America's Credentialed Class Finds Joy In Making The Masses Obey And Comply

ET  |  Censorship is the cudgel that is out there. Censorship and cancellation are the two cudgels that are being used against us. It’s absolutely remarkable how easily we’ve gone from free speech to asking, “How can I make my way around the censorship that’s here?” We have skipped over the outrage phase, which might have led us to a more vigorous protection. Granted, a lot of boiling frog-type dynamics were built into the censorship regime.

But if you’ve been looking for the last 20 years at our press, September 11th brought a quantum leap in this need to marshal people into categories and to prohibit certain things and certain words and certain positions from entering into the public sphere. In 2001, Susan Sontag, one of the great American intellectuals, wrote about having some questions about the way the new war on terror was being pursued, and she was hooted down.

We’re beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as spontaneous as many of us would like to believe. With the recent Twitter Files, and the case that the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana are trying now, we’re finding out that this was anything but spontaneous. There were a number of government actors working in concert with private actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for those of us of a certain age, is unimaginable.

You used to be able to say, “I have the First Amendment. Screw you. I’m going to say what I’m going to say.” We’ve gone from that to, “I have to be on guard because someone’s always watching me.” We went down this hole fairly quickly, and it’s very troubling.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is the treason of the experts, I suppose.

Mr. Harrington:
Yes. If you have been lucky enough to have a mentor in your life, what is a mentor? A mentor is someone who leads you along, who suggests, who looks at you and says, “What skills does this young person have that they are not aware of ?” They do an inquiry into that person and suggest and lead along, and then say implicitly, “How can I help this young person be the best version of themselves as I see it?” That is what an expert does. They do not impose a reality on anyone.

They are very aware of the power they have through their social title, but more often through their moral force. They realize that it’s a sacred thing that they have, and that it needs to be treated with the care that you treat treasures in your life, and that you don’t abuse it. They need to be very rigorous and be able to look at and check some of their ego impulses, and then ask, “Am I using this power to satisfy my ego gratification, more than I am to help the people that I say I am helping?”

It seems that that line has been crossed. There’s a lot of ego gratification that is interfering with what should be a real sober taking of responsibility for a gift of power. Power is a gift in a democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who don’t have as much power as you do.

With the term treason of the experts, I’m playing with history a bit here with the title. It’s from a famous book that was written by Julien Benda after the First World War. He was an intellectual. As you know, the First World War was one of the great cataclysms in the history of the world, with violence that few people had ever seen.

When you go back and study it, you can look at what the violence was about, and the cynicism with which the violence was employed. Leaders marched their hundreds of thousands of troops so that they could get a tiny strip of land. It was an open auctioning of soldiers to be fed into the machine.

Benda wrote this book in 1927 called, “La Trahison des Clercs,” the Treason of the Clerisy. What he’s playing with is that in the world after the late 19th century, the church clerisy began to recede as an important element in society, to be superseded by the intellectual. The independent intellectual was made possible through newspapers and the publishing industry. The new clerisy, as he’s suggesting, are the free intellectuals.

He suggests that the role of the free intellectual is to always be rigorous and to always place themselves above their passions to the best extent they can and say, “What’s really going on here?” He wrote a devastating critique in the mid-1920s in which he takes on both the French intellectuals and the German intellectuals. He said, “They betrayed our trust. They acted as cheerleaders. They sent young men off to war to get destroyed, and became cheerleaders of gross propaganda.” He said, “Come on. We’ve got to reassume the responsibility that goes with having been granted a credential or a moment in power.” The first thing I thought about when this began three years ago was World War I.

Mr. Jekielek:
This being Covid?

Mr. Harrington:
Covid. The Covid triennial that we’re in now. In March of 2020, and you’ll see it in the first essay in the book where I say, “What’s going on here?” My mind immediately went to World War I. There were big forces that were pushing us in ways that didn’t add up. There were hidden hands in places making us do things that simply were not justified at the level of pure rational analysis. I was very grateful that I had studied a bit of World War I.

There’s another wonderful book where you can see some of the madness. It’s by Stefan Zweig, who was a wonderful intellectual back in that time. He talks about what happened in 1914 in Vienna. He thought, “We’ve reached the highest civilization that the world has ever seen.” He was a Viennese Jew. His friends had been integrated into Viennese life, and they were leading Viennese life in many ways.

All of a sudden, they were saying, “Don’t you want to go off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be going off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be excited? I’m going to go. Isn’t it wonderful?” He began to say, “What’s going on in this world that I thought was civilized?” I had the very same reaction in March of 2020.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some people think that this is being done for their own good. It’s not that there are nefarious forces with their own agendas. A lot of these folks genuinely believe in this incredibly dystopian vision of the world, that this is really the right thing to do, and that it will be good for me and good for you. There is a line that I flagged in the book, “Ever more open disdain for the intelligence of the citizenry.” There’s hubris here. That’s particularly infuriating, isn’t it?

Mr. Harrington:
Absolutely. It’s condescension, and I’ve always had a very thin skin for people being condescending to me. One of the nice things that my parents did in general was they talked to us as sentient beings almost from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’ve sought to do with both my children and with my students.

The condescending idea is that you need to dole it out and say, “If I told you, you might not understand. I’m coming from a place of complexity that you can’t understand. You’ll just have to trust me.” This is very insulting to people, and it’s antidemocratic. That’s just a fact.

The premise of democracy, as we understand it, and as it was formed in this country in the late 18th century, was that the farmer, the worker, and the lawyer were all citizens in the same measure. Granted, there would be a natural pecking order in terms of certain skill sets that would emerge. But in the public space, no one was inherently better or in a place to tell someone else what they need to know and how they need to live. It’s one of the great things about this country.

 

Big Tech Has Made The Internet Terrible

jacobin  |  David Moscrop: Well, speaking of grifts, let’s talk about Twitter. The site was never a utopian online space, but it was previously at least better than it is now. What’s driving its collapse beyond Elon Musk purchasing it? Is there something better out there or something better to come?

Cory Doctorow: I think we should thank Elon Musk for what he’s doing because I think a lot of the decay of platforms and the abuses that enable that decay is undertaken slowly and with the finest of lines, so that it’s very hard to point at it and say that it’s happening. And Musk, a bit like Donald Trump, instead of moving slowly and with a very fine-tip pencil, he kind of grabs a crayon in his fist and he just scrawls. This can help to bring attention to issues on which it would otherwise be difficult to reach a consensus.

With Musk and with Trump, it’s much easier to identify the pathology at play and do something about it — and actually get people to understand what the struggle’s contours are and to join the struggle. I think in a very weird way, we should be thankful to Musk and Trump for this.

The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.

To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.

Jeff Bezos is a grocer twice over. He runs a company called Amazon Fresh that’s an all-digital grocer and he runs a company called Whole Foods that’s an analog grocer. And if Amazon Fresh wants to gouge on the price of eggs, he just clicks a mouse and the price of eggs changes on the platform; he can even change the price for different customers or at different times of the day. If Whole Foods wants to change the price of eggs, they need teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns. And so, the ability to play the shell game really quickly is curtailed in the analog world.

The digital world does the same things that mediocre sociopath monopolists did in the Gilded Age, but they do it faster and with computers. And in some ways, this contributes to the kind of mythology surrounding the digital world’s Gilded Age equivalents. They can compose themselves as super geniuses because they’re just doing something fast and with computers that makes it look like an amazing magic trick, even though it’s just the same thing, but fast. And the way that this cycle unfolds is you use this twiddling to allocate surpluses — that is, to give goodies to end users so they come into the platform. This is things like loss-leaders and subsidized shipping.

In the case of Facebook or Twitter, it’s “you tell us who you want to hear from and we’ll tell you when they say something new.” That’s a valuable proposition; that’s a cool and interesting technology. And then you want to bring business customers onto the platform. And so, you’ve got to withdraw some surplus from the end users. So, you start spying on end users and using that to make algorithmic recommendations.

 

Just look at grocery stores in Canada. Loblaws is buying its competitors, engaged in predatory pricing, and abusing both its suppliers and customers to extract monopoly rents and leave everyone worse off. But there’s a thing that happens in the digital world that’s different. Digital platforms have a high-speed flexibility that is not really present in analog businesses.

John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.

An Open Letter To Twitter

consentfactory  |  To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc.
                                cc: Elon Musk

Dear Ms. Irwin,

This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3, 2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my @consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels for approximately two years.

First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.

Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the @consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:

(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:

Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism, and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”) in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.

In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”

(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from 2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being and/or has been “filtered.”

(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.

There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian, or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet. Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory, “interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these “interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole proprietors.

Social Parasitism In Humans (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

counterfire |  It is not surprising that Marx’s concept of class is unpopular in the mainstream. Marx’s picture of a brutally divided society with organised robbery at its heart amounts to a devastating moral condemnation of capitalism. It also directly contradicts the various ways in which the establishment want us to understand the world we live in. Their preferred model of society is a giant market in which individuals interact freely and equally. In reality, of course, individuals are born into society with drastically different levels of wealth. Marx stressed however that it is the way production is organised that more than anything shapes society. ‘The arrangement of distribution’ he says in Capital, ‘is entirely dependent on the arrangement of production’. What people consume, even what people regard as needs, depends in the first instance on what is produced in any given society. The way the goods are distributed depends on the distribution of wealth, itself determined by one’s position in the productive process.

Politicians also like to tell us ‘we are all in it together.’ This illusion can only gain traction because the economy appears to operate independently of human will and control. The idea can’t survive contact with an understanding that the whole system is driven by a tiny minority forcing profit from the labour of the many. We are also told that capitalist investors are ‘wealth creators’. Looked at from the point of view of class, the capital that an investor brings to the table has been extracted – stolen – from past labour. The investor is simply recycling the spoils to make still more money.

Marxism also challenges the idea that capitalism will ‘lift up’ the poor over time. Capitalism has produced unimaginable wealth, but as Marx predicted, its drive to keep wages down means that for most of its existence the distribution of that wealth has become more and more unequal. Forty years of neoliberal capitalism has brought us to the extraordinary point at which just eight men are worth as much as half the world’s population. Marx’s analysis leads to the devastating conclusion that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. Generalised poverty and inequality are a necessary outcome of a system based on competition for profit.

The most radical aspect of all of Marx’s class analysis is however that it shows that in the process of conquering the world and achieving by far the highest levels of exploitation in history, capitalism has created its own nemesis, its own ‘grave digger’ in the working class. Marx believed workers had the potential to overthrow existing conditions for a number of reasons. The first was directly economic. The fact that workers are denied the material benefits of a more and more productive society gave them an immediate interest in resistance. The second was that the degradation experienced by most of humanity under capitalism was concentrated in the working class. The denial of human self-fulfilment, the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’, was most acutely experienced in exploitation and its attendant alienation. Workers have through their experience the most acute consciousness of the immensely destructive and degrading capacities of capitalist accumulation.

Secondly, as well as having an interest in change, workers have the means to make it happen. Just as workers rely entirely on capitalists for their livelihood, capitalists are completely dependent on workers for their profits. Powerless as individuals, collectively, workers have immense potential power. As Marx put it, ‘of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself’. By forcing huge numbers of workers together at the point of production, capitalism creates a counter-power. Struggles over pay and conditions have the capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations:

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination… If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Social Parasitism In Ants (How Different Individuals In A Single Species Can Be)

quantamagazine |  When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi). In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop wings. What made this even stranger was that clonal raider ants don’t even have queens: In keeping with their name, these ants reproduce asexually, so all the ants in a colony are nearly perfect genetic clones.

Kronauer was intrigued by the miniature queens because they seemed so different from the other clonal raider ants even though he believed them to be the same species. But answers to his questions weren’t forthcoming, so he took some specimens, shot some photos for records and then moved on with his work.

A few years later, Kronauer established a lab at Rockefeller University and set up a colony of clonal raider ants for study. One day, his then-doctoral student Buck Trible found a few more of the odd miniature queens in that colony and decided to characterize them.

Trible found that the wings weren’t the ants’ only unusual characteristic. The strange ants also showed different social behaviors, had larger ovaries and laid twice as many eggs. Using genetic tools, he traced all of these changes to a 2.25-million-base-pair-long stretch of DNA. In the ordinary ants, the DNA on each of the two copies of their chromosome 13 was different. But in the miniature-queen ants, the two copies were identical.

As Trible, Kronauer and their colleagues reported in March in Current Biology, all of the characteristics of the odd ants — the wings, the social behaviors and the reproductive traits — were caused by what geneticists call a supergene, a collection of genes that are inherited as a unit and are highly resistant to being broken up. At some point in their evolution, the ants had acquired a second copy of that supergene, and that chromosomal change had transformed their bodies and behaviors. The findings suggested a new mechanism for how complex combinations of body parts and behaviors can sometimes surface all at once in evolution: through a mutation that duplicates a supergene, toggling on entire suites of traits like strings of lights controlled by a light switch.

Ant researchers are excited by the work, and not just because it seems to solve a decades-old mystery about how at least one form of social parasitism evolves in the insects. The supergene discoveries may also help them pin down long-sought features in ants’ genetic architecture that make their colonies develop as hierarchical castes of queens and workers.

More broadly, the new study also offers insights into a fundamental evolutionary question about how different the individuals in a single species can be.

Just How Much Damage Will One Ignorant Old Criminal Joe Biden Be Allowed To Do?

kunstler  |  Reality has become so elastic in America now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money laundering and racketeering operations.

     In fact, the committee outlined a shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank accounts it landed in. Thus: No evidence of wrongdoing.

      Meanwhile, another whistleblower from the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme. Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah….

     Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration:

I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source.
They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter
was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger,
the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.
This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer
is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.

It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stefan ‘Hamburger’ Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive intelligence, methods and foreign sources.

  Would they dare pull this one with Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him. The people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes. Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.

    Does the Party of Chaos actually suppose they can keep pretending “Joe Biden” will run for a second term? Articles of impeachment await for bribery, at least, and perhaps treason. At this point, the case couldn’t be more clear-cut. The House is solely in-charge of the impeachment process. The hearings will be brutal. A bill of impeachment would then go to the Senate for trial, as we’ve seen twice before recently. Do you think the mainstream media can avoid covering that?

      You must conclude that there is no way that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. He may resign rather than face impeachment. And then what? I’ll tell you what: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. starts making-over the Democratic Party the way that Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party in 2016. Bobby Kennedy has the tremendous advantage of standing completely outside the matrix of corruption, lying, and Woke mental illness that the Dems have made of themselves, and the voters are going to notice, even if The New York Times doesn’t.

70-80 Year Olds In Cognitive Decline Are Unemployable Yet They're Exclusively Running The Country

counterpunch  |  Our government is run by second-raters. Mediocrities in the state department and national security apparatus have seized the political steering wheel, because president Joe Biden, like senator Dianne “No Show” Feinstein and many others in our extensive gerontocracy do not inspire confidence. And the results are disastrous for Americans. De-dollarization across much of the planet and the possibility of a two-front, conceivably radioactive war against China and/or Russia. You think these two developments sound far-fetched? Well, the former is already underway, and as for the latter, rabid neo-cons and jingoistic four-star generals have stepped into the vacuum at the top and on your TV screen, and these dimwits can’t imagine losing, so now we move closer than ever before, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to igniting nuclear Armageddon.

Just picture the Ukrainian drone that struck the Kremlin May 3 and ask yourself what would have happened had a Russian drone collided with the roof of the white house? The U.S. might well have launched nuclear missiles – amirite? We denizens of planet earth are all very lucky, and especially those of us who reside in American cities, that Russian leaders were rational enough not to target western metropolises with nuclear warheads. They have made clear that they won’t be further provoked, even by preposterous U.S. media claims that the Kremlin droned itself, claims that reveal yet again two sorry facts: first, our press outlets think we are morons and second, they parrot CIA talking points.

That’s the hot war. Then there’s the economic one. Dollar boosters like Treasury secretary Janet Yellen like to note that it would be very difficult for any other country’s money to replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. True enough. But who says the world has to HAVE a reserve currency? What China, Russia and the Global South show, as they stop trading in dollars and dump U.S. Treasuries, is that they can conduct business in their own currencies and will do so, having witnessed Washington’s idiotic sanctions on numerous nations and thus having been terrorized by the imbecilic weaponization of the dollar. So most of the world, aside from the west, now takes steps to abandon the U.S. financially. The dollar’s reign is ending, and soon we Americans will face a radically altered and indisputably grimmer future. All thanks to the stupidity of the very pedestrian people at the top in Washington, starting back in the Clinton administration.

As for the China-Russia alliance, anyone with a brain could see that coming. But not our congressmembers. And those forewarned had not a care in the world. As long ago as 1997, senator Joe Biden proclaimed: “And then the Russians say to me ‘You keep expanding NATO, we’re going to make friends with China.’ I almost burst out laughing. I could barely contain myself, I said ‘Good luck to you guys. If China doesn’t work out, try Iran.’” Well, who’s laughing now? Not the U.S. president, who can’t even get China’s leader to answer his phone calls. Not the American people, who, according to some polls (58 percent, said a Reuters-Ipsos poll in October), worry that this administration of very unexceptional people will enrage the Russia-China colossus and thus stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile congress throws gasoline on this political dumpster fire with its Ukrainian Victory Resolution. In the House, Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen and South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson sponsored this bill. A companion resolution, introduced by senators – Connecticut Dem Richard Blumenthal, liberal darling and Rhode Island Dem Sheldon Whitehouse, and South Carolina Republican Lindsay “Bombs Away” Graham – now percolates through that chamber of the capitol. This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over,” according to Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft April 28.

This is called asking for trouble. Because these are precisely the points that led to Russia’s invasion in the first place. Moscow tried to negotiate over Kiev joining NATO, but Washington turned up its nose. And as far as the Russians who populate the Donbas are concerned, well, it looked like Ukraine had ethnic cleansing for them on the schedule, and the west didn’t object. So Russia invaded. In short, congress now actively touts its own recipe for nuclear World War III, since that is what the Ukrainian Victory Resolution will bring.

The Dollar Is Finally Being Dethroned

unherd  |  In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

 

Balkanization And Neofeudalism In Competition With Globalism

unherd  |  When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

 

 

Politicians Seeing "Which Way The Wind Blows" On Homeless Eliminationism

vice  |  New York City’s mayor and the state’s governor, who have tied their reputation to increasing the vaguely-defined feeling of safety that people get on the subway, were alternately vague or quick to deflect blame. When asked about the killing on Wednesday, Governor Hochul initially said, "People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior." It was not clear who was deserving of consequences, in Hochul’s view, but many interpreted it to be Neely. 

On Thursday, Governor Hochul tried to strike a different tone, saying, ​​"I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on our subway trains. And so our hearts go out to his family. I’m really pleased that the district attorney is looking into this matter. As I said, there had to be consequences.” After apparently viewing the video, she said, “the video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him, I would say it was a very extreme response.”

Mayor Eric Adams is more hesitant to denounce Neely’s killing.“There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to Gothamist. “However,” he added in his statement, “we do know that there were serious mental health issues in play here, which is why our administration has made record investments in providing care to those who need it and getting people off the streets and the subways.” In a CNN interview, Adams called comptroller Brad Lander and others “irresponsible” for labeling the man who killed Neely a vigilante and calling his killing a lynching. 

When asked during the same interview whether it was right to intervene, Adams, a former transit cop, told interviewer Abby Phillip of CNN: “We have so many cases where passengers assist other riders. And we don't know exactly what happened here,” he said.

Adams has been intentionally provocative on the issue of houselessness: he made a rhetorical show of increasing sweeps of encampments, though they have more or less proceeded at the same pace as under his predecessor, who made 9,600 sweeps during his tenure. In November, he instructed police and medical workers that they can involuntarily detain people who appear mentally ill and homeless, though so far it hasn’t led to more people being taken to the hospital.

The statement released by Daniel Penny’s lawyers seemed to mostly reflect Adams’ perspective, pointing to the mental health crisis as the real culprit. They also presented Penny’s actions as a group attempt to maintain order and safety: “Daniel, with the help of others, acted to protect themselves, until help arrived,” they wrote.

The idea that visible homelessness means public order is breaking down, with an attendant rise in violent crime, is a powerful narrative being pushed by right-wingers and the wealthy, but Democratic mayors and civic leaders also participate in this rhetoric. Predictably, vigilantism has become normalized across the country. 

There have been a few high-profile cases just in the last few weeks where these violent fantasies are on full display. In San Francisco, a businessman named Don Carmigniani claimed to have been assaulted by an unhoused person wielding a metal pipe on April 5, and a 24-year old man named Garrett Doty was arrested for it.  

During the criminal case against Carmigniani’s assailant, video was released showing Carmigniani moments earlier approaching Doty while he was lying on the sidewalk and appearing to spray him with bear spray before Doty, startled, gets up and is confronted by Carmigniani, who a third party witness said was threatening the unhoused man. Based on police reports, defense attorneys alleged that Carmiginiani was regularly spraying houseless people with bear spray. Prosecutors later told the 52-year-old Carmigniani that they were dropping charges against Doty.

When tech executive Bob Lee was murdered in April, tech executives including Elon Musk blamed the killing on out of control violent crime. (According to Mission Local, violent crime in San Francisco is still near historic lows.). When police arrested a suspect, it turned out to be another tech executive, Nima Momeni, who had allegedly stabbed Lee. 

The rush of some in the tech sector to cast blame made sense, as the industry is complicit in this crisis: aside from causing rents to spike and exacerbating the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area, the Citizen app enables vigilantism,  and NextDoor is a cesspool of NIMBYism and anti-homeless rhetoric, 

Public camping bans have sprung up independently all over the country, and a single conservative think tank headed by a co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir  has successfully made it a felony to sleep outdoors  in multiple states.

 

Once Upon A Time America Had Better Politicians And Better Policies...,

nps.gov  |  The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established by Congress on March 31, 1933, provided jobs for young, unemployed men during the Great Depression. Over its 9-year lifespan, the CCC employed about 3 million men nationwide. The CCC made valuable contributions to forest management, flood control, conservation projects, and the development of state and national parks, forests, and historic sites. In return, the men received the benefits of education and training, a small paycheck, and the dignity of honest work. Three CCC companies operated in the North Dakota badlands between 1934 and 1941, contributing to projects that today’s visitors can still appreciate.
 
Companies and Camps
The North Dakota State Historical Society sponsored the three CCC companies that worked in the badlands from 1934 to 1941. All three CCC companies in the badlands arrived in 1934. About 200 men were assigned to each company.

When CCC Companies 2767, 2771, and 2772 arrived, the men lived in tents until buildings could be erected at their camps. When completed, each camp included a full complement of buildings: barracks, mess hall, recreational hall, bath house, latrine, supply, garage, and headquarters. The camp complex also included its own classrooms, hospital, barber shop, post office, canteen, and sometimes a theater. The buildings were frame structures heated by wood and coal burning pot-belly stoves.

Company 2767’s camp was located on the west bank of the Little Missouri River in what is now the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park from July, 1934 to 1937. Companies 2771 and 2772 established camps adjacent to one another in 1934 on the north bank of the Little Missouri River near what is now the entrance to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Company 2771 moved out in 1935, but Company 2772 remained until the fall of 1939. In 1939, Company 2771 moved to a site on the east bank of the Little Missouri River just south of Jones Creek, which they occupied until November, 1941.
 
The Work
The CCC sought to provide the maximum opportunity for labor at a minimum cost for materials and equipment. With little more than strong backs, shovels, and picks, the CCC built roads, trails, culverts, and structures. When building structures, the CCC utilized native materials, such as the local sandstone, which they quarried themselves with star drills, sledge hammers, muscle, and sweat.

In the badlands, the CCC, along with the Emergency Relief Administration (ERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), worked on numerous projects. Even as the men were working on these construction projects, it was unclear who would ultimately be responsible for managing these recreation areas; Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park was not established until 1947.

In the North Unit of the park, the CCC built the two picnic shelters in the Juniper campground area and the River Bend Overlook shelter. In the South Unit, the CCC built the now-abandoned East Entrance Station, the entrance pylons, and portions of the park's roads and trails. The CCC also built structures at the nearby Chateau de Mores State Historic Site.
 
CCC Work Crew
A CCC veteran who worked in the badlands reflected on the 50th anniversary of the CCC, "You learned how to live with other men, you learned self esteem ... you learned about yourself."

The People
The CCC was open to unemployed men ages 17 to 23.5 who were U.S. citizens. Enrollees served 6-month terms, and were allowed to re-enroll at the end of each term up to a maximum of two years. A CCC worker’s salary was $30 a month, most of which the men sent home to their families. Meals, lodging, clothing, medical, and dental care were all free for enrollees. The men generally spent $5 to $8 of their monthly salary on toiletries, postage, haircuts, and occasional entertainment. The few enrollees promoted to Assistant Leader and Leader positions earned a bit more, $36 and $45 per month, respectively.

While the CCC men lived and worked on a regimented schedule, there was time for continuing their education through evening classes and for leisure activities on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Living and working together, the men learned to get along. Some formed life-long friendships.

As the generation who participated in the CCC passes, the legacy of their work lives on. When you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drive the roads, stop at the River Bend Overlook, or hike out to the old East Entrance Station. Take a few moments to reflect on the CCC, the men who labored on these projects, and the investment America made during its most desperate economic period. The Civilian Conservation Corps' hard work all those years ago still continues to pay off today.