Garret Keizer wrote about the desperate plight of American labor unions in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine. His thinking is the same as mine. In the following passage, he quotes himself.
“I grew up with the assumption that there was labor and there was management,” I tell him, “and they’d always be locked in this struggle, and sometimes labor would win and sometimes, probably most of the time, management would win, but they’d be wrestling back and forth, and that’s how it would go on, and in some ways that would be how society progressed.
“And now I’ve started to wonder whether that’s the right way of thinking about it, whether it isn’t a wrestling match but a fight to the death and there are only two possible outcomes.
“One is that labor, not by itself but in a coalition with other groups, prevails to the extent of being able to restructure society in some basic ways.
“Or management, or whatever you want to call it—the One Percent—will destroy all unions and basically there will be masters and slaves.
“What’s wrong with that construction? What am I missing?”
His question is addressed to Larry Cohen, former president of the Communication Workers of America and chairman of the board of Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution movement.
The great economic historian Adam Tooze, in his just-published book, CRASHED: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, showed me things I hadn’t known, and made me rethink things I thought I understood.
Above all, he jolted me out of thinking of the 2008 financial crisis as primarily an American crisis. It was global in nature, its consequences are still rippling through the world economy and its basic causes have not been dealt with
It is a kind of bookend to his earlier book, THE DELUGE: The Great War, America and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931.
In the earlier book, Tooze described the continuing debt crisis following World War One, with Germans unable to pay reparations and the Allies unable to pay their war loans, and how the ongoing debt crisis shaped international relations and governmental policy in that era.
The United States, as the world’s top industrial power and top creditor nation, dominated the world financial system, but American leaders lacked both the understanding and the political means to resolve the crisis. All the United States could think to do was lend money to Germany to keep the system from crashing. In the end the financial system crashed anyhow..
Prior to the 2008 crash, the United States was in the opposite situation. U.S. industrial power had been hollowed out and the United States was the world’s top debtor nation. Economists feared the “twin deficits”—the U.S. trade deficit and government budget deficit—would cause runaway inflation.
This didn’t happen. The U.S. dollar continues to be the medium of world trade, and the financial markets continue to consider U.S. Treasury bonds the world’s safest financial asset.
American financial leaders such as Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers acted boldly to meet the crisis. They bailed out banks, stabilized the financial system and averted a 1930s-type great depression, which was a real possibility.
That was no small achievement. What they failed to do was to reform the system so as to reduce the possibility of a second crash.
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I had put the blame for the crash on Clinton-era deregulation, which gave free rein to speculation and to unethical and illegal (but unprosecuted) manipulation of the subprime mortgage market. Financial markets have always been subject to cycles of expansion and recession, but removing the brakes made the crash a disaster instead of just a problem.
What I learned from Crashed is that deregulation was international. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government completely deregulated British financial markets in 1986, in what was called the “Big Bang.” Her hope was to make the City of London, the British equivalent of Wall Street, the world financial center, and she succeeded. American, European and Asian banks all made London their major hub, even though they did business in dollars. The purpose of Clinton-era regulation was to enable Wall Street to catch up with the City of London.
The international trade in goods is one thing and the international flow of money is another.
I came across these two charts showing how China is at the center of world trade in goods, and the United Kingdom is at the periphery, and the UK is at the center of world banking and China is at the periphery.
Economic historian Adam Tooze said that the UK is trying to make itself China’s financial gateway to the world. It is well positioned to do that. The danger is that the greatest current threat to the world economy is a Chinese meltdown, he wrote, and the UK is even more exposed than the rest of the world.
Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, Texas, is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against incumbent Ted Cruz, an extreme and unpopular right-winger.
He was recently asked whether he thinks NFL football players who kneel during the national anthem, in order to protest police brutality against black people, are showing disrespect to the nation and to veterans.
O’Rourke gave a great answer, which was straightforward, respectful of the questioner and ended:
I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights anytime, anywhere, any place.
He is financing his campaign with small donations and does not accept PAC money, but seems to be out-raising Cruz. I admire the way he campaigns. I’d like to think he could win.
Electronic voting systems have long been vulnerable to tampering and hacking. This has been known for more than 10 years, but little or nothing has been done about it.
Having a vulnerable system is like leaving your door unlocked or the keys in the ignition of your car. Eventually somebody is going to take advantage of you.
If we Americans want to protect our voting systems from tampering, it doesn’t matter if the suspected tamperers are Russians, Republicans or somebody else. We need written ballots that are hand-counted in public.
That’s only one of many problems. Our election system is increasingly rigged to favor Republicans by discouraging or disqualifying voting by poor people, young people and people of color.
How to Fight Voter Suppression in 2018 by Edward Burmila for Dissent Magazine. Twelve ways in which voting procedures are rigged against poor people, young people and people of color, and what to do about them.
A group of scientists have written a paper for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimating the weight of the different kinds of life on earth.
The total carbon in all living things amounts to 550 billion metric tons, they wrote. A metric ton is 2,200 pounds.
The weight of all the world’s plants is an estimated 450 billion metric tons.
The world’s bacteria weigh 70 billion metric tons.
All the world’s animals weigh only 2 billion metric tons, of which 1 billion tons consists of arthropods (including insects).
All the world’s humans total a mere 60 million metric tons.
Put another way, life on earth is, by weight, 82 percent plants, 13 percent bacteria and 5 percent everything else, of which 0.01 percent is human life.
I probably should refrain from posting anything more about Donald Trump and the Mueller investigations until Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issues his final report. But having already posted on this topic, I find it hard to stop. I continually feel the need to make new posts to clarify or explain or update my previous posts.
My present opinion is that if the Mueller investigation finds anything that Donald Trump or his inner circle have done that is worthy of indictment or impeachment, it is much more likely to be in their relationships with Russian oligarchs and mobsters than with Vladimir Putin or (knowingly) with the Russian FSB.
Trump’s whole business career was based on his relationships with corrupt American officials and organized crime figures. The revival of his real state empire after the collapse of his casino gambling business was largely due to infusions of Russian money, as Donald Trump Jr. boasted in 2008.
Nobody that I know of has proved that Trump knowingly helped Russians launder money they got from crime or corruption, but the question is not only what he knew for a fact, but what he probably guessed and was expected to know, but made sure not to know.
If he or his family have done anything blackmail-able, my guess is that it has to do with business dealings with individual Russians.
[Added 8/16/2018] One interesting thing about the reports (linked below) on Trump’s business connections with Russian gangsters is that they began in the mid-1980s. It indicates that the Russian so-called mafia was already a powerful force with ties to Trump even before the fall of Communism.
The regime of Islam Karimov, who ruled the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan from 1991 to 2016, once had a couple of dissidents boiled alive. When the grandmother of one of them complained publicly, she was sentenced to six years in prison.
People under his rule could be jailed, tortured or killed for the slightest reason. Police raped women at will. His country’s chief export crop, cotton, was picked by forced labor. Karimov’s family, especially his daughter Gulnara, and his cronies controlled the economy.
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But he was not a primitive tyrant ruling a backward country remote from the centers of civilization. Rather he and his fellow Central Asian dictators were intimately connected with global finance and politics, and owed their power to those connections..
International banks helped Karimov and his family take their wealth out of the country and hide it. Russian, American and Chinese governments completed for his favor, and turned a blind eye when his secret services reached out to capture and kill political opponents living abroad.
Corrupt Third World dictators that Western governments support are not mere puppets. Empowering them means compromising and corrupting institutions that are supposedly based on the rule of law.
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I recently read two books about Central Asia – MURDER IN SAMARKAND: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terrorby Craig Murray (2006) and DICTATORS WITHOUT BORDERS: Power and Money in Central Asiaby Alexander Cooley and John Heathersaw (2017). I’ll first comment on Murray’s book, then on the other book.
Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian nations were part of the Soviet Union until it broke up. Their governments were continuations of the former Communist governments.
Craig Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004. His descriptions of life in Uzbekistan reminds me of accounts of the USSR in the 1930s
He was a colorful character—a drinker, a womanizer and a proud Scot who appeared in formal occasions in Highland dress complete with kilt. But his physical and moral courage were indisputable.
He once found himself with a stalled car on a country road, alone except for his female interpreter, a female staff member and the widow of a murder victim.
A couple of roughnecks approached, and the widow whispered Murray that they were the murderers of her husband. Murray pushed one of them in the chest, told them he was the British ambassador and to get out of his way. He did.
He in theory was supposed to advocate for human rights laws that the British government had endorsed, but in reality, his superiors wanted him to go along with U.S. policy, which was to support Karimov as a valued supporter of the U.S. “war on terror” and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Uzbekistan was part of the Northern Supply Route, by which U.S. forces in Afghanistan are supported by way of Russia and Central Asia, and it allowed a U.S. air based on its territory.
This mean that Murray was expected to overlook at lot, as he told a Guardian reporter at the time:
People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; asphyxiation; pulling out of fingernails; smashing of limbs with blunt objects; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body. This is not uncommon. Thousands of people a year suffer from this torture at the hands of the authorities.
He once interviewed an old professor about imprisoned Uzbek dissidents. A short time later, the body of the professor’s 18-year-old grandson, bearing the marks of torture, was dumped on the professor’s doorstep. That is the “murder in Samarkand” in the title.
The U.S. ambassador strongly opposed Murray’s meddling. At the time was Uzbekistan was a destination for American “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists. The CIA set great store by information obtained by torture and so did the British government.
I found this video on the kottke.org blog. It is a time-lapse photo of a kidney bean sprouting into a plant, shot at the rate of one shot every 9 minutes 36 seconds and played at the rate of 30 frames per second.
The little bean seems strangely gallant to me. It makes me feel proud to be a carbon-based life form.
The problem is not just pornography. Promoting addictiveness is a widespread business model.
A venture capitalist named Paul Graham, writing in 2010, said it is the nature of free market capitalism to make products addictive.
He wasn’t speaking of pornography in particular, but of everything from tobacco to gambling to compulsive viewing of the Internet.
The logic of the marketplace is that the person who makes the most addictive product wins the largest market share.
More recent Jaron Lanier, a famous virtual reality pioneer, wrote a book giving 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which is about addictive social media companies. The business model for companies such as Facebook is behavior modification, he wrote; they cannot give that model up and stay in business.
Their artificial intelligence systems use personal information, social science information and psychology to create “engagement” — which laymen would call “addiction” — by means of advertising and propaganda. The systems are constantly at work to increase the power of their algorithms.
Stanford University has a Persuasive Technology Laboratory, which learns how to design interactive technology to alter human thoughts and behavior in the interests of advertisers and politicians, not the individuals targeted.
Richard Freed wrote about B.J. Fogg, the head of the laboratory, and how psychological research is used not to liberate people from addictive and compulsive behavior, but the opposite.
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The “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.
Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”
Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use.
Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network, or suggesting that they check — yet again — to see if anyone liked their post or photo.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story, published in 1960, about how a Communist dropped by his home in Ceylon to thank him for us idea of television broadcasting from earth satellites positioned over fixed points of the earth’s surface.
He said the Chinese planned to use this idea to saturate the United States with pornography and turn Americans into a nation of brainwashed pornography addicts.
They would start with broadcasts of images of erotic art on Hindu temples, but then produced specialized programming aimed at every sexual taste identified in the Kinsey Report. They would also have a sideline of sadistic violence, starting with bullfights and working up to every torture and atrocity documented in the Nazi archives.
All this was fiction, of course.
My old friend Steve, who called my attention to this story, said that we Americans are now doing to ourselves what Clarke envisioned our enemies doing to us. As conservative Christian journalist Rod Dreher writes:
We are conducting a radical experiment that has never before in history been tried, because it has never been possible. What happens to individuals and societies when images — moving images — of the most bizarre and violent sex acts imaginable can be instantly accessed by anyone, anywhere, at any time? What does that do to our brains, our minds, and our hearts? What does it to do us as a people?
The American Psychological Association is undecided whether to call excessive porn watching an addiction, a compulsion or just a bad habit, but, in layman’s terms and for all practical purposes, it is an addiction.
Of course, some people enjoy pornography with no obvious ill effects. I have a friend who has read every issue of Playboy since it began its publication in 1953, and he scoffs at my concern.
But compared to what’s out there today, looking at Playboy’s centerfolds is more like looking at the lingerie ads in the old Sears Roebuck catalogs than it is like looking at the porn of today.
And he started at age 18, not age 13. The effect of pornography on young children is different.
“I grew up with the assumption that there was labor and there was management,” I tell him, “and they’d always be locked in this struggle, and sometimes labor would win and sometimes, probably most of the time, management would win, but they’d be wrestling back and forth, and that’s how it would go on, and in some ways that would be how society progressed.
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