it will be them swinging from the lamp-posts, or cowering in gated
communities that they dare not leave (Venezuela, South Africa). Those riots
in London five years ago were a warning. History is littered with them.
You can make a reasonable case that 'Neoliberalism' expects that every
interaction, including between individuals, can be reduced to a financial
one. If this results in loneliness then that's certainly a downside
- but the upside is that billions have been lifted out of absolute poverty
worldwide by 'Neoliberalism'.
Mr Monbiot creates a compelling argument that we should end 'Neoliberalism'
but he is very vague about what should replace it other than a 'different
worldview'. Destruction is easy, but creation is far harder.
As a retired teacher it grieves me greatly to see the way our education
service has become obsessed by testing and assessment. Sadly the results
are used not so much to help children learn and develop, but rather as a
club to beat schools and teachers with. Pressurised schools produce pressurised
children. Compare and contrast with education in Finland where young people
are not formally assessed until they are 17 years old. We now assess toddlers
in nursery schools.
SATs in Primary schools had children concentrating on obscure grammatical
terms and usage which they will never ever use again. Pointless and counter-productive.
Gradgrind values driving out the joy of learning.
And promoting anxiety and mental health problems.
It is all the things you describe, Mr Monbiot, and then some. This dystopian
hell, when anything that did work is broken and all things that have never
worked are lined up for a little tinkering around the edges until the camouflage
is good enough to kid people it is something new. It isn't just neoliberal
madness that has created this, it is selfish human nature that has made
it possible, corporate fascism that has hammered it into shape. and an army
of mercenaries who prefer the take home pay to morality. Crime has always
paid especially when governments are the crooks exercising the law.
The value of life has long been forgotten as now the only thing that
matters is how much you can be screwed for either dead or alive. And yet
the Trumps, the Clintons, the Camerons, the Johnsons, the Merkels, the Mays,
the news media, the banks, the whole crooked lot of them, all seem to believe
there is something worth fighting for in what they have created, when painfully
there is not. We need revolution and we need it to be lead by those who
still believe all humanity must be humble, sincere, selfless and most of
all morally sincere. Freedom, justice, and equality for all, because the
alternative is nothing at all.
Ive long considered neo-liberalism as the cause of many of our problems,
particularly the rise in mental health problems, alienation and loneliness.
As can be seen from many of the posts, neo-liberalism depends on, and
fosters, ignorance, an inability to see things from historical and different
perspectives and social and intellectual disciplines. On a sociological
level how other societies are arranged throws up interesting comparisons. Scandanavian countries, which have mostly avoided neo-liberalism by and
large, are happier, healthier places to live. America and eastern countries
arranged around neo-liberal, market driven individualism, are unhappy places,
riven with mental and physical health problems and many more social problems
of violence, crime and suicide.
The worst thing is that the evidence shows it doesn't work. Not one of
the privatisations in this country have worked. All have been worse than
what they've replaced, all have cost more, depleted the treasury and led
to massive homelessness, increased mental health problems with the inevitable
financial and social costs, costs which are never acknowledged by its adherents.
Put crudely, the more " I'm alright, fuck you " attitude is fostered,
the worse societies are. Empires have crashed and burned under similar attitudes.
The people who fosted this this system onto us, are now either very old
or dead.
We're living in the shadow of their revolutionary transformation of our
more equitable post-war society. Hayek, Friedman, Keith Joseph, Thatcher,
Greenspan and tangentially but very influentially Ayn Rand.
Although a remainder (I love the wit of the term 'Remoaner') , Brexit can
be better understood in the context of the death-knell of neoliberalism.
I never understood how the collapse of world finance, resulted in a right
wing resurgence in the UK and the US. The Tea Party in the US made the absurd
claim that the failure of global finance was not due to markets being fallible,
but because free markets had not been enforced citing Fanny Mae and Freddie
Mac as their evidence and of Bill Clinton insisting on more poor and black
people being given mortgages.
I have a terrible sense that it will not go quietly, there will be massive
global upheavals as governments struggle deal with its collapse.
I have never really agreed with GM - but this article hits the nail on the
head.
I think there are a number of aspects to this:
The internet. The being in constant contact, our lives mapped and
our thoughts analysed - we can comment on anything (whether informed or
total drivel) and we've been fed the lie that our opinion is is right and
that it matters) Ive removed fscebook and twitter from my phone, i have
never been happier
Rolling 24 hour news. That is obsessed with the now, and consistently
squeezes very complex issues into bite sized simple dichotomies. Obsessed
with results and critical in turn of everyone who fails to feed the machine
The increasing slicing of work into tighter and slimmer specialisms,
with no holistic view of the whole, this forces a box ticking culture. "Ive
stamped my stamp, my work is done" this leads to a lack of ownership of
the whole. PIP assessments are an almost perfect example of this - a box
ticking exercise, designed by someone who'll never have to go through it,
with no flexibility to put the answers into a holistic context.
Our education system is designed to pass exams and not prepare for
the future or the world of work - the only important aspect being the compilation
of next years league tables and the schools standings. This culture is neither
healthy no helpful, as students are schooled on exam technique in order
to squeeze out the marks - without putting the knowledge into a meaningful
and understandable narrative.
Apologies for the long post - I normally limit myself to a trite insulting
comment :) but felt more was required in this instance.
Overall, I agree with your points. Monbiot here adopts a blunderbuss approach
(competitive self-interest and extreme individualism; "brutal" education,
employment social security; consumerism, social media and vanity). Criticism
of his hypotheses on this thread (where articualted at all) focus on the
existence of solitude and loneliness prior to neo liberalism, which seems
to me to be to deliberately miss his point: this was formerly a minor phenomenon,
yet is now writ on an incredible scale - and it is a social phenomenon particular
to those western economies whose elites have most enthusiastically embraced
neo liberalism. So, when Monbiot's rhetoric rises:
"So why are we engaging in this world-eating, self-consuming frenzy
of environmental destruction and social dislocation, if all it produces
is unbearable pain?"
the answer is, of course, 'western capitalist elites'.
We stand together or we fall apart.
Hackneyed and unoriginal but still true for all that.
the answer is, of course, 'western capitalist elites'.
because of the lies that are being sold.
We all want is to: (and feel we have the right to) wear the best clothes,
have the foreign holidays, own the latest tech and eat the finest foods.
At the same time our rights have increased and awareness of our responsibilities
have minimized. The execution of common sense and an awareness that everything
that goes wrong will always be someone else fault.
We are not all special snowflakes, princesses or worthy of special treatment,
but we act like self absorbed, entitled individuals. Whether that's entitled
to benefits, the front of the queue or bumped into first because its our
birthday!
I share Monbiots pain here. But rather than get a sense of perspective
- the answer is often "More public money and counseling"
George Monbiot has struck a nerve.
They are there every day in my small town local park: people, young and
old, gender and ethnically diverse, siting on benches for a couple of hours
at a time.
They have at least one thing in common.
They each sit alone, isolated in their own thoughts..
But many share another bond: they usually respond to dogs, unconditional
in their behaviour patterns towards humankind.
Trite as it may seem, this temporary thread of canine affection breaks the
taboo of strangers
passing by on the other side.
Conversations, sometimes stilted, sometimes deeper and more meaningful,
ensue as dog walkers become a brief daily healing force in a fractured world
of loneliness.
It's not much credit in the bank of sociability.
But it helps.
Trite as it may seem from the outside, their interaction with the myriad
pooches regularly walk
Unhealthy social interaction, yes. You can never judge what is natural to
humans based on contemporary Britain. Anthropologists repeatedly find that
what we think natural is merely a social construct created by the system
we are subject to.
If you don't work hard, you will be a loser, don't look out of the window
day dreaming you lazy slacker. Get productive, Mr Burns millions need you
to work like a machine or be replaced by one.
Good article. You´re absoluately right. And the deeper casue is this: separation
from God. If we don´t fight our way back to God, individually and collectively,
things are going to get a lot worse. With God, loneliness doesn´t exist.
I encourage anyone and everyone to start talking to Him today and invite
Him into your heart and watch what starts to happen.
Religion divides not brings people together. Only when you embrace all humanity
and ignore all gods will you find true happiness. The world and the people
in it are far more inspiring when you contemplate the lack of any gods.
The fact people do amazing things without needing the promise of heaven
or the threat of hell - that is truly moving.
I see what you're saying but I read 'love' instead of God. God is too religious
which separates and divides ("I'm this religion and my god is better than
yours" etc etc). I believe that George is right in many ways in that money
is very powerful on it's impact on our behavior (stress, lack etc) and
therefore our lives. We are becoming fearful of each other and I believe
the insecurity we feel plays a part in this.
We have become so disconnected
from ourselves and focused on battling to stay afloat. Having experienced
periods of severe stress due to lack of money I couldn't even begin to think
about how I felt, how happy I was, what I really wanted to do with my life.
I just had to pay my landlord, pay the bills and try and put some food on
my table so everything else was totally neglected.
When I moved house to
move in with family and wasn't expected to pay rent, though I offered, all
that dissatisfaction and undealt with stuff came spilling out and I realised
I'd had no time for any real safe care above the very basics and that was
not a good place to be. I put myself into therapy for a while and started
to look after myself and things started to change. I hope to never go back
to that kind of position but things are precarious financially and the field
I work in isn't well paid but it makes me very happy which I realise now
is more important.
Neo-liberalism has a lot to answer for in bringing misery to our lives and
accelerating the demise of the planet but I find it not guilty on this one. The current trends as to how people perceive themselves (what you've
got rather than who you are) and the increasing isolation in our cities
started way before the neo-liberals. It is getting worse though and on balance social media is making us more
connected but less social. Share
The way that the left keeps banging on about neoliberalism is half of what
makes them such a tough sell electorally. Just about nobody knows what neoliberalism
is, and literally nobody self identifies as a neoliberal. So all this moaning
and wailing about neoliberalism comes across as a self absorbed, abstract
and irrelevant. I expect there is the germ of an idea in there, but until
the left can find away to present that idea without the baffling layer of
jargon and over-analysis, they're going to remain at a disadvantage to the
easy populism of the right.
Interesting article. We have heard so much about the size of our economy
but less about our quality of life. The UK quality of life is way below
the size of our economy i.e. economy size 6th largest in the world but quality
of life 15th. If we were the 10th largest economy but were 10th for quality
of life we would be better off than we are now in real terms.
We need a
radical change of political thinking to focus on quality of life rather
than obsession with the size of our economy. High levels of immigration
of people who don't really integrate into their local communities has fractured
our country along with the widening gap between rich and poor. Governments
only see people in terms of their "economic value" - hence mothers being
driven out to work, children driven into daycare and the elderly driven
into care homes. Britain is becoming a soulless place - even our great British
comedy is on the decline.
Interesting. 'It is the isolated and marginalised animals that are most
likely to be picked off by predators....' so perhaps the species is developing
its own predators to fill a vacated niche.
(Not questioning the comparison to other mammals at all as I think it
is valid but you would have to consider the whole rather than cherry pick
bits)
Generation snowflake. "I'll do myself in if you take away my tablet and
mobile phone for half an hour".
They don't want to go out and meet people anymore. Nightclubs for instance,
are closing because the younger generation 'don't see the point' of going
out to meet people they would otherwise never meet, because they can meet
people on the internet. Leave them to it and the repercussions of it.....
Socialism is dying on its feet in the UK, hence the Tory's 17 point lead
at the mo. The lefties are clinging to whatever influence they have to sway
the masses instead of the ballot box. Good riddance to them.
17 point lead? Dying on it's feet? The neo-liberals are showing their disconnect
from reality. If anything, neo-liberalism is driving a people to the left
in search of a fairer and more equal society.
George Moniot's articles are better thought out, researched and written
than the vast majority of the usual clickbait opinion pieces found on the
Guardian these days. One of the last journalists, rather than liberal arts
blogger vying for attention.
Neoliberalism's rap sheet is long and dangerous but this toxic philosophy
will continue unabated because most people can't join the dots and work
out how detrimental it has proven to be for most of us.
It dangles a carrot in order to create certain economic illusions but
the simple fact is neoliberal societies become more unequal the longer they
persist.
Neoliberal economies allow people to build huge global businesses very quickly
and will continue to give the winners more but they also can guve everyone
else more too but just at a slower rate. Socialism on the other hand mires
everyone in stagnant poverty. Question is do you want to be absolutely or
relatively better off.
You have no idea. Do not confuse capitalism with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism
is a political ideology based on a mythical version of capitalism that doesn't
actually exist, but is a nice way to get the deluded to vote for something
that doesn't work in their interest at all.
And things will get worse as society falls apart due to globalisation, uberization,
lack of respect for authority, lacks of a fair tax and justice system, crime,
immorality, loss of trust of politicians and financial and corporate sectors,
uncontrolled immigration bringing with it insecurity and the risk of terrorism
and a dumbing down of society with increasing inequality. All this is in
a new book " The World at a Crossroads" which deals with the major issues
facing the planet.
What, like endless war, unaffordable property, monstrous university fees,
zero hours contracts and a food bank on every corner, and that's before
we even get to the explosion in mental distress.
There's nothing spurious or obscure about Neoliberalism. It is simply the
political ideology of the rich, which has been our uninterrupted governing
ideology since Reagan and Thatcher: Privatisation, deregulation, 'liberalisation'
of housing, labour, etc, trickledown / low-tax-on-the-rich economics, de-unionization.
You only don't see it if you don't want to see it.
I'm just thinking what is wonderful about societies that are big of social
unity. And conformity.
Those societies for example where you "belong" to your family. Where
teenage girls can be married off to elderly uncles to cement that belonging.
Or those societies where the belonging comes through religious centres.
Where the ostracism for "deviant" behaviour like being gay or for women
not submitting to their husbands can be brutal. And I'm not just talking
about muslims here.
Or those societies that are big on patriotism. Yep they are usually good
for mental health as the young men are given lessons in how to kill as many
other men as possible efficiently.
And then I have to think how our years of "neo-liberal" governments have
taken ideas of social liberalisation and enshrined them in law. It may be
coincidence but thirty years after Thatcher and Reagan we are far more tolerant
of homosexuality and willing to give it space to live, conversely we are
far less tolerant of racism and are willing to prosecute racist violence.
Feminists may still moan about equality but the position of women in society
has never been better, rape inside marriage has (finally) been outlawed,
sexual violence generally is no longer condoned except by a few, work opportunities
have been widened and the woman's role is no longer just home and family.
At least that is the case in "neo-liberal" societies, it isn't necessarily
the case in other societies.
So unless you think loneliness is some weird Stockholm Syndrome thing
where your sense of belonging comes from your acceptance of a stifling role
in a structured soiety, then I think blaming the heightened respect for
the individual that liberal societies have for loneliness is way off the
mark.
What strikes me about the cases you cite above, George, is not an over-respect
for the individual but another example of individuals being shoe-horned
into a structure. It strikes me it is not individualism but competition
that is causing the unhappiness. Competition to achieve an impossible ideal.
I fear George, that you are not approaching this with a properly open
mind dedicated to investigation. I think you have your conclusion and you
are going to bend the evidence to fit. That is wrong and I for one will
not support that. In recent weeks and months we have had the "woe, woe and
thrice woe" writings. Now we need to take a hard look at our findings. We
need to take out the biases resulting from greater awareness of mental health
and better and fuller diagnosis of mental health issues. We need to balance
the bias resulting from the fact we really only have hard data for modern
Western societies. And above all we need to scotch any bias resulting from
the political worldview of the researchers.
It sounded to me that he was telling us of farm labouring and factory fodder
stock that if we'd 'known our place' and kept to it ,all would be well because
in his ideal society there WILL be or end up having a hierarchy, its inevitable.
Wasn't all this started by someone who said, "There is no such thing as
Society"? The ultimate irony is that the ideology that championed the individual
and did so much to dismantle the industrial and social fabric of the Country
has resulted in a system which is almost totalitarian in its disregard for
its ideological consequences.
Thatcher said it in the sense that society is not abstract it is just other
people so when you say society needs to change then people need to change
as society is not some independent concept it is an aggregation of all us.
The left mis quote this all the time and either they don't get it or they
are doing on purpose.
No, Neoliberalism has been around since 1938.... Thatcher was only responsible
for "letting it go" in Britain in 1980, but actually it was already racing
ahead around the world.
Furthermore, it could easily be argued that the Beatles helped create
loneliness - what do you think all those girls were screaming for? And also
it could be argued that the Beatles were bringing in neoliberalism in the
1960s, via America thanks to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis etc.. Share
Great article, although surely you could've extended the blame to capitalism
has a whole?
In what, then, consists the alienation of labor? First, in the fact
that labor is external to the worker, i.e., that it does not belong
to his nature, that therefore he does not realize himself in his work,
that he denies himself in it, that he does not feel at ease in it, but
rather unhappy, that he does not develop any free physical or mental
energy, but rather mortifies his flesh and ruins his spirit. The worker,
therefore, is only himself when he does not work, and in his work he
feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and
when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor, therefore, is
not voluntary, but forced--forced labor. It is not the gratification
of a need, but only a means to gratify needs outside itself. Its alien
nature shows itself clearly by the fact that work is shunned like the
plague as soon as no physical or other kind of coercion exists.
Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
We have created a society with both flaws and highlights- and we have unwittingly
allowed the economic system to extend into our lives in negative ways.
On of the things being modern brings is movement- we move away from communities,
breaking friendships and losing support networks, and the support networks
are the ones that allow us to cope with issues, problems and anxiety.
Isolation among the youth is disturbing, it is also un natural, perhaps
it is social media, or fear of parents, or the fall in extra school activities
or parents simply not having a network of friends because they have had
to move for work or housing.
There is some upsides, I talk and get support from different international
communities through the social media that can also be so harmful- I chat
on xbox games, exchange information on green building forums, arts forums,
share on youtube as well as be part of online communities that hold events
in the real world.
Increasingly we seem to need to document our lives on social media to somehow
prove we 'exist'. We seem far more narcissistic these days, which tends
to create a particular type of unhappiness, or at least desire that can
never be fulfilled. Maybe that's the secret of modern consumer-based capitalism.
To be happy today, it probably helps to be shallow, or avoid things like
Twitter and Facebook!
Eric Fromm made similar arguments to Monbiot about the psychological
impact of modern capitalism (Fear of Freedom and The Sane Society) - although
the Freudian element is a tad outdated. However, for all the faults of modern
society, I'd rather be unhappy now than in say, Victorian England. Similarly,
life in the West is preferable to the obvious alternatives.
Thanks George for commenting in such a public way on the unsayable: consume,
consume, consume seems to be the order of the day in our modern world and
the points you have highlighted should be part of public policy everywhere.
I'm old enough to remember when we had more time for each other; when
mothers could be full-time housewives; when evenings existed (evenings now
seem to be spent working or getting home from work). We are undoubtedly
more materialistic, which leads to more time spent working, although our
modern problems are probably not due to increasing materialism alone.
Regarding divorce and separation, I notice people in my wider circle
who are very open to affairs. They seem to lack the self-discipline to concentrate
on problems in their marriage and to give their full-time partner a high
level of devotion. Terrible problems come up in marriages but if you are
completely and unconditionally committed to your partner and your marriage
then you can get through the majority of them.
Aggressive self interest is turning in on itself. Unfortunately the powerful
who have realised their 'Will to Power' are corrupted by their own inflated
sense of self and thus blinded. Does this all predict a global violent revolution?
However, what is most interesting is how nearly all modern politicians
who peddle neoliberal doctrine or policy, refuse to use the name, or even
to openly state what ideology they are in fact following.
I suppose it is just a complete coincidence that the policy so many governments
are now following so closely follow known neoliberal doctrine. But of course
the clever and unpleasant strategy of those like yourself is to cry conspiracy
theory if this ideology, which dare not speak its name is mentioned.
Your style is tiresome. You make no specific supported criticisms again,
and again. You just make false assertions and engage in unpleasant ad homs
and attempted character assassination. You do not address the evidence for
what George Monbiot states at all.
An excellent article. One wonders exactly what one needs to say in order
to penetrate the reptilian skulls of those who run the system.
As an addition to Mr Monbiot's points, I would like to point out that
it is not only competitive self-interest and extreme individualism that
drives loneliness. Any system that has strict hierarchies and mechanisms
of social inclusion also drives it, because such systems inhibit strongly
spontaneous social interaction, in which people simply strike up conversation.
Thailand has such a system. Despite her promoting herself as the land of
smiles, I have found the people here to be deeply segregated and unfriendly.
I have lived here for 17 years. The last time I had a satisfactory face-to-face
conversation, one that went beyond saying hello to cashiers at checkout
counters or conducting official business, was in 1999. I have survived by
convincing myself that I have dialogues with my books; as I delve more deeply
into the texts, the authors say something different to me, to which I can
then respond in my mind.
Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of
millions. It's time to ask where we are heading and why
I want to quote the sub headline, because "It's time to ask where we are
heading and why", is the important bit. George's excellent and scathing
evidence based criticism of the consequences of neoliberalism is on the
nail. However, we need to ask how we got to this stage. Despite it's name
neoliberalism doesn't really seem to contain any new ideas, and in some
way it's more about Thatcher's beloved return to Victorian values. Most
of what George Monbiot highlights encapsulatec Victorian thinking, the sort
of workhouse mentality.
Whilst it's very important to understand how neoliberalism, the ideology
that dare not speak it's name, derailed the general progress in the developed
world. It's also necessary to understand that the roots this problem go
much further back. Not merely to the start of the industrial revolution,
but way beyond that. It actually began with the first civilizations when
our societies were taken over by powerful rulers, and they essentially started
to farm the people they ruled like cattle. On the one hand they declared
themselves protector of their people, whilst ruthlessly exploiting them
for their own political gain. I use the livestock farming analogy, because
that explains what is going on.
To domesticate livestock, and to make them pliable and easy to work with
the farmer must make himself appear to these herd animals as if they are
their protector, the person who cares for them, nourishes and feeds them.
They become reliant on their apparent benefactor. Except of course this
is a deceitful relationship, because the farmer is just fattening them up
to be eaten.
For the powerful to exploit the rest of people in society for their own
benefit they had to learn how to conceal what they were really doing, and
to wrap it in justifications to bamboozle the people they were exploiting
for their own benefit. They did this by altering our language and inserting
ideas in our culture which justified their rule, and the positions of the
rest of us.
Before state religions, generally what was revered was the Earth, the
natural world. It was on a personal level, and not controlled by the powerful.
So the powerful needed to remove that personal meaningfulness from people's
lives, and said the only thing which was really meaningful, was the religion,
which of course they controlled and were usually the head of. Over generations
people were indoctrinated in a completely new way of thinking, and a language
manipulated so all people could see was the supposed divine right of kings
to rule. Through this language people were detached from what was personally
meaningful to them, and could only find meaningfulness by pleasing their
rulers, and being indoctrinated in their religion.
If you control the language people use, you can control how perceive
the world, and can express themselves.
By stripping language of meaningful terms which people can express themselves,
and filling it full of dubious concepts such as god, the right of kings
completely altered how people saw the world, how they thought. This is why
over the ages, and in different forms the powerful have always attempted
to have full control of our language through at first religion and their
proclamations, and then eventually by them controlling our education system
and the media.
The idea of language being used to control how people see the world,
and how they think is of course not my idea. George Orwell's Newspeak idea
explored in "1984" is very much about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
This control of language is well known throughout history. Often conquerors
would abolish languages of those they conquered. In the so called New World
the colonists eventually tried to control how indigenous people thought
by forcibly sending their children to boarding school, to be stripped of
their culture, their native language, and to be inculcated in the language
and ideas of their colonists. In Britain various attempts were made to banish
the Welsh language, the native language of the Britons, before the Anglo-Saxons
and the Normans took over.
However, what Orwell did not deal with properly is the origin of language
style. To Orwell, and to critics of neoliberalism, the problems can be traced
back to the rise of what they criticised. To a sort of mythical golden age.
Except all the roots of what is being criticised can be found in the period
before the invention of these doctrines. So you have to go right back to
the beginning, to understand how it all began.
Neoliberalism would never have been possible without this long control
of our language and ideas by the powerful. It prevents us thinking outside
the box, about what the problem really is, and how it all began.
All very well but you are talking about ruthlessness of western elites,
mostly British, not all.
It was not like that everywhere. Take Poland for example, and around
there..
New research is emerging - and I'd recommend reading of prof Frost from
St Andrew's Uni - that lower classes were actually treated with respect
by elites there, mainly land owners and aristocracy who more looked after
them and employed and cases of such ruthlessness as you describe were unknown
of.
So that 'truth' about attitudes to lower classes is not universal!
It's spouted by many on here as the root of all evil.
I'd be interested to see how many different definitions I get in
response...
The reason I call neoliberalism the ideology which dare not speak it's name
is that in public you will rarely hear it mentioned by it's proponents.
However, it was a very important part of Thatcherism, Blairism, and so on.
What is most definite is that these politicians and others are most definitely
following some doctrine. Their ideas about what we must do and how we must
do it are arbitrary, but they make it sound as if it's the only way to do
things.
However, as I hint, the main problem in dealing with neoliberalism is
that none of the proponents of this doctrine admit to what ideology they
are actually following. Yet very clearly around the world leaders in many
countries are clearly singing from the same hymn sheet because the policy
they implement is so similar. Something has definitely changed. All the
attempts to roll back welfare, benefits, and public services is most definitely
new, or they wouldn't be having to reverse policy of the past if nothing
had change. But as all these politicians implementing this policy all seem
to refuse to explain what doctrine they are following, it makes it difficult
to pin down what is happening. Yet we can most definitely say that there
is a clear doctrine at work, because why else would so many political leaders
around the world be trying to implement such similar policy.
Neo-liberalism doesn't really exist except in the minds of the far
left and perhaps a few academics.
Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that
transfers control of economic factors to the private sector from the public
sector. ... Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire approach to economic
development.
I believe the term 'Neo liberalism' was coined by those well known 'Lefties'The
Chicago School .
If you don't believe that any of the above has been happening ,it does beg
the question as to where you have been for the past decade.
The ironies of modern civilization - we have never been more 'connected'
to other people on global level and less 'connected' on personal level.
We have never had access to such a wide range of information and opinions,
but also for a long time been so divided into conflicting groups, reading
and accessing in fact only that which reinforces what we already think.
Sir Harry Burns, ex-Chief Medical Officer in Scotland talks very powerfully
about the impact of loneliness and isolation on physical and mental health
- here is a video of a recent talk by him -
http://www.befs.org.uk/calendar/48/164-BEFS-Annual-Lecture
These issues have been a long time coming, just think of the appeals of
the 60's to chill out and love everyone. Globalisation and neo-liberalism
has simply made society even more broken.
The way these problems have been ignored and made worse over the last few
decades make me think that the solution will only happen after a massive
catastrophe and society has to be rebuilt. Unless we make the same mistakes
again.
A shame really, you would think intelligence would be useful but it seems
not.
I would argue that it creates a bubble of existence for those who pursue
a path of "success" that instead turns to isolation . The amount of people
that I have met who have moved to London because to them it represents the
main location for everything . I get to see so many walking cliches of people
trying to fit in or stand out but also fitting in just the same .
The real disconnect that software is providing us with is truly staggering
. I have spoken to people from all over the World who seem to feel more
at home being alone and playing a game with strangers . The ones who are
most happy are those who seem to be living all aloe and the ones who try
and play while a girlfriend or family are present always seemed to be the
ones most agitated by them .
We are humans relying on simplistic algorithms that reduce us ,apps like
Tinder which turns us into a misogynist at the click of a button .
Facebook which highlights our connections with the other people and assumes
that everyone you know or have met is of the same relevance .
We also have Twitter which is the equivalent of screaming at a television
when you are drunk or angry .
We have Instagram where people revel in their own isolation and send
updates of it . All those products that are instantly updated and yet we
are ageing and always feeling like we are grouped together by simple algorithms
.
Television has been the main destroyer of social bonds since the 1950s and
yet it is only mentioned once and in relation to the number of competitions
on it, which completely misses the point. That's when I stopped taking this
article seriously.
I actually blame Marx for neoliberalism. He framed society purely in terms
economic, and persuaded that ideology is valuable in as much as it is actionable.
For a dialectician he was incredibly short sighted and superficial, not
realising he was creating a narrative inimical to personal expression and
simple thoughtfulness (although he was warned). To be fair, he can't have
appreciated how profoundly he would change the way we concieve societies.
Neoliberalism is simply the dark side of Marxism and subsumes the personal
just as comprehensively as communism.
We're picked apart by quantification and live as particulars, suffering
the ubiquitous consequences of connectivity alone . . .
Unless, of course, you get out there and meet great people!
Neo-liberalism allows psychopaths to flourish, and it has been argued by
Robert Hare that they are disproportionately represented in the highest
echelons of society. So people who lack empathy and emotional attachment
are probably weilding a significant amount of influence over the way our
economy and society is organised. Is it any wonder that they advocate an
economic model which is most conducive to their success? Things like job
security, rigged markets, unions, and higher taxes on the rich simply get
in their way.
That fine illustration by Andrzej Krauze up there is exactly what I see
whenever I walk into an upscale mall or any Temple of Consumerism.
You can hear the Temple calling out: "Feel bad, atomized individuals?
Have a hole inside? Feel lonely? That's all right: buy some shit you don't
need and I guarantee you'll feel better."
And then it says: "So you bought it and you felt better for five minutes,
and now you feel bad again? Well, that's not rocket science...you should
buy MORE shit you don't need! I mean, it's not rocket science, you should
have figured this out on your own."
And then it says: "Still feel bad and you have run out of money? Well,
that's okay, just get it on credit, or take out a loan, or mortgage your
house. I mean, it's not rocket science. Really, you should have figured
this out on your own already...I thought you were a modern, go-get-'em,
independent, initiative-seizing citizen of the world?"
And then it says: "Took out too many loans, can't pay the bills and
the repossession has begun? Honestly, that's not my problem. You're just
a bad little consumer, and a bad little liberal, and everything is your
own fault. You go sit in a dark corner now where you don't bother the other
shoppers. Honestly, you're just being a burden on other consumers now. I'm
not saying you should kill yourself, but I can't say that we would mind
either."
And that's how the worms turn at the Temples of Consumerism and Neoliberalism.
I kept my sanity by not becoming a spineless obedient middle class pleaser
of a sociopathic greedy tribe pretending neoliberalism is the future.
The result is a great clarity about the game, and an intact empathy for
all beings.
The middle class treated each conscious "outsider" like a lowlife,
and now they play the helpless victims of circumstances.
I know why I renounced to my privileges.
They sleepwalk into their self created disorder.
And yes, I am very angry at those who wasted decades with their social stupidity,
those who crawled back after a start of change into their petit bourgeois
niche.
I knew that each therapist has to take a stand and that the most choose
petty careers.
Do not expect much sanity from them for your disorientated kids.
Get insightful yourself and share your leftover love to them.
Try honesty and having guts...that might help both of you.
Alternatively, neo-liberalism has enabled us to afford to live alone (entire
families were forced to live together for economic reasons), and technology
enables us to work remotely, with no need for interaction with other people.
This may make some people feel lonely, but for many others its utopia.
Some of the things that characterise Globalisation and Neoliberalism are
open borders and free movement. How can that contribute to isolation? That
is more likely to be fostered by Protectionism.
And there aren't fewer jobs. Employment is at record highs here and in many
other countries. There are different jobs, not fewer, and to be sure there
are some demographics that have lost out. But overall there are not fewer
jobs. That falls for the old "lump of labour" fallacy.
The corrosive state of mass television indoctrination sums it up: Apprentice,
Big Brother, Dragon's Den. By degrees, the standard keeps lowering. It is
no longer unusual for a licence funded TV programme to consist of a group
of the mentally deranged competing to be the biggest asshole in the room.
Anomie is a by-product of cultural decline as much as economics.
Our whole culture is more stressful. Jobs are more precarious; employment
rights more stacked in favor of the employer; workforces are deunionised;
leisure time is on the decrease; rents are unaffordable; a house is no longer
a realistic expectation for millions of young people. Overall, citizens
are more socially immobile and working harder for poorer real wages than
they were in the late 70's.
Unfortunately, sexual abuse has always been a feature of human societies.
However there is no evidence to suggest it was any worse in the past. Then
sexual abuse largely took place in institutional settings were at least
it could be potentially addressed. Now much of it has migrated to the great
neoliberal experiment of the internet, where child exploitation is at endemic
levels and completely beyond the control of law enforcement agencies. There
are now more women and children being sexually trafficked than there were
slaves at the height of the slave trade. Moreover, we should not forget
that Jimmy Saville was abusing prolifically right into the noughties.
My parents were both born in 1948. They say it was great. They bought
a South London house for next to nothing and never had to worry about getting
a job. When they did get a job it was one with rights, a promise of a generous
pension, a humane workplace environment, lunch breaks and an ethos of public
service. My mum says that the way women are talked about now is worse.
Sounds fine to me. That's not to say everything was great: racism was
acceptable (though surely the vile views pumped out onto social media are
as bad or worse than anything that existed then), homosexuality was illegal
and capital punishment enforced until the 1960's. However, the fact that
these things were reformed showed society was moving in the right direction.
Now we are going backwards, back to 1930's levels or inequality and a reactionary,
small-minded political culture fueled by loneliness, rage and misery.
And there is little evidence to suggest that anyone has expanded their mind
with the internet. A lot of people use it to look at porn, post racist tirades
on Facebook, send rape threats, distributes sexual images of partners with
their permission, take endless photographs of themselves and whip up support
for demagogues. In my view it would much better if people went to a library
than lurked in corporate echo chambers pumping out the like of 'why dont
theese imagrantz go back home and all those lezbo fems can fuckk off too
ha ha megalolz ;). Seriously mind expanding stuff. Share
As a director and CEO of an organisation employing several hundred people
I became aware that 40% of the staff lived alone and that the workplace
was important to them not only for work but also for interacting with their
colleagues socially . This was encouraged and the organisation achieved
an excellent record in retaining staff at a time when recruitment was difficult.
Performance levels were also extremely high . I particulalry remember with
gratitude the solidarity of staff when one of our colleagues - a haemophiliac
- contracted aids through an infected blood transfusion and died bravely
but painfully - the staff all supported him in every way possible through
his ordeal and it was a privilege for me to work with such kind and caring
people .
Indeed. Those communities are often undervalued. However, the problem is,
as George says, lots of people are excluded from them.
They are also highly self-selecting (e.g. you need certain trains of
inclusivity, social adeptness, empathy, communication, education etc to
get the job that allows you to join that community).
Certainly I make it a priority in my life. I do create communities. I
do make an effort to stand by people who live like me. I can be a leader
there.
Sometimes I wish more people would be. It is a sustained, long-term effort.
Share
To add to this discussion, we might consider the strongest need and conflict
each of us experiences as a teenager, the need to be part of a tribe vs
the the conflict inherent in recognising one's uniqueness. In a child's
life from about 7 or 8 until adolescence, friends matter the most. Then
the young person realises his or her difference from everyone else and has
to grasp what this means.
Those of us who enjoyed a reasonably healthy upbringing will get through
the peer group / individuation stage with happiness possible either way
- alone or in friendship. Our parents and teachers will have fostered a
pride in our own talents and our choice of where to socialise will be flexible
and non-destructive.
Those of us who at some stage missed that kind of warmth and acceptance
in childhood can easily stagnate. Possibly this is the most awkward of personal
developmental leaps. The person neither knows nor feels comfortable with
themselves, all that faces them is an abyss.
Where creative purpose and strength of spirit are lacking, other humans
can instinctively sense it and some recoil from it, hardly knowing what
it's about. Vulnerabilities attendant on this state include relationships
holding out some kind of ersatz rescue, including those offered by superficial
therapists, religions, and drugs, legal and illegal.
Experience taught that apart from the work we might do with someone deeply
compassionate helping us where our parents failed, the natural world
is a reliable healer. A kind of self-acceptance and individuation is
possible away from human bustle. One effect of the seasons and of being
outdoors amongst other life forms is to challenge us physically, into present
time, where our senses start to work acutely and our observational skills
get honed, becoming more vibrant than they could at any educational establishment.
This is one reason we have to look after the Earth, whether it's in a
city context or a rural one. Our mental, emotional and physical health is
known to be directly affected by it.
A thoughtful article. But the rich and powerful will ignore it; their doing
very well out of neo liberalism thank you. Meanwhile many of those whose
lives are affected by it don't want to know - they're happy with their bigger
TV screen. Which of course is what the neoliberals want, 'keep the people
happy and in the dark'. An old Roman tactic - when things weren't
going too well for citizens and they were grumbling the leaders just
extended the 'games'. Evidently it did the trick
The rich and powerful can be just as lonely as you and me. However, some
of them will be lonely after having royally forked the rest of us over...and
that is another thing
- Fight Club
People need a tribe to feel purpose. We need conflict, it's essential for
our species... psychological health improved in New York after 9/11.
Totally agree with the last sentences. Human civilisation is a team effort.
Individual humans cant survive, our language evolved to aid cooperation.
Neo-liberalism is really only an Anglo-American project. Yet we are so
indoctrinated in it, It seems natural to us, but not to hardly any other
cultures.
As for those "secondary factors. Look to advertising and the loss of
real jobs forcing more of us to sell services dependent on fake needs. Share
It's importance for social cohesion -- yes inspite of the problems , can
not be overestimated .Don't let the rich drive it out , people who don't
understand ,or care what it's for .The poorer boroughs cannot afford it
.K&C have easily 1/2billion in Capital Reserves ,so yes they must continue
. Here I can assure you ,one often sees the old and lonely get a hug .If
drug gangs are hitting each other or their rich boy customers with violence
- that is a different matter . And yes of course if we don't do something
to help boys from ethnic minorities ,with education and housing -of course
it only becomes more expensive in the long run.
Boris Johnson has idiotically mouthed off about trying to mobilise people
to stand outside the Russian Embassy , as if one can mobilise youth by telling
them to tidy their bedroom .Because that's all it amounts to - because you
have to FEEL protest and dissent . Well here at Carnival - there it is ,protest
and dissent . Now listen to it . And of course it will be far easier than
getting any response from sticking your tongue out at the Putin monster --
He has his bombs , just as Kensington and Chelsea have their money.
(and anyway it's only another Boris diversion ,like building some fucking
stupid bridge ,instead of doing anything useful)
"Society" or at least organized society is the enemy of corporate power.
The idea of Neoliberal capitalism is to replace civil society with corporate
law and rule. The same was true of the less extreme forms of capitalism.
Society is the enemy of capital because it put restrictions on it and threatens
its power.
When society organizes itself and makes laws to protect society from
the harmful effects of capitalism, for example demands on testing drugs
to be sure they are safe, this is a big expense to Pfizer, there are many
examples - just now in the news banning sugary drinks. If so much as a small
group of parents forming a day care co-op decide to ban coca cola from their
group that is a loss of profit.
That is really what is going on, loneliness is a big part of human life,
everyone feels it sometimes, under Neoliberal capitalism it is simply more
exaggerated due to the out and out assault on society itself.
Well the prevailing Global Capitalist world view is still a combination
1. homocentric Cartesian Dualism i.e. seeing humans as most important and
sod all other living beings, and seeing humans as separate from all other
living beings and other humans and 2. Darwinian "survival of the fittest"
seeing everything as a competition and people as "winners and losers, weak
or strong with winners and the strong being most important". From these
2 combined views all kinds of "games" arise. The main one being the game
of "victim, rescuer, persecutor" (Transactional Analysis). The Guardian
engages in this most of the time and although I welcome the truth in this
article to some degree, surprisingly, as George is environmentally friendly,
it kinda still is talking as if humans are most important and as if those
in control (the winners) need to change their world view to save the victims.
I think the world view needs to zoom out to a perspective that recognises
that everything is interdependent and that the apparent winners and the
strong are as much victims of their limited world view as those who are
manifesting the effects of it more obviously.
Here in America, we have reached the point at which police routinely dispatch
the mentally ill, while complaining that "we don't have the time for this"
(N. Carolina). When a policeman refuses to kill a troubled citizen, he or
she can and will be fired from his job (West Virginia). This has become
not merely commonplace, but actually a part of the social function of the
work of the police -- to remove from society the burden of caring for the
mentally ill by killing them. In the state where I live, a state trooper
shot dead a mentally ill man who was not only unarmed, but sitting on the
toilet in his own home. The resulting "investigation" exculpated the trooper,
of course; in fact, young people are constantly told to look up to the police.
Sounds like the inevitable logical outcome of a society where the predator
sociopathic and their scared prey are all that is allowed.
This dynamic dualistic tautology, the slavish terrorised to sleep and bullying
narcissistic individual, will always join together to protect their sick
worldview by pathologising anything that will threaten their hegemony of
power abuse: compassion, sensitivity, moral conscience, altruism and the
immediate effects of the ruthless social effacement or punishment of the
same ie human suffering.
The impact of increasing alienation on individual mental health has been
known about and discussed for a long time.
When looking at a way forward, the following article is interesting:
"Alienation, in all areas, has reached unprecedented heights; the social
machinery for deluding consciousnesses in the interest of the ruling class
has been perfected as never before. The media are loaded with upscale advertising
identifying sophistication with speciousness. Television, in constant use,
obliterates the concept under the image and permanently feeds a baseless
credulity for events and history. Against the will of many students, school
doesn't develop the highly cultivated critical capacities that a real sovereignty
of the people would require. And so on.
The ordinary citizen thus lives
in an incredibly deceiving reality. Perhaps this explains the tremendous
and persistent gap between the burgeoning of motives to struggle, and the
paucity of actual combatants. The contrary would be a miracle. Thus the
considerable importance of what I call the struggle for representation:
at every moment, in every area, to expose the deception and bring to light,
in the simplicity of form which only real theoretical penetration makes
possible, the processes in which the false-appearances, real and imagined,
originate, and this way, to form the vigilant consciousness, placing our
image of reality back on its feet and reopening paths to action."
For the global epidemic of abusive, effacing homogenisation of human intellectual
exchange and violent hyper-sexualisation of all culture, I blame the US
Freudian PR guru Edward Bernays and his puritan forebears - alot.
Thanks for proving that Anomie is a far more sensible theory than Dialectical
Materialistic claptrap that was used back in the 80s to terrorize the millions
of serfs living under the Jack boot of Leninist Iron curtain.
There's no question - neoliberalism has been wrenching society apart.
It's not as if the prime movers of this ideology were unaware of the likely
outcome viz. "there is no such thing as society" (Thatcher). Actually in
retrospect the whole zeitgeist from the late 70s emphasised the atomised
individual separated from the whole. Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" (1976)
may have been influential in creating that climate.
Anyway, the wheel has turned thank goodness. We are becoming wiser and
understanding that "ecology" doesn't just refer to our relationship with
the natural world but also, closer to home, our relationship with each other.
The Communist manifesto makes the same complaint in 1848. The wheel has
not turned, it is still grinding down workers after 150 years. We are none
the wiser.
"The wheel is turning and you can't slow down,
You can't let go and you can't hold on,
You can't go back and you can't stand still,
If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will."
R Hunter
What is loneliness? I love my own company and I love walking in nature and
listening to relaxation music off you tube and reading books from the library.
That is all free. When I fancied a change of scene, I volunteered at my
local art gallery.
Mental health issues are not all down to loneliness. Indeed, other people
can be a massive stress factor, whether it is a narcissistic parent, a bullying
spouse or sibling, or an unreasonable boss at work.
I'm on the internet far too much and often feel the need to detox from
it and get back to a more natural life, away from technology. The 24/7 news
culture and selfie obsessed society is a lot to blame for social disconnect.
The current economic climate is also to blame, if housing and job security
are a problem for individuals as money worries are a huge factor of stress.
The idea of not having any goal for the future can trigger depressive thoughts.
I have to say, I've been happier since I don't have such unrealistic
expectations of what 'success is'. I rarely get that foreign holiday or
new wardrobe of clothes and my mobile phone is archaic. The pressure that
society puts on us to have all these things- and get in debt for them is
not good. The obsession with economic growth at all costs is also stupid,
as the numbers don't necessarily mean better wealth, health or happiness.
Very fine article, as usual from George, until right at the end he says:
This does not require a policy response.
But it does. It requires abandonment of neoliberalism as the means used
to run the world. People talk about the dangers of man made computers usurping
their makers but mankind has, it seems, already allowed itself to become
enslaved. This has not been achieved by physical dependence upon machines
but by intellectual enslavement to an ideology.
A very good "Opinion" by George Monbiot one of the best I have seen on this
Guardian blog page.
I would add that the basic concepts of the Neoliberal New world order are
fundamentally Evil, from the control of world population through supporting
of strife starvation and war to financial inducements of persons in positions
of power. Let us not forget the training of our younger members of our society
who have been induced to a slavish love of technology. Many other areas
of human life are also under attack from the Neoliberal, even the very air
we breathe, and the earth we stand upon.
The Amish have understood for 300 years that technology could have a negative
effect on society and decided to limit its effects. I greatly admire their
approach. Neal Stephenson's recent novel Seveneves coined the term Amistics
for the practice of assessing and limiting the impact of tech. We need a
Minister for Amistics in the government. Wired magazine did two features
on the Amish use of telephones which are quite insightful.
If we go back to 1848, we also find Marx and Engels, in the Communist
Manifesto, complaining about the way that the first free-market capitalism
(the original liberalism) was destroying communities and families by forcing
workers to move to where the factories were being built, and by forcing
women and children into (very) low paid work. 150 years later, after many
generations of this, combined with the destruction of work in the North,
the result is widespread mental illness. But a few people are really rich
now, so that's all right, eh?
Social media is ersatz community. It's like eating grass: filling, but
not nourishing.
Young people are greatly harmed by not being able to see a clear path forward
in the world. For most people, our basic needs are a secure job, somewhere
secure and affordable to live, and a decent social environment in terms
of public services and facilities. Unfortunately, all these things are sliding
further out of reach for young people in the UK, and they know this. Many
already live with insecure housing where their family could have to move
at a month or two's notice.
Our whole economic system needs to be built around providing these basic
securities for people. Neoliberalism = insecure jobs, insecure housing and
poor public services, because these are the end result of its extreme free
market ideology.
I agree with this 100%. Social isolation makes us unhappy. We have a false
sense of what makes us unhappy - that success or wealth will enlighten or
liberate us. What makes us happy is social connection. Good friendships,
good relationships, being part of community that you contribute to. Go to
some of the poorest countries in the world and you may meet happy people
there, tell them about life in rich countries, and say that some people
there are unhappy. They won't believe you. We do need to change our worldview,
because misery is a real problem in many countries.
It is tempting to see the world before Thatcherism, which is what most English
writers mean when they talk about neo-liberalism, as an idyll, but it simply
wasn't.
The great difficulty with capitalism is that while it is in many ways
an amoral doctrine, it goes hand in hand with personal freedom. Socialism
is moral in its concern for the poorest, but then it places limits on personal
freedom and choice. That's the price people pay for the emphasis on community,
rather than the individual.
Close communities can be a bar on personal freedom and have little tolerance
for people who deviate from the norm. In doing that, they can entrench loneliness.
This happened, and to some extent is still happening, in the working
class communities which we typically describe as 'being destroyed by Thatcher'.
It's happening in close-knit Muslim communities now.
I'm not attempting to vindicate Thatcherism, I'm just saying there's
a pay-off with any model of society. George Monbiot's concerns are actually
part of a long tradition - Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1770) chimes
with his thinking, as does DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The kind of personal freedom that you say goes hand in hand with capitalism
is an illusion for the majority of people. It holds up the prospect of that
kind of freedom, but only a minority get access to it. For most, it is necessary
to submit yourself to a form of being yoked, in terms of the daily grind
which places limits on what you can then do, as the latter depends hugely
on money. The idea that most people are "free" to buy the house they want,
private education, etc., not to mention whether they can afford the many
other things they are told will make them happy, is a very bad joke. Hunter-gatherers
have more real freedom than we do. Share
According to Wiki: 'Neoliberalism refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence
of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism.
These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization,
fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government
spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.'
We grow into fear - the stress of exams and their certain meanings; the
lower wages, longer hours, and fewer rights at work; the certainty of debt
with ever greater mortgages; the terror of benefit cuts combined with rent
increases.
If we're forever afraid, we'll cling to whatever life raft presents.
It's a demeaning way to live, but it serves the Market better than having
a free, reasonably paid, secure workforce, broadly educated and properly
housed, with rights.
Insightful analysis... George quite rightly pinpoints the isolating effects of modern society
and technology and the impact on the quality of our relationships. The obvious question is how can we offset these trends and does the government
care enough to do anything about them?
It strikes me that one of the major problems is that [young] people have
been left to their own devices in terms of their consumption of messages
from Social and Mass online Media - analogous to leaving your kids in front
of a video in lieu of a parental care or a babysitter. In traditional society
- the messages provided by Society were filtered by family contact and real
peer interaction - and a clear picture of the limited value of the media
was propogated by teachers and clerics. Now young and older people alike
are left to make their own judgments and we cannot be surprised when they
extract negative messages around body image, wealth and social expectations
and social and sexual norms from these channels. It's inevitable that this
will create a boundary free landscape where insecurity, self-loathing and
ultimately mental illness will prosper.
I'm not a traditionalist in any way but there has to be a role for teachers
and parents in mediating these messages and presenting the context for analysing
what is being said in a healthy way. I think this kind of Personal Esteem
and Life Skills education should be part of the core curriculum in all schools.
Our continued focus on basic academic skills just does not prepare young
people for the real world of judgementalism, superficiality and cliques
and if anything dealing with these issues are core life skills.
We can't reverse the fact that media and modern society is changing but
we can prepare people for the impact which it can have on their lives.
A politician's answer.
X is a problem. Someone else, in your comment it will be teachers that have
to sort it out. Problems in society are not solved by having a one hour
a week class on "self esteem". In fact self-esteem and self-worth comes
from the things you do. Taking kids away from their academic/cultural studies
reduces this. This is a problem in society. What can society as a
whole do to solve it and what are YOU prepared to contribute.
Rather difficult to do when their parents are Thatchers children and buy
into the whole celebrity, you are what you own lifestyle too....and teachers
are far too busy filling out all the paperwork that shows they've met their
targets to find time to teach a person centred course on self-esteem to
a class of 30 teenagers.
I think we should just continue to be selfish and self-serving, sneering
and despising anyone less fortunate than ourselves, look up to and try to
emulate the shallow, vacuous lifestyle of the non-entity celebrity, consume
the Earth's natural resources whilst poisoning the planet and the people,
destroy any non-contributing indigenous peoples and finally set off all
our nuclear arsenals in a smug-faced global firework display to demonstrate
our high level of intelligence and humanity. Surely, that's what we all
want? Who cares? So let's just carry on with business as usual!
Neoliberalism is the bastard child of globalization which in effect is Americanization.
The basic premise is the individual is totally reliant on the corporate
world state aided by a process of fear inducing mechanisms, pharmacology
is one of the tools.
No community no creativity no free thinking. Poded sealed and cling filmed
a quasi existence.
Having grown up during the Thatcher years, I entirely agree that neoliberalism
has divided society by promoting individual self-optimisation at the expensive
of everyone else.
What's the solution? Well if neoliberalism is the root cause, we need
a systematic change, which is a problem considering there is no alternative
right now. We can however, get active in rebuilding communities and I am
encouraged by George Monbiot's work here.
My approach is to get out and join organizations working toward system
change. 350.org is a good example. Get involved.
we live in a narcissistic and ego driven world that dehumanises everyone.
we have an individual and collective crisis of the soul. it is our false
perception of ourselves that creates a disconnection from who we really
are that causes loneliness.
I agree. This article explains why it is a perfectly normal reaction to
the world we are currently living in. It goes as far as to suggest that
if you do not feel depressed at the state of our world there's something
wrong with you ;-) http://upliftconnect.com/mutiny-of-the-soul/
Surely there is a more straightforward possible explanation for increasing
incidence of "unhapiness"?
Quite simply, a century of gradually increasing general living standards
in the West have lifted the masses up Maslows higiene hierarchy of needs,
to where the masses now have largely only the unfulfilled self esteem needs
that used to be the preserve of a small, middle class minority (rather than
the unfulfilled survival, security and social needs of previous generations)
If so - this is good. This is progress. We just need to get them up another
rung to self fulfillment (the current concern of the flourishing upper middle
classes).
Maslow's hierarchy of needs was not about material goods. One could be poor
and still fulfill all his criteria and be fully realised. You have missed
the point entirely.
Error.... Who mentioned material goods? I think you have not so much "missed
the point" as "made your own one up" .
And while agreed that you could, in theory, be poor and meet all of your
needs (in fact the very point of the analysis is that money, of itself,
isn't what people "need") the reality of the structure of a western capitalist
society means that a certain level of affluence is almost certainly a prerequisite
for meeting most of those needs simply because food and shelter at the bottom
end and, say, education and training at the top end of self fulfillment
all have to be purchased. Share
Also note that just because a majority of people are now so far up the
hierarchy
does in no way negate an argument that corporations haven't also noticed
this and target advertising appropriately to exploit it (and maybe we need
to talk about that)
It just means that it's lazy thinking to presume we are in some way "sliding
backwards" socially, rather than needing to just keep pushing through this
adversity through to the summit.
I have to admit it does really stick in my craw a bit hearing millenials
moan about how they may never get to *own* a really *nice* house while their
grandparents are still alive who didn't even get the right to finish school
and had to share a bed with their siblings.
There is no such thing as a free-market society. Your society of 'self-interest'
is really a state supported oligarchy. If you really want to live in a society
where there is literally no state and a more or less open market try Somalia
or a Latin American city run by drug lords - but even then there are hierarchies,
state involvement, militias.
What you are arguing for is a system (for that is what it is) that demands
everyone compete with one another. It is not free, or liberal, or democratic,
or libertarian. It is designed to oppress, control, exploit and degrade
human beings. This kind of corporatism in which everyone is supposed to
serve the God of the market is, ironically, quite Stalinist. Furthermore,
a society in which people are encouraged to be narrowly selfish is just
plain uncivilized. Since when have sociopathy and barbarism been something
to aspire to?
George, you are right, of course. The burning question, however, is not
'Is our current social set-up making us ill' (it certainly is), but 'Is
there a healthier alternative?' What form of society would make us less
ill? Socialism and egalatarianism, wherever they are tried, tend to lead
to their own set of mental-illness-inducing problems, chiefly to do with
thwarted opportunity, inability to thrive, and constraints on individual
freedom. The sharing, caring society is no more the answer than the brutally
individualistic one. You may argue that what is needed is a balance between
the two, but that is broadly what we have already. It ain't perfect, but
it's a lot better than any of the alternatives.
We certainly do NOT at present have a balance between the two societies...Have
you not read the article? Corporations and big business have far too much
power and control over our lives and our Gov't. The gov't does not legislate
for a real living minimum wage and expects the taxpayer to fund corporations
low wage businesses. The Minimum wage and benefit payments are sucked in
to ever increasing basic living costs leaving nothing for the human soul
aside from more work to keep body and soul together, and all the while the
underlying message being pumped at us is that we are failures if we do not
have wealth and all the accoutrements that go with it....How does that create
a healthy society?
Neoliberalism. A simple word but it does a great deal of work for people
like Monbiot.
The simple statistical data on quality of life differences between generations
is absolutely nowhere to be found in this article, nor are self-reported
findings on whether people today are happier, just as happy or less happy
than people thirty years ago. In reality quality of life and happiness indices
have generally been increasing ever since they were introduced.
It's more difficult to know if things like suicide, depression and mental
illness are actually increasing or whether it's more to do with the fact
that the number of people who are prepared to report them is increasing:
at least some of the rise in their numbers will be down to greater awareness
of said mental illness, government campaigns and a decline in associated
social stigma.
Either way, what evidence there is here isn't even sufficient to establish
that we are going through some vast mental health crisis in the first place,
never mind that said crisis is inextricably bound up with 'neoliberalism'.
Furthermore, I'm inherently suspicious of articles that manage to connect
every modern ill to the author's own political bugbear, especially if they
cherry-pick statistical findings to support their point. I'd be just as,
if not more, suspicious if it was a conservative author trying to link the
same ills to the decline in Christianity or similar. In fact, this article
reminds me very much of the sweeping claims made by right-wingers about
the allegedly destructive effects of secularism/atheism/homosexuality/video
games/South Park/The Great British Bake Off/etc...
If you're an author and you have a pet theory, and upon researching an
article you believe you see a pattern in the evidence that points towards
further confirmation of that theory, then you should step back and think
about whether said pattern is just a bit too psychologically convenient
and ideologically simple to be true. This is why people like Steven Pinker
- properly rigorous, scientifically versed writer-researchers - do the work
they do in systematically sifting through the sociological and historical
data: because your mind is often actively trying to convince you to believe
that neoliberalism causes suicide and depression, or, if you're a similarly
intellectually lazy right-winger, homosexuality leads to gang violence and
the flooding of(bafflingly, overwhelmingly heterosexual) parts of America.
I see no sign that Monbiot is interested in testing his belief in his
central claim and as a result this article is essentially worthless except
as an example of a certain kind of political rhetoric.
social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide,
anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat .... Dementia,
high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses,
even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people.
Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking
15 cigarettes a day:
it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%
Why don't we explore some of the benefits?.. Following the long
list of some the diseases, loneliness can inflict on individuals, there
must be a surge in demand for all sort of medications; anti-depressants
must be topping the list. There is a host many other anti-stress treatments
available of which Big Pharma must be carving the lion's share. Examine
the micro-economic impact immediately following a split or divorce. There
is an instant doubling on the demand for accommodation, instant doubling
on the demand for electrical and household items among many other products
and services. But the icing on the cake and what is really most critical
for Neoliberalism must be this: With the morale barometer hitting
the bottom, people will be less likely to think of a better future, and
therefore, less likely to protest. In fact, there is nothing left worth
protecting.
Your freedom has been curtailed. Your rights are evaporating in front
of your eyes. And Best of all, from the authorities' perspective, there
is no relationship to defend and there is no family to protect. If you have
a job, you want to keep, you must prove your worthiness every day to 'a
company'.
What's missing in each and every case above -- at least in the USA! -- is
countervailing power. 6% labor union density in private business is equivalent
to 20/10 blood pressure in the human body: it starves every other healthy
process.
It is not just labor market bargaining power that has gone missing, it
is not only the lost political muscle for the average person (equal campaign
financing, almost all the votes), it is also the lack of machinery to deal
with day-to-day outrages on a day-to-day basis (that's called lobbying).
Late dean of the Washington press corps David Broder told a young reporter
that when he came to DC fifty years ago (then), all the lobbyists were union.
Big pharma's biggest rip-offs, for profit school scams, all the stuff you
hear about for one day on the news but no action is ever taken -- that's
because there is no (LABOR UNION) mechanism to stay on top of all (or any)
of it (LOBBYISTS).
It is a chicken and egg problem. Before large scale automation and globalization,
unions "negotiated" themselves their power, which was based on employers
having much fewer other choices. Any union power that was ever legislated
was legislated as a *result* of union leverage, not to enable the latter
(and most of what was legislated amounts to limiting employer interference
with unions).
It is a basic feature of human individual and group relations that when
you are needed you will be treated well, and when you are not needed you
will be treated badly (or at best you will be ignored if that's less effort
overall). And by needed I mean needed as a specific individual or narrowly
described group.
What automation and globalization have done is created a glut of labor
- specifically an oversupply of most skill sets relative to all the work
that has to be done according to socially mediated decision processes (a
different set of work than what "everybody" would like to happen as long
as they don't have to pay for it, taking away from other necessary or desired
expenditure of money, effort, or other resources).
Maybe when the boomers age out and become physically too old to work,
the balance will tip again.
Same thing with the internet - it has been hailed as a democratizing force,
but instead it has mostly (though not wholly) amplified the existing power
differentials and motivation structures.
Anecdotally, a lot of companies and institutions are either restricting
internal internet access or disconnecting parts of their organizations from
the internet altogether, and disabling I/O channels like USB sticks, encrypting
disks, locking out "untrusted" boot methods, etc. The official narrative
is security and preventing leaks of confidential information, but the latter
is clearly also aimed in part at whistleblowers disclosing illegal or unethical
practices. Of course that a number of employees illegitimately "steal" data
for personal and not to uncover injustices doesn't really help.
Surely there is a huge difference between the labor market here and the
labor market in continental Europe -- though labor there faces the same
squeezing forces it faces here. Think of German auto assembly line workers
making $60 an hour counting benefits.
Think Teamster Union UPS drivers -- and pity the poor, lately hired (if
they are even hired) Amazon drivers -- maybe renting vans.
The Teamsters have the only example here of what is standard in continental
Europe: centralized bargaining (aka sector wide labor agreements): the Master
National Freight Agreement: wherein everybody doing the same job in the
same locale (entire nation for long distance truckers) works under one common
contract (in French Canada too).
Imagine centralized bargaining for airlines. A few years ago Northwest
squeezed a billion dollars in give backs out of its pilots -- next year
gave a billion dollars in bonuses to a thousand execs. Couldn't happen under
centralized bargaining -- wouldn't even give the company any competitive
advantage.
"What's missing in each and every case above -- at least in the USA! --
is countervailing power."
It was deliberately destroyed. Neoliberalism needs to "atomize" work
force to function properly and destroys any solidarity among workers. Unions
are anathema for neoliberalism, because they prevent isolation and suppression
of workers.
Amazon and Uber are good examples. Both should be prosecuted under RICO
act. Wall-Mart in nor far from them.
Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses,
accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed
in a report by the National Center for Health Statistics .
== quote ==
Anne Case and Angus Deaton garnered national headlines in 2015 when they
reported that the death rate of midlife non-Hispanic white Americans had
risen steadily since 1999 in contrast with the death rates of blacks, Hispanics
and Europeans. Their new study extends the data by two years and shows that
whatever is driving the mortality spike is not easing up.
... ... ..
Offering what they call a tentative but "plausible" explanation, they
write that less-educated white Americans who struggle in the job market
in early adulthood are likely to experience a "cumulative disadvantage"
over time, with health and personal problems that often lead to drug overdoses,
alcohol-related liver disease and suicide.
== end of quote ==
Greed is toxic. As anger tends to accumulate, and then explode, at some
point neoliberals might be up to a huge surprise. Trump was the first swan.
"... [Neo]liberalism that needs monsters to destroy can never politically engage with its enemies. It can never understand those enemies as political actors, making calculations, taking advantage of opportunities, and responding to constraints. It can never see in those enemies anything other than a black hole of motivation, a cesspool where reason goes to die. ..."
"... Hence the refusal of empathy for Trump's supporters. Insofar as it marks a demand that we not abandon antiracist principle and practice for the sake of winning over a mythicized white working class, the refusal is unimpeachable. ..."
"... Such a [neo]liberalism becomes dependent on the very thing it opposes, with a tepid mix of neoliberal markets and multicultural morals getting much-needed spice from a terrifying right. Hillary Clinton ran hard on the threat of Trump, as if his presence were enough to authorize her presidency. ..."
"... Clinton waged this campaign on the belief that her neoliberalism of fear could defeat the ethnonationalism of the right. ..."
"... In the novel, what begins as a struggle against inherited privilege results in the consolidation of a new ruling class that derives its legitimacy from superior merit. This class becomes, within a few generations, a hereditary aristocracy in its own right. Sequestered within elite institutions, people of high intelligence marry among themselves, passing along their high social position and superior genes to their progeny. Terminal inequality is the result. The gradual shift from inheritance to merit, Young writes, made "nonsense of all their loose talk of the equality of man": ..."
"... Losing every young person of promise to the meritocracy had deprived the working class of its prospective leaders, rendering it unable to coordinate a movement to manifest its political will. ..."
"... A policy of benign neglect of immigration laws invites into our country a casualized workforce without any leverage, one that competes with the native-born and destroys whatever leverage the latter have to negotiate better terms for themselves. The policy is a subsidy to American agribusiness, meatpacking plants, restaurants, bars, and construction companies, and to American families who would not otherwise be able to afford the outsourcing of childcare and domestic labor that the postfeminist, dual-income family requires. At the same time, a policy of free trade pits native-born workers against foreign ones content to earn pennies on the dollar of their American counterparts. ..."
"... Four decades of neoliberal globalization have cleaved our country into two hostile classes, and the line cuts across the race divide. On one side, college students credential themselves for meritocratic success. On the other, the white working class increasingly comes to resemble the black underclass in indices of social disorganization. On one side of the divide, much energy is expended on the eradication of subtler inequalities; on the other side, an equality of immiseration increasingly obtains. ..."
[Neo]liberalism that needs monsters to destroy can never politically engage with its enemies.
It can never understand those enemies as political actors, making calculations, taking advantage
of opportunities, and responding to constraints. It can never see in those enemies anything other
than a black hole of motivation, a cesspool where reason goes to die.
Hence the refusal of empathy for Trump's supporters. Insofar as it marks a demand that we
not abandon antiracist principle and practice for the sake of winning over a mythicized white working
class, the refusal is unimpeachable. But like the know-nothing disavowal of knowledge after
9/11, when explanations of terrorism were construed as exonerations of terrorism, the refusal of
empathy since 11/9 is a will to ignorance. Far simpler to imagine Trump voters as possessed by a
kind of demonic intelligence, or anti-intelligence, transcending all the rules of the established
order. Rather than treat Trump as the outgrowth of normal politics and traditional institutions -
it is the Electoral College, after all, not some beating heart of darkness, that sent Trump to the
White House - there is a disabling insistence that he and his forces are like no political formation
we've seen. By encouraging us to see only novelty in his monstrosity, analyses of this kind may prove
as crippling as the neocons' assessment of Saddam's regime. That, too, was held to be like no tyranny
we'd seen, a despotism where the ordinary rules of politics didn't apply and knowledge of the subject
was therefore useless.
Such a [neo]liberalism becomes dependent on the very thing it opposes, with a tepid mix of
neoliberal markets and multicultural morals getting much-needed spice from a terrifying right. Hillary
Clinton ran hard on the threat of Trump, as if his presence were enough to authorize her presidency.
Where Sanders promised to change the conversation, to make the battlefield a contest between a
multicultural neoliberalism and a multiracial social democracy, Clinton sought to keep the battlefield
as it has been for the past quarter-century. In this single respect, she can claim a substantial
victory. It's no accident that one of the most spectacular confrontations since the election pitted
the actors of Hamilton against the tweets of Trump. These fixed, frozen positions - high
on rhetoric, low on action - offer an almost perfect tableau of our ongoing gridlock of recrimination.
Clinton waged this campaign on the belief that her neoliberalism of fear could defeat the
ethnonationalism of the right. Let us not make the same mistake twice. Let us not be addicted
to "the drug of danger," as Athena says in the Oresteia, to "the dream of the enemy that
has to be crushed, like a herb, before [we] can smell freedom."
The term "meritocracy" became shorthand for a desirable societal ideal soon after it was coined
by the British socialist Sir Michael Young. But Young had originally used it to describe a dystopian
future. His 1958 satirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, imagines the creation and growth of
a national system of intelligence testing, which identifies talented young people from every stratum
of society in order to install them in special schools, where they are groomed to make the best use
possible of their innate advantages.
In the novel, what begins as a struggle against inherited privilege results in the consolidation
of a new ruling class that derives its legitimacy from superior merit. This class becomes, within
a few generations, a hereditary aristocracy in its own right. Sequestered within elite institutions,
people of high intelligence marry among themselves, passing along their high social position and
superior genes to their progeny. Terminal inequality is the result. The gradual shift from inheritance
to merit, Young writes, made "nonsense of all their loose talk of the equality of man":
Men, after all, are notable not for the equality, but for the inequality, of their endowment.
Once all the geniuses are amongst the elite, and all the morons are amongst the workers, what meaning
can equality have? What ideal can be upheld except the principle of equal status for equal intelligence?
What is the purpose of abolishing inequalities in nurture except to reveal and make more pronounced
the inescapable inequalities of Nature?
I thought about this book often in the years before the crack-up of November 2016. In early 2015,
the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam published a book that seemed to tell as history the same story
that Young had written as prophecy. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis opens with an evocation
of the small town of Port Clinton, Ohio, where Putnam grew up in the 1950s - a "passable embodiment
of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever
their background." Port Clinton was, as Putnam is quick to concede, a nearly all-white town in a
pre-feminist and pre-civil-rights America, and it was marked by the unequal distribution of power
that spurred those movements into being. Yet it was also a place of high employment, strong unions,
widespread homeownership, relative class equality, and generally intact two-parent families. Everyone
knew one another by their first names and almost everyone was headed toward a better future; nearly
three quarters of all the classmates Putnam surveyed fifty years later had surpassed their parents
in both educational attainment and wealth.
When he revisited it in 2013, the town had become a kind of American nightmare. In the 1970s,
the industrial base entered a terminal decline, and the town's economy declined with it. Downtown
shops closed. Crime, delinquency, and drug use skyrocketed. In 1993, the factory that had offered
high-wage blue-collar employment finally shuttered for good. By 2010, the rate of births to unwed
mothers had risen to 40 percent. Two years later, the average worker in the county "was paid roughly
16 percent less in inflation-adjusted dollars than his or her grandfather in the early 1970s."
Young's novel ends with an editorial note informing readers that the fictional author of the text
had been killed in a riot that was part of a violent populist insurrection against the meritocracy,
an insurrection that the author had been insisting would pose no lasting threat to the social order.
Losing every young person of promise to the meritocracy had deprived the working class of its
prospective leaders, rendering it unable to coordinate a movement to manifest its political will.
"Without intelligence in their heads," he wrote, "the lower classes are never more menacing
than a rabble."
We are in the midst of a global insurrection against ruling elites. In the wake of the most destructive
of the blows recently delivered, a furious debate arose over whether those who supported Donald Trump
deserve empathy or scorn. The answer, of course, is that they deserve scorn for resorting to so depraved
and false a solution to their predicament - and empathy for the predicament itself. (And not just
because advances in technology are likely to make their predicament far more widely shared.) What
is owed to them is not the lachrymose pity reserved for victims (though they have suffered greatly)
but rather a practical appreciation of how their antagonism to the policies that determined the course
of this campaign - mass immigration and free trade - was a fully political antagonism that was disregarded
for decades, to our collective detriment.
A policy of benign neglect of immigration laws invites into our country a casualized workforce
without any leverage, one that competes with the native-born and destroys whatever leverage the latter
have to negotiate better terms for themselves. The policy is a subsidy to American agribusiness,
meatpacking plants, restaurants, bars, and construction companies, and to American families who would
not otherwise be able to afford the outsourcing of childcare and domestic labor that the postfeminist,
dual-income family requires. At the same time, a policy of free trade pits native-born workers against
foreign ones content to earn pennies on the dollar of their American counterparts.
In lieu of the social-democratic provision of childcare and other services of domestic support,
we have built a privatized, ad hoc system of subsidies based on loose border enforcement - in effect,
the nation cutting a deal with itself at the expense of the life chances of its native-born working
class. In lieu of an industrial policy that would preserve intact the economic foundation of their
lives, we rapidly dismantled our industrial base in pursuit of maximal aggregate economic growth,
with no concern for the uneven distribution of the harms and the benefits. Some were enriched hugely
by these policies: the college-educated bankers, accountants, consultants, technologists, lawyers,
economists, and corporate executives who built a supply chain that reached to the countries where
we shipped the jobs. Eventually, of course, many of these workers learned that both political parties
regarded them as fungible factors of production, readily discarded in favor of a machine or a migrant
willing to bunk eight to a room.
Four decades of neoliberal globalization have cleaved our country into two hostile classes,
and the line cuts across the race divide. On one side, college students credential themselves for
meritocratic success. On the other, the white working class increasingly comes to resemble the black
underclass in indices of social disorganization. On one side of the divide, much energy is expended
on the eradication of subtler inequalities; on the other side, an equality of immiseration increasingly
obtains.
Even before the ruling elite sent the proletariat off to fight a misbegotten war, even before
it wrecked the world economy through heedless lending, even before its politicians rescued those
responsible for the crisis while allowing working-class victims of all colors to sink, the working
class knew that it had been sacrificed to the interests of those sitting atop the meritocratic ladder.
The hostility was never just about differing patterns in taste and consumption. It was also about
one class prospering off the suffering of another. We learned this year that political interests
that go neglected for decades invariably summon up demagogues who exploit them for their own gain.
The demagogues will go on to betray their supporters and do enormous harm to others.
If we are to arrest the global descent into barbarism, we will have to understand the political
antagonism at the heart of the meritocratic project and seek a new kind of politics. If we choose
to neglect the valid interests of the working class, Trump will prove in retrospect to have been
a pale harbinger of even darker nightmares to come.
3:39
8:24
Oilman2 says: April 10, 2021 at 11:14 am
![]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1b0thJ.img?h=100&w=100&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=t&l=f&x=199&y=69"}})
Grandfather sentenced to more than 500 years in jail ordered to be released
![]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1b1021.img?h=100&w=100&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=t&l=f&x=1962&y=958"}})
Supporters of President Donald Trump rally in Washington DC to protest 
![a man standing in front of a brick building: Are executive orders on labor rules in store for government workers in a Biden administration?]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"27","h":"19","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1aZBsb.img?h=189&w=270&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"}})
© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Are executive orders on labor rules in store for
government workers in a Biden administration?
![Joe Biden wearing a suit and tie smiling at the camera]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1b0TZl.img?h=70&w=94&m=6&q=60&o=t&l=f&x=550&y=321"}} "Calls growing for Joe Biden to get intelligence briefings - Provided by FOX News")
![FOX News Logo]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAywOab.img?h=16&w=16&m=6&q=60&o=t&l=f"}})
![a group of people holding a sign: Supporters of Donald Trump walk through BLM Plaza, where opponents of the president are gathered, on their way to Freedom Plaza to participate in the "Million MAGA March." IMAGES]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1b0XJd.img?h=70&w=94&m=6&q=60&o=t&l=f&x=1454&y=948"}} "Supporters and opponents of President Trump gather ahead of rally - BASTIEN INZAURRALDE")
![AFP Logo]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB18qTPD.img?h=16&w=16&m=6&q=60&o=t&l=f"}})
![a group of people standing in a room]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB1b10gW.img?h=70&w=94&m=6&q=60&o=t&l=f"}} "Courts reject Trump campaign lawsuits to block Pennsylvania mail-in ballots - Provided by FOX News")
© Getty Images/Peter Byrne/PA Images 26 Follow RT on 
Britain has always been unfair, unequal and divided – Covid-19 has only served to show
this in even more stark relief
GOT TIPS? Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco
BIO EMAIL TWITTER 
SHARE
'I don't recognise Amazon as a
bullying workplace' says Bezos READ MORE
Richard D. Wolff: Viruses like Covid-19 are a part of
nature we must accept. But Capitalism-2020 must be destroyed
ONE IN SEVEN Americans would avoid Covid-19 treatment for
fear of cost, even as pricey new pill shows promise against virus
