Histyar Qader: Iraqi Kurdish Leaders' No-Good very Bad Year

Histyar Qader writes about Iraqi Kurdish Leaders’ No-Good very Bad Year.

The end of the year brought strife to Iraqi Kurdistan, The northern region has to deal with a reduced area of influence, internal and external political problems, and a financial crisis.

This year brought major transformation to the semi-autonomous northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan and by the end of the year it had become clear that these changes were not necessarily going to be positive. The future is not looking so bright up north.

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The federal government made it clear who was actually still in charge, closing Kurdish airspace and demanding that international border crossings be put back under federal control. It became very clear, very fast, that much of what many Kurdish voters had been taking for granted as their regional right, had always just been Baghdad doing them a favour — or perhaps being otherwise preoccupied, who knows.

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Internal and inter-party conflicts continue and most recently, in late December, the major opposition parties in Iraqi Kurdistan withdrew from the regional parliament altogether.

Part of the reason for all the internal political tension, analysts say, is because of the loss of the region’s long-term political leadership, a leadership that, for all its faults, had maintained political checks and balances and some semblance of unity.

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Iraqi Kurdish locals had been demonstrating corruption and the fact that many civil servants had not been paid for some months. The Kurdish government has major debts, has seen its revenue sources reduced significantly and owes back pay to hundreds of local workers.

The region that was once doing so well, and seemed so peaceful and prosperous, that it claimed the title “the new Dubai”, has fallen onto extremely hard times, both politically and economically.

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Kurdistan has always been an ideal, not a reality. Shared cultural identity is not enough to create a nation state. This has to be a degree of political unity.

In Kurdistan's case, the political unity was personal. As the personalities depart the scene, the political unity dissapates.

It would be difficult to build a shared political vision of Kurdistan based on four (4) separate independence struggles: against Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The differences between those struggle are currently too great for a united front for the liberation of Kurdistan.

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Joumanah El Matrah: The feared other: Peter Dutton's and Australia's pathology around race

Joumanah El Matrah writes about The feared other: Peter Dutton's and Australia's pathology around race.

Dutton’s elevation to the home affairs ministry was always to read crime through the lens of ideology; this is the only context in which linking crime to race makes sense. Increasingly it appears that this government wants us to conceive of ourselves as a nation under siege from foreigners, and right now from foreigners that come from one of the most discriminated communities in Australia. Dutton seems compelled to persuade us that those who are most disempowered in our society are our greatest threat.

Ideology is perhaps also why Dutton chose to portray Victoria as a state of residents too frightened to leave home. This is a state that is both Australia’s progressive heartland and the nation’s best attempt at a highly diverse society. Dutton’s implication is that this is the cost of progressive politics and the cost of any sort of pride in our cultural diversity. But this is not a state of scared people, and how most Victorians would respond to Dutton’s comments was best captured by Victoria’s minister for youth affairs Jenny Mikakos’s description of them as “bullshit”.

The damage of wholesale vilification of a community, especially its young people who already face considerable challenges, is sometimes irreparable. It is not only the damage that is wrought from labelling a community as one prone to violence, it is also the damage that is wrought by communities having to defend themselves against accusations of violence as if they are personally responsible.

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Racism divides us so that the elite can rule.

Resistance starts with overcoming fear.

In seeing the dignity in others, we see the dignity in ourselves.

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Juan Cole: Trump Engineered Saudi Soft Coup, attack on Qatar, to Save Self

Juan Cole writes that Trump Engineered Saudi Soft Coup, attack on Qatar, to Save Self.

This naked power grab on the part of Saudi Arabia has likely destroyed the budding Gulf Cooperation Council (that groups Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar), which aimed at being sort of like the European Union plus NATO for the small Gulf Arab oil monarchies. Some of its rationale was to resist Iranian hegemony, so breaking it up helps Iran. Iran has correct relations with Qatar, and stepped in to help offset the Saudi boycott.

To any extent that Trump encouraged the rash Saudi move, he helped further fragment politics in the region. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and SecDef Mattis clearly did not approve and have tried behind the scenes to undermine Trump policy in this regard.

So to conclude: Trump did not get hundreds of billions in new investments in the US from Saudi Arabia. He did manage to put in an erratic and aggressive crown prince in Riyadh, helping destabilize the region in ways Iran will take advantage of. The other corner of Wolff’s reporting on the May trip, that Trump thought it was a prelude to Peace in Our Time in Israel-Palestine, is too complex to take on here but that was also obviously a scam.

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In his eagerness to prove his deal-making abilities, Donald Trump is destabilizing the Middle-East by emboldening Saudi Arabia and strengthening the geopolitical clout of Iran.

In private business, Trump could walk away from a failed deal because he was using other people's money. In international affairs, a failed deal can have horrendous consequences.

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TeleSur: Israeli Ruling Party Votes to Annex West Bank and Seize Last Palestinian Lands

TeleSur reports that Israeli Ruling Party Votes to Annex West Bank and Seize Last Palestinian Lands.

Many analysts expected bolder expansionist moves by the right-wing head of state, especially in light of U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that Washington would move its embassy to Jerusalem — a gesture that was tantamount to a U.S. recognition of unilateral Israeli claims to the divided and unlawfully-held Arab city.

The U.S. announcement was welcomed by the Israelis, who have been working alongside Saudi Arabia in hopes to pressure the Palestinian Authority to accept Donald Trump’s so-called Arab-Israeli “deal of the century” that has not yet been announced. The “deal” would see the Palestinian question settled in exchange for the normalization of ties between Tel Aviv and the Gulf monarchies and the integration of Israel into the regional “family of nations” that the Saudis claim leadership over.

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The Palestinians are about to be screwed over “bigly”. This they have always known: the US unilaterally supports Israel; the Saudis would sell out the Palestinians in a heart-beat.

The only regimes that still garner political support for supporting the Palestinians (Syria, Iran) are figthing for survival.

It is up to the Arab Street to remind the Palestinians that they are not alone. The Palestinian struggle is an Arab one. And a human one.

We, in Australia, should remind Israel that they cannot commit genocide.

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Barry Ritholtz: Taking Stock of a Very Weird Year in Markets

Barry Ritholtz is Taking Stock of a Very Weird Year in Markets.

• Overseas Trounces U.S.: This was a notable performance metric. Although the Standard & Poor's 500 Index had a good year, up 21.7 percent, the rest of the world beat the U.S. Europe had an even better year, with a 27 percent gain, while the Pacific region advanced 28.9 percent and emerging markets surged 37.4 percent. Even Japan, mired in slow growth for ages, outperformed with a 24.3 percent gain. A global economic recovery and improving corporate profits worldwide deserve the credit, not deregulation or tax cuts in the U.S.

• Volatility: A favorite theme of ours reasserted itself last year: Political volatility doesn't equal stock-market volatility. Despite all of the political sturm und drang, be it North Korean missiles, health-care repeal drama, white nationalists is Charlottesville, Virginia, and too many other @realDonaldTrump tweets to keep up with, stock volatility was the lowest in a half-century. You have to go back to 1964 to find average daily change for the S&P 500 as low as it was in 2017. It wasn’t just the U.S.; the lack of connectivity between politics and equities in emerging markets saw those stocks ignore all manner of political crises as well.

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This would mean that investors are consistently confident. They are more so outside of the US.

This well be a delusion on the part of investors. They imagine themselves isolated from everything happening around the world. Maybe they are confident that governments will bail them out as governments did back in the Great Financial Crisis, and there would be no political ramifications for doing so.

When elites lose any connection to reality, we enter dangerous times.

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GLW: Iran rocked by mass anti-regime protests fuelled by poverty

Iran rocked by mass anti-regime protests fuelled by poverty.

Iran is a country of 80 million people. Despite extensive natural resources, such as oil, gas, coal, copper … and considerable wealth, almost 70 per cent of people live in poverty. At the same time, we have growing upper classes and super rich that are mostly linked to different factions of the regime and children and relatives of the officials and various forces within the establishment. We have witnessed the most shameful theft of resources and financial embezzlement in the country’s history by these groups while workers and poor people have been continuously humiliated and their protests for their rights and accountability frequently crushed.

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We strongly oppose and condemn any interference by Trump’s administration and its allies like the Israeli regime, and the Iranian right-wing and pro-monarchy opposition, in the protest movements in Iran. The working and poor people of Iran know well that Trump’s fascist and ultra-right politics would bring nothing but more disaster to the country. We need the workers’ and socialist organizations and progressive forces in the world to stand in solidarity with the working class and the poor oppressed people of Iran and help strengthen anti-capitalist, anti-poverty and social justice movements while increasing efforts in identifying and isolating the right wing, nationalist and pro-imperialist elements.

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The Capitalists are divided — the Iranian and American Capitalists fight each other.

Do not let this fight fool you. In the face of a proletarian revolution, the Capitalists would unite with the petite-bourgeoisie to crush the revolution.

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Gay Alcorn: Helen Garner's The First Stone is outdated. But her questions about sexual harassment aren't

Gay Alcorn writes that Helen Garner’s The First Stone is outdated. But her questions about sexual harassment aren’t.

Garner is “aware of the immense weight of men on women, the ubiquity of their attentions, the exhaustion of our resistance”.

But through the book, there is no sense that that could change. It just couldn’t be comprehended at the time. It is hard to overstate what a mind shift that has been over the past few months, what an explosion of insight and possibility.

For this moment is not really about sexual harassment. It is about the unfinished project of equality between men and women. That has much more to do with disadvantaged women with casual jobs than Hollywood stars with all their privileges. But most women, from all classes, all backgrounds, recognise that “weight”.

Yet Garner won’t let women off the hook, not for a moment. She reminds us that feminism is about justice.

Unjust is the word for the behaviour of men who use their position of power as a weapon in forcing women to endure their repeated sexual approaches, or who take revenge for a knockback by distorting a woman’s career or making her workplace intolerable or sacking her. Unjust does not apply to a clumsy pass at a party by a man who’s had too much to drink.

These days, it does, and mostly should, if that man is a leader in an organisation. But her point about proportion, about gradation of offence, rings true today. The hardline view that every transgression reinforces rape culture and misogyny is a hindrance, not a help. “The ability to discriminate must be maintained,” writes Garner. “Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world.”

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In realising the dignity of women, men realise their own dignity.

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Dan Crawford: The end game is privatization...vouchers are one step

Dan Crawford writes that The end game is privatization…vouchers are one step.

Jennifer Berkshire pointed Peter Greene to:

If you take nothing else from this piece, remember this— for many of the most ardent voucher supporters, school vouchers are not a destination, but just a stop-gap, something that will have to do until they can finally move on their real goal— the complete dismantling of public education in this country, replaced with a loose system of unaccountable, unregulated private schools. That fully privatized system, not a voucher system, is the goal. Keep your eye on the ball.

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So as it is in America, so it will be in Australia.

Capital has to continually find new sources of profit. In Australia, higher education has become a very profitable sector for the time-being. And as the many scandals over the private schools has shown (outside of the rampant pedophilia) is the shameless pursuit of profit over the educational needs of the students.

As a society, we have to decide whether education is a public good available to all, or just another commodity, like iron ore or cars, to be exploited for profit.

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Juan Cole: Are Iran's protests Economic or Political?

Juan Cole asks: Are Iran's protests Economic or Political?

It also appears that the protests began last Thursday [2017-12-28] with support from hard liners who were hoping to embarrass President Rouhani. The latter had put a lot of political capital behind the nuclear deal with the Security Council, on the grounds that it would end sanctions and improve the economic situation, which had become dire under Obama’s severe sanctions. The joke turned out to be on the hard liners, who started a wave of protests but lost control of them, with crowds chanting not just death to Rouhani (what the hard liners were going for) but death to Khamenei and death to the Revolutionary Guards (the very institutions the hard liners wanted to strengthen).

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One problem with the debate between Abrams and Thomas Erdbrink of the NYT is that separating out economic and political discontents is not easy, especially in Iran, where the government (as in most petro-states) owns some 80% of the economy. I think we may conclude that some voices in some of the protests have begun speaking of overthrowing the government, and the question for many protesters no longer seems to be high priced food but rather the clerical regime itself.

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That is the problem with state capitalism: economic performance and political legitimacy are intertwined.

The protests initially started as political maneuvering by the hard-liners, but ended up by attacking the legitimacy of the state.

Israel hoped to capitalise on this unrest in order to undermine the Iranian influence in the Middle East by causing the Iranian government to withdraw while saving itself.

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Anna Patty; 'Class cluelessness' in Australia is not a white working class issue

Anna Patty writes that 'Class cluelessness' in Australia is not a white working class issue.

Dr David Burchell, who lectures on History and Political Thought at the University of Western Sydney, says traditional working-class people in Australia valued the respect they earned in their local community because they held down stable jobs and worked with their hands with some skill.

Dignity was found in hard work and in holding down a steady job and being able to support a family. But those values are not shared by the professional managerial class that live in city centres.

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However, the gulf between the traditional working class and professional managerial class has widened and the Australian Labor movement has drifted further away from socially conservative views held by the traditional working class, while embracing many of the more progressive social values held by the professional managerial class.

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The bread winner model family also remains robust among blue-collar workers. The traditional working-class vision for a stable job and nostalgia for the nuclear family continues to be the ideal for many working parents who barely see each other. They often tag team their child care, which can mean meeting in a car park to hand over the baby as one parent starts work and the other finishes.

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In Australia, class divisions are not simple. Watson says there is a divide between wage earners and the self-employed. That means tradies vote Liberal alongside other self-employed business people, fee-charging lawyers and other members of the upper managerial class.

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In Australia, the post-war professional managerial class had an interest in nation building including large infrastructure projects, including social housing during the Whitlam era. During the Hawke/Keating period that social infrastructure investment started to become dismantled.

Watson argues that when the professional managerial class developed its own strong economic interests aligned with the owners of capital, an antagonism with the traditional working class developed.

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There has always been a split between the ordinary proletariat and the worker aristocracy. The latter have always aligned themselves with the petite-bourgeoisie.

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Chris Dillow: Conservatives & austerity

Chris Dillow ponders the strange relationship between Conservatives & austerity.

There’s a second way. Once we acknowledge that people’s incomes depend upon fiscal policy it follows that poverty is a failure of government rather than of individuals. Conservatives can then no longer regard it as a moral failing.

Fiscal austerity, therefore, is needed in order to maintain the “natural” hierarchy in which the rich are entitled to power because they are virtuous heroes whilst the poor must be stigmatized as lazy and feckless.

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Secondly, American rightists have no problem with the prospect of rising government debt if it means tax cuts for the rich. They value inequality and hierarchy over fiscal prudence.

Yes, support for austerity is an intellectual error. But it might be one founded in a peculiarity of the Conservative psyche. Keynesians, I fear, under-rate this point.

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George Orwell expressed the same sentiments in his book, 1984.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

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And I cannot resist including Adam Suttler's rant about why the people need the rulers:

People need hierarchy to protect them from all of those threats that the hierarchy created.

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Steve Roth: The Evolution of Ownership...get off my lawn

Steve Roth writes about The Evolution of Ownership…get off my lawn.

It’s not hard to see the crucial fact in this little fable: property rights are ultimately based, purely, on coercion and violence. If the controlling tribe can’t enforce its claim through violence, their “ownership” is meaningless. And those claimed rights are not just inclusionary (the one tribe can use the water). Property rights are primarily or even purely exclusionary. Owners can prevent others from doing anything with the owners’ property. Get off my lawn!

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In the modern world we’ve largely outsourced the execution of that violence, the monopoly on violence, to government. If a family sets up a picnic on “your” lawn, you can call the police and they’ll remove that family — by force if necessary. And we’ve multiplied the institutional and legal mechanics and machinery of ownership a zillionfold. The whole world’s financial machinery — the immensely complex web of claims, claims on claims, and claims on claims on claims, endlessly and densely iterated and interwoven — all comes down to (the threat of) physical force.

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Balance sheets, accounting, and their associated concepts (assets, liabilities, net worth, equity and equity shares) are the technology humans have developed to manage, control, and allocate our (violence-enforced) ownership claims, a crucial portion of our social relationships. At first the balance sheets were only implicit — when the tribe first laid claim to the spring. But humans started writing them down and formalizing them, tallying those ownership and obligation relationships, thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. (Coins weren’t invented till about 800 BC.)

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Roth gives a succinct history of property. The importance of the state in enforcing those rights are critical.

Different property rights are the basis of social classes. Slavery treats slaves as property. Feudalism treats a tract of land along with its people as property. Capitalism treats the products of labour as property.

In a Capitalist society, the government is not neutral, nor are the police, the justice system, or the army. They all exist to enforce and protect Capitalist property rights.

Socialist control of a Capitalist government is untenable because of the inherent contradiction between what the government protects and promotes, and what the mass of the people want.

A Socialist revolution means the sweeping away of the Capitalist instruments of power, and replacing them with Socialist ones.

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Paul Mason: Churchill's genius was understanding how to keep working-class radicalism in check

Paul Mason writes that Churchill’s genius was understanding how to keep working-class radicalism in check.

Churchill’s choice to fight — even though, as the writer of the Oldman movie claims, he veered dangerously close to the idea of a compromise with Hitler — was the result of a patriotic calculation. If you don’t fight, you lose the empire, was one line of argument. The other, implicit, but understood above all by the Labour moderates around the Cabinet table of the all-party coalition — Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood — was about domestic politics.

Boris Johnson, in his recent biography of Churchill, constructs a convincing alt-history around the question: what would have happened to the world in a “non-Churchill universe”? Nazi tyranny across Europe is the answer — but Johnson can’t quite bring himself to complete the picture by asking what it might have done to British politics. The answer is, they would have exploded. In a non-Churchill universe, the Labour leaders, under pressure from their mass base, might never have joined the National Government. They would certainly have broken with it if, under cover of a semi-press blackout, the British government had handed Malta, Gibraltar and some African colonies to Germany and then sued for a separate peace. To sell that peace to the public, the entire supercilious apparatus of the media, monarchy and civil service would have been deployed.

Churchill’s genius in 1940 was not just that he understood the military situation, but that he understood the dynamics of the British class system and what kept working-class radicalism in check better than any Conservative member of the cabinet.

Both the current Churchill biopics portray him as a flawed elitist, past his prime, drawing on emotion and willpower to make an otherwise inexplicable break with his blundering past. Meanwhile the Dunkirk movie portrays Britain as a kind of sepia postcard, in which people manning the flotilla boats stand like model figurines against fragments of Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Though all three films are eminently watchable, it is important to understand that a false reality is being constructed, in which class conflict, ignorance and the deep pro-fascist sympathies of the large sections of the British elite are edited out. Once you factor them back in, the redemptive character of Churchill’s actions become all the more impressive.

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Fascism is what the Capitalists want when the petite-bourgeoisie and proletariat want change. Fascism allows the Capitalists to pit the petite-bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

Fascism always starts as a petite-bourgeoisie revolutionary movement as has been happening in the US. This movement manifested itself as the TEA Party, White Rights, Mens Rights, etc.. The latter are all based on groups that have lost power under social changes. These groups want to return to a mythical past.

This is the danger with Donald Trump. His political base is within the petite-bourgeoisie. He has to align with fascist tendencies if he wants to keep their support. He had to do this at the recent Charlottesville protests.

Even if Trump does not have Fascism as his destination, his reliance on those who do, drives him in that direction. This tendency will be deepened as Trump comes into conflict with other factions within the Capitalist class. He needs the support of the Fascists to survive any political fight.

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Will Steffen: Penrith swelters while Florida freezes: climate disruption is to blame

Will Steffen writes that Penrith swelters while Florida freezes: climate disruption is to blame.

Terms like "global warming" and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is "climate disruption", which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.

"Climate disruption" was often used by Professor John Holdren, science adviser to former US president Barack Obama, to emphasise that a 1 or 2 degree increase in global average temperature does not simply translate into modest, uniform warming but rather triggers surprisingly sharp changes in extreme weather and disrupts longer-term weather and climate patterns.

The world's ecosystems and critical human systems, such as agriculture, are adapted to the relatively stable climatic conditions of the past 12,000 years. These include not only temperature, but also the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and the oceans that move heat and moisture around the planet and deliver the seasonal and geographical patterns of rainfall, heat and storms that we consider normal. These normal patterns are increasingly being disrupted by what is often termed "climate change".

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If people think migration is bad now, wait until whole populations start moving in reaction to permanent changes in climate. In history, people have always moved away from areas that became drier to those that became wetter. Rainfall dictates where people live. This should be obvious to Australians.

Syria is probably the best current example of how a state is failing because of climate disruption. The prolonged drought caused an internal migration which the government failed to address adequately. This caused a social crisis that escalated in a brutal civil war.

Australia should not be worried about a few hundred migrants in boats. Australians should be worried about 120 million Indonesians who face the choice between dying in the soon-to-be-too-hot islands, or moving south to cooler climes.

By the time it is obvious that action should be taken, it would be too late to restore normalcy quickly. The cost of reversing the emission grows daily. The future cost of doing nothing is high; the future cost of fixing the problem will be even higher.

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Andrew Bacevich: A Country Addicted to War

Andrew Bacevich writes about A Country Addicted to War.

The fact is that the individuals entrusted by President Trump to direct U.S. policy believe with iron certainty that difficult political problems will yield to armed might properly employed.  That proposition is one to which generals like Mattis and Nicholson have devoted a considerable part of their lives, not just in Afghanistan but across much of the Islamic world. They are no more likely to question the validity of that proposition than the Pope is to entertain second thoughts about the divinity of Jesus Christ.

In Afghanistan, their entire worldview — not to mention the status and clout of the officer corps they represent — is at stake.  No matter how long the war there lasts, no matter how many “generations” it takes, no matter how much blood is shed to no purpose, and no matter how much money is wasted, they will never admit to failure — nor will any of the militarists-in-mufti cheering them on from the sidelines in Washington, Donald Trump not the least among them.

Meanwhile, the great majority of the American people, their attention directed elsewhere — it’s the season for holiday shopping, after all — remain studiously indifferent to the charade being played out before their eyes.

It took a succession of high-profile scandals before Americans truly woke up to the plague of sexual harassment and assault.  How long will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don’t work?  Here’s hoping it’s before our president, in a moment of ill temper, unleashes “fire and fury” on the world.

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As Upton Sinclair once wrote:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

The objective reality of failure in Afghanistan has its roots in the subjective reality of American morality superiority. The Americans cannot succeed without challenging their subjective reality.

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David Von Drehle: The Trump Recession is coming

David Von Drehle writes that The Trump Recession is coming.

The stock market races endlessly upward. Help-wanted signs paper shop windows. Economies around the world are in a rare period of simultaneous growth, and tax cuts have brightened corporate boardrooms around the US.

But a downward turn lies somewhere ahead, be it a recession, slump or, God forbid, crash. A necessary part of the energy of economic cycles comes from the ebbing of each wave.

History suggests that the next recession is not far off. The current expansion, though relatively weak, has been steady since June 2009, making this the third-longest upward climb on record.

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This analysis relies solely on historical comparisons which is a good first-order approximation. But it explains nothing, and predicts nothing.

However, each boom and bust cycle is different. But the underlying cause remains the same: over-production.

In this boom cycle, there is no obvious commodity that is driving the boom. This makes it difficult to estimate when over-production will occur and the bust starts.

That there will be over-production is one of the fundamental laws of motion for Capitalism. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

The Wikipedia article (List of recessions in the United States) points out:

The National Bureau of Economic Research dates recessions on a monthly basis back to 1854; according to their chronology, from 1854 to 1919, there were 16 cycles. The average recession lasted 22 months, and the average expansion 27. From 1919 to 1945, there were six cycles; recessions lasted an average 18 months and expansions for 35. From 1945 to 2001, and 10 cycles, recessions lasted an average 10 months and expansions an average of 57 months. This has prompted some economists to declare that the business cycle has become less severe. Factors that may have contributed to this moderation include the creation of a central bank and lender of last resort, like the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the establishment of deposit insurance in the form of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933, increased regulation of the banking sector, the adoption of interventionist Keynesian economics, and the increase in automatic stabilizers in the form of government programs (unemployment insurance, social security, and later Medicare and Medicaid). See Post-World War II economic expansion for further discussion.

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These economic stabilizers are under attack by Conservatives. Removing the stabilizers will make live for the workers miserable when a crash happens. But, the rich do not give a fuck for the poor.

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Steve Roth: The winners have us all playing a loser's game

Steve Roth writes that The winners have us all playing a loser’s game.

Perfect markets concentrate wealth. It’s their nature. But at some point, market-generated wealth concentration strangles those very markets (compared to markets with broader distributions of wealth). If a handful of people have all the wealth, how many iPhones will Apple sell? If only a few have the wealth to buy cars, automakers will produce a handful of million-dollar Bugattis, instead of forty handfuls of $25,000 Toyotas. Sounding familiar?

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Why, then, aren’t we spending our lives on the right side of this chart? It’s a total win-win, right? The answer is not far to find. Nassim Taleb shows with some impressive math (PDF) what’s also easy to see with some arithmetic on the back of an envelope: if a few richer people (who dominate our government, financial system, and economy) have the choice between making our collective pie bigger or just grabbing a bigger slice, grabbing the bigger slice is the hands-down winner.

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To summarize: perfect markets, left to their own devices, concentrate wealth. Concentrated wealth results in less wealth, and far less collective well-being. (You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned fairness. It matters. But I’ll leave that to my gentle readers.)

This all leads one to wonder: how could we move ourselves into that happy world of rapidly increasing wealth and well-being on the right side of the graph? Hmmmm…

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Roth agrees that Marx was right about the dynamics of Capitalism. However, Roth wants to save Capitalism through the expansion of the Welfare State.

Yet, Roth points out the main impediment to the expansion of the Welfare Stete: the capture of the state by the wealthy. The plutotracy cares not whether it grows fast or slow, as long it stays in control.

Roth fails also to mention the importance of the USSR in the creation of the Welfare State in the West. The Welfare State was a political instrument to counteract Communist propaganda about a workers' paradise. Without the USSR, there is no longer a need for the Welfare State because there is now no alternative.

Or it could be as George Orwell wrote in 1984?

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

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A free society is a Communist one.

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Daniel Little: Is history probabilistic?

Daniel Little asks Is history probabilistic?

However, there are several crucial flaws in this analysis. First, the picture is flawed by the fact that history is made by purposive agents, not algorithms or mechanical devices. These actors are not characterized by fixed objective probabilities. Historical actors have preferences and take actions to influence outcomes at crucial points. Second, agents are not fixed over time, but rather develop through learning. They are complex adaptive agents. They achieve innovations in their practices just as the engineers and bureaucrats do. They develop and refine repertoires of resistance (Tilly). So each play of the game of political history is novel in important respects. History is itself influenced by previous history.

Finally, there is the familiar shortcoming of simulations everywhere: a model along these lines unavoidably requires making simplifying assumptions about the causal factors in play. And these simplifications can be shown to have important consequences for the sensitivity of the model.

So it is important to understand that social causation is generally probabilistic; but this fact does not permit us to assign objective probabilities to the emergence of central states, dictatorships, or democracies.

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This is a very important part of Lennist Party theory. A revolutionary party must attract and develop cadre who are able to intervene at critical points in the development of the consciousness of the proletariat. And, in doing so, the cadre develop themselves and othe party members by reflecting upon their collective experience.

This is also why the revolutionary party is always the subject of intense survellience and intervention by state security appartuses. The prime example is COINTELPRO that was run by the FBI.

The development of the proletarian consciousness has to consider the history of the society in which they operate. Consciousness is not made in a vacuum. Consciousness is built through experience, reflection, and action.

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Chris Dillow: The politics of death

Chris Dillow investigates The politics of death.

Neither response, though, is what we get. Instead, when Aditya Chakrabortty said on Question Time last week that the government is “send[ing] disabled people to their deaths” the reaction was as if he’d spat in the church’s collection plate (9 mins in).

Which in a sense he had. Aditya had the bad manners to point out that politics is a matter of life and death — at least for the poor — thereby puncturing his audience’s illusion that it is just a cosy little debating game in which the only costs are that a few MPs move down the career ladder. I had hoped that the Grenfell disaster would destroy this illusion, but it seems the imbecilities of posh folk don’t die as quickly as do the poor.

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We live in a political and economic system (Capitalism) in which winners are celebrated and the losers are forgotten. Every day Capitalism exists, we are compilicit in mass murder.

Indeed, the obliviousness of the death of poor leads the celebration of death under Fascism. As Miguel de Unamuno said:

Just now I heard a necrophilous and senseless cry: 'Long live death'. And I, who have spent my life shaping paradoxes must tell you as an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellent to me. Let it be said without any slighting undetone. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately there are too many cripples in Spain now. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millan Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the greatness of Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him. General Millan Astray would like to create Spain anew, a negative creation in his own image and likeness; for that reason he wishes to see Spain crippled as he unwittingly made clear.

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Seth Godin: Where would we be without failure?

Seth Godin asks Where would we be without failure?

Failure (and the fear of failure) gives you a chance to have a voice…

Because failure frightens people who care less than you do.

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People are continually advising me to give up because Communism and Socialism has failed. They point to historical examples (of which there are many). My response is that we are learning from failure.

The real question is whether Communism is a worthwhile goal? Would the struggle towards Communism make us better people? Or are we content to wallow in the mire of selfish self-interest?

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Mike Kimel: The Upcoming Liberation of Mexico (and Parts of Africa)

Mike Kimel writes about The Upcoming Liberation of Mexico (and Parts of Africa).

All of this, taken together, suggests that Mexico is an awful place for Mexican and non-Mexican people alike. And yet, the land has so much promise. Plus great weather. The humane and socially aware solution is obvious: the government of Mexico must be overthrown. Ideally, it would be replaced by indigenous, peaceful, inclusive, tolerant, non-racist, intersectional, organic and home-grown Mexicanx policies and traditions. Obviously, in Mexico, that would be a social structure derived from Aztec culture. That would be the ideal outcome. However, given the conditions people in Mexico are willing to tolerate to get to and live in the US, the bar is very, very low. That means the odds of making things worse are infinitesimally small.

So for this operation, the likelihood of success is large, the probability of failure is tiny, and the benefits are huge. What’s not to like about regime change in Mexico? Furthermore, the benefits of this regime change wouldn’t accrue just to Mexicans and African refugees who are currently trapped in Mexico. Even white supremacists — who because they are in the majority in the US would bear the bulk of the cost in blood and treasure — would have a benefit: penance. The karmic load they carry would diminish slightly, and they might even develop some empathy. Some white supremacists might stop and think about how the world could have turned out but for their accident of birth. With a different history, America’s white supremacists would have all ended up in Mexico. Conversely, the Mexican population (together with America’s minority population and the few white Americans who are racially aware) might have ended up living in the US, perhaps even a US operating along pre-Columbian Mexican norms.

Now, this opportunity for racist white people to achieve some small measure of redemption doesn’t have to stop with Mexico. In fact, it shouldn’t stop with Mexico. From the LA Times article, it is clear there are people in countries in Africa who could be spared having to flee their homeland if the white supremacists in the US would develop a small measure of humanity and overthrow their governments too. Now I know what you’re thinking… we heard a similar “we will be greeted as liberators” line about a decade and a half ago. But it was different then. The motives were selfish. Our leaders thought they were acting to make Americans safer, and to make matters worse, they didn’t even bother to differentiate between the safety of the racist majority who should just die already and those who are worthy of such safety.

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Kimel is being sarcastic here. The US government currently loves the Mexican and African governments. If the US government did not, the CIA would be busy trying to overthrow these foreign governments.

The litany of US interventions to overthrow unfriendly governments can be found here.

The US government does not give a fuck about ordinary people whether they are white, black, brown, yellow, red, etc.. All Capitalist governments want to divide us by race, gender, sexual preferences, culture, history, language, nationality, etc..

It is up to we workers to develop our own consciousness about how the current world is constructed to benefit the rich and screw over the poor.

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Steve Roth: Democracy. Capitalism. Socialism. Choose Any Three of the Above

Steve Roth writes about Democracy. Capitalism. Socialism. Choose Any Three of the Above.

None of this is to suggest that there is a political parity or symmetry among these anti-ists — at least in the United States. Anti-democrats are essentially invisible and voiceless, their message a fatal political non-starter. As for anti-capitalism, try naming one successful politician this side of the Seattle city council (one member) who even makes noises about “eradicating capitalism.” Certainly on a national stage, doing so would be political suicide. (The Bernie movement is, rather, all about the ubiquitous social institutions detailed above, and about pushbacks to corporate power within our heavily capitalistic system.) Anti-socialists, on the other hand, stand at the very pinnacles of power; their voices are manifold, loud, and widely broadcast.

But regardless of their relative political power, all of these these ill-considered, utopian, faith-based, tribalistic anti-isms are a bane on the body politic. At this point in our evolution, capitalism, socialism, and democracy are necessary for any country’s prosperity, economic freedom, and economic well-being. And they all need improvement — just as we’ve been fitfully improving things for hundreds, even thousands of years.

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Socialism has to develop out of Capitalism. This has to be a conscious development — Socialism is not inevitable. Socialism has to be chosen daily.

Democracy is vital for the functioning of Socialism and the eventual evolution to Communism.

There well may be residual pockets of Capitalism in a Socialist society as is now happening in Cuba. But the majority of the productive forces will be owned and managed by the people.

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Ted Rall: How Society Makes Victimhood a No-Win Proposition

Ted Rall examines How Society Makes Victimhood a No-Win Proposition.

Society doesn’t like victims. Victims make us uncomfortable. It’s probably a vestige of our Darwinian instinct for survival: the monkey clan prospers when its members are healthy and lucky, but finds life perilous around those who are sick and unfortunate. We turn away from the unlucky: the homeless man, the woman whose face bears burn scars, the black guy getting choked to death by cops. Not our business, not our problem, these are troubles to be avoided. I do it too.

This instinct goes double for those who refuse to soft-pedal their victimhood. Not even the most active social justice warriors have Rose McGowan’s back in her Twitter crusade against Harvey Weinstein — she’s a bit too angry for comfort. (Her recent drug arrest doesn’t help.)

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This is especially so in a society that is built on Darwinian survival: Capitalism. The apex predator is worshipped and emulated. Victims are trophies to be displayed and mocked.

Donald Trump is an unabashed Capitalist and enough Americans wanted him to be a symbol of their country that he became POTUS.

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Daniel Little: Organizational dysfunction

Daniel Little writes about Organizational dysfunction.

One intriguing hypothesis is that correction of dysfunctions requires observation, diagnosis, and incentive alignment. It is necessary that some influential actor or group should be able to observe the failure; it should be possible to trace the connection between the failure and the organizational features that lead to it; and there should be some way of aligning the incentives of the powerful actors within and around the organization so that their best interests are served by their taking the steps necessary to correct the dysfunction. If any of these steps is blocked, then a dysfunctional organization can persist indefinitely.

The failures of Soviet agriculture were observable and the links between organization and farm inefficiency were palpable; but the Soviet public had not real leverage with respect to the ministries and officials who ran the agricultural system. Therefore Soviet officials had no urgent incentive to reform agriculture. So the dysfunctions of collective farming were not corrected until the collapse of the USSR. A dysfunction in a corporation within a market economy that significantly impacts its revenues and profits will be noticed by shareholders, and pressure will be exerted to correct the dysfunction. The public has a strong interest in nuclear reactor safety; but its interests are weak and diffused when compared to the interests of the industry and its lobbyists; so Congressional opposition to reform of the agency remains strong. The same could be said with respect to the current crisis at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the influence of the financial industry and its lobbyists can be concentrated in a way that the interests of the public cannot.

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For an organization to function correctly, it must be under democratic control. A wide democratic base ensures that an organization functions for the benefit of the wider society.

The width of a democratic base determines spread of benefits from that organization. An organization exists to benefit its owners. If a narrow clique control an organization, then a narrow group reaps the benefits, while the majority bear the costs. This is the case under Capitalism.

Socialism means that there is social control of important organizations. This would mean that the benefits from these organizations would flow to the wider community.

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Ten truths about Cuba's general elections

Ten truths about Cuba's general elections.

Although the media spends a lot of time portraying Cuba as a “dictatorship”, it has barely covered the fact that Cubans have once again begun a process of electing officials, starting from the local and going all the way up to the national parliament.

Already, 78% of the population has participated in the process of selecting candidates for local government elections scheduled for November 26. A second round is scheduled for December 5 [2017] in cases where no candidate reaches 50%.

More than 27,000 candidates (from an initial list of 60,800 nominees) will contest for more than 12,000 seats spread out across 168 municipal assemblies. Sixty-five per cent of candidates are not sitting incumbents and 35% are women.

The second round of the process, to elect representatives to regional parliaments and the National Assembly, is scheduled for early next year [2018]. President Raul Castro has already announced he will step down as the head of state following the election of the next National Assembly.

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A dictatorship is any political entity in which the Western elites do not get their own way:

• Iran is a dictatorship because the Iranian people think for themselves.
• Chine is currently not a dictatorship because Western companies are making lots of money.
• Russia is a dictatorship because the Russian elite have their own agenda.
• Venezuela is a dictatorship because the people are putting their needs first.
• Saudi Arabia is not a dictatorship because they sell cheap oil and buy expensive arms from the West.

When the Western media talk about democracy, they mean the multi-billion dollar political campaigns in which very rich people run for office. Democracy is perverted into a scam in which the rich get richer, and the poor get ripped off.

This was why the Bernie Sanders campaign so frightened the elite:

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