Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can’t lie
to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and
zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That’s all there is! I think
programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There’s something
spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it.
Science has been misused for political purposes many times in history. However, the most glaring
examples of politically motivated pseudoscience happened just recently, in XX century. That means that
it is useful to review historic examples of "Zombie ideas" used for political purposes and the pattern
that defines that abuse.
The important lesson of XX century is that discredited economic and political ideas, no matter how
absurd, don't die as long as they serve well power that be. In a way they are real living
dead, sucking blood from humans. Those ideas that should have died long ago, still shamble forward,
like Zombies. Usage of such ideas is one of the most dangerous deception schemes practiced by
modern elites
It's not easy to write about pseudo science. The problem has to do with the fluid nature of the concept.
It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement about its constituent elements. But
first and foremost it involved subjugation of scientific aims to political goals and deliberate attempt
in deception and subsequent cover up. But recently almost all social and economic science became political
and all politics involved deception: to say that a politician is not lying is the same as to say that
an alcoholic is not drinking. Still there are different degrees of lies and different level of density
of the "cloud of deception".
Discredited ideas with political support or "Zombies" can be extremely dangerous for people who oppose
them. Lysenkoism probably represents classic early example when
an set of obvious lies was supported by repressive apparatus of state and dissenters were prosecuted
and sentenced to Gulag. For nearly 45 years, the Soviet government used propaganda to foster unproven
theories of agriculture promoted by Trofim Lysenko. Scientists seeking favor with the Soviet hierarchy
produced fake experimental data in support of Lysenko’s false claims. Contradicting scientific evidence
from the fields of biology and genetics was simply banned. University programs
taught only Lysenkoism
. This state supported attempt to suppress generics continued for over forty years, until 1964,
and even managed to spread to other communist countries, such as China.
What we saw it as a tragedy in Stalin's Russia genetics, we now see it as a farce in USA economics
with neo-classical economics flourishing with the supportive guidance of neoliberal state and financial
oligarchy.
The whole neoclassical economics is essentially a set of zombie ideas which are kept in the forefront
by financial oligarchy. The financial crisis of 2008 buried key ideas of 'free market liberalism'
(aka neoliberalism), such as the 'Efficient Markets Hypothesis', yet these zombie ideas still were dug
our, dressed and continue to be sold via major newspapers and journals. Much like Lysenkoism in the
USSR by CPSU. See
This is a real Faustian bargain for academic scholars. One can trade the independence for political
influence, good salary and other perks. It is also helps in the power grab. And despite popular image
of scientists, they proved to be as corruptible, if not more corruptible, as anybody else. Historically
the scientific community is generally held together and all its affairs are peacefully managed through
its joint acceptance of the same fundamental scientific beliefs. Science is best practiced in a voluntary,
peaceful and free atmosphere.
But that idyllic arrangement firmly belongs to the past. Now we can talk only about the level
of political pressure on scientists via research grants, not so much about presence or absence of such
a pressure. What really matters as far as politics and science is concerned is what type of environment
the individual scientists have to work in and what degree of freedom they can enjoy.
Historically the situation changed irrevocably since early XX contrary, which signified discovery
of atomic particles. It should be understood that the modern scientist, built in the modern "neoliberal"
democracies, is at the same time - and it is possible that even in the first place - a political agent,
a manipulator. For the unwashed masses a public scientist represent the ultimate carrier of truth for
a given discipline, so his opinion have a distinct political weight. And the architects of these systems
use this values of scientists to the fullest extent possible. Like we can see with neoclassical economics,
scientists have turned into an instrument of cognitive manipulation, when under the guise
of science financial oligarchy promote beneficial to itself a false and simplistic picture of the world,
which brainwash the masses into "correct" thinking.
In this sense one can say that Lysenkoism represented a natural side effect of shrinking of
freedom of the scientific community and growing influence of political power on science. As by Frederick
Seitz noted in his The
Present Danger To Science and Society
Everyone knows that the scientific community faces financial problems at the present time. If
that were its only problem, some form of restructuring and allocation of funds, perhaps along lines
well tested in Europe and modified in characteristic American ways, might provide solutions that
would lead to stability and balance well into the next century. Unfortunately, the situation is more
complex, made so by the fact that the scientific establishment has become the object of controversy
from both outside and inside its special domain. The most important aspects of the controversy
are of a new kind and direct attention away from matters that are sufficiently urgent to be the focus
of a great deal of the community's attention.
The assaults on science from the outside arise from such movements as the ugly form of "political
correctness" that has taken root in important portions of our academic community. There are to be
found, in addition, certain tendencies toward a home-grown variant of the anti-intellectual Lysenkoism
that afflicted science in the Stalinist Soviet Union. So-called fraud cases are being dealt with
in new, bureaucratic ways that cut across the traditional methods of arriving at truth in science.
From inside the scientific community, meanwhile, there are challenges that go far beyond those
that arise from the intense competition for the limited funds that are available to nourish the country's
scientific endeavor.
The critical issue of arriving at a balanced approach to funding for science is being subordinated
to issues made to seem urgent by unhealthy alliances of scientists and bureaucrats. Science
and the integrity of its practitioners are under attack and, increasingly, legislators and bureaucrats
shape the decisions that determine which paths scientific research should take. There is, in
addition, a sinister tendency, especially in environmental affairs, toward considering the undertaking
of expensive projects that are proposed by some scientists to remedy worst-case formulations of problems
before the radical and expensive remedies are proven to be needed. They are viewed seriously
though they are based on the advice of opportunistic alarmists in science who leap ahead of what
is learned from solid research to encourage support for the expensive remedies they perceive to be
necessary. The potential for very great damage to science and society is real.
Of course, the rise of 'Lysenkoism' in the Soviet Union in the late 40th of the twentieth century
is one of the most tragic pages of the history of science. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist,
came to prominence as the proponent of a theory of heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism.
The details of this theory need not concern us, except to note that it was 'Larmarckist' in its contention
that it is possible for organisms to inherit acquired characteristics. This was wrong and the
principles of Mendelianism - the theory of heredity - were well understood by then. But Lysenko theory
fitted nicely with the Soviet ideology. Particularly, the idea that acquired characteristics could be
inherited held out the promise of the perfectibility of mankind which as strange as it may sound was
the necessary precondition to irreversible victory of socialism/communism (later when nationalistic
forces tore apart the USSR it became clear that such hopes are completely misplaced).
So the Stalinist state intervened in the pre-exiting scientific struggle by declaring the victor
and the consequences, certainly for many of the scientists involved and arguably also for the USSR agriculture,
were disastrous. The essence of Lysenkoism is that pseudo-scientific theory became a pseudo-religious
cult and the power of state was used to suppress dissidents. Many scientists were exiled; some killed.
Unfortunately we cannot dismiss the obviously pernicious use of ideology by Lysenko and his supporters
simply as an aberration of the era that is often brushed aside as 'the cult of personality' (with or
without naming the personality in question). This proved to be much more dangerous and at the same time
remarkably resilient phenomenon that survived the dissolution of the USSR. Actually the situation repeated
with the USA economics when anything that was not neo-classic was suppressed was by-and-large similar
although this time this time it happened without any killings.
Do not fool yourself that Lysenkoism is irrevocably connected with communist ideology. The link was
poorly accidental. In reality Lysenkoism emerged more like a cult which was extremely convenient for
the control freaks in high position in government. It's not a secret that a lot of high-level administrators
in academic institutions belong to the category of
micromanagers
and as such they are naturally predisposed to Lysenkoism.
In general "Lysenkovisation of science" occurs when the state tries to control both the methodologies
and goals of scientific activity and that happens all over the world, although to different degree.
In the USSR huge bureaucratic institutions such as VASKhNIL and VIEM had been set up with the specific
goal to control resources and, especially, scientific press. Part of the reason that Lysenkoism
gained official support in the Soviet Union was because the Mendelian approach to genetics contradicted
official ideology, in particular, Engels's dialectical materialism. In early 50th, just before his death
Stalin began to sense that Lysenkoism can hinder practical science by interfering with the academic
atmosphere of toleration of dissent most conducive to scientific accomplishment. He even went as far
as to declare that
“no science can develop and proper without the clash of opinions, without freedom of criticism.”
But it was too late...
Other governments are also far from being immune from this kind of tendency to select between scientific
theories on the basis of ideology rather than the balance of evidence.
More benign variant of Lysenkoism that does not rely on the power of the state is usually called
Cargo Cult Science. Another related term is
"Mayberry
Machiavellis". A long time ago -- well, actually it was just a year, but it seems like a
lot longer than that -- a former Bush advisor John DiIulio got into quite a bit of trouble for revealing
to Esquire that the White House did not possess, in any conventional definition of the term,
a
policy-making process:
...on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only
casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who
meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros
and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff
would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information
on a given issue...
This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently
talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue
to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives
or policy proposals as far right as possible.
Dan Gardner - Senior Writer for The Ottawa Citizen writes: "Cabinet meetings were scripted, Mr. O'Neill
discovered, by White House staffers who sent advance notes to cabinet secretaries telling them when
they were 'supposed to speak, about what, and for how long.'" Is this the shadow of Politburo or what?
The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics, by David Colander, Hans Föllmer,
Armin Haas, Michael Goldberg, Katarina Juselius, Alan Kirman, and Thomas Lux: [From the conclusion]
..."We believe that economics has been trapped in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which much of its
research efforts are not directed towards the most prevalent needs of society. Paradoxically
self-reinforcing feedback effects within the profession may have led to the dominance of a paradigm
that has no solid methodological basis and whose empirical performance is, to say the least, modest.
Defining away the most prevalent economic problems of modern economies and failing to communicate
the limitations and assumptions of its popular models, the economics profession bears some responsibility
for the current crisis. It has failed in its duty to society to provide as much insight as possible
into the workings of the economy and in providing warnings about the tools it created. It has also
been reluctant to emphasize the limitations of its analysis. We believe that the failure to even
envisage the current problems of the worldwide financial system and the inability of standard macro
and finance models to provide any insight into ongoing events make a strong case for a major reorientation
in these areas and a reconsideration of their basic premises."
While at the surface it looks like rent-seeking behavior of dishonest economists the analogy is pretty
strong. A broad critique of Neoclassical economics has been put forward in the book Debunking Economics
by Steve Keen See, for example:
Henry Simons and Irving Fisher supported the Chicago Plan to take away the bankers
ability to create money.
"Simons envisioned banks that would have a choice of two types of holdings: long-term
bonds and cash. Simultaneously, they would hold increased reserves, up to 100%. Simons saw
this as beneficial in that its ultimate consequences would be the prevention of
"bank-financed inflation of securities and real estate" through the leveraged creation of
secondary forms of money."
Bankers do need to ensure the money they lend out gets paid back to balance their
books.
Banking requires prudent lending.
If someone can't repay a loan, they need to repossess that asset and sell it to recoup
that money.
If they use bank loans to inflate asset prices they get into a world of trouble when
those asset prices collapse.
As the real estate and stock market collapsed the banks became insolvent as their assets
didn't cover their liabilities.
They could no longer repossess and sell those assets to cover the outstanding loans and
they do need to get the money they lend out back again to balance their books.
The banks become insolvent and collapsed, along with the US economy.
When banks have been lending to inflate asset prices the financial system is in a
precarious state and can easily collapse.
Cont ......
Sound of the Suburbs 2 hours ago
That was the 1920s.
What was the ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices that collapsed in Japan in 1991?
Japanese real estate.
They avoided a Great Depression by saving the banks.
They killed growth for the next 30 years by leaving the debt in place.
Japan could study the Great Depression to avoid this fate.
What was the ponzi scheme of inflated asset prices that collapsed in 2008?
"It's nearly $14 trillion pyramid of super leveraged toxic assets was built on the back
of $1.4 trillion of US sub-prime loans, and dispersed throughout the world" All the
Presidents Bankers, Nomi Prins.
We avoided a Great Depression by saving the banks.
We left Western economies struggling by leaving the debt in place, just like Japan.
It's not as bad as Japan as we didn't let asset prices crash in the West, but it is this
problem has made our economies so sluggish since 2008.
We, in turn, seem to have learnt something from Japan, as they did let asset prices
crash.
The banking system and the markets are still closely coupled.
Any significant fall in asset prices will feed back into the banking system.
We are trapped, and the only way to keep things from collapsing is to keep pumping in
more and more liquidity.
It's a choice
Let the assets bubbles collapse, and watch this feed back into the financial
system.
Keep the whole thing afloat, but make things worse in the long run as the bubbles
just get bigger and bigger.
We've gone for option two.
That's why the FED get so jittery when the markets start to fall.
During the coronavirus lockdowns there was no way the markets could be allowed to
reflect what was going on in the real economy.
The banking system would go down.
Sound of the Suburbs 1 hour ago remove link
They learnt from the mistakes of the 1920s and put regulations in place to ensure this
didn't happen again.
Financial stability arrived in the Keynesian era and was locked into the regulations of
the time.
"This Time is Different" by Reinhart and Rogoff has a graph showing the same thing
(Figure 13.1 - The proportion of countries with banking crises, 1900-2008).
Neoclassical economics came back and so did the financial crises.
The neoliberals removed the regulations that created financial stability in the
Keynesian era and put independent central banks in charge of financial stability.
Why does it go so wrong?
Richard Vague had noticed real estate lending balloon from 5 trillion to 10 trillion
from 2001 – 2007 and knew there was going to be a financial crisis.
Richard Vague has looked at the data for financial crises going back 200 years and found
the cause was nearly always runaway bank lending.
We put central bankers in charge of financial stability, but they use an economics that
ignores the main cause of financial crises, private debt.
Most of the problems are coming from private debt.
The technocrats use an economics that ignores private debt.
The poor old technocrats never really stood a chance.
So even in 1971 corporate American understood usefulness of critical race theory and "black
bolshevism" for their needs. Otherwise Bell would never get a tenure in Harvard -- the bastion of
neoliberalism and corporatism.
As the theory is a typical pseudoscience in the best style of Academician Lysenko, it is
natural that " Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents
than from the theorists themselves."
The idea that "struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed."
remiinds me Eduard Bernstein's "movement toward goal is everything; goal is nothing" see
Eduard Bernstein's
Revisionist Critique of Marxist Theory and Practice Bernstein was a member of the German
Social Democratic party which was a particularly strong and important member of the Second
International conference. Bernstein's thoughts are encapsulated in his book, Evolutionary
Socialism, published in 1899.
Notable quotes:
"... ...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. ..."
"... The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis." ..."
"... Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action must be taken." ..."
"... To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?" ..."
In their book "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction," Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list
several of its core premises, including the view that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational,"
and that it "serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,"
that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to
the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile
cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times's 1619 Project and
bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an
Antiracist." Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other
institutions.
...Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than
from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly
aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: "Faces at the Bottom
of the Well," the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather
of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today's controversies. In
"Faces," he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic
sense of "the permanence of racism" -- the book's subtitle. Bell's thought has been an
important influence on some of today's most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi
Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to
work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left
the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid
compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell's work: Can
traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans,
or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the
law?
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As
he writes in "Faces," "When I agreed to become Harvard's first black faculty member I did so on
the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be
the pioneer, the trailblazer." But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell
to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law
School.
... ... ...
The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality,
wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where "I heard the late,
esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress
since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell's own life, as well as the fact that
Harvard's black law students' organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his
claim." Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as "more a jeremiad than an analysis."
In the conclusion to "Faces," Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is
worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus,
who saw Sisyphus's eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an
absurd world, Bell demands "recognition of the futility of action" while insisting "that action
must be taken."
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic
magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: "If you convince whites that their
racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their
hard-won victim status?"
... ... ...
These experiences inform "Faces at the Bottom of the Well," which is made up of nine fables,
some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean,
with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a
system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks -- a kind of
cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
I agree. If the US scientists are so worried about the possibility the SARS-CoV-2 leaked
from a laboratory, why don't they also ask their government to investigate their own
labs?
And also, the corruption of the medical profession, to which he is now speaking (it's
running as I write this). The interviewer is using the words "medical mafia", citing the
later manifestations we've seen this year. But this interview seems that it will do much to
illustrate the long process of corruption that has happened over the years and decades, and
this is very valuable to learn.
The interviewer is using the words "medical mafia", citing the later manifestations
we've seen this year
Yes, the circuitous depravity they've engaged, the 'offer you can't refuse' has worked
wonders, as the interviewer attests his young peers who've taken the jab only to
regain their 'freedom', like my youngest daughter, 30, against my spoken preference, and my
silent prayers.
This one big fraud. And Fauci is implicated. the fact that in the USA the results of the test
do not come with the number of amplifications used speaks volumes about the current medical
establishement.
Notable quotes:
"... With a cutoff of 35, about half of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 70 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30. ..."
"... It's just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests -- that they're just returning a positive or a negative,' Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, said. ..."
Up to 90 percent of people tested for COVID-19 in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada in July
carried barely any traces of the virus and it could be because today's tests are 'too
sensitive', experts say.
... PCR tests analyze genetic matter from the virus in cycles and today's tests typically
take 37 or 40 cycles, but experts say this is too high because it detects very small amounts of
the virus that don't pose a risk.
... ... ...
Experts say a reasonable cutoff for the virus would be 30 or 35 cycles, according to Juliet
Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside.
Mina said he would set the cutoff at 30.
New York's state lab Wadsworth analyzed cycle thresholds values in already processed
COVID-19 PCR tests and found in July that 794 positive tests were based on a threshold of 40
cycles.
With a cutoff of 35, about half of those tests would no longer qualify as positive.
About 70 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30.
In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle
threshold of 40 would have been considered negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Mina
said.
'I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,' he said.
The Food and Drug Administration said that it does not specify the cycle threshold ranges
used to determine who is positive and 'commercial manufacturers and laboratories set their
own.'
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is examining the use of cycle
threshold measures for 'policy decision'.
The CDC said its own calculations suggest its extremely hard to detect a live virus in a
sample above a threshold of 33 cycles.
It's just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from
all these tests -- that they're just returning a positive or a negative,' Angela Rasmussen, a
virologist at Columbia University in New York, said.
Predictable Propaganda, a Whore media complex coupled with a corrupted scientific
community in bed with big pharma, any mention of therapeutics that work like
Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin must be destroyed as it disqualifies these emergency gene
therapy shots that are destroying human lives everywhere. This **** is Pure Evil !
Note well... the only societies I know that condemn free speech and punish those that don't
adhere to 'the way' are China, Russia and North Korea. Can you spot the theme?
Anthony Aaron
You forgot cuba and the United States, at least since the early days of the 21st Century
Personalities of the Left are group-thinkers, not critical-thinkers.
Group-thinkers have two giant vulnerabilities: They're easily misled by ANYONE with
harisma, and psychopaths actively exploit that weakness. And inasmuch as group-think
inherently discounts primary evidence in favor of social affirmation, group-think is ALWAYS
wrong.
So we have real problems with vaccines as Delta mutation puts the end of Fauci and company
fake dream about herd immunity -- it infects vaccinated people, but we can't discuss that the US medical establishment is corrupt,
in bed with Big Pharma and failed us.
This "medical bolshevism" should better be stopped.
Notable quotes:
"... Johnson said Sheryl Ruettgers will detail "severe neurological reactions that still inhibit her ability to live a normal life, including muscle pain, numbness, weakness and paresthesia" that she experienced after getting the COVID-19 vaccine earlier this month. ..."
Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson announced plans to hold a news conference to
discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID-19 vaccine, drawing backlash from health care
experts who view the move as "dangerous" and a way to promote misinformation.
In a statement Friday, Johnson said he plans to give a platform to six people from across
the country who claim to have had negative health reactions after receiving the coronavirus
jab. Johnson said the conference will take place Monday to allow the individuals to tell their
stories and discuss issues that have been "repeatedly ignored" by the medical community,
according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The Republican senator, who has been a vocal critic of vaccine mandates and has previously
advocated for alternative and unproven drug treatments to COVID-19, faced immediate backlash
from critics who feel the event will be a platform for spreading misinformation about the
safety of vaccines.
Dr. Jeff Huebner, a doctor in Madison, Wisconsin, said that Johnson was "promoting dangerous
and unfounded claims" about the vaccine that contradict medical research and analysis.
"As a member of the Wisconsin medical community I'm gravely concerned about the impact his
event and remarks will have on our ability to return to normal and protect Wisconsinites from
COVID-19.," Huebner said in a statement, the Journal Sentinel reported .
Joanna Bisgrove, a Wisconsin primary care doctor, told FOX6 that Johnson's statements and
event are "putting people at risk and already hurting people."
Tony Evers, the state's Democratic governor, added Friday that Johnson was being "reckless
and irresponsible" and said the event was "jeopardizing the health and safety" of the state's
vaccine rollout and economic recovery.
.@SenRonJohnson, you're being reckless and irresponsible. The #COVID19 vaccine is safe and
effective and based on years of science and research. Every time you suggest otherwise,
you're jeopardizing the health and safety of the people of our state and our economic
recovery.
-- Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) June 25, 2021
In defense, Johnson said Friday that he is "just asking questions" and isn't against the
vaccine.
"We're all supporters of vaccines. As I've repeatedly said, I'm glad that hundreds of
millions of Americans have been vaccinated, but I don't think authorities can ignore and censor
some of the issues," Johnson said in a tweet responding to Evers. "On Monday, we'll bring light
to stories that deserve to be seen, heard & believed."
Monday's event in Milwaukee will include statements from former Green Bay Packers player Ken
Ruettgers and his wife, Sheryl.
Johnson said Sheryl Ruettgers will detail "severe neurological reactions that still inhibit
her ability to live a normal life, including muscle pain, numbness, weakness and paresthesia"
that she experienced after getting the COVID-19 vaccine earlier this month.
Additional testimonies will be heard from individuals from Ohio, Missouri, Utah, Michigan
and Tennessee.
The medical community has long stressed that the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine far
outweigh the risks of possible side effects. Earlier this week, top U.S. health officials, medical agencies, laboratory and hospital
associations issued a statement reiterating the benefits by stating that getting vaccinated is
the "best way to protect yourself, your loved ones, your community, and to return to a more
normal lifestyle safely and quickly."
Newsweek contacted Johnson for additional comment, but did not hear back in time for
publication.
Newsweek, in partnership with NewsGuard, is dedicated to providing accurate and
verifiable vaccine and health information. With NewsGuard's HealthGuard browser extension,
users can verify if a website is a trustworthy source of health information. Visit the Newsweek
VaxFacts website to learn more and to download the HealthGuard browser extension.
"... He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and "sustainability" have come to take their place. ..."
"... "Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone." ..."
"... Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were -- and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis, Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people." ..."
"... The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
"... He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges" America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else." ..."
"... The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides. ..."
"... Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity -- including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement, Coca-Cola apologized for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.") ..."
"... Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250 sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives." (Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and "we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.") ..."
"... Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute. ..."
"... Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds. ..."
"... Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent. These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more. ..."
"... One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human characteristic. There are more. ..."
A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every
inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth
grade. He's joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General
Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with
him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back -- a very Indian
filial act.
"I was probably the only person my age who'd heard of Antonin Scalia, " Mr. Ramaswamy, 35,
says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would
often rage on the way home from class about "some Scalia opinion." Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that
this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he
switched to being conservative at Harvard in "an act of rebellion" against the politics he
found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences --
the drug-development company that made him rich -- and write "Woke, Inc," a book that takes a
scathing look at "corporate America's social-justice scam." (It will be published in
August.)
Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie "Spotlight," which tells the story of how reporters
at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the
early 2000s. "My goal in 'Woke, Inc.' is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of
Wokeism." He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral
vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we
derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and
"sustainability" have come to take their place.
"Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the
blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a
cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is
getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone."
Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic
and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were --
and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says.
Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis,
Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad
guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people."
The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the
left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought,
'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and
minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in
Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials,
birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr.
Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
Mr. Ramaswamy says that "unlike the investigative 'Spotlight' team at the Boston Globe, I'm
a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong." He paraphrases a line
in the movie: "It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In
the case of my book, the child I'm concerned about is American democracy."
In league with the woke left, corporate America "uses force" as a substitute for open
deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "There's the sustainability accounting standards
board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from
BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that
board."
Was the board put in place by the owners of the trillions of dollars of capital that Mr.
Fink manages? Of course not, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "And yet he's actually using his seat of
corporate power to sidestep debate about questions like environmentalism or diversity on
boards."
The irrepressible Mr. Ramaswamy presses on with another example. Goldman Sachs , he says with obvious relish,
"is a very Davos-fitting example." At the 2020 World Economic Forum, Goldman Sachs CEO David
Solomon "issued an edict from the mountaintops of Davos." Mr. Solomon announced his company
would refuse to take a company public if its board wasn't sufficiently diverse. "So Goldman
gets to define what counts as 'diverse,' " Mr. Ramaswamy says. "No doubt, they're referring to
skin-deep, genetically inherited attributes."
He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political
debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges"
America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a
one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted
by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our
uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate
silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites
gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else."
The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over
the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the
woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look
the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This
arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides.
The rest of corporate America appears to be following suit. "There's a Big Pharma version,
too," Mr. Ramaswamy says. "Big Pharma had an epiphany in dealing with the left." It couldn't
beat them, so it joined them. "Rather than win the debate on drug pricing, they decided to just
change the subject instead. Who needs to win a debate if you can just avoid having it?" So we
see "big-time pharma CEOs musing about topics like racial justice and environmentalism, and
writing multibillion-dollar checks to fight climate change, while taking price hikes that
they'd previously paused when the public was angry about drug pricing."
Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements
about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is
to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity --
including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement,
Coca-Cola apologized
for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company
training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.")
Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's
history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250
sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the
while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives."
(Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and
"we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions
that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.")
... ... ...
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
Rod Drake 53 minutes ago
Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No
surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume
that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds.
In addition, I have been
saying for some time discrimination based on political belief desperately needs to be
included as a prohibited basis. Where are the Republicans, while the greatest civil rights
violation of our time is going on right under their noses?
Terry Overbey 1 hour ago
I love reading stories about people who are willing to take on the woke political class. For
most people, even if they strongly disagree, their only option is to bite their tongue and go
along. People aren't stupid. If you buck the system, you don't get promoted, you don't get
good grades, you don't get into elite schools, you don't get the government job.
Thank you Mr Ramaswany.
James Ransom 1 hour ago
Well. If nothing else, he just sold me a book. I think we should say that "Wokeism" tries to
"Act Like" a religion, not that it is one. Because of this fakery, we do not need to give it
"freedom" in the sense that we have "Freedom of Religion."
These misguided Americans perhaps need to be exposed to a real religion. Christianity and
Buddhism would be good choices; I don't know about Hinduism, but my point is that "Wokeism"
is more like a mental disorder. We should feel sorry for its victims, offer them treatment,
but not let them run anything.
marc goodman 1 hour ago
Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent
being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent.
These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more.
One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to
unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises
elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth
uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human
characteristic. There are more.
Humans need to believe in something greater than themselves. We fulfill this need with
religion, and historically, the "greater something" has been a transcendent being. Wokeism
fulfills this need for its adherents but without a transcendent being. Ultimately, Wokeism
will fail as a religion because it can't nourish the soul like the belief in a transcendent
being does.
Grodney Ross 2 hours ago (Edited)
Judgement will be passed in November of 2022. I don't see this as a Democrat vs Republican
issue. I think it's a matter of who is paying attention vs. those who are not. We live in a
society where, generally, the most strident voices are on the left, along with the most
judgmental voices. When the "wokeless" engage in a manner that conflicts with views of the
woke, they are attacked, be you from the left or the right, so you keep your mouth shut and go
about your day.
I believe that this coming election will give voice to those who are fatigued and fed up
with the progressive lefts venom and vitriol. If not, we will survive, but without a meaningful
first amendment,14th amendment, or 2nd amendment.
Barbara Helton 2 hours ago (Edited)
Being woke, when practiced by the wealthy and influential, can be extremely similar to
bullying.
Johnson &
Johnson has agreed to pay $230 million to the state of New York to resolve an opioid
lawsuit slated to go to trial Tuesday, as negotiations intensify with the company and three
drug distributors to clinch a
$26 billion settlement of thousands of other lawsuits blaming the pharmaceutical industry
for the opioid crisis.
Johnson & Johnson's New York deal removes it from a coming trial on Long Island but not
from the rest of the cases it faces nationwide, including a continuing trial in California. The
New York settlement includes an additional $33 million in attorney fees and costs and calls for
the drugmaker to no longer sell opioids nationwide, something Johnson & Johnson said it
already stopped doing.
States have been trying to re-create with the opioid litigation what they accomplished with
tobacco companies in the 1990s, when $206 billion in settlements flowed into state coffers.
More than 3,000 counties, cities and other local governments have also pursued lawsuits over
the opioid crisis,
complicating talks that have dragged on since late 2019 and that have been slowed down by
the Covid-19 pandemic.
Stories across Illinois and most of America now report furious parents standing up against
what's bundled under the term "Critical Race Theory," or CRT, widely taught in K-12
schools.
Those who know what CRT is don't like it. A new Economist/YouGov poll found
opposition beating support by 58% to 38% . And opponents feel strongly. Those with "very
unfavorable" views of CRT outnumber those with "very favorable" views" by 53% to 25%.
Opposition is even more intense when specific tenets of CRT are
polled .
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What is CRT? Why the intense opposition? Does only the "right wing" oppose its teachings, as
Gov. JB Pritzker claimed
on Wednesday?
Call it "antiracism," "culturally responsive teaching," "equity" or "wokeness" if you want;
dissecting the differences would be quibbling.
Here are the specific teachings they have mostly in common that are generating the rage:
Individuals are forever defined by race, not character. CRT expressly rejects notions of
color blindness and the melting pot.
America is systemically racist and all whites are racists or at least implicitly
biased.
The Constitution and the American system of government were designed to perpetuate
slavery and oppression.
Equality of opportunity means nothing; only equality of results matters.
Individuals are either oppressors or victims; there's nothing in between.
America's true history is told by "The 1619 Project," which holds that America's real
birth date was 1619 when the first slaves arrived, and that it is "out of slavery "" and
the anti""‹black racism it required" "" that "nearly everything that has truly made
America exceptional" grew.
Capitalism is evil. "In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be
anticapitalist," says Ibram X. Kendi, a leading CRT proponent.
That's probably enough to insult the core values and common sense of most Americans, but
three overarching themes in CRT add to the fury.
First it's taught as incontrovertible truth.
"This is not teaching about critical race theory; it is teaching in critical race theory,"
an important distinction Andrew Sullivan describes in a superb, new article .
"And this is why" crucially" it will suppress any other way of seeing the world" because any
other way, by definition, is merely perpetuating oppression," Sullivan wrote. "As Kendi
constantly reminds us, it is either/or. An antiracist cannot exist with a liberalism that
perpetuates racism. And it's always the liberalism that has to go."
CRT champion Ibram X. Kendi
Second, it is Marxist in its roots
and a broad assault on most everything about classical liberalism.
"Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including
equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of
constitutional law," says a detailed
look at CRT's origins.
Third, there's little hope for rational debate with CRT supporters.
Their standard claim is that opposition means refusal to recognize racism and the history of
slavery. There would be no controversy if that were true, and the polls demolish claims like
Pritzker's that only the "right wing" is opposed, or "ultra-conservatives" as NBC and many
others have claimed.
The Illinois State Board of Education
was particularly deceitful in defending its "culturally responsive" teaching standards.
"The standards do not impact teachers licensure or evaluation," it
wrote , yet that's precisely the object of its new rule. And its standards aren't about
curriculum,
ISBE falsely claimed .
The national press, as you'd expect, suppresses opinion opposed to CRT. Take a look at the
ever-growing
compendium of black scholars and activists who hold different views, compiled at FreeBlackThought.com . They are dead to
the world as most of the MSM sees things.
* * *
Illinois is where the first skirmish occurred in a school in what is now a national battle.
Four years ago, a rather small group of parents objected to the narrow, radical curriculum of
New Trier High School's "Seminar Day" on race "" "Racial Indoctrination Day," as the Wall
Street Journal
called it . That was before terms like "woke" became a thing and before Critical Race
Theory became the commonly used label, but the issues were largely the same as today:
Dissenting parents
objected to what they saw as authoritarianism in the school's exclusion of alternate
viewpoints.
The parents lost. New Trier refused to include those alternate viewpoints.
They lost, in part, because many angry parents were afraid to speak up. They feared
retribution from those who labeled all critics as racists.
But national coverage of that story and more alarming ones ensued. Having seen the reality
of what CRT means to classrooms, its critics are now the majority.
Gone is any excuse for silence. CRT is in our schools due only to a loud and aggressive
minority concentrated in today's political, educational and media establishments. It will be
driven into the obscurity it deserves if the majority continues to speak up.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy 2 hours ago (Edited)
Most Americans oppose CRT because it and its proponents are viciously racist.
Fat Beaver 2 hours ago (Edited)
And they are literally trying to teach our children to hate us and attack us...this is
full blown bolshevism...lead is the only answer to it. It's like any infestation...it has
to be eradicated and the longer you wait the more damage accrues and the greater the
cost...
CRT goes after children. It divides children from other children, divides children from
their parents, divides children from themselves. That's one of the last things that gets
people riled up anymore.
Rattling Bones 2 hours ago
Promoting racism to fight racism is an idiocy that only a liberal could love.
nmewn 2 hours ago
It is openly Marxist, anti-Liberal at it's core and in the final analysis, proposes an
authoritarian state (with all of it's bureaucracies, functionaries & apparatchiks) as
the remedy to the non-existent contrived issue as a means to subvert & divide the
targeted society.
In other words, its commies doing what commies do ;-)
The Justice Centre for Constitutional
Freedoms represents Dr. Francis Christian, Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the
University of Saskatchewan and a practising surgeon in Saskatoon .
Dr. Christian was called into a meeting today, suspended from all teaching responsibilities
effective immediately, and fired from his position with the University of Saskatchewan as of
September 2021.
There is a recording of Dr.
Christian's meeting today between Dr. Christian and Dr. Preston Smith, the Dean of Medicine
at the University of Saskatchewan, College of Medicine, Dr. Susan Shaw, the Chief Medical
Officer of the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and Dr. Brian Ulmer, Head of the Department of
Surgery at the Saskatchewan College of Medicine.
In addition, the Justice Centre will represent Dr. Christian in his defence of a complaint
that was made against him and an investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of
Saskatchewan. The complaint objects to Dr. Christian having advocated for the informed consent
of Covid vaccines for children.
Dr. Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in
2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and
Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also
the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.
On June 17, Dr. Christian
released a statement to over 200 doctors which contained his concerns regarding giving the
Covid shots to children. In it he noted that he is pro-vaccine, and that he did not represent
any group, the Saskatchewan Health Authority, or the University of Saskatchewan.
"I speak to you directly as a physician, a surgeon, and a fellow human being."
Dr. Christian noted that the principle of informed consent was sacrosanct and noted that a
patient should always be "fully aware of the risks of the medical intervention, the benefits of
the intervention, and if any alternatives exist to the intervention."
"This should apply particularly to a new vaccine that has never before been tried in
humans"¦ before the vaccine is rolled out to children, both children and parents must
know the risks of m-RNA vaccines," he wrote.
Dr. Christian expressed concern that he had not come across "a single vaccinated child or
parent who has been adequately informed" about Covid vaccines for children.
Among his points, he stated that:
The m-RNA vaccine, is a new, experimental vaccine never used by humans before.
The m-RNA vaccines have not been fully authorized by Health Canada or the US CDC, and
are in fact under "interim authorization" in Canada and "emergency use authorization" in
the US. He noted that "full vaccine approval takes several years and multiple safety
considerations "" this has not happened."
That in order to qualify for "emergency use authorization" there must be an emergency.
While he said there is a strong case for vaccinating the elderly, the vulnerable and health
care workers, he said, "Covid does not pose a threat to our kids. The risk of them dying of
Covid is less than 0.003% "" this is even less than the risk of them dying of the flu.
There is no emergency in children."
Children do not readily transmit the Covid virus to adults.
M-RNA vaccines have been "associated with several thousand deaths" in the Vaccine
Adverse Reporting System in the US. "These appear to be unusual, compared to the total
number of vaccines administered." He called it a "strong signal that should not be
ignored."
He noted that vaccines have already caused "serious medical problems for kids"
worldwide, including "a real and significantly increased risk" of myocarditis, inflammation
of the heart. Dr. Christian notes the
German national vaccine agency and the UK vaccine agency are not recommending the
vaccine for healthy children and teenagers.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority/College of Medicine wrote a letter to Dr. Christian on
June 21, 2021, alleging that they had "received information that you are engaging in activities
designed to discourage and prevent children and adolescents from receiving Covid-19 vaccination
contrary to the recommendations and pandemic-response efforts of Saskatchewan and Canadian
public health authorities."
Dr. Christian's concerns regarding underage Covid vaccinations are not isolated to him. The
US Centre for Disease Control had an "emergency meeting" today to discuss the growing cases of
myocarditis (heart inflammation) in younger males after receiving the Covid-19 vaccines.
The CDC released
new data today that the risk of myocarditis after the Pfizer vaccine is at least 10 times
the expected rate in 12 "" 17 year old males and females. The German government has issued
public guidance against vaccinating those under the age of 18.
The World Health Organization posted an update to its website on Monday, June 21, which
contained the statement in respect of advice for Covid-19 vaccination that " Children should not be
vaccinated for the moment ." Within 24 hours, this guidance was withdrawn and new
guidance was posted which stated that "Covid vaccines are safe for those over 18 years of
age."
Dr. Christian says there is a large, growing "network of ethical, moral physicians and
scientists" who are urging caution in recommending vaccines for all children without informed
consent. He said, physicians must "always put their patients and humanity first."
Dr. Byram Bridle, a prominent immunologist at the University of Guelph with a sub-speciality
in vaccinology, recently participated in a Press Conference on Parliament Hill on CPAC organized by MP
Derek Sloan, where he discussed the censorship of scientists and physicians. Dr. Bridle
expressed his safety concerns with vaccinating children with experimental MRNA vaccines.
Justice Centre Litigation Director Jay Cameron also has concern over the growing censorship
of medical professionals when it comes to questioning the government narrative on Covid.
"We are seeing a clear pattern of highly competent and skilled medical doctors in very
esteemed positions being taken down and censored or even fired, for practicing proper science
and medicine," says Mr. Cameron.
The Justice Centre
represented Dr. Chris Milburn in Nova Scotia, who faced professional disciplinary
proceedings last year after a group of activists took exception to an opinion column he wrote
in a local paper. The Justice Centre provided
submissions to the College on Dr. Milburn's behalf, defending the right of physicians to
express their opinions on matters of policy in the public square and arguing that everyone is
entitled to freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, as guaranteed by the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms "" including doctors. The Justice Centre noted that attempting
to have a doctor professionally disciplined for his opinions and commentary on matters of
public interest amounts to bullying and intimidation for speaking out against the
government.
Last week, Dr. Milburn also faced punishment for speaking out with his concerns about public
health policies, as he was removed from his
position as the Head of Emergency for the eastern zone with the Nova Scotia Health
Authority. In an unusual twist, a petition has been started to have Dr. Milburn replace Dr.
Strang as the province's Chief Medical Officer.
"Censoring and punishing scientists and doctors for freely voicing their concerns is
arrogant, oppressive and profoundly unscientific", states Mr. Cameron.
"Both the western world and the idea of scientific inquiry itself is built to a large extent
on the principles of freedom of thought and speech. Medicine and patient safety can only
regress when dogma and an elitist orthodoxy, such as that imposed by the Saskatchewan College
of Medicine, punishes doctors for voicing concerns," Mr. Cameron concludes.
Mr. Apotheosis 4 hours ago
These mother f'ers are seriously evil. To the bone evil.
high5mail 3 hours ago
I'm Canadian and the sooner they throw Trudeau and Manitoba's Pallister out of office
won't be too soon.
It is effen ridiculous what this country turned into. Makes California appear to be a
free place compared to here and that is saying something.
I am jealous of people living in Florida, Texas and South Dakota. They don't know how
lucky they are that some people in power there are not only intelligent but have
cajones...
No_Pretzel_Logic 2 hours ago
The Davos crowd is clutching most of the Western countries by the short hairs.
Yank....how does that feel, plebe?
"... The most significant problem came from the scientific community. "Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks," she says, and partisanship wasn't their only motive: "Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants." ..."
"... Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of "seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that's devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players." ..."
"... Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak "conspiracy theories." He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak served on the World Health Organization's origin investigation team. ..."
"... She says that regardless of Covid's origin, lab safety is crucial for preventing a future pandemic. "There needs to be a body, an international body that has a mandate to track and keep oversight of these kinds of facilities," she says. "You've got to ingrain more of a safety and security culture in people and the labs." ..."
"... Mr. O'Neal is a European-based editorial page writer for the Journal. ..."
The problem with poeople such as Ms. Lentzos is that they promote the thoery of lab origin
also due to thier political intirests, and affiliations.
Why she ignores the possibility that virus emerged much erlier, possibly in summer of 2019
and not in China? And BTW couple it emerge from UK "novichok" lab in Porton Down ?
Looks like she is another witch hunter.
Ms. Lentzos, who places her own politics on the Swiss "center left," thought that conclusion
premature and said so publicly. In May 2020, she published an
article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists weighing whether "safety lapses in the
course of basic scientific research" caused the pandemic. While acknowledging there was, "as of
yet, little concrete evidence," she noted "several indications that collectively suggest this
is a serious possibility that needs following up by the international community."
She was suggesting an accident, not a deliberate release: "If you're culturing a virus that
is readily able to infect humans, particularly via the respiratory tract, then any droplet
caused by a simple splash or aerosolization of liquid can be inhaled without you realizing it,"
she wrote. "Could an unknowingly infected researcher showing no symptoms unwittingly have
infected family, friends, and anyone else he or she was in contact with? Or was there perhaps
an unnoticed leak of a coronavirus from the lab, from improperly incinerated waste material or
animal carcasses that found their way to rubbish bins that rats or cats could have
accessed?"
She was confident in her argument but "a bit wary about writing it" given that it challenged
the enforced consensus. "It was really sticking my neck out, because no one else was saying it
at the time, even a lot of people who know better. Everyone was just going with the narrative:
"˜Yeah, no, it's natural,' and there's no discussion."
The article barely made a ripple. "If you look at the argumentation that's used today, it's
exactly the same basically as what I laid out, which was, accidents happen," she says. "We know
that they're having questions around safety. We know they were doing this field work. We see
videos where they're in breach of standard biosafety protocol. We know China is manipulating
the narrative, closing down information sources""all of that stuff. All of that is in there.
But it didn't get much traction."
That began to change early this year. Media outlets published articles considering the
possibility of a lab leak. At least five of the Lancet signers have distanced themselves from
the letter. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization's Director-General Tedros
Ghebreyesus said the theory merits further study. President Biden ordered the intelligence
community to investigate the question. Even Facebook reversed its ban.
The most significant problem came from the scientific community. "Some of the scientists
in this area very quickly closed ranks," she says, and partisanship wasn't their only motive:
"Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the
scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There
were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared
for their grants."
Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of "seeing science and
scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that's
devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a
social activity, where there are good players and bad players."
Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak
"conspiracy theories." He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for
his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make
viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it
proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that
has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak
served on the World Health Organization's origin investigation team.
A scientific consensus isn't always true, and peer review can look like peer pressure. "How
do we know what we know? Well, the way we know in science is you provide references to
everything, all the claims that you make, and you can trace it back," Ms. Lentzos says. The
lab-leak theory began to be treated "like an attack on science, the sciences. And so the
scientists were like, "˜Well, I trust other scientists,' without actually doing the
groundwork." Few nonscientists, including journalists and social-media executives, even have
the capacity to do the groundwork. "For many," she says, "it was a shortcut. "˜Yeah,
scientists are saying this and we also believe in those scientists.' "
... ... ...
The problem is, it matters who speaks. "Your institution, the fact that you have a
doctorate, or the fact that you have previously gotten all of these grants make what you say
weightier than what somebody else, even though they're saying the same thing""even though they
use the same evidence." Ms. Lentzos has a doctorate in sociology and is an associate professor
at King's College London.
As an example, she compares a letter signed by several biologists and immunologists and
published May 14 in Science with another, published earlier in the year, by a less specialized
collection of experts known as "the Paris group." The latter received "a lot of media attention
and stuff, but scientists didn't take that as seriously because it wasn't the right voices
saying it in the right outlets, even though there were many scientists in the group, and a much
more diverse group, including biosafety experts like myself." The difference in reception was
striking, because both letters "said exactly the same thing."
Ms. Lentzos says it's possible Covid-19 originated in the wild, but "as time goes on, there
has been more and more circumstantial evidence for the lab-leak theory that's come out, and
less and less from the natural-spillover theory." With evidence mostly circumstantial, and the
Chinese Communist Party stonewalling, can we ever know? "In a perfect world, it would be open;
we'd have a serious forensic investigation," she says. "Evidence has been deliberately taken
away, or erased, but even time would have just done that anyway."
She says that regardless of Covid's origin, lab safety is crucial for preventing a
future pandemic. "There needs to be a body, an international body that has a mandate to track
and keep oversight of these kinds of facilities," she says. "You've got to ingrain more of a
safety and security culture in people and the labs."
Are international institutions capable of the task? Ms. Lentzos has experience working with
United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization. "It was incredibly exciting
to finally go in. And then you become more disillusioned when you see how things operate, how
things don't operate," she says. "Like any large organization, they are slow, and inflexible,
and bureaucratic." But, she asks rhetorically, "What is the alternative?"
Last month she co-published a
study on global lab safety, along with an interactive map that tracks biosafety level 4
laboratories such as the one in Wuhan. These labs work with the most dangerous pathogens, but
"there's no international body that has a mandate to track where they are, and to have any
oversight over them. There's no official list of how many of these labs there are in the world,
or where they are." The new project tracks each lab's "levels of transparency, or training, or
membership in various biosafety associations," to assess its potential threat.
... ... ...
She concedes it's unlikely "we'll get anywhere on the origins. We're not going to find the
smoking gun. But I do think we have power to change that narrative."
Mr. O'Neal is a European-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
I give credit to the writer of this op-ed for just sticking to facts and keeping unhinged
right-wing bloviation out of it.
And the facts are:
(1) When researchers like Ms. Lentzos started looking into lab leak theory they had no
evidence whatsoever to refer to. It was just hypothesis and speculation. In science there is
room for such, and it wasn't ever presented as anything different.
(2) Trump, Cotton, and the rest of right-wing blowhards took up lab leak hypothesis as
fact to serve their unhinged narratives in effort to deflect from their abysmal, deadly, and
disastrous handling of the pandemic. They prevented serious researchers from being taken
seriously. Pompeo specifically is so dumb and ignorant that he thinks ACE2 receptor is on the
virus.
(3) When researchers gathered more corroborating evidence the media started taking them
seriously. That's how science works. I do recommend reading up in detail on the group of
researchers calling themselves DRASTIC and their arguments.
Derek M
Why are you so angry toward people that don't share your beliefs and opinions?
MARK KOFMAN
On the contrary" I consider ALL arguments intelligently presented. You, on the other hand,
are too vested in your unhinged right-wing ideology and get angry when reasonable people
debunk and dismiss it. Unhinged right-wing bloviation with no basis in fact whatsoever is
what undermines real scientific research. If Trump and his minions kept their mouths shut
real scientists would be able to do their work unimpeded.
MARK KOFMAN
(4) Peter Daszak is the real anti-hero. He indeed orchestrated effort to silence lab leak
theory researchers to protect his parochial turf, and unhinged right-wingers helped him do it
by conflating serious research with unhinged bloviation and conspiracy theories. Peter Daszak
also conspired with Shi Zhengli (the "Bat Woman" who runs the Wuhan lab), Chinese government,
and WHO to whitewash the Wuhan lab. He and Chinese government made sure that no US scientist
except him (he is of British origin, to be exact) would be allowed to visit China as part of
WHO "investigative" team. Individuals such as this have no place in science and deserve utter
contempt, scorn, and condemnation.
However, lab leak theory has received rebuttals to its key arguments:
(1) Lack of identifiable intermediate animal is not pre-requisite for possibility of
natural transmission in the wild being dismissed, as intermediate animal is not identified in
many cases of confirmed natural transmission in the wild.
MARK KOFMAN
(2) Furin cleavage which is claimed as smoking gun marker of genetic engineering also occurs
naturally, so it isn't necessarily a smoking gun. Furin cleavage makes virus protein binding
to ACE2 cell receptor much easier, and its deliberate engineering is consistent with gain of
function research, but if it also occurs naturally then it's no smoking gun at all.
(3) CGG coding sequence can also occur naturally and isn't necessarily proof of
engineering.
The key point that lab leak theory hinges on is that if virus is engineered then it
definitely came from the lab. But whether it was engineered is still debatable among
scientists.
Lab leak is suggested by pure circumstantial evidence: bat caves being far away from Wuhan
and bats not sold in Wuhan wet market, lab's database of viruses taken offline, deliberate
stonewalling by the Chinese government.
Occam's Razor suggests that lab leak is most likely, but there is no hard proof, so the
most rational response is to keep mind open.
Stephen Gardner
We don't know much more today than we knew a year ago. But we did know:
1. There was NO evidence for the zoonotic origin of the virus.
2. The bats implicated lived a thousand miles away and had no link to the wet market.
3. There was a research lab in Wuhan involved in gain-of-function work which had a bad
grade from State as far as safety protocols went.
4. The CCP destroyed or suppressed evidence, including physical evidence and actual
scientists involved.
(That perhaps is most damning. at this point.)
5. Democrats bend over backwards to protect China, much like Lebron.
6. Democrat media jumped to the conclusion that only racists and conspiracy theorists
could accuse China of a lab leak.
(For Democrat ideologues and hacks, that's the default mode of argument, not just for this
but for everything.)
7. The Democrat media was keen to deny it before any such evidence could be considered one
way or another.
Yes--that's how science works--today.
MARK KOFMAN
You did fine with points 1-4 and then drove into the ditch and proceeded to go off the cliff
with 5-7.
There is also no evidence whatsoever disproving zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-1 virus was
PROVEN to be zoonotic. Based on what reasoning do you conclude that SARS-CoV-2 is not?
It is precisely this type of ideological bloviation that undermines real researchers. Lab
leak is a theory, NOT a fact. It is a theory that is as EQUALLY valid as zoonotic origin.
The points 2-4 that you cite are all circumstantial at best. Chinese government does not
trust its scientists and doesn't want any investigation whether Chinese scientists are guilty
or not. Better safe than sorry. So Chinese government stonewalling is important
circumstantial data point, but not smoking gun proof by any stretch.
Real researchers present scientific evidence far stronger than your points. Read up on
furin cleavage and CGG coding. It will be far more useful than bloviating purely
circumstantial points as hard fact.
Lilly Wu
Circumstantial evidence points to one conclusion over the other. Read Nicholas Wade's
article. You will see the light.
Oh yeah, and everything he says is true about the Democrats.
MARK KOFMAN
You need to look up the definition of circumstantial evidence. You clearly have no idea what
it means.
Nicholas Wade has his own problems with reputation. The fact that you bring Democrats into
scientific debate only proves that your pursuit is trivial partisan ideology, not science or
search for truth. Read what DRASTIC researchers write.
Lilly Wu
Stephen,
Don't forget this point too. "Both American experts explained that COVID-19 has the genome
sequencing CGC-CGG or "˜ double CGG' which is one of the 36 sequencing patterns. CGC is
rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2 which is a "damning
fact.". Quay wrote, "The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG." they further said,
"That's because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of
experience inserting it...An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with
the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to
track the insertion in the laboratory.""
MARK KOFMAN
This point has rebuttal. CGG coding can occur naturally.
Jeffrey Sonheim
Here is the flaw in this ointment:
Ms Lentzos opines: "Well, the way we know in science is you provide references to
everything, all the claims that you make, and you can trace it back". This is not science. It
is not the Scientific Method. And it is not even rational dialog.
The key to Science is Open Ended Questioning. The canary in this mine is the stopping of
exactly this - Open Ended Questioning. And this is exactly what happened by Agenda driven
people hiding under their purported scientific credentials. Once the canary in this mine was
snuffed out, for however long, only politicians remained. Making their silly points. Using
the word "debunked" with nary a shred of proof.
A Scientist with a conflict of interest is no Scientist. At all. Yet we read of exactly
this in the telling of this saga. "Take Peter Daszak", Ms Lentzos further opines. I say take
him and banish him from the realm of Science. Malpractice deserves exactly this outcome.
Bruce Fegley
Worldwide, liberal scientists allowed their political beliefs to destroy the scientific
method and to issue propaganda disguised as scientific facts that argued against the common
sense obvious explanation - accidental release from the virus lab sitting right there at the
center of the COVID outbreak.
Mass Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Pamela Rose
I am reminded of The Story of Louis Pasteur. There are always those in the scientific
community / medical community / publishing communities that have not evolved much in 160+
years. Egos, personal gain & power are still headwinds to real science. Humanity applauds
those that choose actual research & results.
Anne Hall
Then there is the account of Doctor Semmelweis, who hypothesized that physicians and their
unwashed hands were carrying infections to newly delivered mothers, which killed quite a few.
He endured quite terrible treatment from his medical community in 19th century Vienna.
GARY FIELD
In May 2020, she published an article
By then, many of us already suspected the Chinese lab.
In April 2020, Australia called for a full and honest CV-19 reckoning at the World Health
Organization. China immediately responded with economic warfare, targeting Australian imports
and encouraging Chinese citizens to avoid tourism in Australia, and to stop sending their
children there for secondary school and university education..
Normal people thought: "Australia's a well respected country. Why the punitive reaction by
China?" Sadly, either through incompetence or malfeasance, we have come to expect that
journalists and politicians ignore or cover up inconvenient facts. But scientists? Spineless
and/or corrupt. Ms. Lentzos is a brave and welcome exception.
A child would understand that when China reacted furiously, to a respectful call by
Australia for an independent investigation, China was trying to deflect from their guilty and
reckless behavior.
John Brady
I have to agree with Michael McElfrish "This is a conspiracy theory whether the lab is true
or not, because it is irrelevant to what happened. and diverts from the real issue, i.e. how
come the US did not contain ihe disease early when it had the chance to do so?" To have the
esteemed WSJ give voice to conspiracy theories is frustrating. It only supports more COVID
denialism. What does appear to be clear is that regardless there is NO human engeneering.
Rupert Murdoch has destroyed the Journal's once impeccable reputation with drivel like
this.
David Lacey
To the voices that were against the lab leak theory in the beginning, we need to follow the
money trail and how much of that trail would be threatened if it was realized that research
like this was done and supported. Scientists get their funding largely via government grants.
If GOFR was banned, deeply investigated, or funding diminished or dropped due to political
pressure, this group would find perhaps their life's work called into question and funding
imperiled. It would be a natural human response to circle the wagons and point investigators
away from anything that would threaten your work. Readers, connect the dots yourself........
Gary Goodman
SOCIOLOGIST'S GUT SAID NO TO COVID GROUPTHINK
This would have been a more accurate headline. Referring to Dr. Lentos as a "Scientist" in
the article's actual title, is misleading.
From the article it seems she did no rigorous research to support the lab leak inference.
She used casual observation along with email chats with a cohort of frequent doubters.
And her only tentative conclusion is, we may never confirm the source of the virus.
Inadvertently, through its attempts to prop-up Dr. Lentos, the article does support the
useful caveat that any reference to a source's authority and credibility should be treated
with skepticism.
Nicholas Megaw in London Sun, June 6, 2021, 8:00 PM
The UK's competition regulator has been accused of "putting foxes in charge of the henhouse"
after asking the banking industry's own lobby group to design a supervisory body to combat the
dominance of big banks. Dozens of organisations including fintech start-ups, established tech
groups like Experian and Equifax, consumer representatives and a cross-party group of MPs have
raised concerns over the Competition and Markets Authority's plan to use proposals drawn up by
UK Finance as the basis for a consultation on the future of so-called open banking rules. Open
banking forces banks to share valuable customer data with other financial services providers,
allowing smaller firms to make faster lending decisions or offer new services such as budgeting
tools.
A top scientist said the virus couldn't have evolved naturally""then reversed his
position weeks later.
They told the world that the Covid-19 virus clearly couldn't have been manipulated in the
laboratory. But what they actually thought at first sight was that it had been.
The letter from five virologists published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was the
single most influential statement in capturing the public narrative about the origin of
SARS-CoV-2. Here was an authoritative statement from leading experts assuring the public that
in terms of the virus's origin "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible."
But that's the exact opposite of what these experts thought after taking their first look at
the virus. A large batch of emails exchanged with Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was made available this week to BuzzFeed and the
Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. For the most part the emails concern
meeting arrangements or messages from cranks and have been redacted of any meaningful
information. But one significant email escaped the censor's black marker.
On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen,
the five virologists' leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were "unusual features" in the
virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that "one has to look really
closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look
engineered."
Mr. Andersen went on to note that he and his team "all find the genome inconsistent with
expectations from evolutionary theory." It isn't clear exactly what he meant by this striking
phrase. But anything inconsistent with an evolutionary origin has to be man-made.
This remarkable email establishes that the Andersen team's initial reaction was to suspect
that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered in a lab. Their subsequent letter doesn't adequately
explain how they overcame this impression.
The furin cleavage site, a small element of the virus that they doubtless had in mind when
referring to "unusual features," is an anomalous genetic insertion that could be a sign of
laboratory manipulation. The distinguished virologist David Baltimore has called it a smoking
gun and "a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2."
The Andersen team in its letter discusses how the virus could have acquired the furin
cleavage site naturally. Their best suggestion is that SARS-CoV-2 picked up the necessary
genetic information from people after it had made its jump from bats. But no evidence for this
idea has emerged. And it's hard to see why the Andersen team decided that this conjecture
should outweigh the appearance of laboratory manipulation.
As virologists, all had a professional interest in not provoking a storm of public
condemnation over gain-of-function experiments, the bland name for genetically enhancing the
pathogenic power of viruses. After taking one look at the horrific possibility that a lab leak
origin for SARS-CoV-2 might cause virology labs all over the world to be closed down, it would
seem, the Andersen team decided to disregard their first impressions of possible manipulation.
Recall what they said in their letter: "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based
scenario is plausible."
Dr. Fauci has long suggested that the virus emerged naturally""until the past few weeks,
when he started to allow that lab escape is possible and should be investigated. The Jan. 31,
2020, email from Mr. Andersen shows that Dr. Fauci knew from the beginning that experts had
serious suspicions about the virus's origins. There were many other matters on his agenda at
the time, but it's too bad he didn't ask for an independent panel, one not dominated by
virologists, to look into the possibility that Chinese researchers genetically manipulating
coronaviruses in low-level safety conditions had sparked a global pandemic.
Mr. Wade is a science writer who has worked for Nature, Science and the New York Times .
Marching in ideological lockstep is less forgivable in a society where one has a choice in
the matter.
...In this country, scientists, bureaucrats, journalists and executives of Big Tech
companies suppressed the story not out of fear of imprisonment or death, but of their own
volition, out of ideological or even venal motives. You may well ask: Whose culpability is
greater?
It's not simply that the lab-leak theory was "debunked," as news organizations repeatedly
told us when anyone tried to raise it a year ago. It wasn't even permitted to be considered.
Discussion of the topic was deliberately extinguished on tech platforms, in the respectable
scientific journals and in newsrooms.
...Thanks to a recent release of emails under the Freedom of Information Act, we now know
that some of the scientists dismissing the idea had themselves expressed concerns that the
zoonotic explanation they were publicly championing might not be right. We also know that in
the case of the Lancet letter
, some of the correspondents were involved in similar research and had a strong professional
interest in denying the possibility of an engineered virus.
...Last year, many scientists beclowned themselves by bowing to the prevailing political
pieties with their absurd assertion that taking part in protests on behalf of Black Lives
Matter was literally salubrious, whereas taking part in protests against lockdowns was lethally
reckless.
If too many American scientists failed to help us get a proper understanding of the origins
of Covid, they seem to have been abetted by like-minded people in the permanent bureaucracy.
Emails to and from Anthony Fauci uncovered last week show that while there were some genuinely
diligent officials determined to get to the truth, too many in positions of power seemed keen
to stamp out a proper investigation.
As Katherine Eban
reported in Vanity Fair last week, officials from two separate bureaus in the State
Department warned against a proper investigation for fear of opening a "can of worms."
Again we have good grounds to suspect that officials in a bureaucracy that had already
undermined Donald Trump's presidency with baseless allegations about Russian collusion seemed
intent on suppressing any suggestion, however well-supported it might be, that Trump officials
might be right about a critical issue of state.
Yet the largest responsibility for the failure to consider in a timely fashion the lab-leak
theory lies with the media.
Journalists were once marked by their curiosity. Now the only thing that's curious about
many of them is their lack of curiosity when a story doesn't fit their priors.
...It seems increasingly likely that Chinese officials mishandled research and
misrepresented and misinformed the public. But they did so under pain of punishment, even
death, in a system designed to suppress that kind of information.
In this country, constitutionally protected, free and independent scientists, bureaucrats,
journalists and others did the same. What's their excuse?
WSJ became much like ZH pushing "china lab leak" hypotheses. Why the possibility of Fort
Detrick leak or Barric lab leak ( Dr Ralph Baric didn't
create Covid-19 - weehingthong ) is ignored ? "In 2014, the U.S. government decided it would
stop funding
gain-of-function research , though Baric's study was underway and was grandfathered in. The
National Institutes of Health deemed the study not risky enough to fall under the moratorium on
funding, Baric told Nature in 2015...Debbink, who helped author Baric's 2015 paper, said everyone
involved with that research has been targeted online by harassers who are accusing them of
creating a biological weapon."
Top scientist said the virus couldn't have evolved naturally
-- then reversed his position weeks later.
Notable quotes:
"... The Andersen team in its letter discusses how the virus could have acquired the furin cleavage site naturally. Their best suggestion is that SARS-CoV-2 picked up the necessary genetic information from people after it had made its jump from bats. But no evidence for this idea has emerged. And it's hard to see why the Andersen team decided that this conjecture should outweigh the appearance of laboratory manipulation. ..."
They told the world that the Covid-19 virus clearly couldn't have been manipulated in the
laboratory. But what they actually thought at first sight was that it had been.
The letter from five virologists published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was the
single most influential statement in capturing the public narrative about the origin of
SARS-CoV-2. Here was an authoritative statement from leading experts assuring the public that
in terms of the virus's origin "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible."
But that's the exact opposite of what these experts thought after taking their first look at
the virus. A large batch of emails exchanged with Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was made available this week to BuzzFeed and the
Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. For the most part the emails concern
meeting arrangements or messages from cranks and have been redacted of any meaningful
information. But one significant email escaped the censor's black marker.
On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen,
the five virologists' leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were "unusual features" in the
virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that "one has to look really
closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look
engineered."
Mr. Andersen went on to note that he and his team "all find the genome inconsistent with
expectations from evolutionary theory." It isn't clear exactly what he meant by this striking
phrase. But anything inconsistent with an evolutionary origin has to be man-made.
This remarkable email establishes that the Andersen team's initial reaction was to suspect
that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered in a lab. Their subsequent letter doesn't adequately
explain how they overcame this impression.
The furin cleavage site, a small element of the virus that they doubtless had in mind when
referring to "unusual features," is an anomalous genetic insertion that could be a sign of
laboratory manipulation. The distinguished virologist David Baltimore has called it a smoking
gun and "a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2."
The Andersen team in its letter discusses how the virus could have acquired the furin
cleavage site naturally. Their best suggestion is that SARS-CoV-2 picked up the necessary
genetic information from people after it had made its jump from bats. But no evidence for this
idea has emerged. And it's hard to see why the Andersen team decided that this conjecture
should outweigh the appearance of laboratory manipulation.
As virologists, all had a professional interest in not provoking a storm of public
condemnation over gain-of-function experiments, the bland name for genetically enhancing the
pathogenic power of viruses. After taking one look at the horrific possibility that a lab leak
origin for SARS-CoV-2 might cause virology labs all over the world to be closed down, it would
seem, the Andersen team decided to disregard their first impressions of possible manipulation.
Recall what they said in their letter: "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based
scenario is plausible."
Dr. Fauci has long suggested that the virus emerged naturally -- until the past few weeks,
when he started to allow that lab escape is possible and should be investigated. The Jan. 31,
2020, email from Mr. Andersen shows that Dr. Fauci knew from the beginning that experts had
serious suspicions about the virus's origins. There were many other matters on his agenda at
the time, but it's too bad he didn't ask for an independent panel, one not dominated by
virologists, to look into the possibility that Chinese researchers genetically manipulating
coronaviruses in low-level safety conditions had sparked a global pandemic.
Mr. Wade is a science writer who has worked for Nature, Science and the New York Times .
Metrics are judged to be misleading if they meet the following criteria:
The website for the metric is nontransparent and provides little information about itself such as location, management team
and its experience, other company information, and the like
The company charges journals for inclusion in the list.
The values (scores) for most or all of the journals on the list increase each year.
The company uses Google Scholar as its database for calculating metrics (Google Scholar does not screen for quality and indexes
predatory journals)
The methodology for calculating the value is contrived, unscientific, or unoriginal.
The company exists solely for the purpose of earning money from questionable journals that use the gold open-access model.
The company charges the journals and assigns them a value, and then the journals use the number to help increase article submissions
and therefore revenue. Alternatively, the company exists as a front for an existing publisher and assigns values to that publisher's
journals.
"... In today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science. You'd be wrong. Many billions of dollars' worth of wrong. ..."
"... A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology. The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test -- that the original results couldn't be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches. But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid. ..."
"... "Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research," observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen's head of global cancer research, "this was a shocking result." ..."
"... A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D; projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. ..."
"... "The thing that should scare people is that so many of these important published studies turn out to be wrong when they're investigated further," ..."
"... Eisen says the more important flaw in the publication model is that the drive to land a paper in a top journal -- Nature and Science lead the list -- encourages researchers to hype their results, especially in the life sciences. Peer review, in which a paper is checked out by eminent scientists before publication, isn't a safeguard. Eisen says the unpaid reviewers seldom have the time or inclination to examine a study enough to unearth errors or flaws. ..."
"... Eisen is a pioneer in open-access scientific publishing, which aims to overturn the traditional model in which leading journals pay nothing for papers often based on publicly funded research, then charge enormous subscription fees to universities and researchers to read them. ..."
"... But concern about what is emerging as a crisis in science extends beyond the open-access movement. It's reached the National Institutes of Health, which last week launched a project to remake its researchers' approach to publication. ..."
"... PubMed Commons is an effort to counteract the "perverse incentives" in scientific research and publishing, says David J. Lipman, director of NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is sponsoring the venture. ..."
"... The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path. ..."
In today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend
on for verifiable facts is science. You'd be wrong. Many billions of dollars' worth of wrong.
A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark
papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology. The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending
millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test -- that the original
results couldn't be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches. But what
they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.
"Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research," observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen's head of global cancer research,
"this was a shocking result."
Unfortunately, it wasn't unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published
papers on which it was basing R&D; projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge
resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of research, including some in which patients were already participating in clinical trials, are based
on science that hasn't been, and possibly can't be, validated.
"The thing that should scare people is that so many of these important published studies turn out to be wrong when they're investigated
further,"
says Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley and the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Economist recently estimated spending on biomedical R&D; in industrialized countries at $59
billion a year. That's how much could be at risk from faulty fundamental research.
Eisen says the more important flaw in the publication model is that the drive to land a paper in a top journal -- Nature
and Science lead the list -- encourages researchers to hype their results, especially in the life sciences. Peer review, in which
a paper is checked out by eminent scientists before publication, isn't a safeguard. Eisen says the unpaid reviewers seldom have
the time or inclination to examine a study enough to unearth errors or flaws.
"The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims," he says. "And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having
splashy papers in Science or Nature -- it's not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it's gotten a lot of attention."
Eisen is a pioneer in open-access scientific publishing, which aims to overturn the traditional model in which leading journals
pay nothing for papers often based on publicly funded research, then charge enormous subscription fees to universities and researchers
to read them.
But concern about what is emerging as a crisis in science extends beyond the open-access movement. It's reached the
National Institutes of Health, which last week launched a project to remake its researchers' approach to publication. Its new
PubMed Commons system allows qualified scientists to post
ongoing comments about published papers. The goal is to wean scientists from the idea that a cursory, one-time peer review is enough
to validate a research study, and substitute a process of continuing scrutiny, so that poor research can be identified quickly and
good research can be picked out of the crowd and find a wider audience.
PubMed Commons is an effort to counteract the "perverse incentives" in scientific research and publishing, says David J. Lipman,
director of NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is sponsoring the venture.
The Commons is currently in its pilot phase, during which only registered users among the cadre of researchers whose work appears
in PubMed -- NCBI's clearinghouse for citations from biomedical journals and online sources -- can post comments and read them.
Once the full system is launched, possibly within weeks, commenters still will have to be members of that select group, but the
comments will be public.
Science and Nature both acknowledge that peer review is imperfect. Science's executive editor, Monica Bradford, told me by email
that her journal, which is published by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, understands that for papers based on
large volumes of statistical data -- where cherry-picking or flawed interpretation can contribute to erroneous conclusions -- "increased
vigilance is required." Nature says that it now commissions expert statisticians to examine data in some papers.
But they both defend pre-publication peer review as an essential element in the scientific process -- a "reasonable and fair"
process, Bradford says.
Yet there's been some push-back by the prestige journals against the idea that they're encouraging flawed work -- and that their
business model amounts to profiteering. Earlier this month, Science published a piece by journalist John Bohannon about what happened
when he sent a spoof paper with flaws that could have been noticed by a high school chemistry student to 304 open-access chemistry
journals (those that charge researchers to publish their papers, but make them available for free). It was accepted by
more than half of them.
One that didn't bite was PloS One, an online open-access journal sponsored
by the Public Library of Science, which Eisen co-founded. In fact, PloS One was among the few journals that identified the fake
paper's methodological and ethical flaws.
What was curious, however, was that although Bohannon asserted that his sting showed how the open-access movement was part of
"an emerging Wild West in academic publishing," it was the traditionalist Science that published the most dubious recent academic
paper of all.
This was a 2010 paper by then-NASA biochemist Felisa Wolfe-Simon
and colleagues claiming that they had found bacteria growing in Mono Lake that were uniquely able to subsist on arsenic and even
used arsenic to build the backbone of their DNA.
The publication in Science was accompanied by a breathless press release and press conference sponsored by NASA, which had an
institutional interest in promoting the idea of alternative life forms. But almost immediately it was debunked by other scientists
for spectacularly poor methodology and an invalid conclusion. Wolfe-Simon, who didn't respond to a request for comment last week,
has defended her interpretation
of her results as "viable." She hasn't withdrawn the paper, nor has Science, which has published numerous
critiques of the work . Wolfe-Simon is now
associated with the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
To Eisen, the Wolfe-Simon affair represents the "perfect storm of scientists obsessed with making a big splash and issuing press
releases" -- the natural outcome of a system in which there's no career gain in trying to replicate and validate previous work,
as important as that process is for the advancement of science.
"A paper that actually shows a previous paper is true would never get published in an important journal," he says, "and it would
be almost impossible to get that work funded."
However, the real threat to research and development doesn't come from one-time events like the arsenic study, but from the dissemination
of findings that look plausible on the surface but don't stand up to scrutiny, as Begley and his Amgen colleagues found.
The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources
devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest
of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to
get back on the right path.
A top scientist said the virus couldn't have evolved naturally""then reversed his
position weeks later.
They told the world that the Covid-19 virus clearly couldn't have been manipulated in the
laboratory. But what they actually thought at first sight was that it had been.
The letter from five virologists published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was the
single most influential statement in capturing the public narrative about the origin of
SARS-CoV-2. Here was an authoritative statement from leading experts assuring the public that
in terms of the virus's origin "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is
plausible."
But that's the exact opposite of what these experts thought after taking their first look at
the virus. A large batch of emails exchanged with Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was made available this week to BuzzFeed and the
Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. For the most part the emails concern
meeting arrangements or messages from cranks and have been redacted of any meaningful
information. But one significant email escaped the censor's black marker.
On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen,
the five virologists' leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were "unusual features" in the
virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that "one has to look really
closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look
engineered."
Mr. Andersen went on to note that he and his team "all find the genome inconsistent with
expectations from evolutionary theory." It isn't clear exactly what he meant by this striking
phrase. But anything inconsistent with an evolutionary origin has to be man-made.
This remarkable email establishes that the Andersen team's initial reaction was to suspect
that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered in a lab. Their subsequent letter doesn't adequately
explain how they overcame this impression.
The furin cleavage site, a small element of the virus that they doubtless had in mind when
referring to "unusual features," is an anomalous genetic insertion that could be a sign of
laboratory manipulation. The distinguished virologist David Baltimore has called it a smoking
gun and "a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2."
The Andersen team in its letter discusses how the virus could have acquired the furin
cleavage site naturally. Their best suggestion is that SARS-CoV-2 picked up the necessary
genetic information from people after it had made its jump from bats. But no evidence for this
idea has emerged. And it's hard to see why the Andersen team decided that this conjecture
should outweigh the appearance of laboratory manipulation.
As virologists, all had a professional interest in not provoking a storm of public
condemnation over gain-of-function experiments, the bland name for genetically enhancing the
pathogenic power of viruses. After taking one look at the horrific possibility that a lab leak
origin for SARS-CoV-2 might cause virology labs all over the world to be closed down, it would
seem, the Andersen team decided to disregard their first impressions of possible manipulation.
Recall what they said in their letter: "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based
scenario is plausible."
Dr. Fauci has long suggested that the virus emerged naturally""until the past few weeks,
when he started to allow that lab escape is possible and should be investigated. The Jan. 31,
2020, email from Mr. Andersen shows that Dr. Fauci knew from the beginning that experts had
serious suspicions about the virus's origins. There were many other matters on his agenda at
the time, but it's too bad he didn't ask for an independent panel, one not dominated by
virologists, to look into the possibility that Chinese researchers genetically manipulating
coronaviruses in low-level safety conditions had sparked a global pandemic.
Mr. Wade is a science writer who has worked for Nature, Science and the New York Times .
If we take ZH commentariat opinions as a representative sample of the US conservatives
opinion, Fauci days are now numbered. And not only because he over 80.
Speaking to Laura Ingraham, Paul asserted that "The emails paint a disturbing picture, a
disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding
gain-of-function research. He knows it to this day, but hasn't admitted it."
The Senator also urged that Fauci's involvement has not been adequately investigated because
in the eyes of Democrats "he could do no wrong".
Paul pointed out that Fauci was denying that there was even any funding for gain of function
research at the Wuhan lab just a few weeks back, a claim which is totally contradicted by his
own emails in which he discusses it.
"In his e-mail, within the topic line, he says "˜acquire of perform research.' He was
admitting it to his non-public underlings seven to eight months in the past," Paul
emphasised.
The Senator also pointed to
the email from Dr. Peter Daszak , President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that
directly funded the Wuhan lab gain of function research, thanking Fauci for not giving credence
to the lab leak theory.
Ingraham asked Paul if Fauci could face felony culpability, to which the Senator replied "At
the very least, there is ethical culpability," and Fauci should be fired from his government
roles.
Earlier Paul had reacted to Amazon pulling Fauci's upcoming book from pre-sale:
In softball interviews with MSNBC and CNN Thursday, Fauci dismissed the notion that his
emails show any conflicts of interest, and claimed that it is in China's "best interest" to be
honest about the pandemic origins, adding that the US should not act "accusatory" toward the
communist state.
Roger Stone was given 9 years for lying to Congress. Fauci should be on the same
hook.
truth or go home 2 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Looks like Fauci is going the way of Gates, but he won't be arrested, because he is
doing the bidding of the overlords.
What could he be arrested for? Let's see: Misappropriation of government funds, lying to
a senator under oath, covering up a criminal operation, operating a conspiracy to deceive
the people of the United States.
Seems like Rand is willing to nail Fauci to the wall, but he is not willing to go after
the big kahuna - the entire hoax - the fake vaxxes, the fake lockdowns, the fake "cases",
the fake death count, the elimination of flu...
Lucky Guesst 10 hours ago
Fauci is owned by big pharma. All the major news channels have at least one big pharma
rat on the board. MSM continues to push the vaccines. They are all in bed together and need
busted up if not taken out.
SummerSausage PREMIUM 15 hours ago
2012- Fauci says weaponized virus research may produce a pandemic but it would be worth
it.
Jan 9, 2017 NIAD memo recommends lifting ban on funding weaponized virus research. Fauci
controls the funds.
Jan 4, 2017 - CIA/FBI/DNC - under Obama's direction are told, essentially, to get
Trump.
Obama is behind release of this virus, creating pandemic panic and lockdown to
facilitate stealing the 2020 election.
OBAMA must be investigated.
play_arrow
CheapBastard 10 hours ago
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak
it."
~ Anonymous
serotonindumptruck 17 hours ago remove link
Call me a pessimist, but I predict no accountability, no malfeasance, no criminal
charges will be filed against Fauci.
We've all witnessed similar criminal behavior being perpetrated by the wealthy elite
which result in no consequences.
Why should this be any different?
(((They))) now know that (((they))) can lie to us with impunity, and get away with
it.
alexcojones 16 hours ago
New Nuremberg Needed Now.
Fauci in the witness chair.
"So, Dr. Fauci, your decisions, your outright lies, led to thousands, perhaps millions
of unnecessary deaths."
Baric & Batwoman published their chimeric coronavirus with ACE2 receptor access in
2015. Funded by Fauci, of course.
Kevin 3 hours ago (Edited)
That document only shows that Gain Of Function research exists - not that the deaths,
falsely attributed to covid are due to the product of that research.
What self-respecting, lab-created, killer virus, supposedly so deadly that it warrants
the shutting down of the entire planet, is incapable of doing any more damage than the flu
does every year?
In the case of the UK, and according to its own official figures, it hasn't even been
able to do that compared to its history of seasonal flu.
So, 2020 was just a blip compared to the past and most of that blip in increased deaths
was due to the insane policies imposed rather than any lab-created Fluzilla. If you
subtract the deaths that occurred due to:
1. Kicking seniors out of hospital and dumping them into nursing homes where they died
because they no longer got the treatment they needed but where they could infect the other,
previously healthy residents.
2. The many tens of thousands of people who had life-saving surgeries and procedures
cancelled.
3. The huge increase in suicides.
..... I doubt there would even be that blip.
If those historically, insignificant 2020 death figures are due to a lab-created,
chimeric coronavirus then that's an epic fail of the scientists and an enormous waste of
money for their education and the G.o.F. research.
However, it has conned enough idiots into believing that there was a Fluzilla in 2020
and got them to beg for jabs that might be how a lab created, chimeric coronavirus with
ACE2 receptor access gets into their bodies and kills them.
The new con that it was a leaked GoF bio-weapon that caused the 2020 'pandemic' is just
a lie upon a lie.
But it will persuade many of the gullible and fence-sitters to get jabbed because they
will have accepted (subconsciously), that the Fluzilla must have existed last year and that
the only way to combat such a bio-weapon is to jab themselves with poison. Ironically, that
will create in their bodies what they fear most.
Befits 9 hours ago remove link
No, you are not thinking clearly. The Covid death numbers were clearly and horrifically
inflated
1) The CDC changed how death certificates were recorded. Co-morbidities ( cancer,
congestive heart failure, COPD for example) that co- morbidity was listed as cause of death
in part one of the death certificate for 2 decades until the CDC changed death
certificates. If that person had for example a flu At that time ( cough, stuffy nose etc)
it might be listed as a contributing factor ( part 2 of death certificate) person died of
co- morbidity but flu was a contributing factor. The CDC reversed these to make sure Covid
was the cause of death- but truth was people died with Covid not from Covid.
2) 95% of Covid listed deaths actually died of co- morbidities- with Covid not from
Covid. The CDC published that only 5% of " Covid " deaths had only Covid- the other 95% had
on average 4 co- morbidities. In other words their cause of death was co- morbidity not
Covid.
3) personal experience. I was a nurse. A close friend's brother had cancer for 7 years-
in and out of remission. He was " diagnosed with Covid via PCR, almost no symptoms but for
a slight cough and runny nose in March 2020. In April his cancer came back his liver shut
down and he was dead by May 2020. He died from liver cancer but his death was recorded as
Covid 19 simply because he had tested positive 60 days before on a Covid PCR test. This is
the fraud the CDC perpetrated.
4) Hospitals received greatly enhanced financial renumeration if a patient was "
diagnosed" with Covid. Compare hospital reimbursement ( Medicare) for a hospitalized Covid
patient v influenza patient - similar symptoms- on or off respirator. Bottom line the
medical system was financially rewarded for diagnosing " Covid" v influenza. Indeed the
hospital did not even have to confirm a " Covid diagnosis with the fraudulent PCR test to
diagnose Covid- just " symptom" based.
5) The PCR test can not diagnose any viral illness- simply by amplification cycles (30
plus) you can " find" Covid from a dead, partial RNA fragment. As Kary Mullis, Nobel prize
inventor of PCR testing said PCR testing is NOT a diagnostic tool. Hospitals and docs,
universities and public health departments, corporations, the CDC, FDA, used false PCR
testing to financially enrich themselves while destroying the lives and livelihoods of
millions inc careers of medical truth- tellers.
Fauci, the CDC, and the FDA knows all of this. Crimes v humanity trials must be
undertaken v every medical person- from Big Pharma, CDC, FDA, Doctor, nurse, hospital
administrator, public health official, corporate leader etc who used this Covid plandemic
for personal benefit or whom through their actions harmed another.
SoDamnMad 17 hours ago
Watch Tucker Carlson's expose on "Why they lied for so long" At 3:29 he goes into Peter
Danzak getting 27 "scientists" to write in the Lancet that the Covid virus didn't come from
the Wuhan Lab but rather from nature (with the HIV spliced into the genome). But he also
tells individuals at UNC NOT to sign the letter so that their gain-of-function research
isn't tied into this. His e-mail goes to Ralph Baric, Antoinette Baric, as well as Andre
Alison and Alexsei Chmura at EcoHealthAlliance who Fauci got the money to for funding GOF
Chinese research.
Fauci is 80. Why was he allowed to stay on so long?
He controls $32 billion in annual grants that all US scientists and researchers depend
on.
There's a whole lot more corruption to explore.
CatInTheHat 8 hours ago remove link
This whole thing feels CONTRIVED
Why does this even matter anymore?
China is NOT the problem here and focusing on CHINA DISTRACTS from a few things
here.
1 FORT DETRIK. A nefarious US BIOWEAPONS lab that Fraudci worked at for 20 years. FD
also works in conjunction with DARPA
2. Whenever it's WAPO or Buzzfeed (FFS!) who breaks a story related to the Rona, I am
convinced that the elite have called them up to DISTRACT the public from something more
important. Maybe that Fort Detrik was the source of the virus transferred to China via the
US MIC/CIA and the Wuhan military games in China in Nov of 2019. 2 weeks later the first
cases showed up at Wuhan.
3. This VACCINE has now killed over 5000 people and since the rollout for children
between 12-16, several hundred have now been hospitalized with MYOCARDITIS OR
PERICARDITIS.. In Israel a study conducted as the vax rolled out in YOUNG MEN, it was
revealed that one in 3,000 was suffering from MYOCARDITIS within 4 days of the jab.
MSM is now reporting on adolescents in several states hospitalized with INFLAMMATION.
... Which they blame on RONA. FUNNY how every one of those states have rolled out the jab
for CHILDREN
WE are being massively LIED too.
Also, Biden's press secretary PSAKI LIED when she said, today, that 63% of the
population has had the jab.
Wrong. Only 41% of the US population has had BOTH jabs. Anti gun Biden is now offering
guns in exchange for a vax in Virginia. And anti marijuana Biden offering MJ in AZ for
those who take the jab. Why the desperation?
For more perspective on the massive deaths piling up due to this jab, in 1976, when 50
people were killed after the Swine flu jab IT WAS PULLED FROM THE MARKET.
Many thousands who have not had the jab are reporting illness after being in close
contact with those who are vaxxed.
Lots and lots to DISTRACT from
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
ableman28 10 hours ago
True story....one of my VC firms investments was approached by the defense department to
create a wearable lapel style detector for chemical and biological weapons that would work
in very low concentrations giving people time to put on their CBW gear. Our investee said
sure, we'll take a crack at it, but where are we going to get all the biological and
chemical agents to test it with. The DOD response was don't worry, we have everything
you'll need. And they did.
The US bio weapons program was supposedly terminated by Nixon in 1969. And our official
policy is that we don't research or stockpile such things. ********.
Armed Resistance 15 hours ago (Edited) remove link
This virus was engineered at Ft. Detrick. It's the same place that made the
military-grade Anthrax the deep state sent to Tom Daschle and others in government post
9/11 to gin up more fear.
This was a Fauci-coordinated deep state bio weapon they released in Wuhan to kick off
the scamdemic and the "great reset". Releasing it China gave some cover to the deep state
and the people there are under total control of the state. The rest is just filler. Always
about more control.....
BeePee 15 hours ago
The virus was not engineered at Ft. Detrick.
You are a CCP troll.
Sorry you have such a low pay grade job.
Armed Resistance 15 hours ago (Edited)
Anybody who Questions the deep state is a CCP troll? Look in the mirror. You're the one
running cover for these satanists! You rack up downvotes like Jordan did points! ZH'ers can
spot a troll a mile away son.
louie1 PREMIUM 14 hours ago (Edited)
The US way is to put the perpetrators in charge of the inuiry to control the outcome.
Dulles, Zellick, Fauci
Mighty Turban of Gooch 11 hours ago
Our government is corrupt. As long as the Democrats and the MSM have Fauci's back, he
has nothing to worry about no matter what he's done.
He's just a typical lying bureaucrat and lying to the public thru the media outlets, as
we have seen countless times now by countless government 'officials', is not a crime. Lying
under oath however is. But now days we see these guys get away with that too without
consequence.
So don't hold your breath. There is absolutely nothing that can take these guys out.
Even if they throw one of their own under the bus, the best you can ever hope for is a
resignation as criminal charges would never happen.
dustinthewind 16 hours ago (Edited)
"The CDC Foundation operates independently from CDC as a private , nonprofit 501(c)(3)
organization incorporated in the State of Georgia."
"Because CDC is a federal agency , all scientific findings resulting from CDC research
are available to the public and open to the broader scientific community for review."
"The Board of Directors of the CDC Foundation today named Judith A. Monroe, MD, FAAFP,
as the new president and CEO of the CDC Foundation . Monroe joins the CDC Foundation from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ), where she leads the agency's Office
for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support."
Gates is the largest private donor of the CDC and WHO. Gates is part of the World
Economic Forum who controls Fauci which using US taxpayers funds did gain of function
studies first in the US and caught moved to China where it was intentionally leaked to
blame the Chinese. John Kerry is also part of the WEF and is their man in Washington
calling the war mongering narrative against both China and Russia. Gates funded Imperial
College and Ferguson to write the code that was fake and used by many countries to justify
lockdowns. Gates is the largest ag landowner and wants to ban meat. Who just got hacked and
now it is blamed on Russia? Boris is destroying the UK and after a call from Gates gave 500
million pounds to vaccinate third world countries and lockdowns. Both fathers were tied to
Rockefeller Institute. Rand, connect the dots!
Fauci is under attack globally and has shown himself to be unreliable and should be
fired "" PERIOD! All the emails that have come out from an
FOIA request are interesting, and it shows he has information that was credible
concerning a leak from the lab in Wuhan. Let me make this PERFECTLY clear! This was NOT a
DELIBERATE leak by the Chinese government. If China wanted to really hurt the West, the
technology is there where a virus can be used as a delivery system, and as such, it can be
designed to attack specific genetic sequences meaning that it could target just Italian,
Greeks, English, Germans, or whoever.
COVID-19, based upon everything I see from our model and reliable sources, was created
in a lab and was DELIBERATELY unleashed to further this Great Reset. I BELIEVE someone from
this agenda bribed a lab technician to release it in the local community. China did NOT
benefit from this pandemic. The only ones who benefitted were the World Economic Forum
(WEF) consortium, which I know sold stocks and bonds ahead of the crash. They are also in
league with the World Health Organization (WHO), and the head of the WHO is a politician
and not even a doctor. That is like putting me in charge of surgery at a hospital. How can
Tedros Adhanom be in such a position with no background in the subject matter? Tedros appears at the World
Economic Forum and has participated in its agenda. The WHO should be compelled to turn over
ALL emails and communication ASAP. My bet is they pull a Hillary"¦Oh sorry. They
were hacked by Russians who destroyed everything.
The World Economic Forum is at the center of everything. When will someone investigate all
of these connections right down to creating the slogan, Build Back Better? Of course, they
will call this a conspiracy theory so they can avoid having to actually investigate
anything. My point is simple: produce the evidence and prove this is just a conspiracy
theory.
'John Kerry's Think Tank Calls for War With Russia Over Climate Change'
" America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent
national security threat it is."" John Kerry
Recently-appointed Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has announced his
intention of dealing with the pressing issue of global warming as a national security
concern. "America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent
national security threat it is," the 76-year-old former Secretary of State wrote. "I am
proud to partner with the President-elect, our allies, and the young leaders of the climate
movement to take on this crisis." Kerry is a founding member of the Washington think tank,
the American Security Project (ASP) , whose board is a who's who of retired generals,
admirals and senators.
For the ASP, the primary objectives were:
A huge rebuilding of the United States' military bases,
Countering China in the Pacific,
Preparing for a war with Russia in the newly-melted Arctic.
The ASP recommends "prioritizing the measures that can protect readiness" of the
military to strike at any time, also warning that rising sea levels will hurt the combat
readiness of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Thus, a rebuilding of the U.S.' worldwide
network of military bases is in order.
Fort Detrik a US BIOWEAPONS lab working in tandem with the Wuhan lab. The US is the
leader in BIOWEAPONS research and has 100's of labs across the US and in other
countries.
FRAUDCI having worked at FD for 20 years.
MommickedDingbatter 12 hours ago
Without Nuremberg trials 2.0, this is all meaningless.
Nycmia37 16 hours ago remove link
Follow the science, lol. Just ask yourself who controls the science?? Big drug pharmas,
people is so stupid they believe in everything doctors tell them. The vast majority are on
the field to get rich and enjoy from the big bonuses and trips they get paid in order to
promote a drug. If they speak out they get called a conspiracy person. Nobody cant go
against this mafia because they have the total control, media, politicians, government. We
the people have to self educate about health and finance otherwise we will become zombies
like the majority of people.
SoDamnMad 7 hours ago remove link
Here are the 27 starting with Peter Daszak who signed THE LANCET letter saying ," We
stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not
have a natural origin. "
Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, New York
Charles Calisher, Colorado State University
Dennis Carroll, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Texas
Fauci is protected at the very highest levels of the oligarchy. So regardless of these
revelations nothing serious will ever happen to him. At worst, he will step down and retire
to his villa in the south of France. Then the controlled MSM will refuse to mention him
again.
Clearing 17 hours ago
Gee, while you're at it, sue Fauci in his individual capacity. He doesn't get immunity
for lying. See below:
In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government
officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from civil suits unless
the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or
constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known". It is a form of
sovereign immunity less strict than absolute immunity that is intended to protect officials
who "make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions" extending to "all
[officials] but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law " Qualified
immunity applies only to government officials in civil litigation, and does not protect the
government itself from suits arising from officials' actions.
DemandSider 3 hours ago (Edited)
"PCR is separate from that, it's just a process that's used to make a whole lot of
something out of something. That's what it is. It doesn't tell you that you're sick and it
doesn't tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything
like that," Mullis said.
-Nobel Prize winning inventor of PCR being used as a "test" to perpetuate the scamdemic.
Mr. "small government" Rand Paul is only making it worse.
Almachius 2 hours ago
Never mind Fauci. White Supremacists are the greatest threat to America.
Obiden said so.
And Obiden is an honourable man.
Fiscal Reality 14 hours ago
Fauci doesn't give a crap what happens. He got his book deal payoff. He's praying to get
fired so he can cash in on his taxpayer funded pension and get a $10 million contract with
CNN.
2types PREMIUM 13 hours ago
Amazon pulled his book from presale so says the article. Probably in his best interest
to keep his mouth shut right now. Anything he says can and will be used against him. On
second thought.... maybe that's why water carrier Bezos suspended sales?
The climate of fear that today governs much of our academic world, with future grant applications and even careers at risk if
researchers depart from perceived orthodoxy on certain issues is a clear sign of Lysenkoism...
Those measures as well as control of scientific publications were "amazingly effective" in suppressing dissent and reaching desirable
for authorities academic consensus.
Notable quotes:
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... The Wall Street Journal ..."
"... The Associated Press ..."
"... The Wall Street Journal ..."
"... For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if " ..."
"... New York Magazine ..."
"... New York Times, Science, ..."
"... Did people or nature open Pandora's box at Wuhan? ..."
"... as Wade demonstrates, that supposed consensus was largely illusory, having been shaped by two early items that appeared in prestigious scientific publications. On February 19, 2020, the Lancet ..."
"... Nature Medicine ..."
"... Wade notes that the former statement had actually been organized behind the scenes by Peter Daszak, an American closely associated with the Wuhan lab and therefore hardly a disinterested party, while the latter relied heavily upon very dubious scientific reasoning. ..."
"... Moreover, Wade also emphasizes the climate of fear that today governs much of our academic world, with future grant applications and even careers at risk if researchers depart from perceived orthodoxy on certain issues, perhaps including disputing the origins of Covid-19. He argues that although the Lancet ..."
"... Nature Medicine ..."
"... A Troublesome Inheritance ..."
"... We would also expect an animal virus that became dangerous to humans would require a lengthy series of intermediate mutational steps as it gradually evolved the ability to effectively infect our own species, just as had been the case with SARS and other previous diseases. But Covid-19 seems to have suddenly appeared in a maximally infectious form, perfectly pre-adapted to humans and apparently derived from a single original source. ..."
"... Finally, an important structural element of the virus, the "furin cleavage site," is entirely absent from all other members of its viral family ..."
"... Moreover, the particular genetic sequence found in that Covid-19 element is extremely rare in other coronaviruses, strongly suggesting that it was added from a different source. ..."
"... Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. ..."
As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth."
There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation
can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful
outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements
from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience.
I have sometimes faced this dilemma myself , but
over the last few years, my lengthy American Pravda series
has charted those gaping lacunae in our received accounts of modern world history, as I have sought to provide
a historical counter-narrative of the last
one hundred years .
Careful reexaminations of events from fifty or sixty years ago may be interesting, but those of the present day have far greater
importance, and this is particularly true with regard to the Covid-19 epidemic that has engulfed the world since early 2020. Millions
have already died, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, with
a newly released research study by the University of Washington's authoritative Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)
now suggesting that our domestic death-toll has already exceeded 900,000. This global outbreak first began in Wuhan, and the nature
of its origin has become a major flashpoint in the new Cold War between China and America, with the trajectory of that conflict having
only slightly changed as Trump Neocons have been replaced by Biden Neocons at the helm of our foreign policy.
Two months ago I published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak and focusing
upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. Aside from the reports of the teams of investigative journalists at the
New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , and the Associated Press , several very long articles by independent
journalists and researchers have constituted my main sources of information, including:
For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if "
Nicholson Baker "New York Magazine "January 4, 2021 " 12,000 Words
This compendium of crucial research has now received a major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19
by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times,
Science, and Nature , and the author of several excellent books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.
The central focus of both Baker and Wade is indicated by their closely-related titles, namely the origins of the virus and whether
it was the product of a laboratory, presumably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then later released in a tragic accident. Both these
authors strongly lean toward that latter possibility, but take somewhat different approaches. While Baker, a prominent novelist and
liberal public intellectual, must rely upon general arguments or merely reports the opinions of the experts that he interviewed,
Wade deploys his strong scientific background to build a persuasive case for that same conclusion.
From nearly the beginning of the epidemic, the position taken by the mainstream media had been that Covid-19 was very likely natural
in origin, and although President Trump and some of his political allies soon loudly claimed otherwise, the perceived scientific
consensus remained unchanged.
But as Wade demonstrates, that supposed consensus was largely illusory, having been shaped by two early items that appeared
in prestigious scientific publications. On February 19, 2020, the Lancet had published
a statement signed
by 27 virologists and other noted scientists that declared: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting
that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," and that "[scientists] overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in
wildlife." Then the following month Nature Medicine published
an analysis by five virologists providing some theoretical
arguments against any artificial origin, stating that: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or
a purposefully manipulated virus."
These published pieces became far more influential than was warranted. Wade notes that the former statement had actually been
organized behind the scenes by Peter Daszak, an American closely associated with the Wuhan lab and therefore hardly a disinterested
party, while the latter relied heavily upon very dubious scientific reasoning. But once these emphatic conclusions had appeared
in influential periodicals, few microbiologists were willing to challenge this newly established orthodoxy, especially because doing
so would have placed them in the same political camp as Trump, a much vilified figure in their community. Baker had earlier made
similar criticism and I had fully endorsed his verdict in my own March article, but Wade's analysis provides far greater depth.
Moreover, Wade also emphasizes the climate of fear that today governs much of our academic world, with future grant applications
and even careers at risk if researchers depart from perceived orthodoxy on certain issues, perhaps including disputing the origins
of Covid-19. He argues that although the Lancet and Nature Medicine letters were actually political statements
rather than scientific findings, they were "amazingly effective" in suppressing dissent and led the overwhelming majority of journalists
to accept them as reflecting a research consensus that actually did not exist.
Wade's own personal experiences have surely informed this shrewd analysis of the underlying political dynamics. His most recent
book A Troublesome Inheritance had appeared in 2014, and its subtitle "Genes, Race, and Human History" reflected the potentially
explosive nature of his subject matter. Although I considered it
an outstanding treatment of the controversial
topic , Wade's work soon attracted a lynch-mob of critics, who organized a denunciatory public statement that they persuaded
139 prominent genetic scientists to sign. All these individuals were soon humiliated
once it was proven
that not a single one of them had actually bothered examining the true contents of the book that they were so fiercely attacking.
In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider the
evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully
weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as a
so-called "conspiracy theory."
For example, despite fifteen months of presumably intensive effort, the Chinese have failed to locate evidence of any wildlife
population hosting a closely-related precursor virus, which had easily been found in the previous cases of emergent viral epidemics
such as SARS and MERS. Indeed, the closest natural relative to Covid-19 only exists among bats in the caves of Yunnan, nearly 1,000
miles distant from the Wuhan outbreak.
We would also expect an animal virus that became dangerous to humans would require a lengthy series of intermediate mutational
steps as it gradually evolved the ability to effectively infect our own species, just as had been the case with SARS and other previous
diseases. But Covid-19 seems to have suddenly appeared in a maximally infectious form, perfectly pre-adapted to humans and apparently
derived from a single original source.
Finally, an important structural element of the virus, the "furin cleavage site," is entirely absent from all other members
of its viral family, and crucially contributes to its dangerously infectious nature. A natural origin for that structure seems
implausible, while the scientific literature is replete with such additions having been made in laboratory experiments, including
those conducted by the Wuhan researchers. Moreover, the particular genetic sequence found in that Covid-19 element is extremely
rare in other coronaviruses, strongly suggesting that it was added from a different source.
Having now twice read Wade's long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and
I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.
The explanation of this seeming paradox comes near the very beginning of his article, when he accurately states:
As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people.
The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped.
A paragraph later, the text contains his first major section heading, entitled "A Tale of Two Theories."
Although Wade is absolutely correct in stating that "there are two main theories" about the origins of Covid-19, this duality
has been enforced by political pressures quite similar to those that had earlier excluded discussion of the "lab-leak hypothesis,"
but with the sanctions being far harsher and more extreme.
Wade's analysis masterfully demonstrates that once we are actually willing to explore the much-vilified "conspiracy theory" of
an accidental lab-leak, we discover that it is far more plausible than the case of a natural origin, partly because the latter appears
so unlikely. And if these were the only two possible theories, all arguments against the one would necessarily support the other.
But this framework is upended once we recognize that there is a third logical possibility, far more vilified and excluded than that
of the "lab-leak hypothesis" but also far more plausible and supported by much stronger evidence.
In my March discussion of Baker's long article, I summarized how he first became involved in the topic, and described the crucial
omission I had noticed in his 12,000 word opus:
Baker may not have been a professional virologist or expert in biowarfare, but as the Covid-19 outbreak began he had just completed
Baseless , a lengthy non-fictional account of American national security secrets, which appeared to glowing reviews in
July 2020. One of his major elements was an account of America's massive 1950s bioweapons research program, which had been accorded
resources and importance matching that of our nuclear weapons efforts. Based upon his years of research, the author was not a
complete neophyte on biological warfare issues and was also fully aware of our own long history of laboratory accidents, which
had claimed a number of lives. So he was naturally alert to the possibility that a similar accident had occurred in Wuhan, which
contained China's most secure facility of that same type.
The greatest weakness of Baker's comprehensive analysis is not the controversial theory that he carefully examines, but the
even more controversial possibility that he seems to totally ignore. At one point, he notes the remarkable characteristics of
the pathogen, whose collection of features allowed it to so effectively target humans and which had first appeared in a city having
one of the very few world laboratories engaged in exactly that type of viral research, closing his paragraph with the sentence
"What are the odds?" But other, even more implausible coincidences were entirely excluded from his discussion, and the same had
also been true for Lemoine.
Both these authors seem to assume that there exist only two possible scenarios: a natural virus that suddenly appeared in Wuhan
during late 2019 or an accidental lab-leak of an enhanced disease agent in that same city. But there is an obvious third case
as well, clearly suggested by Baker's focus on America's own very active biowarfare program, which he extensively discussed both
in his long article and in his highly-regarded book. We must surely consider the possibility that the Covid-19 outbreak was not
at all accidental, but instead constituted a deliberate attack against China, occurring as it did near the absolute height of
the international tension with America, and therefore suggesting that elements of our own national security apparatus were the
most obvious suspects. Given the realities of the publishing industry, any serious exploration of such a scenario would probably
have precluded the appearance of the important Baker or Lemoine articles in any respectable publication, perhaps helping to explain
such silence. But as I have argued in my long American
Pravda series , many historical accounts that were blacklisted for exactly those sorts of reasons appear quite likely to be
true.
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced
a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words
is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare
program. For several years, our newspapers have proclaimed that we are now locked into a new Cold War against China, with some
risk that it might turn hot. But the obvious possible implications of the sudden, potentially-devastating outbreak of a dangerous
viral epidemic in our leading international adversary remains unmentionable, too explosive even to dismissed or ridiculed, let alone
carefully considered.
As I noted towards the end of my long March article:
I can easily understand why all these simple facts and their obvious implications regarding the likely origins of the worldwide
epidemic might be considered extremely uncomfortable, perhaps too uncomfortable to be discussed in our media outlets, and therefore
have been so widely ignored. Most of these crucial points were already presented in my original April 2020 article on the subject,
which quickly began to attract enormous traffic and interest in social media. Yet just days after it ran, our entire website was
suddenly banned from Facebook and all our web pages were deranked by Google, perhaps underscoring the very dangerous nature of
this material, and the reasons why so few others have been willing to raise the same points.
I find almost nothing to dispute in the comprehensive analyses provided by Lemoine, Baker, and Wade, but I do think my own work
represents a crucial supplement to their research, given that I have primarily focused on that third possibility, a possibility that
they were necessarily forced to avoid considering. Readers may judge for themselves, but I believe that my articles have demonstrated
that the evidence supporting that excluded hypothesis is considerably stronger than that favoring either of those other two possibilities,
whether the mainstream narrative of a natural virus or the much-vilified "conspiracy theory" of a lab-leak in Wuhan.
For convenience, I am excerpting substantial portions of my original April 2020 and my most recent March 2021 articles:
Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1% or less, it is extremely contagious,
including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and also among asymptomatic carriers. Thus, portions of the US and Europe
are now suffering heavy casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national economies.
The virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population, but we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak
can so easily wreck our entire economic life.
During January, the journalists reporting on China's mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new
viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to
the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration,
thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The
Chinese government avoided that grim fate by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700
million Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near thing, and if Wuhan had remained
open for just a few days longer, China might easily have suffered long-term economic and social devastation.
The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the outbreak seems to have begun during
the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As
I noted in January, I
saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the timing of the release seemed very unlikely to
have been accidental.
Consider also the preceding waves of other unfortunate viral epidemics that had recently ravaged China:
[D]uring the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases,
although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating
large portions of China's poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China's pig farms, destroying
40% of the nation's primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious
small drones. My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories,
noting that the
sudden collapse of much of China's domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of
our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely
impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial,
but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.
Another even more remarkable coincidence has received far greater distribution, becoming a staple of anti-American "conspiracy
theories" and even resulting in a diplomatic incident involving the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
According to the widely accepted current chronology, the Covid-19 epidemic began in Wuhan during late October or early November
of 2019. But the World Military Games were also held in Wuhan during that same period, ending in late October, with 300 American
military servicemen attending. As I've repeatedly emphasized in
my articles and comments for more than a year , how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended
visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly erupted in that city?
It surely would have been very easy for our intelligence services to have slipped a couple of their operatives into that large
American military contingent, and the presence of many thousands of foreign military personnel, traveling around the large city
and doing sightseeing, would have been ideally suited to providing cover for the quiet release of a highly-infectious viral bioweapon.
None of this constitutes proof, but the coincidental timing is quite remarkable.
Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their
classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to
prison in chains. My own knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the
coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself "OldMicrobiologist" and who claimed
to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible,
and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described.
I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of
a 3,400 word article
, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.
Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that
the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that
country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies
had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon
since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological
agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words "a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect
for ruining an economy," suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard.
Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness.
Some of this same speculation eventually reached Chinese social media, and led to articles in Chinese government publications,
which immediately provoked a very hostile response by Trump Administration officials.
This latter sequence of events is carefully recounted in
a massive 17,000 word, 54 page report released a few weeks ago by DFRLab, a social media-oriented research unit within the
establishmentarian Atlantic Council, with the work being based upon nine months of research and preparation by a dozen staffers,
together with the Associated Press investigations team. The study seemed aimed at tracking the appearance and Internet
dissemination of a wide range of supposedly false or unsubstantiated "conspiracy theories" regarding the Covid-19 outbreak, and
AP journalists soon publicized
the results , denouncing "the superspreaders" of such allegedly spurious and potentially dangerous beliefs.
But while this project did produce a very useful compendium of the chronology and source references of the various unorthodox
narratives surrounding the disease, many of which were certainly erroneous or implausible, few effective rebuttal arguments were
provided, notably regarding the extremely suspicious timing of the American military presence in Wuhan. Blogger Steve Sailer and
others have often ridiculed this "point-and-sputter" school of refutation, in which non-mainstream theories need only be described
in order to be considered conclusively disproved.
Although the Atlantic Council/Associated Press team certainly included numerous skilled social media researchers, journalists,
and editors, there is no indication that any of these individuals possessed serious national security credentials, let alone specialized
expertise in the arcane topic of biowarfare. This may help to explain why the weighty report which drew upon such enormous resources
was almost entirely descriptive and made so little effort to analyze or evaluate the plausibility of the various conflicting "conspiracy
narratives" that it treated at great length.
One further oddity of the very comprehensive DFRLab/Atlantic Council report was its own rather curious omissions. Given that its
entire focus was on the full range of absurd "conspiracy theories," the authors naturally explored speculation regarding an American
biowarfare attack, and attributed this theory partly to Kevin Barrett, whom the report characterized as "a US Holocaust denier who
has also claimed that the September 11 attacks were an "˜inside job' by the George W. Bush Administration."
The resulting news story
by its Associated Press partners prominently featured Barrett as one of the America's leading "super-spreaders" of Covid-19
conspiracy-nonsense. Yet Barrett's only real role had been to quote and endorse my own very substantial writings in that area, and
although
he unsuccessfully urged the AP journalists to contact me directly , my name was entirely absent from either the news
articles or the lengthy underlying research report. Since my own writings had constituted the longest and most comprehensive presentation
of the American Biowarfare Hypothesis, such an omission appears curious. I suspect that the editors concluded that any attack on
me would bring my articles to much wider attention, and therefore ruled it out as being obviously counter-productive.
I find it highly unlikely that the DFRLab staffers were unaware of my existence. Their comprehensive report appeared in February
2021, and since it was based upon nine months of investigation, the project would have begun in May 2020. But on April 21, 2020,
I had published
my long original
article making the case for an American biowarfare attack, and its rapidly growing popularity on Facebook only came to an end
after the social media giant quickly banned our entire website, a sudden action that had been based upon
a very doubtful report produced
by that very same DFRLab team , with which
Facebook has long partnered . Indeed
this remarkable coincidence of timing raises the interesting possibility that the appearance of my article and its considerable popularity
had actually prompted DFRLab to undertake its nine month investigation into the general subject of Covid-19 "conspiracy theories."
Furthermore:
The extensive material collected by the Atlantic Council researchers lent further support to an important point
I had made
last April about the curious nature of the early Covid-19 coverage:
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China
reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms
to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis
that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to
take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously
authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and
the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack
had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.
During January, American media outlets, including those under the authority of Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike
Pompeo, began focusing attention on the Wuhan lab as the potential source of the viral outbreak, while journalists disputing this
narrative and attempting to raise other possibilities had serious difficulties even getting their articles published on alternative
websites:
Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat virus, leading to widespread media
speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated
waves of anti-China accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon published
a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of America's own enormous biowarfare
research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News
, but that publication had strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions it directed
towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our platform, her major contribution to the public
debate might have attracted relatively little readership.
All the evidence thus far presented has merely been circumstantial, strongly establishing that elements of the American national
security establishment had the means, motive, and opportunity to stage a biowarfare attack in Wuhan. However, in April 2020 certain
additional facts appeared that some have characterized as "smoking gun" proof of that disturbing scenario:
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies
have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month,
an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical
intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic
was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning
that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the
existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But
a few days later,
Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak
with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News
story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan
more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered
the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge
of future fires.
According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by "the second week of November" our Defense Intelligence Agency
was already preparing a secret report warning of a "cataclysmic" disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably
no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious
symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied
my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering
China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political
elites had been especially hard-hit, with
a full 10% of the entire Iranian
parliament soon infected and at least
a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were
quite senior
. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any
significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred
almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander on Jan. 2nd
and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus,
with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
Most of the material quoted above had originally appeared in my April 2020 article and was afterwards extended and further discussed
in my later pieces, the most recent appearing in March 2021. Taken together, they have been read at least a couple of hundred thousand
times, and have provoked more than 500,000 words of comments. Yet the undeniable facts I presented have remained almost entirely
excluded from the ongoing public debate, presumably for the practical political reasons I have suggested, so it is difficult to know
exactly who has become aware of them.
Donald Trump's departure from the White House seems to have finally encouraged our timorous mainstream media organs to admit that
their longstanding presumption of the entirely natural origin of Covid-19 might not be correct, and
they
have begun giving some consideration to the long-derided competing theory of a man-made virus released in an accidental lab-leak.
But under these changed circumstances, I consider it entirely unreasonable if they continue ignoring that very real third possibility
of an American biowarfare attack. The key pieces of evidence I have provided that favor this hypothesis over the competing lab-leak
scenario may easily be summarized:
(1) For three years, China had been locked in growing conflict with America over trade and geopolitics, and for three years in
a row, China had been hit very hard by mysterious viruses. An Avian Flu virus severely damaged its poultry industry in 2018 and the
following year a Swine Flu virus destroyed over 40% of its pig herds, China's primary meat source. The third year, Covid-19 appeared.
Certainly a suspicious pattern if the last were just a random lab-leak.
(2) The Covid-19 outbreak appeared at absolutely the worst time and place for China, the major transit hub of Wuhan, timed almost
perfectly to reach high local levels of infection just as the travelers for the Lunar New Year holiday spread the disease to all
other parts of the country, thereby producing an unstoppable epidemic. The timing of an accidental lab-leak would obviously be random.
(3) 300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the World Military Games, providing a perfect opportunity
for releasing a viral bioweapon. Consider what Americans would think if 300 Chinese military officers had visited Chicago, and immediately
afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral disease suddenly broke out in that city. It would be a strange coincidence if that the American
military visit and an entirely unrelated accidental lab-leak had occurred at exactly the same time.
(4) The characteristics of Covid-19, including high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal in an anti-economy
bioweapon. It seems odd that a random lab-leak would release a virus so perfectly designed to severely damage the Chinese economy.
(5) From almost the very moment that the outbreak began, anti-China bloggers in America and the US-funded Radio Free Asia network
had launched a powerful international propaganda offensive against China, claiming that the outbreak in Wuhan was due to the leak
of an illegal bioweapon from the Wuhan lab. This may have merely been an exceptionally prompt but opportunistic response of our propaganda
organs, but they seemed remarkably quick to take full advantage of an entirely unexpected and mysterious development, which they
immediately identified as being due to a lab-leak.
(6) By "the second week of November" our Defense Intelligence Agency had already begun preparing a secret report warning of a
"cataclysmic" disease outbreak in Wuhan although according to the standard timeline at that point probably only a couple of dozen
people had started experiencing any symptoms of illness in a city of 11 million. How did they discover what was happening in Wuhan
so much sooner than the Chinese government or anyone else?
(7) Almost immediately afterwards, the ruling political elites in Iran became severely infected, with many of them dying. Why
did the accidental Wuhan lab-leak jump to the Iran's political elites so quickly, before it had reached almost anywhere else in the
world.
Given the conclusions suggested above, I also think it would be useful for me to provide my own summary of a plausible scenario
for the Covid-19 outbreak. Although I had already presented this outline
in a September 2020 article , I see no need for any revisions. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think
it best fits all the available evidence, while individual elements may be modified, dropped, or replaced without necessarily compromising
the overall hypothesis.
(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict
severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19
so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used
the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is
that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.
(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although
Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread
by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it
would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China's economy
and society.
(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran's political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant
of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.
(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released
in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America's own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence
Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed "intelligence leak." Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan
was apparently suffering a "cataclysmic" disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning
our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.
(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped
out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after
the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had
no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America's economy
and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.
Fauci is a reincarnations of Academisian Lysenko in much more sinister and dangerous form. He is a political hack masquerading as
bioscience researcher.
Appearing on Newsmax TV, Paul said "I'm just glad that Dr. Fauci has now chosen to accept vaccine science "" basic vaccine science
says you can't get it after you've been vaccinated; that's why we get vaccinated."
He was performing theater, wearing masks because he didn't want people to see him without a mask," Paul noted, adding "It wasn't
the masks worked or that he needed it. You heard the way he phrased it. He didn't want someone to see him without the mask. So,
really, it was theater."
"If we send them a signal that they're just making up this science and they're treating us like imbeciles, and they're doing
things for show, it actually discourages some of the people who are hesitant to get vaccinated," Paul further argued.
When it comes to vaccines, the Senator said that it should be up to Americans whether or not they get the shot, and there shouldn't
be any mandatory decree.
"I think high-risk people should, voluntarily; I wouldn't tell anybody they had to," Paul emphasised, adding "I wouldn't be
out there telling 12-year-olds we're not going to let you go to summer camp or we're not going to let you go to school or get
on a plane unless you're vaccinated."
"We need to really not treat this as a one-size fits all. This really should be individualized, and that's way healthcare should
be in a free society," The Senator further urged.
Fauxci is now making a strategic withdrawal on masks to divert attention away from his responsibility for the illegal NIH funding
of the gain of function research at WIV - where he is using the oldest bureaucrat trick in the book, "it wasn't me!!" (because
he obfuscated it by using a third party to attempt to create "plausible deniability").
Rand Paul should not let him get away with that because he should understand that Grants to third parties are subject to TOR,
progress reports and defined "Deliverables" - reported against in the final report. So Fauxci will have been fully informed throughout.
The virus source issue and illegal funding is the ONE thing that MIGHT get him busted; and he knows it. Don't let it drop Senator!!
asteroids 10 hours ago
That wasn't theatre, Fauci was LYING to you. That's what fraudsters do.
play_arrow
BigJJ 10 hours ago
And he killed many more than that with him steering funds to gain of function "research" under the Obama regime for his genocidal
white man wannabe master in the White House.
Lordflin 14 hours ago remove link
If I were Fauci I would be looking to go underground...
Dr Sen Paul needs to follow up with the fact that Fauci lied under oath in that senate hearing. If the weasel Keebler Elf word
salads his way around "intent" then he needs to be accused of incompetence. Fact is Fauci lied, is incompetent & most importantly,
is a criminal against humanity.
rockstone 12 hours ago (Edited)
You and I are on the same page but Fauci is far from "incompetent." He helped engineer and front one of the biggest and most
dangerous scams in history. It's just you can only keep up the front so long. I try, it's hard but I try, to never see these people
as dumb, or idiots, or stupid. They aren't Fredo. They're crazy like foxes and flat out evil and....... this time they succeeded.
You're correct that he is a vicious criminal. He should hang from a lamppost.
russellthetreeman PREMIUM 14 hours ago (Edited)
Apparently the cdc has recently admitted only 6% of covid deaths were actually caused by covid. All others had serious co-morbidities...it's
all been theatre. Or flat out lies. Depends how you look at it I guess, LOL!
I remember someone called it a hoax early last year. play_arrow
Al Jolson 14 hours ago
Fauci should be hanged for what he's done.
when is Summit News or ZH going to report on the tens of thousands of deaths and serious adverse events directly associated
with this injection?
I've asked that here almost every day for months!!
It doesn't make medical sense to "vaccinate" people who are already immune (variously estimated as up to 80% - think the Diamond
Princess) and it is unethical to "vaccinate" pregnant women and children. It also makes more medical sense to issue "Passports"
to those with natural immunity because they are truly long-term immune and cannot transmit. In contarst, neither applies to "vaccinated"
people who are shedding" spike proteins (being produced irreversibly in huge volumes) and causing problems in the unvaccinated
because it is the spike proteins that cause the AEs.
So, in view of all of the above it is clear that the obsession with "vaccinating" every man, woman and child has NOTHING to
do with "Public Health".
freedommusic 13 hours ago remove link
Dr. Anthony Fauci lacks knowledge of medicine and is willing to lie on television.
""Kary Mullis, PCR inventor, 1993 Nobel Prize
Died August 7, 2019
SacredCowPies 13 hours ago
... petition filed in India's Supreme Court by Dr Jacob Puliyel , a former member of the National Technical Advisory Group
on Immunisation , also prayed that the court may declare vaccination mandates as unconstitutional.
Paul said "I'm just glad that Dr. Fauci has now chosen to accept vaccine science "" basic vaccine science says you can't
get it after you've been vaccinated; that's why we get vaccinated."
There's your outright lie and propaganda. Just get "vaccinated" with the experimental gene therapy and other concoctions because
then you don't need a mask...
It has long been known that the vaccinated test positive.
Feb 26, 2021
In the days and weeks after Covid-19 vaccines became available, healthcare professionals observed that some vaccinated individuals
tested positive by both PCR and rapid antigen tests
I worked at a university for almost 7 years and it's ALL about funding, seriously that's ALL anyone talked about was getting
funding and getting people to apply for grant writing gigs to get funding. They absolutely do what's asked of them for funding.
GreatUncle 12 hours ago
Tells you that scientists are not those who should be trusted because a nice paycheck makes you disregard science.
Proven through this pandemic, also proven with much of the global warming BS too.
Scientists sold out ... if anybody says I am a scientist ask them if they sold out their specialist area too!
seryanhoj 11 hours ago (Edited)
Here's how;-
""Of course the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that
he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany.
That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter
to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any
country."
Herman Goering
Sign Felled 14 hours ago remove link
It's NEVER been about the science. I wish respected scientists and researchers around the world would stand up and condemn
gov'ts for invoking "science" in the name of politics. Otherwise, I fear the scientific process will forever be lost and the
conclusions drawn from the process will never be trusted again. Sadly, I don't hold out much hope that will happen. Many of
these previously respected scientists have been complicit in politicizing their own discipline.
"Johnson...caved to big government as soon as technocrats frightened the world with
nonsense...."
True, but the old pre-Wuflu paradigm was to trust the experts. Now that they've squandered
their scientific inheritance and demonstrated that they are political hacks like the rest, we
know better and will do it differently in the future.
Ian Campbell SUBSCRIBER 9 hours ago
We need to make sure you're right. There is a whole 'how science is managed in/by government'
topic to be totally discussed and reformed.
Allowing one group to both exclusively advise gov't without counter opinions publicly
in the mix, while also going on TV, radio and other media and 'advising' the public also is
totally un-acceptable.
The same has happened over agriculture, and energy both of which have become captured by
one side of the relevant debates - the side with the loudest voices, crony contacts and
deepest pockets. It needs to be across the board reform and putting the techno's back in the
most useful box they should be inhabiting. And making sure they are doing only science, not
advocacy.
Michael Yeadon, wasn't just any scientist. The 60-year-old is a former vice president of Pfizer, where he spent 16 years as an
allergy and respiratory researcher. He later co-founded a biotech firm that the Swiss drugmaker Novartis purchased for at least $325
million.
This is amazing interview for a scientist who really knows his staff... His warning is
essentially a very powerful warning against Lysenkoism in science.
I disagree with him on some minor points like wearing masks in closed spaces as well as the spectrum of applicability of
vaccines (I think that healthcare workers, teachers and other people who systematically interact with a lot of (possibly infected)
people might benefit from vaccination, which should in any case be strocly voluntary. But I agree that vaccinating people who
already have had COVID-19 and children s very questionable and probably indefensible practice -- flavor of Lysenkoism which is
called Fauchism. Also stress of vaccines and downgrading therapy is also Faucism, or worse.
I also disagree with his statement that vaccine should be effective against all strains. Now we know that htis not the case. For
exampe South afrecan mutation successfully infects people vaccinated wit the the first generation vaccines.
He is against medicines which are used with violation of safety protocols. He is anti unsafe
medicines, no matter what they are.
We never have such an absurd attribution of death to COVID, when that fact the diseased is
false positive serve as the key reason of death
Lockdowns were political hysteria. Witch hunt against witches which never arrived. They were
unscientific and fradulent. Lockdown were never used before because they are ineffective. Instead
in the past guaranteed the sick. Mass testing of people without symptoms is Lysenkoism and defies
common sense.
Non-symptomatic people will not infect you. That's faucism and new flavor of Lysenkoism.
Asymptomatic transmission is bunk. It can happen but this never exceed fraction of one
percent.
It is all about increasing of the level of fear and increasing political control as in famous
quote. The only open question to what end this control will used for.
PCR technology is similar to technology used in forensic investigation using genetic
material. They just ignore false positives. Nobody in the world releases the percentage of false
positive of PcR test and dependence of the number of false positive on the number of
amplification.
I never expected to be writing something like this. I am an ordinary person, recently semi-retired from a career in the
pharmaceutical industry and biotech, where I spent over 30 years trying to solve problems of disease understanding and seek new
treatments for allergic and inflammatory disorders of lung and skin. I've always been interested in problem solving, so when
anything biological comes along, my attention is drawn to it. Come 2020, came SARS-CoV-2. I've written
about the pandemic as objectively as I could. The scientific method never leaves a person who trained and worked as a
professional scientist. Please do read that piece. My co-authors & I will submit it to the normal rigours of peer review, but that
process is slow and many pieces of new science this year have come to attention through pre-print servers and other less
conventional outlets.
While paying close attention to data, we all initially focused on the sad matter of deaths. I found it remarkable that, in
discussing the COVID-19 related deaths, most people I spoke to had no idea of large numbers. Asked approximately how many people a
year die in the UK in the ordinary course of events, each a personal tragedy, They usually didn't know. I had to inform them it is
around 620,000, sometimes less if we had a mild winter, sometimes quite a bit higher if we had a severe 'flu season. I mention this
number because we know that around 42,000 people have died with or of COVID-19. While it's a huge number of people, its 'only' 0.06%
of the UK population. Its not a coincidence that this is almost the same proportion who have died with or of COVID-19 in each of the
heavily infected European countries – for example, Sweden. The annual all-causes mortality of 620,000 amounts to 1,700 per day,
lower in summer and higher in winter. That has always been the lot of humans in the temperate zones. So for context, 42,000 is about
~24 days worth of normal mortality. Please know I am not minimising it, just trying to get some perspective on it. Deaths of this
magnitude are not uncommon, and can occur in the more severe flu seasons. Flu vaccines help a little, but on only three occasions in
the last decade did vaccination reach 50% effectiveness. They're good, but they've never been magic bullets for respiratory viruses.
Instead, we have learned to live with such viruses, ranging from numerous common colds all the way to pneumonias which can kill.
Medicines and human caring do their best.
So, to this article. Its about the testing we do with something called PCR, an amplification technique, better known to biologists
as a research tool used in our labs, when trying to unpick mechanisms of disease. I was frankly astonished to realise they're
sometimes used in population screening for diseases – astonished because it is a very exacting technique, prone to invisible errors
and it's quite a tall order to get reliable information out of it, especially because of the prodigious amounts of amplification
involved in attempting to pick up a strand of viral genetic code. The test cannot distinguish between a living virus and a short
strand of RNA from a virus which broke into pieces weeks or months ago.
I believe I have identified a serious, really a fatal flaw in the PCR test used in what is called by the UK Government the Pillar 2
screening – that is, testing many people out in their communities. I'm going to go through this with care and in detail because I'm
a scientist and dislike where this investigation takes me. I'm not particularly political and my preference is for competent, honest
administration over the actual policies chosen. We're a reasonable lot in UK and not much given to extremes. What I'm particularly
reluctant about is that, by following the evidence, I have no choice but to show that the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, misled the
House of Commons and also made misleading statements in a radio interview. Those are serious accusations. I know that. I'm not a
ruthless person. But I'm writing this anyway, because what I have uncovered is of monumental importance to the health and wellbeing
of all the people living in the nation I have always called home.
Back to the story, and then to the evidence. When the first (and I think, only) wave of COVID-19 hit the UK, I was with almost
everyone else in being very afraid. I'm 60 and in reasonable health, but on learning that I had about a 1% additional risk of
perishing if I caught the virus, I discovered I was far from ready to go. So, I wasn't surprised or angry when the first lockdown
arrived. It must have been a very difficult thing to decide. However, before the first three-week period was over, I'd begun to
develop an understanding of what was happening. The rate of infection, which has been calculated to have infected well over 100,000
new people every day around the peak, began to fall, and was declining before lockdown. Infection continued to spread out, at an
ever-reducing rate and we saw this in the turning point of daily deaths, at a grim press conference each afternoon. We now know that
lockdown made no difference at all to the spread of the virus. We can tell this because the interval between catching the virus and,
in those who don't make it, their death is longer than the interval between lockdown and peak daily deaths. There isn't any
controversy about this fact, easily demonstrated, but I'm aware some people like to pretend it was lockdown that turned the
pandemic, perhaps to justify the extraordinary price we have all paid to do it. That price wasn't just economic. It involved
avoidable deaths from diseases other than COVID-19, as medical services were restricted, in order to focus on the virus. Some say
that lockdown, directly and indirectly, killed as many as the virus. I don't know. Its not something I've sought to learn. But I
mention because interventions in all our lives should not be made lightly. Its not only inconvenience, but real suffering, loss of
livelihoods, friendships, anchors of huge importance to us all, that are severed by such acts. We need to be certain that the prize
is worth the price. While it is uncertain it was, even for the first lockdown, I too supported it, because we did not know what we
faced, and frankly, almost everyone else did it, except Sweden. I am now resolutely against further interventions in what I have
become convinced is a fruitless attempt to 'control the virus'. We are, in my opinion – shared by others, some of whom are well
placed to assess the situation – closer to the end of the pandemic in terms of deaths, than we are to its middle. I believe we
should provide the best protection we can for any vulnerable people, and otherwise cautiously get on with our lives. I think we are
all going to get a little more Swedish over time.
In recent weeks, though, it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that there has been a drum beat which feels for all the world
like a prelude to yet more fruitless and damaging restrictions. Think back to mid-summer. We were newly out of lockdown and despite
concerns for crowded beaches, large demonstrations, opening of shops and pubs, the main item on the news in relation to COVID-19 was
the reassuring and relentless fall in daily deaths. I noticed that, as compared to the slopes of the declining death tolls in many
nearby countries, that our slope was too flat. I even mentioned to scientist friends that inferred the presence of some fixed signal
that was being mixed up with genuine COVID-19 deaths. Imagine how gratifying it was when the definition of a COVID-19 death was
changed to line up with that in other countries and in a heartbeat our declining death toll line became matched with that elsewhere.
I was sure it would: what we have experienced and witnessed is a terrible kind of equilibrium. A virus that kills few, then leaves
survivors who are almost certainly immune – a virus to which perhaps 30-50% were already immune because it has relatives and some of
us have already encountered them – accounts for the whole terrible but also fascinating biological process. There was a very interesting
piece in the BMJ in
recent days that offers potential support for this contention.
Now we have learned some of the unusual characteristics of the new virus, better treatments (anti-inflammatory steroids,
anti-coagulants and in particular, oxygen masks and not ventilators in the main) the 'case fatality rate' even for the most hard-hit
individuals is far lower now than it was six months ago.
As there is no foundational, medical or scientific literature which tells us to expect a 'second wave', I began to pay more
attention to the phrase as it appeared on TV, radio and print media – all on the same day – and has been relentlessly repeated ever
since. I was interviewed
recently by Julia Hartley-Brewer on her talkRADIO show and on that occasion I called on the Government to disclose to us the
evidence upon which they were relying to predict this second wave. Surely they have some evidence? I don't think they do. I searched
and am very qualified to do so, drawing on academic friends, and we were all surprised to find that there is nothing at all. The
last two novel coronaviruses, Sar (2003) and MERS (2012), were of one wave each. Even the WW1 flu 'waves' were almost certainly a
series of single waves involving more than one virus. I believe any second wave talk is pure speculation. Or perhaps it is in a
model somewhere, disconnected from the world of evidence to me? It would be reasonable to expect some limited 'resurgence' of a
virus given we don't mix like cordial in a glass of water, but in a more lumpy, human fashion. You're most in contact with family,
friends and workmates and they are the people with whom you generally exchange colds.
A long period of imposed restrictions, in addition to those of our ordinary lives did prevent the final few percent of virus mixing
with the population. With the movements of holidays, new jobs, visiting distant relatives, starting new terms at universities and
schools, that final mixing is under way. It should not be a terrifying process. It happens with every new virus, flu included. It's
just that we've never before in our history chased it around the countryside with a technique more suited to the biology lab than to
a supermarket car park.
A very long prelude, but necessary. Part of the 'project fear' that is rather too obvious, involving second waves, has been the
daily count of 'cases'. Its important to understand that, according to the infectious disease specialists I've spoken to, the word
'case' has to mean more than merely the presence of some foreign organism. It must present signs (things medics notice) and symptoms
(things you notice). And in most so-called cases, those testing positive had no signs or symptoms of illness at all. There was much
talk of asymptomatic spreading, and as a biologist this surprised me. In almost every case, a person is symptomatic because they
have a high viral load and either it is attacking their body or their immune system is fighting it, generally a mix. I don't doubt
there have been some cases of asymptomatic transmission, but I'm confident it is not important.
That all said, Government decided to call a person a 'case' if their swab sample was positive for viral RNA, which is what is
measured in PCR. A person's sample can be positive if they have the virus, and so it should. They can also be positive if they've
had the virus some weeks or months ago and recovered. It's faintly possible that high loads of related, but different coronaviruses,
which can cause some of the common colds we get, might also react in the PCR test, though it's unclear to me if it does.
But there's a final setting in which a person can be positive and that's a random process. This may have multiple causes, such as
the amplification technique not being perfect and so amplifying the 'bait' sequences placed in with the sample, with the aim of
marrying up with related SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA. There will be many other contributions to such positives. These are what are called
false positives.
Think of any diagnostic test a doctor might use on you. The ideal diagnostic test correctly confirms all who have the disease and
never wrongly indicates that healthy people have the disease. There is no such test. All tests have some degree of weakness in
generating false positives. The important thing is to know how often this happens, and this is called the false positive rate. If 1
in 100 disease-free samples are wrongly coming up positive, the disease is not present, we call that a 1% false positive rate. The
actual or operational false positive rate differs, sometimes substantially, under different settings, technical operators, detection
methods and equipment. I'm focusing solely on the false positive rate in Pillar 2, because most people do not have the virus
(recently around 1 in 1000 people and earlier in summer it was around 1 in 2000 people). It is when the amount of disease, its
so-called prevalence, is low that any amount of a false positive rate can be a major problem. This problem can be so severe that
unless changes are made, the test is hopelessly unsuitable to the job asked of it. In this case, the test in Pillar 2 was and
remains charged with the job of identifying people with the virus, yet as I will show, it is unable to do so.
Because of the high false positive rate and the low prevalence, almost every positive test, a so-called case, identified by Pillar 2
since May of this year has been a FALSE POSITIVE. Not just a few percent. Not a quarter or even a half of the positives are FALSE,
but around 90% of them. Put simply, the number of people Mr Hancock sombrely tells us about is an overestimate by a factor of about
ten-fold. Earlier in the summer, it was an overestimate by about 20-fold.
Let me take you through this, though if you're able to read Prof Carl Heneghan's clearly
written piece first, I'm more confident that I'll be successful in explaining this dramatic conclusion to you. (Here is a link to
the record of numbers of tests, combining Pillar 1 (hospital) and Pillar 2 (community).)
Imagine 10,000 people getting tested using those swabs you see on TV. We have a good estimate of the general prevalence of the virus
from the ONS, who are wholly independent (from Pillar 2 testing) and are testing only a few people a day, around one per cent of the
numbers recently tested in Pillar 2. It is reasonable to assume that most of the time, those being tested do not have symptoms.
People were asked to only seek a test if they have symptoms. However, we know from TV news and stories on social media from sampling
staff, from stern guidance from the Health Minister and the surprising fact that in numerous locations around the country, the local
council is leafleting people's houses, street by street to come and get tested.
The bottom line is that it is reasonable to expect the prevalence of the virus to be close to the number found by ONS, because they
sample randomly, and would pick up symptomatic and asymptomatic people in proportion to their presence in the community. As of the
most recent ONS survey, to a first approximation, the virus was found in 1 in every 1000 people. This can also be written as 0.1%.
So when all these 10,000 people are tested in Pillar 2, you'd expect 10 true positives to be found (false negatives can be an issue
when the virus is very common, but in this community setting, it is statistically unimportant and so I have chosen to ignore it,
better to focus only on false positives).
So, what is the false positive rate of testing in Pillar 2? For months, this has been a concern. It appears that it isn't known,
even though as I've mentioned, you absolutely need to know it in order to work out whether the diagnostic test has any value! What
do we know about the false positive rate? Well, we do know that the Government's own scientists were very concerned about it, and a report on
this problem was sent to SAGE dated June 3rd 2020. I quote: "Unless we understand the operational false positive rate of the UK's
RT-PCR testing system, we risk over-estimating the COVID-19 incidence, the demand on track and trace and the extent of asymptomatic
infection". In that same report, the authors helpfully listed the lowest to highest false positive rate of dozens of tests using the
same technology. The lowest value for false positive rate was 0.8%.
Allow me to explain the impact of a false positive rate of 0.8% on Pillar 2. We return to our 10,000 people who've volunteered to
get tested, and the expected ten with virus (0.1% prevalence or 1:1000) have been identified by the PCR test. But now we've to
calculate how many false positives are to accompanying them. The shocking answer is 80. 80 is 0.8% of 10,000. That's how many false
positives you'd get every time you were to use a Pillar 2 test on a group of that size.
The effect of this is, in this example, where 10,000 people have been tested in Pillar 2, could be summarised in a headline like
this: "90 new cases were identified today" (10 real positive cases and 80 false positives). But we know this is wildly incorrect.
Unknown to the poor technician, there were in this example, only 10 real cases. 80 did not even have a piece of viral RNA in their
sample. They are really false positives.
I'm going to explain how bad this is another way, back to diagnostics. If you'd submitted to a test and it was positive, you'd
expect the doctor to tell you that you had a disease, whatever it was testing for. Usually, though, they'll answer a slightly
different question: "If the patient is positive in this test, what is the probability they have the disease?" Typically, for a good
diagnostic test, the doctor will be able to say something like 95% and you and they can live with that. You might take a different,
confirmatory test, if the result was very serious, like cancer. But in our Pillar 2 example, what is the probability a person
testing positive in Pillar 2 actually has COVID-19? The awful answer is 11% (10 divided by 80 + 10). The test exaggerates the number
of covid-19 cases by almost ten-fold (90 divided by 10). Scared yet? That daily picture they show you, with the 'cases' climbing up
on the right-hand side? Its horribly exaggerated. Its not a mistake, as I shall show.
Earlier in the summer, the ONS showed the virus prevalence was a little lower, 1 in 2000 or 0.05%. That doesn't sound much of a
difference, but it is. Now the Pillar 2 test will find half as many real cases from our notional 10,000 volunteers, so 5 real cases.
But the flaw in the test means it will still find 80 false positives (0.8% of 10,000). So its even worse. The headline would be "85
new cases identified today". But now the probability a person testing positive has the virus is an absurdly low 6% (5 divided by 80
+ 5). Earlier in the summer, this same test exaggerated the number of COVID-19 cases by 17-fold (85 divided by 5). Its so easy to
generate an apparently large epidemic this way. Just ignore the problem of false positives. Pretend its zero. But it is never zero.
This test is fatally flawed and MUST immediately be withdrawn and never used again in this setting unless shown to be fixed. The
examples I gave are very close to what is actually happening every day as you read this.
I'm bound to ask, did Mr Hancock know of this fatal flaw? Did he know of the effect it would inevitably have, and is still having,
not only on the reported case load, but the nation's state of anxiety. I'd love to believe it is all an innocent mistake. If it was,
though, he'd have to resign over sheer incompetence. But is it? We know that internal scientists wrote to SAGE, in terms, and,
surely, this short but shocking warning document would have been drawn to the Health Secretary's attention? If that was the only bit
of evidence, you might be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the evidence grows more damning.
Recently, I published with my co-authors a short Position Paper. I don't think by then, a month ago or so, the penny had quite
dropped with me. And I'm an experienced biomedical research scientist, used to dealing with complex datasets and probabilities.
On September 11th 2020, I was a guest on Julia Hartley-Brewer's talkRADIO
show. Among other things, I called upon Mr Hancock to release the evidence underscoring his confidence in and planning for 'the
second wave'. This evidence has not yet been shown to the public by anyone. I also demanded he disclose the operational false
positive rate in Pillar 2 testing.
On September 16th, I was back on Julia's show and this time focused on the false positive rate issue (1m 45s – 2min 30s). I had read
Carl Heneghan's analysis showing that even if the false positive rate was as low as 0.1%, 8 times lower than any similar test, it
still yields a majority of false positives. So, my critique doesn't fall if the actual false positive rate is lower than my assumed
0.8%.
On September 18th, Mr Hancock again appeared, as often he does, on Julia Hartley-Brewer's show. Julia asked
him directly (1min 50s – on) what the false positive rate in Pillar 2 is. Mr Hancock said "It's under 1%". Julia again asked him
exactly what it was, and did he even know it? He didn't answer that, but then said "it means that, for all the positive cases, the
likelihood of one being a false positive is very small".
That is a seriously misleading statement as it is incorrect. The likelihood of an apparently positive case being a false positive is
between 89-94%, or near-certainty. Of note, even when ONS was recording its lowest-ever prevalence, the positive rate in Pillar 2
testing never fell below 0.8%.
It gets worse for the Health Secretary. On September the 17th, I believe, Mr Hancock took a question from
Sir Desmond Swayne about false positives. It is clear that Sir Desmond is asking about Pillar 2.
Mr Hancock replied: "I like my right honourable friend very much and I wish it were true. The reason we have surveillance testing,
done by ONS, is to ensure that we're constantly looking at a nationally representative sample at what the case rate is. The latest
ONS survey, published on Friday, does show a rise consummate (sic) with the increased number of tests that have come back positive."
He did not answer Sir Desmond's question, but instead answered a question of his choosing. Did the Health Secretary knowingly
mislead the House? By referring only to ONS and not even mentioning the false positive rate of the test in Pillar 2 he was, as it
were, stealing the garb of ONS's more careful work which has a lower false positive rate, in order to smuggle through the hidden and
very much higher, false positive rate in Pillar 2. The reader will have to decide for themselves.
Pillar 2 testing has been ongoing since May but it's only in recent weeks that it has reached several hundreds of thousands of tests
per day. The effect of the day by day climb in the number of people that are being described as 'cases' cannot be overstated. I know
it is inducing fear, anxiety and concern for the possibility of new and unjustified restrictions, including lockdowns. I have no
idea what Mr Hancock's motivations are. But he has and continues to use the hugely inflated output from a fatally flawed Pillar 2
test and appears often on media, gravely intoning the need for additional interventions (none of which, I repeat, are proven to be
effective).
You will be very familiar with the cases plot which is shown on most TV broadcasts at the moment. It purports to show the numbers of
cases which rose then fell in the spring, and the recent rise in cases. This graph is always accompanied by the headline that "so
many thousands of new cases were detected in the last 24 hours".
You should know that there are two major deceptions, in that picture, which combined are very likely both to mislead and to induce
anxiety. Its ubiquity indicates that it is a deliberate choice.
Firstly, it is very misleading in relation to the spring peak of cases. This is because we had no community screening capacity at
that time. A colleague has adjusted the plot to show the number of cases we would have detected, had there been a well-behaved
community test capability available. The effect is to greatly increase the size of the spring cases peak, because there are very
many cases for each hospitalisation and many hospitalisations for every death.
Secondly, as I hope I have shown and persuaded you, the cases in summer and at present, generated by seriously flawed Pillar 2
tests, should be corrected downwards by around ten-fold.
I do believe genuine cases are rising somewhat. This is, however, also true for flu, which we neither measure daily nor report on
every news bulletin. If we did, you would appreciate that, going forward, it is quite likely that flu is a greater risk to public
health than COVID-19. The corrected cases plot (above) does, I believe, put the recent rises in incidence of COVID-19 in a much more
reasonable context. I thought you should see that difference before arriving at your own verdict on this sorry tale.
There are very serious consequences arising from grotesque over-estimation of so-called cases in Pillar 2 community testing, which I
believe was put in place knowingly. Perhaps Mr Hancock believes his own copy about the level of risk now faced by the general
public? Its not for me to deduce. What this huge over-estimation has done is to have slowed the normalisation of the NHS. We are all
aware that access to medical services is, to varying degrees, restricted. Many specialities were greatly curtailed in spring and
after some recovery, some are still between a third and a half below their normal capacities. This has led both to continuing delays
and growth of waiting lists for numerous operations and treatments. I am not qualified to assess the damage to the nation's and
individuals' health as a direct consequence of this extended wait for a second wave. Going into winter with this configuration will,
on top of the already restricted access for six months, lead inevitably to a large number of avoidable, non-Covid deaths. That is
already a serious enough charge. Less obvious but, in aggregate, additional impacts arise from fear of the virus, inappropriately
heightened in my view, which include: damage to or even destruction of large numbers of businesses, especially small businesses,
with attendant loss of livelihoods, loss of educational opportunities, strains on family relationships, eating disorders, increasing
alcoholism and domestic abuse and even suicides, to name but a few.
In closing, I wish to note that in the last 40 years alone the UK has had seven official epidemics/pandemics; AIDS, Swine flu, CJD,
SARS, MERS, Bird flu as well as annual, seasonal flu. All were very worrying but schools remained open and the NHS treated everybody
and most of the population were unaffected. The country would rarely have been open if it had been shut down every time.
I have explained how a hopelessly-performing diagnostic test has been, and continues to be used, not for diagnosis of disease but,
it seems, solely to create fear.
This misuse of power must cease. All the above costs are on the ledger, too, when weighing up the residual risks to society from
COVID-19 and the appropriate actions to take, if any. Whatever else happens, the test used in Pillar 2 must be immediately withdrawn
as it provides no useful information. In the absence of vastly inflated case numbers arising from this test, the pandemic would be
seen and felt to be almost over.
Dr Mike Yeadon is the former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco
Pharma Ltd.
Its both...its fear porn and also shedding...according to researchers.
The National Vaccine Information Center published an important document relevant to this
topic titled "The Emerging Risks of Live Virus & Virus Vectored Vaccines: Vaccine Strain
Virus Infection, Shedding & Transmission." Pages 34-36 in the section on "Measles, Mumps,
Rubella Viruses and Live Attenuated Measles, Mumps, Rubella Viruses" discuss evidence that
the MMR vaccine can lead to measles infection and transmission.
New policies will artificially deflate "breakthrough infections" in the vaccinated, while
the old rules continue to inflate case numbers in the unvaccinated.
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and
testing for "Covid19" in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy "vaccines" are
effective at preventing the alleged disease.
They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late
April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the
change).
The trick is in their reporting of what they call "breakthrough infections" – that is
people who are fully "vaccinated" against Sars-Cov-2 infection, but get infected anyway.
Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention –
to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:
Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition
of "Covid case", used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a
"Covid19 case", even if they never experienced any symptoms .
Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all , and
now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated
people.
Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected "breakthrough
infections".
From the CDC's instructions for state health authorities on handling "possible breakthrough
infections" (uploaded to their website in late April):
For cases with a known RT-PCR cycle threshold (Ct) value, submit only specimens with Ct
value ≤28 to CDC for sequencing. (Sequencing is not feasible with higher Ct values.)
Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the
world going into the 40s.
18 play_arrow
Just a Little Froth in the Market 15 hours ago
They are manipulating the numbers to make it look like only the unvaxxed get infected.
That is fraud, and this rogue agency needs to be stopped.
Enraged 1 hour ago remove link
The CDC is not an independent government agency, but is actually a subsidiary of Big
Pharma.
The CDC owns patents on at least 57 different vaccines, and profits $4.1 billion per year
in vaccination sales.
There are CDC patents applicable to vaccines for Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, HIV,
Anthrax, Rabies, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Group A Strep, Pneumococcal disease,
Meningococcal disease, RSV, Gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, SARS, Rift Valley Fever,
and chlamydophila pneumoniae.
People might be starting to get the impression that the federal regime, which owns the
media, judiciary, academia, bureaucracy, and big tech, are attempting to manipulate
information to increase their power and wealth. The elites have confiscated almost ALL the
commoners wealth and now they want the rest of the money and complete and total control. Mao
or Stalin would be proud of these fascists.
LetThemEatRand 17 hours ago
Imagine living under the rule of a globalist oligarchy that controls the Press. That.
JakeIsNotFake 14 hours ago remove link
What is that if not an obvious and deliberate act of deception?
Well, before 3/20, this would have been a FELONY. Each time a lab provided a patient with
KNOWINGLY FALSE test results, the lab and the doctor would have been subject to a 16 month
term in the state penitentiary. For each instance.
Can you imagine getting a positive, terminal prognosis, committing a well deserved murder,
and then not dying?
Oopsie! My bad.
gregga777 14 hours ago
Government, and that especially includes the so-called "Scientists" in government service,
are Corrupt, Incompetent, Unaccountable and Untrustworthy. The Government's so-called
"Scientists," including those funded by Government contracts, are no more trustworthy than
politicians.
PeterLong 14 hours ago
Sometimes you have no choice. We had to undergo surgical procedures in a hospital and had
to get tested a few days before. Whether they use the same parameters for these type cases as
for others I don't know. Perhaps they are reluctant to turn away or delay surgical cases for
BS reasons and therefore possibly use more realistic standards , but my opinion of the entire
medical industry has become so low that I could believe anything. I still wonder about
hospital and other medical practices finances concenring this scam. Have they continued to
profit somehow despite being shut down in some ways?
Beebee 1 hour ago (Edited) remove link
Same here, Peter. Hubby's mother broke her elbow last year. And we had to bring her to
tests to do surgery. She was negative. But, afterwards, suddenly, developed lymphoma. Now, I
wonder about these tests! The cancer chemo was delayed due to all this stuff. She had so many
Covid tests, all negative, and just now completed the chemo rounds. It's not necessary and
they do make a profit. She is the only reason we stay here, otherwise we would moved from NY.
She's a mess, and I resent the fact the hold-ups are due to testing.
fewer 36 minutes ago
Hospitals made tons of money on this. Uncle Sugar pays so much, and the administrators
always slice & dice the budget/reports so they seem on the edge of bankruptcy no matter
what. Naturally all of this is "debunked" by (((the usual sources))).
Here's one fact that the "debunkers" deliberately ignore: the feds pay for all the
treatment of uninsured C19 patients... including illegals . Normally if an illegal comes to
the ED and needs to be admitted, the hospital can't refuse to do that and instead has to eat
the cost (well, they pass the cost on to hardworking, insurance having people like you and
me, but bear with me).
If they admit the person for a reason *other* than C19, then the hospital still eats the
cost. Now, tell me, what's the incentive here if an illegal comes in with a bunch of
comorbidities and needs admission to manage those? What should be recorded as the admitting
diagnosis/problem if they can get swabbed for a high Ct PCR test (a meaningless positive
result)?
lasvegaspersona 7 hours ago
After more than 50 years in medicine, I tell friends and family, 'stay away from us if you
can'. Modern medicine is a rats nest of false positive testing and chasing trivial
abnormalities on imaging studies.
The sad part is patients feel relieved when they are told 'nothing was finally
found'....this after great expense of time and money.
spiff 54 minutes ago
Caught Red-Handed
Yes, define "Caught". I have a feeling life will continue without consequences for the
perpetrator of this fraud, or even your average person knowing about it.
_triplesix_ 14 hours ago
CDC, FBI, CIA, DHS, NIH, EPA, DOE...shall I go on?
Drater 6 hours ago
FAA, TSA, SEC, FCC, NHTSA, DOJ
JakeIsNotFake 13 hours ago
CDC is .gov. As an NGO, (funded by 99% .gov and 1% phony donations), the CDC can legally,
(not honestly), claim they are just an advisory body.
While noteing the distinction, please pay attention to the language: Mask mandate,
guidelines, advisories are NOT laws. Just like travel advisories, protocols, and best
practice. These are all weasel words. And totally unenforceable.
snatchpounder PREMIUM 9 hours ago
Everything is rigged, this plandemic, elections, markets you name it because when there's
currency to be made you'll always have someone more than willing to do it. Big pharma is
making a killing literally in this case and tax slaves paid for the gene therapy shots
creation. And all the rubes who took the shot will pay much more than just currency for their
naivety.
archipusz 11 hours ago
We can speculate all we want about what the agenda is of the CDC.
But what we know is that it has nothing to do with the truth or our health.
Enraged 1 hour ago remove link
The CDC is not an independent government agency, but is actually a subsidiary of Big
Pharma.
The CDC owns patents on at least 57 different vaccines, and profits $4.1 billion per year
in vaccination sales.
There are CDC patents applicable to vaccines for Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, HIV,
Anthrax, Rabies, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Group A Strep, Pneumococcal disease,
Meningococcal disease, RSV, Gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, SARS, Rift Valley Fever,
and chlamydophila pneumoniae.
amazing they do not even try to hide the deception.
but reporting on such deception will have one labeled a "conspiracy theorist", and the FBI
classifies "conspiracy theorists" as "domestic terrorists".
That's right, re-stating publicly available comments and policies of government agencies
and officials will have you branded as a domestic terrorist.
And the "intellectuals" in the media, academia, and "think-tanks" have abandoned all logic
and common sense to serve their masters in the government and big pharma.
history will not forget.
smacker 12 hours ago
Very good article which rightly exposes the CDC and all those around it for being utterly
corrupt and are perpetrating a fake pandemic with sinister objectives.
crazzziecanuck 11 hours ago
You realize, it's Putin's fault. Putin can rig a presidential election, it's child's play
for him to manipulate the CDC to do his evil bidding.
Everything is Putin's fault: Trump, COVID, 737 Max crashes, slavery, crucifixion of
Christ, the end of the dinosaurs, and so on.
archipusz 13 hours ago
Notice how Rand Paul will argue with Fauci about policy over when we should wear a mask,
BUT WILL NOT DARE ASK THEM WHY THEY HAVE, AND ARE, COMMITTING CRIMINAL FRAUD WITH THE PCR
TESTING?
Demystified 2 hours ago
It's a rigged game, a scam. These people are so dishonest, and intent on falsifying Covid
test results by applying different standards for vaccinated and unvaccinated people? They are
perpetuating a fraud on the people.
You have to be brain dead to not see what they are doing.
Robert De Zero 3 hours ago remove link
This is so evil. Medicalized dictatorship, supported by propaganda media, is here.
Alien 851 4 hours ago
This is NEWS??? Are you kidding?
It was March 2020 when they changed the rules on reporting of Covid deaths to run the
count as high as possible. It is still used in fear headlines today! How about wildly
fluctuation "new cases" that seem to totally respect state borders...?
For God's sake, wake the hell up!!!!
In March, the CDC redefined what is to be reported by Medical Examiners in the US. One
of them gave examples of Covid Death cases reporting criteria:
"The case definition is very simplistic," Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois
Department of Public Health, explains. "It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID
positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a
few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a
COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of clear alternative cause, but you had
COVID at the same time, it's still listed as a COVID death."
After reading my weekend column about the
crisis in life science research,
Hajime Hoji of USC's linguistics department reminded me of the late Richard Feynman's
brilliant deconstruction of the flaws and pitfalls of science as it's done in the modern
age.
"Cargo Cult
Science" was adapted from Feynman's 1974 commencement speech at Caltech, where his spirit
reigns as one of that institution's two certified saints. (The other is Robert A. Millikan,
Caltech's first president.) The text appears in his 1985 book, " Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! " Here are some excerpts, but the talk is worth reading in its
entirety, both for Feynman's lucid, engaging style and the depth of his thinking.
In the talk, Feynman discussed how much laypersons and scientists themselves take for
granted about research results. "We really ought to look into theories that don't work, and
science that isn't science," he said. "Cargo cult science" was his term for research that never
seemed to yield provable results, but acquired public acceptance because they possessed the
veneer of rigorous methodology.
What cargo cult science lacked was something that, he observed, was never actually taught to
Caltech students. "It's a kind of scientific integrity...that corresponds to a kind of utter
honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you
should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right
about it....Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know
them....If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also
put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it."
One suspects that Feynman, who died in 1988, would be appalled by the current standards of
research publication, which critics say favor audacious claims instead of the painstaking,
judicious marshaling of evidence he advocated. It's even more striking today to ponder his
confidence in science's ability to weed out factitious or mistaken findings.
"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out," he told the students. "Other
experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right.... And,
although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation
as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type
of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much
of the research in cargo cult science."
The truth is that the testing of experimental results by other experimenters is exactly what
may be lacking in today's publication-driven science world. And as some scientists recognize,
getting a paper published in a prestigious journal can do a great deal for one's reputation,
even if it's later shown to be wrong.
Even then, Feynman acknowledged that desperation for research funding was driving a tendency
by scientists to hype the applications of their work. Otherwise, a friend told him, "we won't
get support for more research of this kind." Feynman's reaction was characteristically blunt.
"I think that's kind of dishonest," he said.
Critical race theory ( CRT ) is an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in
the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with issues
of race and to
challenge mainstream liberal approaches to
racial justice .
[1] CRT
examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism .
[2][3]
Second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also
achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination
more broadly, are possible. [7]
Critics including George
Will see resonances between CRT's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses
challenges to objective judgments in the U.S., as exemplified by the acquittal of O. J. Simpson .
[47][1][
verification
needed ]Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry argue that CRT lacks
supporting evidence, relies on an implausible belief that reality is socially constructed,
rejects evidence in favor of storytelling, rejects the concepts of truth and merit as
expressions of political dominance, and rejects the rule of law. Additionally, they posit that
the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal
studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications.
[48][49][8]
In particular, they suggest that the success of Jews and Asians within what CRT theorists argue
is a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating, advantage-taking,
or other such claims.
[50] A series of responses to Farber and Sherry was published in the Harvard Law
Review .
[50] These responses argue that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair
system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.
[50][8]
In the Boston College Law Review ,
Jeffrey Pyle argues that CRT undermines confidence in the rule of law, saying that "critical
race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality
theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional
law." [51]
By
jurists
Judge Richard
Posner of the U.S.
Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals argues that critical race theory "turns its back on the
Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative," and that "by
repudiating reasoned argumentation, (critical race theorists) reinforce stereotypes about the
intellectual capacities of nonwhites. [9]
Former Judge Alex
Kozinski , who served on the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals , criticizes critical race theorists for raising "insuperable
barriers to mutual understanding" and thus eliminating opportunities for "meaningful dialogue."
[52]
Controversies
Critical race theory has stirred controversy in the US since the 1980s over such issues as:
[1]
On 20 October 2020, the Conservative UK Equalities Minister
Kemi Badenoch stated
that, in regard to teaching Critical Race Theory in primary and secondary
school , "we do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and
inherited racial guilt.... [A]ny school which teaches these elements of critical race theory,
or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a
balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law." [57] Badenoch's
remarks have been countered in an open letter, signed by hundreds of academics nationwide, that
highlights Badenoch's alleged misapprehensions about CRT. [58] On 30 October
2020, an open letter signed by 101 writers of the Black Writers' Guild [59] condemned
Badenoch for saying that some authors want racial division, including her criticisms of books
such as White
Fragility and Why I'm No
Longer Talking to White People About Race , saying that: "many of these books -- and,
in fact, some of the authors and proponents of critical race theory -- actually want a
segregated society." [60]
In September 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order
directing agencies of the United States Government to cancel
funding for programs that mention "white privilege" or "critical race theory", on the basis
that it constituted "divisive, un-American propaganda". [61][62][63]
He specifically called out the value of meritocracy. On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order
rescinding and canceling Trump's previous executive order and once again permitted agencies to
use such programs. [64]
2021
In mid-April 2021, a bill was introduced in the Idaho legislature that would effectively ban any
educational entity (including school districts, public charter school, and public institutions
of higher education) in the state from teaching or advocating " sectarianism ," including critical race theory
or other programs involving social justice. [65] On May 4, 2021
the bill was signed into law by Governor Brad Little . [66]
@Rev.
Spooner ion and just start making shit up, then that probably qualifies as a "cult".
Bottom line, it's probably all in the eye of the beholder. If you're a true believer, then
it's a "religion". If you have neither belief in a religious species nor respect for its
adherents, then it's a "cult".
An alternative view might be that "religions" are based around life philosophies that
recognise a larger reality than we can perceive here in the material realm, whereas "cults"
probably not so much. The more enduring religions seem to have quite a legacy of spooky stuff
that so-called "modern science" might have difficulty in resolving (perhaps not so much
nowadays, seeing how "science" has become such an arbitrary discipline subject to social and
political whim).
"... He had a total loss of his platelets -- the little blood cells that stop bleeding. In spite of being treated by a team of physicians, he died two weeks later from a brain hemorrhage, and was reported to have had zero platelets . ..."
"... What happened to this physician and the others seems to be a new previously unseen problem related to vaccination -- despite the manufacturers' claims. ..."
"... Increasingly, vaccine manufacturers and government officials are following the sarcastic maxim from Samuel Shem's novel of medical residency entitled The House of God that "if you don't take a temperature you can't find a fever." In other words, if we don't critically look at the actual recorded patient damage, we won't find our products to be defective. ..."
"... Moreover, a vaccine is supposed to prevent disease. By that definition, these agents are not even vaccines. They are more properly termed "experimental unapproved genetic agents." By admission of the manufacturers themselves, both the Pfizer and Moderna products only lessen the symptoms of COVID; they don't prevent transmission. ..."
Many Americans have heard the news account of Dr. Gregory Michael, a 56-year-old Florida physician who, after receiving his first
dose of a Pfizer COVID vaccine on December 18 of last year, was hospitalized three days later. He had a total loss of his platelets
-- the little blood cells that stop bleeding. In spite of being treated by a team of physicians, he died two weeks later from a brain
hemorrhage, and was reported to have had zero platelets .
By February 10, 2021, 36 other similar cases were reported in the mainstream media. Pfizer, which along with its partner BioNTech
made the vaccine the doctor received, said in a statement that it was aware of the death. Typically, they concluded, "We are actively
investigating this case, but we don't believe at this time that there is any direct connection to the vaccine."
Pfizer made this "finding" despite several unusual circumstances of the case. First, low-platelet disorders, known as idiopathic
thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), most commonly affect children, and generally follow a viral illness. Only 10 percent of ITP cases
occur in adults, who usually present with a slow onset form of the disorder, referred to as chronic ITP. The disorder usually starts
by someone noticing easy bleeding, such as slow oozing from gums or the nose, or bruises showing up without trauma. Rarely do platelets
drop below 20,000, and generally treatment either reverses the disease or prolongs life for years in spite of the problem.
What happened to this physician and the others seems to be a new previously unseen problem related to vaccination -- despite
the manufacturers' claims.
Increasingly, vaccine manufacturers and government officials are following the sarcastic maxim from Samuel Shem's novel of
medical residency entitled The House of God that "if you don't take a temperature you can't find a fever." In other words,
if we don't critically look at the actual recorded patient damage, we won't find our products to be defective. Now, major media
are increasingly getting on board, condemning "vaccine hesitancy" and pushing everyone to get vaccinated for COVID, discounting any
dangers. But in the practice of medicine, we are supposed to employ the "precautionary principle" -- above all do no harm.
Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 "vaccines" are experimental, employing a genetic technology never before used on humans. Ironically,
many people who wouldn't purchase the first edition of a new car line are lining up to take an injection they know nothing about,
that has never successfully passed animal trials, that could never meet the required "safety level" for a "drug," and is unapproved
for the prevention of COVID except as an emergency experiment .
Legally, those who get the vaccine are unnamed participants in a Stage IV FDA trial.
Moreover, a vaccine is supposed to prevent disease. By that definition, these agents are not even vaccines. They are more
properly termed "experimental unapproved genetic agents." By admission of the manufacturers themselves, both the Pfizer and Moderna
products only lessen the symptoms of COVID; they don't prevent transmission.
Vaccination was first invented to treat smallpox, which had a a fatality rate of up to 60 percent. Then other diseases such as
typhoid and polio were similarly addressed. But vaccination is not used when effective safe treatment is available. Although censorship
has confused the public understanding, overwhelming evidence dating back to the 1970s shows that viruses can be treated with "lysosomotropic
agents." The truth is, hundreds of papers have shown that chloroquine, and its later version hydroxychloroquine, are very effective
in treating this virus if given early. A worldwide open architecture online review of COVID survival (hcqtrial.com) showed that death
rate was 78.7-percent lower in those countries where hydroxychloroquine was used early and often:
Multiple large studies done in outpatient settings show very excellent prevention and cure with these and other drugs such as
Ivermectin. In Mumbai, India, a study was done of the city police force of 10,000 officers. No deaths were recorded in the 4,600
officers taking a small dose of hydroxychloroquine each week. All the deaths were in the untreated group. Using Worldometer statistics,
COVID deaths per capita in New York State are 2,656 per million population; in New Jersey they are 2,821 per million population.
In India the rate is 126 per million and in Uganda it is only seven per million. Neither India nor Uganda used social distancing
in any real way. But they do use hydroxychloroquine. New York (except for Dr. Zev Zelenko and a few others) does not use the drug.
As to the claims of the efficacy of the drugs, the declaration of 95-percent effectiveness of the Pfizer product was shown to
be bunkum by Dr. Peter Doshi, the associate editor of the British Medical Journal , writing in that publication. After doing
an independent review of the data submitted to the FDA, Dr. Doshi reported that only 30 percent of test subjects, at best, experienced
even the slightest benefit (symptom reduction). Absolute risk reduction -- in other words stopping transmission -- he estimated at
less than one percent.
The limited benefit of taking the drugs is made worse by the relatively high death tolls from the new mRNA therapy. During the
first two months of the rollout of Pfizer and Moderna "vaccines" in 2021, 95 percent of deaths from vaccines recorded in the Vaccine
Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) were for those agents, meaning only five percent of reported deaths involved all the other
vaccines put together. Compared to 2019, deaths in VAERS are up 6,000 percent. Thirty-six deaths were recorded in the first quarter
of 2020 versus 1,754 in the first quarter of 2021.
In Israel, where the Pfizer mRNA product is being used exclusively and a major push is on to vaccinate the whole population, an
independent review of government data after two months of the vaccine program was done by the Aix-Marseille University Faculty of
Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit's Dr. Hervé Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ. They showed that when 12.5
percent of Israelis were vaccinated, 51 percent of the deaths from COVID were in the vaccinated group. Additionally, in the
over 65-year-olds, vaccination resulted in death from COVID 40 times more than in unvaccinated people. In other words, this
is not protecting people from COVID but increasing fatalities from the disease -- and this neglects the number of other side effects.
If the truth were known, most sane, thinking people would not likely take part in such an experiment. With the truth hidden and
with threats of travel bans and an unwarranted fear of COVID, and with pressure from employers and the politicization of COVID in
general, Americans have been throwing caution to the wind.
The Unknowns
To understand what is actually happening to people after receiving the mRNA agents, I reviewed data in VAERS -- an open-source
searchable database of possible vaccine side effects reported by both providers and patients. According to the CDC website:
VAERS is used to detect possible safety problems -- called "signals" -- that may be related to vaccination. If a vaccine safety
signal is identified through VAERS, scientists may conduct further studies to find out if the signal represents an actual risk.
The main goals of VAERS are to:
• Detect new, unusual, or rare adverse events that happen after vaccination.
• Monitor increases in known side effects, like arm soreness where a shot was given
• Identify potential patient risk factors for particular types of health problems related to vaccines
• Assess the safety of newly licensed vaccines
• Watch for unexpected or unusual patterns in adverse event reports
• Serve as a monitoring system in public health emergencies
The CDC acknowledges limitations of the system, including:
• Reports submitted to VAERS often lack details and sometimes contain errors.
◦ Serious adverse events are more likely to be reported than mild side effects.
◦ It is generally not possible to find out from VAERS data if a vaccine caused the adverse event.
I searched the VAERS database using keywords that would identify bleeding problems and thrombocytopenia (low or absent platelets).
Entries are defined by age groups and sex with a narrative account of the injury.
In a two-and-a-half-month period from December 15, 2020 to March 12, 2021, 358 cases of unusual clotting or bleeding were identified,
and it makes grim reading. There were 104 cases of frank thrombocytopenia (low platelets) -- some including young people. However,
the numbers alone do not adequately convey the problems. In one case about an 18-29 year-old female, the physician wrote this: "Patient
was seen in in my office on 1/19/21 with complaint of heavy vaginal bleeding. A CBC was obtained which revealed an H/H of 12.2/36.1
and a platelet count of 1 (not 1K, but 1 platelet!) This was confirmed on smear review." The surprise and horror the doctor experienced
upon seeing the absence of platelets is clear when reading the report.
But the platelet problem may just be the most severe expression of a physical derangement that is producing bleeding of all sorts.
As seen in the table below, there were 49 people with brain hemorrhages -- nine fatal at the time of reporting. A number of other
people arrived at Emergency Departments with bleeding from multiple sites, or internally, so massive that they could not be stabilized
even to clearly define the sources of the bleeding.
Severe Thrombocytopenia
94
Various Spontaneous Skin bleeding
10
Mild Thrombocytopenia
11
Vein bleeding from temple
1
Thrombocytopenic Petechial rash/bruising
5
Prolonged surgical site bleeding
3
Severe Pancytopenia
2
Severe multifocal bleeding
5
Unknown Hematologic Problem
1
Severe internal bleeding
5
Multifocal or "massive" brain hemorrhage
20
Severe uncharacterized bleeding
3
Focal brain hemorrhage
29
Bleeding from cancer site liver
1
GI Bleed
34
Renal dialysis shunt
1
Severe Vaginal Bleeding
7
Hematuria
2
Vaginal Bleeding
21
Renal bleed
1
Bleeding in Pregnancy
6
Tonsillar bleed
1
Bleeding with Miscarriage
12
Acute Uterine Fibroid hemorrhage
1
Irreg Menses
4
Nosebleed
32
Oral bleeding
8
Spontaneous Splenic hemorrhage
1
Subconjunctival Hemorrhage
11
Injection Site Bleeding
21
Intraocular bleed
4
Arm Bruising
1
Most cases of severe problems were in people over the age of 50 years. But there were many younger people involved, especially
in the less severe-but-unusual bleeding problems. Of the 36 reported nosebleeds, six were either unable to be stopped with usual
measures, were recurrent, or were recorded as having significant blood loss or dubbed "profuse." Many were associated with other
symptoms: photophobia (eye sensitivity to light), headache, hives, "sick in bed," brain fog, and face swelling. The youngest patient
with a nosebleed was, sadly, a toddler requiring emergency care. Unusual skin bleeding was also reported. Four 65-plus-year-old males
reported blood spontaneously oozing through the skin: one from the legs, one from the scalp, one from an old biopsy site, and one
from an old healed "boil" site. Frank bleeding at the time of the inoculation occurred 14 times. Some bleeding was momentary, but
often the bleeding was difficult to stop, recurrent, and/or persisted after the patient returned home. (How many times have you had
an injection and bled at all, let alone bled off and on for hours?)
Perhaps the saddest were the bleeding episodes that preceded spontaneous miscarriages. Here are some direct entries in VAERS:
40-49 y.o. Female: The evening of my vaccination I began to feel feverish, weak and achy. During the night I woke with heavy
bleeding and found out the following morning I had miscarried my otherwise healthy pregnancy.
39 y.o. Female: Internal brain bleeding 10 days after 1st dose Covid vaccine; brain damage, confused, suffering memory loss;
This is a spontaneous report from a contactable physician (patient).
30-39 y.o. Female: 48 hours after injection developed micro-hemorrhages in her right eye. Symptoms resolved and 12/29 recurrence
of bleeding to right eye slightly worse than before
65+ y.o. Male: Patient developed significant nose bleed after receiving vaccine. Required emergency department visits x 2 and
hospitalization.
65+ y.o. Female: Vaccine administered 02/02/2021. By Thursday 2/11/2021 patient almost nonverbal, by Monday 2/15/2021 patient
went to the hospital with bruising, sores on her stomach and clots reported as thrombocytopenia. Deceased by Friday, 2/19/20201.
40-49 y.o. Female: Bleeding, myalgia, tingling in the fingers of the right hand; fatigue immediately upon vaccination -- bleeding
at the injection site which the employee reports as filling the Band-Aid over the site. When she got home in the evening and took
it off blood ran.
65+ y.o. Female: Within 15 min of the injection, the individual became aphasic and stroke like symptoms. She was taken to the
ER where she was later diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away.
When such facts are presented, the standard retort from vaccine advocates is, "We have given millions of vaccines, so a few deaths
are to be expected." Besides the fact that a willingness to sacrifice individuals for the nebulous good of the masses represents
a bankrupt moral order, simply calculating the numbers of deaths is inadequate. "Experts" need to take the time to read the narrative
to open their eyes -- and their hearts -- to the suffering happening. There are over 25 pages of such stories printed from VAERS
entries, and we must consider, "How many of these people are now dead, and how many are going to die?"
A second-year medical student armed with the facts should recognize looming disaster -- where are the experts?
In truth, neither recipients nor their doctors know what is in these "vaccines." Only a few people at the top of the Moderna,
Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca research groups really understand them. These mRNA injections produce a potentially deadly
pathogen -- the spike protein -- in your cells.
The Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer product says that it contains "a nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (modRNA) encoding
the viral spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2." If your immune system is strong enough to withstand this onslaught and create some
immunity, you may survive the first onslaught. But even if you don't die in the short term, mRNA is an epigenetic controller of
DNA . Though this foreign synthetic mRNA doesn't actually become part of your DNA to make you a "GMO human," as some people have
been worrying about, it can control DNA in ways we have yet to completely understand . We literally have no idea whether this
bodily additive is going to have a side effect of expressing cancer genes, or of repressing cancer protective genes, or thousands
of other potentially deadly unknowns.
Additionally, the Pfizer vaccine includes all types of ingredients that may by themselves create ailments. The Pfizer shot
contains "lipids ((4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2- hexyldecanoate), 2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide,
1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine, and cholesterol), potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride,
dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate, and sucrose."
I insert this list just for completeness -- don't expect to make sense of it. Your doctor can't either. I understand "sucrose"
(sugar) and sodium chloride (salt), but who doesn't get lost in the "hydroxybutyl" and "distearoyl" lipid list?
After doing some sleuthing and having some inside knowledge to start from, I discovered that this lipid particle is an adjuvant
called "Matrix M." As described in scientific literature, "Adjuvant Matrix-M™ is comprised of 40 nm nanoparticles composed of
Quillaja saponins , cholesterol and phospholipid."
Matrix-M essentially wraps the mRNA in a lipid coating that allows it to move through cell walls and to linger in your system.
Matrix-M is derived from plant chemicals called saponins, which have poorly understood properties in plant biology. They can be toxic
to humans in some cases, and have been traditionally used by aboriginal tribesmen to poison fish. Should we consider that comforting?
The pharmacology industry has a long history of removing bad drugs from the market. Thalidomide is perhaps the most famous example
of a pharmacologic disaster. The drug was released in 1957 for its sedative effects and was touted as being safe for everyone including
"pregnant women and children." In 1961, Dr. William McBride, an obstetrician, discovered that thalidomide was useful for "morning
sickness" in pregnant women. Later he began to see unusual and devastating birth defects in babies born to women for whom he had
prescribed the drug. Independently, Dr. Widuking Lenz, a pediatrician in Germany, also associated thalidomide with severe and unusual
birth defects, such as the absence of limbs or parts of limbs. Sometimes an infants' hands were attached at the shoulders, there
being no connecting long bones at all. By 1962 the drug was taken off the market.
But unlike with our new, experimental agents, recognition of the thalidomide problem was made relatively easy by several factors.
First among these was the uniqueness of the deformities. These were both profound and obvious, which stand in stark contrast to the
current bleeding problems, which appear on the surface to be normal problems in clinical medicine -- such as nosebleeds. Even now,
doctors continue to call the loss of platelets "ITP" -- even though what we are seeing is not the same as what we would expect to
see under that diagnosis. ITP simply does not kill adult males in a few days.
Second, with thalidomide, the physician who first began using the drug for nausea in pregnancy was also the doctor who delivered
the affected babies, so he could readily put two and two together. In the case of our COVID drugs, when your doctor tells you to
get a vaccine, he doesn't administer it, doesn't witness the injection, and usually doesn't follow up to see how you fared. And if
you were to suddenly develop a vision problem or bleeding from the bowel, you wouldn't be seen by your PCP; you would be in an Emergency
Department -- and they don't usually ask about your recent vaccine history.
Third, Dr. Lenz presciently recognized that, in the case of thalidomide, many less-severe deformities, when put into perspective,
revealed "gradations of the defect." Unfortunately in the present case, lesser degrees of clotting problems are indistinguishable
from bleeding issues frequently encountered in an Emergency Room or doctor's office. For example, if a 75-year-old hypertensive male
-- who has gotten a COVID shot -- suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies, it would not likely be deemed unusual, and the relationship
to vaccination may not even be explored.
Keeping that in mind, we should assume the worst when it comes to these new COVID shots. When any new drug problem starts, it
begins slowly and unrecognized -- like a snowball beginning to roll down a mountain. By the time the problem is generally acknowledged,
the avalanche is well on its way. In the case of thalidomide, over 100,000 children were severely damaged before the drug was removed
from use. Though VAERS has the potential to shorten recognition time of drug problems by trying to spot the "unusual patterns," this
requires that physicians be aware of the system, and take the time to enter any suspected side effects -- not just the worst
cases. It also requires that researchers care enough to look. This is not happening. A report previously submitted to the Agency
for Healthcare Research and Quality revealed that fewer than one percent of adverse events get reported to VAERS.
In the past, testing done on mRNA technology revealed problems specifically involving the clotting system. Antibody-mediated platelet
damage has been suspected. Yet today when these exact problems arise, the researchers are mum. Do the experts not study or know their
own vaccine research history?
For those who are concerned about the risks, we need to advocate for ourselves, either through contacting legislators or simply
refusing to take the shots. It's obvious that the pharmaceutical industry is willing to release untried technology upon the entire
world population, and not be deterred by any inconvenience such as unexplained death.
We need to stop being a gullible population that forces our children to get vaccinated for trivial, non-fatal diseases such as
mumps. We need to stop believing in the god-like status of medical technocrats who claim to be making the world safer. We need to
reject the idea that vaccine deniers are anti-scientific troglodytes. We must reject the unspoken premise under which pharmaceutical
companies and doctors operate -- that all vaccines are always safe in all people all the time. It should not be considered unreasonable
to require scientific transparency, honesty by drug manufacturers, and safety from vaccines.
Vaccines are only indicated for diseases with a high risk of death or morbidity, and for which there is no cure. After
seeing the esteemed leaders in medicine denigrate hydroxychloroquine (even though it was a recognized treatment used successfully
elsewhere for SARS, and mentioned favorably by Dr. Fauci for MERS), after watching three plants used in the production of hydroxychloroquine
burn down in a year -- two on the same day -- after watching doctors lose their jobs and be censored for speaking truth and saving
lives with old safe drugs that work, and now, after seeing experimental genetic agents being rolled out for use globally that have
never passed animal testing and have only a few months human trials, perhaps it is time to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room
and ask, "Are they trying to kill us?"
Dr. Lee Merritt has been in the private practice of Orthopaedic and Spinal Surgery since 1995, has served on the Board of
the Arizona Medical Association, and is past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. She is a lifelong
advocate for a patient's right to choose their own medical care without government intervention.
This looks like a reincarnation on Lysenkoism. Politization of epidemic was evident
although it is unclear why this huge instigation of fear benefits neoliberal elite. Still, it is
undeniable that it was used as trump card to weaken mail voting protections. Bit the whole story
is totally bizarre. Looks like science in the USA is no less corrupt then in the USSR under
Stalin.
Notable quotes:
"... Covid mania has also wreaked havoc on science and its influence on policy. While scientists' passion for discovery and improving health has fueled research on the novel coronavirus, Covid mania has interpreted scientific advancements through an increasingly narrow frame. There has only been one question: How can scientific findings be deployed to reduce Covid-19 spread? It hasn't mattered how impractical these measures may be. Discoveries that might have helped save lives, such as better outpatient therapies , were ignored because they didn't fit the desired policy outcome. ..."
"... Covid mania is also creating new conflicts over vaccine mandates. The same people who assured the public that a few weeks of lockdown would control the pandemic now argue that vaccinating children, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved, is essential to end the pandemic. Children account for less than 0.1% of Covid deaths in the U.S. Is enough known about vaccines to conclude that their benefits outweigh potential risks to children? ..."
"... "Yes" is the answer of a salesman, not a scientist. Mandating a vaccine for children without knowing whether the benefits outweigh the risks is unethical. People who insist we should press on anyway, because variants will prolong the pandemic, should be reminded that a large reservoir of unvaccinated people in the U.S. -- and in the world -- will always exist. We cannot outrun the variants. ..."
"... ut one lesson that should transcend ideological differences: Don't put one illness above all other problems in society, a condition known as "Covid mania."" ..."
The problem isn't only the overreaction to the virus but the diminution of every other
problem.
What are the lessons of Covid-19? It depends who you ask. Some believe politicization of the
pandemic response cost lives. Others believe a stronger U.S. public-health system would have
reduced Covid-19 deaths significantly. Still others say lockdowns should have been longer and
more stringent, or that they were ineffective. But one lesson that should transcend ideological
differences: Don't put one illness above all other problems in society, a condition known as
"Covid mania."
The novel coronavirus has caused suffering and heartbreak, particularly for older adults and
their loved ones. But it also has a low mortality rate among most people
and especially the young -- estimated at 0.01% for people under 40 -- and therefore never posed
a serious threat to social and economic institutions. Compassion and realism need not be
enemies. But Covid mania crowded out reasoned and wise policy making.
Americans groaned when leaders first called for "two weeks to slow the spread" in March
2020. Months later, many of these same Americans hardly blinked when leaders declared that
lockdowns should continue indefinitely. For months Covid had been elevated above all other
problems in society. Over time new rules were written and new norms accepted.
Liberty has played a special role in U.S. history, fueling advances from independence to
emancipation to the fight for equal rights for women and racial minorities. Unfortunately,
Covid mania led many policy makers to treat liberty as a nuisance rather than a core American
principle.
Covid mania has also wreaked havoc on science and its influence on policy. While
scientists' passion for discovery and improving health has fueled research on the novel
coronavirus, Covid mania has interpreted scientific advancements through an increasingly narrow
frame. There has only been one question: How can scientific findings be deployed to reduce
Covid-19 spread? It hasn't mattered how impractical these measures may be. Discoveries that
might have helped save lives, such as better outpatient therapies , were
ignored because they didn't fit the desired policy outcome.
A prime example is mask research. However one feels about wearing masks, look at the
evidence from California. Despite a mask mandate imposed last April and steady, high rates of
compliance, California experienced a surge in Covid-19 cases over the winter.
Mandating masks may help in some settings, but masks are not the panacea officials have
presented them as. In September, then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director
Robert Redfield declared that "this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid
than when I take a Covid vaccine."
The statement was remarkable because he made it before seeing vaccine trial data. Those data
and data from people who have recovered from Covid clearly
demonstrate that this statement is false. Immunity is far more effective than whatever
efficacy masks may offer.
Covid mania is also creating new conflicts over vaccine mandates. The same people who
assured the public that a few weeks of lockdown would control the pandemic now argue that
vaccinating children, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved, is essential to end the
pandemic. Children account for less than 0.1% of
Covid deaths in the U.S. Is enough known about vaccines to conclude that their benefits
outweigh potential risks to children?
"Yes" is the answer of a salesman, not a scientist. Mandating a vaccine for children
without knowing whether the benefits outweigh the risks is unethical. People who insist we
should press on anyway, because variants will prolong the pandemic, should be reminded that a
large reservoir of unvaccinated people in the U.S. -- and in the world -- will always exist. We
cannot outrun the variants.
The good news is that recent state legislative efforts in Utah, Tennessee and Ohio to ban
vaccine passports may burst the Covid mania bubble. If passports are banned, then risks from
Covid must be assessed in the same way other risks -- such as playing a sport or starting a new
medication -- are considered. In many places throughout the country, zero has become the only
tolerable risk level. Why else are people who have been vaccinated or recovered from Covid
still asked to wear masks? Reasonable policies cannot sprout from unreasonable levels of risk
tolerance.
The pandemic has been devastating for many Americans, but policies grounded in Covid mania
have compounded the harm and delayed a return to normal life. The challenges ahead require
rational decision making that considers costs and benefits and keeps sight of the countless
things in life that matter.
Dr. Ladapo is an associate professor at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.
m m hovaten SUBSCRIBER 38 minutes ago
So what else is new? We all suspected that something was fishy when the mortality on the
Diamond Princess was only 0.3% while the MSM was propagandizing 3.0% mortality. Directors at
CNN said that their mission was to 'get Trump out of office and they were successful in that
endeavor. Huge advertising bucks were to be made pushing the twin evils of Trump and death by
Covid. If anyone cares to do the research, (NCHS), the 2020 excess mortality was actually
0.12% and that includes all the excess deaths resulting from 'lockdowns" in blue states. I
have stopped reading the news because really is 99% 'fake'!
Karen Hogan SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
My question is: will "Public Health" replace "climate change" and "critical race theory" as
the asserted rationale for imposing unconstitutional totalitarian policies on individual
citizens?
Paul in Karen's subscription.
John Pound SUBSCRIBER 52 minutes ago
Not replace, but be combined with...
Victor Cameron SUBSCRIBER 1 hour ago
Covid 19 was a colossal panic instigated by the Media and Government that has ruined
many thousands of lives financially and otherwise, violated Constitutional Rights with an
over reactive "shutdown" and worse, that had no legitimate authority created by fiat.
Covid 19 was no more dangerous than other past viruses, but was fabricated as a threat
to be the new Bubonic Plague by the Media and Government Medical Bureaucrats who vacillated
and put out questionable information. In essence, it was a national disgrace tainted with a
political cast.
Even currently, the Media continues to broadcast data headlined "Pandemic" with
meaningless numbers.
The government medical bureaucracy CDC continues with their mixed messages, and has yet to
dispense with the ubiquitous Masks that no one want to wear, other than the germaphobes among
us.
With multimillions vaccinated and millions more schedule, now is the time to end the virus
drama and return to a normal country.
David L SUBSCRIBER 3 hours ago
The one important factor not mentioned in the article is the role of the media in
contributing to Covid mania. The coverage of the pandemic by the MSM has been a disgrace.
It's been marked by sensationalism (pandemic porn), a complete lack of perspective and
context in presenting data about the course of the pandemic, and highlighting anomalous cases
and falsely representing them as significant outcomes of the disease. And of course, all this
is now being bolstered by the Biden administration with comments like that from the CDC
director a few weeks ago when she said she "had a sense of impending doom", about the current
status of the disease in the country.
Brian Maresca SUBSCRIBER 2 hours ago
" B ut one lesson that should transcend ideological differences: Don't put one illness
above all other problems in society, a condition known as "Covid mania.""
Yes, but you're putting the cart before the horse here. The question is how could this
public health emergency been handled to ALLOW society to both address the epidemic, develop
effective social and health protocols, and continue to address the manifold issues that face
America. Idiotic debates should have been cut short. Masks help and social distancing was
paramount. 2nd, from DAY ONE public health officials should have emphasized the PARAMOUNT
IMPORTANCE of regular exercise. IMMUNE HEALTH was a key. 3rd; mass testing for the virus is
an enormous waste of time and effort . Testing should have focused on the
presence of ANTIBODIES. This way public health officials would have known what % of the
public had been exposed, and been able to do follow up studies on the duration of immune
response, INFORMING health policy.
Peter Nystrom SUBSCRIBER 4 hours ago
You assume the article "will create confusion." Opinions and information contrary to official
doctrine always have that potential, especially in the minds of the easily confused. Some of
us are not threatened by the prospect of having to weigh divergent opinions. It's hard at
times to credit our fellow citizens with clear thinking, especially when it differs from our
own...umm....flawless logic! I say print the opinions and let them stand or fall on their own
merit. Ditto for official dogma.
"... Have you had any experiences with fad psychology? Join the conversation below. ..."
"... Mr. Singal is a journalist and the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported. This essay is adapted from his new book "The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills," published last week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ..."
"... Joining any of these "movements" is like joining a cult. You go there because you are lost and looking for simple answers to complex problems. They have lofty credentials, fancy theories and anecdotal evidence to convince you to have faith and follow without questioning. Once you accept the "guru" you have to follow. There is no sale, if they tell you, you are fine. You are not okay, but here is the solution (and the check). All you need is good friends, they will cure you. No charge. ..."
"... Absolutely agree, and I would apply the theme of failure to just about all the problems we are facing today. These dilemmas are ancient, deep and complex, maybe unsolvable. However, a step in the right direction might be for us all to honestly and completely admit that basically everyone has now joined the struggle for dominance and power over everyone and everything else in our lives. ..."
"... Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the leader of Black Lives Matter and a self-described Marxist, recently purchased a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where the vast majority of residents are white, according to reports. ..."
"... She believes in that which she espouses and by good fortune, turned social psychology into profit and bought herself something nice? ..."
"... She is a disingenuous predator like a preacher who fleeces his flock or a president who does the same, and took advantage of those who believed in her so she could profit off their backs? ..."
Amy Cuddy (61 million TED Talk views) argued that by adopting brief, expansive poses -- think Wonder Woman with her hands on her
hips -- women could feel more powerful in the workplace, shrinking stubbornly persistent gender gaps. Angela Duckworth (23 million
views) introduced "grit," a new psychological scale for measuring passion and stick-to-it-iveness, which has been marketed, in part,
as a tool to redress educational inequality. Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji's implicit association test, or IAT, came to
utterly dominate the diversity-training industry, promising to pull back the curtain on our minds and reveal their unconscious
biases against disfavored groups.
Psychologist Amy Cuddy, seen here delivering a TED Talk in 2012, argued that 'power posing' can increase confidence.
PHOTO:
JAMES DUNCAN DAVIDSON/TED
These ideas have launched a veritable industry of books, training courses and other products. There's big money in social psychology
and a great deal of excitement. But there's also a lot less substance than meets the eye. Most people don't realize that despite the
air of scientific legitimacy which surrounds such faddish ideas, they have failed to deliver on their potential over and over again.
That's not to say the entire field is rotten. Social psychologists have produced important insights into human nature, from the ways
that in-group/out-group thinking can warp our perceptions of others' motives to Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance.
More recently, Betsy Levy Paluck worked with colleagues to develop an apparently effective anti-bullying strategy that relies on
using students' social networks. Others, like Simine Vazire, have carved out roles as methodological reformers, improving the
quality of research in the field.
Only about half of all published experimental psychological findings are successfully replicated by other researchers.
But a great deal of social psychology's recent output hasn't lived up to these standards. Often the field offers what are, in
effect, quick fixes for complex and enduring societal problems like inequality and bias. These self-help-style solutions are almost
always aimed at diagnosing and optimizing individuals, whether that means boosting their grit, making them feel more powerful or
discovering their hidden racism. Because they promise so much reward for so little effort, social psychology fads often win
attention and resources long before there is any rigorous evidence of their effectiveness. And such evidence often never
materializes: Only about half of all published experimental psychological findings are successfully replicated by other researchers.
The subfield of social psychology tends to fare even worse.
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Have you had any experiences with fad psychology? Join the conversation below.
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us to see science and self-help intersect. Americans have always been easily charmed by the inspiring
promise of profound personal transformation. The 19th-century New Thought movement "held that matter could be spiritualized and
brought under the complete domination of thought, and that all thoughts become matter," as the historian Alfred Whitney Griswold
wrote in 1934. Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book "The Secret," which spawned a wildly successful mega-franchise thanks to a major assist from
Oprah, is basically New Thought updated with the language of 21st-century experimental research.
"Under laboratory conditions cutting edge science has confirmed that every thought is made up of energy and has its own unique
frequency," notes Ms. Byrne's website. This supposedly means that "as your thought radiates out, it attracts the energy and
frequencies of like thoughts, like objects, and even like people, and draws those things back to you." The site offers testimonial
after testimonial proving that anyone who wishes and visualizes hard enough can get what they want, eventually.
The concept of 'grit.' popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth, sees passion and stick-to-it-ivenss as the keys to success.
PHOTO:
ALAMY
Grit, power-posing and the IAT aren't as fundamentally vacuous as "The Secret." Dr. Cuddy's blockbuster power-posing idea originated
in a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2010 that she conducted with two colleagues. The study found that
students who power-posed had higher levels of salivary testosterone and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those who
folded their arms across themselves or enacted other "contractive" poses.
The IAT rests on studies in which a computer algorithm calculates reaction-time differences to certain stimuli and translates that
into a score that supposedly corresponds to the test-taker's "implicit bias." If you are quicker to link positive words with white
faces than with Black ones, you might be implicitly biased against Black people.
But the same thing seems to happen over and over with social psychology's big ideas. A book or TED Talk launches a theory to
stardom, changing the national conversation and winning lots of research funding. Then over the next few years countervailing
evidence quietly piles up, until it's high enough to force the question: Why were we so excited about this, again?
Power-posing, for example, is either dead or on life support, depending on who you ask. Serious methodological flaws with that
seminal study caused one of Dr. Cuddy's co-authors on it, Dana Carney of the University of California, Berkeley, to post a public
note stating flatly that she believes power posing isn't real. The concept has endured some bruising replication failures as well,
leaving little reason to believe in enthusiastic claims about its supposed effectiveness. (Dr. Cuddy did not respond to a request
for comment.)
Grit gained a great deal of attention thanks to Dr. Duckworth's provocative claims that it "beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores,"
and other traditional measures of potential in determining "which individuals will be successful in some situations." Subsequent
research has showed this to be an undeniable overstatement, in some cases a massive one. While some studies have found that grit
might be useful for predicting achievement in certain narrow contexts, the first grit study conducted on a large, representative
sample of Americans, published last year, found that "intelligence contributes 48-90 times more than grit to educational success and
13 times more to job-market success."
To her credit, Dr. Duckworth has acknowledged some of the shortcomings of grit research and the lack of proven grit-enhancing
interventions. But in response to a question about the "beats the pants off" claim, she stood by it, saying that the context of that
remark was her research on teachers and West Point cadets. In fact, if you take a close look at those studies, the claim doesn't
really hold there either.
Psychologists Anthony Greenwald (left) and Mahzarin Banaji developed the implicit association test or IAT.
PHOTO:
QUINN RUSSELL BROWN; ASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES
But it's the implicit association test, a brief computerized exercise anyone can complete on Harvard's
Project
Implicit website
, where the gap between hype and reality is most staggering. The test's creators, Drs. Banaji and Greenwald,
have long claimed that implicit bias may help to explain persistent racial disparities in American society, especially given the
well-documented decline of explicit bias. This is a tidily inspiring story: There is a mental flaw many of us are carrying around
without even realizing it, but here comes a new tool that can shine a light on the problem and help us to overcome it. That's likely
why the IAT narrative was so quickly accepted by corporations and institutions nationwide.
Experts have long understood, however, that modern racial inequalities are the result of complicated social systems that can
reproduce themselves even in the absence of ongoing discrimination. Urban-planning decisions made in the 1960s can continue to
resonate to this day, even if contemporary urban planners are unbiased. Intergenerational poverty is a notoriously difficult problem
to overcome for reasons that go well beyond simple discrimination, whether implicit or explicit.
Implicit bias could certainly play a role in exacerbating these problems. Perhaps some white real-estate agents who view themselves
as unbiased unconsciously favor white buyers over Black ones, contributing to housing discrimination. But no one has come close to
proving that implicit bias is so significant that it deserves to dominate American racial-justice and diversity-training efforts.
It isn't clear exactly what the implicit association test measures in the first place.
Instead, it appears that many people have reasoned backward on this subject, concluding that since there's a test that measures
implicit bias, it must be quite important to explaining racial discrepancies. There's a whole genre of anecdotes in which people
reveal their shame at having scored the way they did on the IAT. "It's something of a custom, when discussing the IAT, to disclose
your own score on the test along with your unease," wrote John Tierney in the New York Times in 2008.
Worse, it isn't clear exactly what the implicit association test measures in the first place. Later research suggests that the score
delivered by the IAT captures not just some ghost of a bias but also cognitive processing speed in general, and may track
familiarity with forms of discrimination rather than endorsement of them. This was memorably demonstrated in a clever study
published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2006, in which psychology researchers were able to induce "implicit
bias" against a wholly fictional group, the "Noffians," by priming test subjects to view this group as downtrodden.
In 2015, Drs. Banaji and Greenwald and a colleague acknowledged in an academic paper that "attempts to diagnostically use such
measures for individuals risk undesirably high rates of erroneous classifications." So even the creators of the IAT cannot endorse
it as a genuinely useful diagnostic instrument for individuals. Yet the test shambles on. In 2018, Dr. Greenwald told the Seattle
newspaper The Stranger that while implicit bias "training has not been shown to be effective," the IAT is still "a valuable
educational device to allow people to discover their own implicit biases."
It's hard to solve complicated social problems, especially in a country as big, diverse, polarized and politically
dysfunctional as ours.
It's hard to solve complicated social problems, especially in a country as big, diverse, polarized and politically dysfunctional as
ours. Psychological quick fixes offer relief from this reality, offering simple solutions to imposing conundrums. Even better, they
come from authoritative-seeming experts with genuine credentials rather than slick self-help charlatans.
If we really could improve gender equity in the workplace with a quick power-pose before a meeting, or close those yawning
achievement gaps with a novel psychometric instrument, that would be undeniably wonderful. But it's also not very realistic. We're
all profoundly affected by forces beyond our control, by decisions made behind closed doors, by the wealth we were born with or
without. "In our complex world, causes and effects always join in complicated ways," wrote the sociologist Charles Tilly in his 2006
book "Why?" "Simultaneous causation, incremental effects, environmental effects, mistakes, unintended consequences, and feedback
make physical, biological, and social processes the devil's own work -- or the Lord's -- to explain in detail. Stories exclude these
inconvenient complications."
There's only so much that individual-level tweaking can do to counter such influences. When we do successfully improve the world,
it's usually the result of big, coordinated actions that are politically fraught, involving difficult trade-offs.
Sometimes it is cheaper and less time-consuming to give everyone in your office an IAT training than to closely examine the
hiring practices that have led to a less-than-diverse workplace.
Quick psychological fixes sidestep these issues. We embrace half-baked psychological science for the same basic reasons we embrace
the idea that chanting a mantra can help us fix our hopelessly messed-up lives. And powerful institutions are happy to jump aboard
the bandwagon because they may have good reasons to prefer Band-Aid approaches.
Sometimes it is cheaper and less time-consuming to give everyone in your office an IAT training than to closely examine the hiring
practices that have led to a less-than-diverse workplace. It might be less painful for all involved to pin academic underachievement
on a lack of "grit" than to look seriously into the heartbreaking educational gaps that manifest themselves by kindergarten and only
grow larger in later grades. But while these ideas help HR managers and school superintendents check items off their to-do lists,
they don't actually solve problems. Once the TED Talk lights go down, there are still the 14-year-olds who are barely literate in
part because of their dysfunctional schools.
Fortunately, there's reason for hope that the worst social-psychology fads are behind us. As awareness of the full severity of the
field's so-called replication crisis has taken hold, so too has an ardor for methodological reform that will likely make tomorrow's
studies sturdier than today's. The original power-posing study, for example, would be less likely to get published in 2021, at least
in a top scientific journal.
Incentives largely caused this problem. Even upright scientists might find that their commitment to rigor wavers when the
possibility of a TED Talk beckons. But incentives can also help to solve it. Research psychologists, particularly young ones, don't
want to waste their early years producing work that will get effortlessly toppled the first time someone tries to replicate it. Now
that they know their work is more likely to face such scrutiny, they are embracing newer, sounder techniques in the hopes of
forestalling such problems. But in the meantime there's still a lot of cleaning up to do, and a lot of zombie ideas in need of
dispatching.
Mr. Singal is a journalist and the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported. This essay is adapted from his new book "The Quick
Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills," published last week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Robert Middleton
SUBSCRIBER
45 minutes ago
I've seen this quick-fix pehenonmenon before, in nutrition, fitness, health, and learnings. Remember high carb / low
fat diets? The Grapefruit Diet? The Scarsdale Diet?
Or vibrating belts? Sauna suits? Subliminal learning? The red wine craze?
BRUCE GALE
SUBSCRIBER
4 hours ago
This summarizes it all:
"It's hard to solve complicated social problems, especially in a country as big, diverse, polarized and politically
dysfunctional as ours. Psychological quick fixes offer relief from this reality, offering simple solutions to imposing
conundrums. Even better, they come from authoritative-seeming experts with genuine credentials rather than slick
self-help charlatans."
I don't know how these people sleep at night.
Brien Akers
SUBSCRIBER
4 hours ago
I would endorse the concept of Grit for its' intrinsic value. There's an old saying: "Hard work beats brains every time
brains doesn't work hard." The point isn't that "every time" may be a bit of an overstatement but that with hard work
and determination a person can overcome much and create a better life for themselves, especially once-upon-a-time in
America.
Robert Middleton
SUBSCRIBER
40 minutes ago
(Edited)
Agree, in a general sense. Hard work helps a lot. Certainly does not hurt.
But there is always dumb luck (right place, right time, or good parents or DNA); old fashioned favortism, nepotism,
privelege; flashes of brilliance / creativity; great personality, good looks (the DNA thing). Grit can only do so
much.
Deborah Feigenson
SUBSCRIBER
6 hours ago
This is a huge problem in education research as well. People find a trendy idea, jump on it because it promises a
quick fix, and then cling to it for years even after it has failed to stand up to any kind of scrutiny. Embracing
humility and healthy skepticism are better than buying in wholesale and refusing to let go (I'm looking at you,
multiple intelligences theory). And I say this as someone who one taught power-posing as a strategy to help students
give presentations...
Publius S
SUBSCRIBER
19 hours ago
Much of the nonsense like the power pose is because of the inability to replicate studies. P-hacking is part
of it (see John Oliver on p-hacking), but also the lack of incentive to try to replicate previous results in
academia.
Dan R
SUBSCRIBER
23 hours ago
(Edited)
The sad reality is that many major US corporations and brands have bought into the implicit bias nonsense.
If you watched the NCAA March Madness tournament, you would have noticed Dove Men Care with their celebrate
Black Men ads. If you go to the Dove Men Care website you will see a body of psychological research
produced by Dove executives and researchers that claims that White people are overwhelmingly guilty of
implicit bias against Blacks entirely based upon these kinds of fake science studies.
So to combat bogus and non-existent implicit bias, Dove promotes Explicit Racial Bias by singling out
Celebrate Black Men in its TV ads. Time to boycott Dove big time ....
NITIN DALAL
SUBSCRIBER
1 day ago
Joining any of these "movements" is like joining a cult. You go there because you are lost and looking for simple
answers to complex problems. They have lofty credentials, fancy theories and anecdotal evidence to convince you to have
faith and follow without questioning. Once you accept the "guru" you have to follow. There is no sale, if they tell you,
you are fine. You are not okay, but here is the solution (and the check). All you need is good friends, they will cure
you. No charge.
Alex Guiness
SUBSCRIBER
1 day ago
... 'zombie ideas in need of dispatching.' If you dispatched all the zombie ideas what would you be left
with?
One thing I have learned since delving into politics and the human condition, is the aphorism
'People are people and do what they do because they are people.'
If you remove the human from humanity you are left with 'ity' which is not much to work with.
Barbara Helton
SUBSCRIBER
1 day ago
Absolutely agree, and I would apply the theme of failure to just about all the problems we are facing
today. These dilemmas are ancient, deep and complex, maybe unsolvable. However, a step in the right
direction might be for us all to honestly and completely admit that basically everyone has now joined the
struggle for dominance and power over everyone and everything else in our lives.
Stephen Keith
SUBSCRIBER
1 day ago
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the leader of Black Lives Matter and a self-described Marxist, recently purchased a $1.4
million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where the vast majority of residents are white, according to
reports.
(from the NYPost)
There's the coalescence of grit, power-posing (she's pictured in front of a sign saying
But
First...Revolution
with a fist held in the air) and IAT.
Obviously, it works.
Alex Guiness
SUBSCRIBER
3 hours ago
Is she an example of someone who was influenced by social psychology?
She believes in that which she espouses and by good fortune, turned social psychology into profit and bought herself
something nice?
She is a disingenuous predator like a preacher who fleeces his flock or a president who does the same, and took
advantage of those who believed in her so she could profit off their backs? and buy a 1200 sqft 3 bedroom home in
overpriced LA?
I think that the problem Neil deGrasse Tyson assigns to bad marketing is more attributable
to prominent scientists overstepping the bounds of their fields ("
What I've Learned From the Pandemic Year: Science Needs Better Marketing ," Review, March
20). Science should inform, not dictate, politics. Science is never settled, so it's OK to
challenge scientists on the facts as well as their predictions.
Many of the inventions Dr. Tyson attributes to science (smartphones, jet flight and the
internet) are in fact the work of engineers. Of course, these inventions are based on science.
But unlike raw science, they have to work in the real world, subject to economics, politics and
culture. Scientists sometimes forget that political and societal decisions are much more
complicated than scientific facts.
Prayson Pate
One need look no further than the 1955 set of encyclopedias in your parent's library to
understand that science is not an irrefutable truth. While the elements of the 1955 periodic
table remain on the 2021 list, many more have been added. The naming of clouds is the same
today as it was in 1955, but how we study and predict weather has changed dramatically. Base
metals are the same, but metallurgy has advanced by leaps and bounds. There were electric cars
over 100 years ago but my 2020 Tesla is a completely different beast than the 1903 Columbia
Electric Runabout. This advancement comes from scientific research and discovery. We call this
progress.
Those of us on the right are quite tired of being cast as rubes and know-nothings by the
self-proclaimed illuminati of the left. We are thinking, feeling and responsible Americans who
happen to be keenly aware of the recent weaponization of science. We like clean water, clean
air, a healthy body and a healthy environment. We just don't agree on whose science will allow
us to reach and sustain these goals.
Steve's fisking is a comic masterpiece! As for Sharkey, he bears out the conclusion that
the most important skill for today's academics is the ability to ignore the obvious,
obfuscate, and appear to embrace the latest ideological fashion, no matter how absurd.
In the present political climate, the words "government" and "ethics" could NEVER go
together in the same sentence. It's an oxymoron. Leftist politicians lie all the time as
easily as they breathe.
CRM114 1 day ago (Edited)
... I was once asked to review a book on Engineering Ethics for a University course. I did
some background research and discovered that the first four examples of ethical behavior
resulted in all those engineers being secretly blacklisted and never being able to work in
the profession again. They didn't use the book. However, the fact still remains that it still
happens, in case you were wondering how all those bridges and dams that fall down passed
inspection the year before.
CaMuPaSh 17 hours ago remove link
The first thing to remember is that most "professors" are frauds.
The second thing to remember is that most places that "professors" work at are frauds.
The third thing to remember is the first thing and the second thing.
We're talking here about a gender of parasite that usually Retires In Place as soon as
s/he gets tenure.
Just keep taking out those student loans to support these, predominantly, left wing
loonies.
Learn plumbing move to TX.
New_Meat 1 day ago remove link
"Military Intelligence"
"Jumbo Shrimp"
and now
"Government Ethics"
Back when, Jack Welch required all GE people to take "GE Ethics". Naturally, one would
think that this is a good thing. But after constant interactions with GE people, we concluded
that the purpose of the training was:
Make sure that everyone in GE knew where "the line" is, then
Make sure that everyone in GE knew where the "gray areas" lie, then
Make sure that everyone in GE knew how far beyond the "gray area" they could operate
without getting into trouble.
Then give the more aggressive people an "out"
Faeriedust 1 day ago
That's the usual purpose of "ethics training" in both medicine and the legal profession.
Been there, arranged the coursework, mailed the certificates.
AI Agent 9 hours ago remove link
Corporate ethics works the same way. President of the Company gets caught bribing the
government. Office of ethics is created. Everyone down to the janitor is trained in ethics:
don't steal stationary and don't stop working, even for a minute.
Meanwhile, new president is designing killer airplanes and hiding stuff from the FAA.
However, saying that's wrong is an ethics violation.
Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques is allowing us to peer into the connections, yet
shrouded in mystery, between local brain activity, cognitive processes, and partisan attachment. This developing body of
knowledge has revealed the profound importance of evolution in shaping the ways in which our brains process all kinds of
information, in particular political information. At the center of this evolutionary journey is the importance of groups -- of being
initiated and accepted into them, of aligning ourselves with them, of being loyal to them regardless of philosophical
considerations.
The social dynamics of group membership and participation are programmed
more deeply into our brains than is abstract philosophizing.
"In other words, people will go along with the group, even
if the ideas oppose their own ideologies --
belonging
may have more value than facts.
" Because we once moved from place to place as nomads, such groups are our homes even more
than any physical locations are.
We now have decades of research suggesting -- if not proving -- "
the
ubiquity of emotion‐biased motivated reasoning
," reasoning that is qualitatively different from the kind operating when
subjects are engaged in "cold reasoning," where the subjects lack a "strong emotional stake" in the subjects at issue. Coupled
with a growing literature on the startling character and extent of
political
ignorance
, the current state has dire implications for human freedom. The stakes are high: in
their
2018 study
of why and how partisanship impairs the brain's ability to process information objectively, NYU researchers Jay J.
Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira note that
"partisanship can alter memory, implicit
evaluation, and even perceptual judgments."
One recent study, published last fall by a team from Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, set out to better understand how
partisan biases develop in the brain. The researchers had subjects watch a series of videos, using fMRI to explore the "neural
mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real‐world political content." The results showed that partisan team members
process identical information in highly biased and motivated ways. The
researchers
locate this neural polarization
in the part of the brain known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with
understanding and formulating narratives. The study also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that to the extent a given participant's
brain activity during the videos
aligned with that of the "average liberal" or "average
conservative," the participant was more likely to take up that group's position
.
The study accords with years of
previous
research
showing that partisans' opinions on important social, political, and economic issues are
affected
by subconscious brain processes -- processes of which they're neither aware nor in control
. This ought to be deeply
concerning to everyone who belongs to a political team: processes are taking place in your brain, underneath or beyond the level
of direct awareness, that are informing your conclusions about important social and political issues. To reflect on this for even
a moment should fill anyone who aspires to critical thinking or rationality with a kind of dread, for
loyalty
to the team seems to be overriding the higher faculties of the mind
.
But, the authors are careful to note, it's important not to interpret these results as pointing to some kind of determinism,
whereby we can't choose how to think or what we believe. As one of of the
study's
authors,
Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, says, "Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree."
Rather,
these neural pathways seem to be carved largely by the kinds and sources of the
media we consume
. From the data yielded by such research, among many other similar studies,
a picture
begins to emerge of partisanship as a kind of mind poisoning
, an infection that leads to serious and, importantly,
measurable
cognitive impairment
. Evidence suggests that, under the influence of
partisanship, we can't even understand our own thoughts and opinions.
In another important, recent experiment, researchers wanted to understand the relative accuracy of participants' introspective
constructs. The researchers set out to gauge people's ability to understand their own choices, to see clearly "the elements of
internal argumentation that lead to [their] choices." In particular, the researchers wanted to know how subjects would deal with
choices that had been manipulated -- that is, whether subjects would "notice mismatches between their intended choice and the
outcome they are presented with." Would subjects recognize that something was off? If they failed to notice the manipulation,
would they offer justifications for choices they had not even made? The assumption is that subjects who fail to notice the
mismatches must not really understand the reasons for their choices or "the internal processes leading to a moral or political
judgment."
The results revealed
a conspicuous "introspective blindness to the internal processes
leading to a moral or political judgment."
People didn't seem to understand why they had made the decisions they'd made
(or had not made), though some exhibited what the researchers call "
unconscious
detection of self‐deception
" -- these subjects were unable to detect the manipulations of their answers, but they did register
lower confidence in the manipulated choices, which the authors suggest points to "the existence of a neural mechanism
unconsciously monitoring our own thoughts."
Once one has chosen and joined a team, she has very little control over her own thoughts. When they are introduced, new data are
distorted, misinterpreted, or discarded based on their consistency with what we may describe as a program running in the
background:
partisanship leads the team member into a cognitive position of unconscious
self‐deception
. Few of us, if fully understanding this phenomenon, would choose it for themselves -- at least that's the
hope of many who study this area. As the authors observe,
"reflecting on our beliefs may
help to develop free societies."
They suggest that if citizens better understood the brain mechanics of the cognitive
impairment and self‐deception brought on by partisanship, they'd be positioned to make better decisions. Research has shown that
"
reflecting
on how we make decisions leads to better decisions
."
Similar research on self‐deception
in politics has also confirmed the presence of the
Dunning‐Kruger
effect
(to summarize, people think they know a lot more than they actually do). Further, the effect is exaggerated within the
context of politics, with
low‐knowledge participants describing themselves as
even
more
knowledgeable than usual once partisanship is made a conspicuous factor
.
Vitor
Geraldi Haase and Isabella Starling‐Alves posit
that the kind of self‐deception that is such "a major characteristic of
political partisanship probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup‐extragroup dynamics of
human evolution." Objective truth, meaning roughly an accurate model of reality, is not important, at least not anywhere near as
important, as conformity and indeed submission, which we may associate with
social
reality
.
Whatever its flaws
, evolutionary psychology offers us several promising leads on the question of just why the brain isn't
able to perform on partisanship. This notion of social reality is an important clue. At this juncture, it is important to
underline the fact that when we speak of partisanship, we are not speaking of ideology; the relationship between partisan
identification and political ideology is complicated, the connection between the two not particularly strong. Ideologues tend to
think systematically, and the philosophical
contents
of their beliefs are deeply
important to them. What is important to the partisan is not
what
she believes, but that
she aligns her beliefs with those of her team or in-group -- or else, as may be the case, that she is loyal to and supportive of the
party group despite any real or perceived ideological nonconcurrences.
Americans tend to vastly
overestimate
the differences
in political ideology and policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact,
most
Americans are not at all ideological
, can't describe ideologies accurately (
as
their proponents would describe them
), and have almost no information on either the history of ideas or the empirical
evidence that bears on particular political or policy questions. Interestingly, partisanship doesn't necessarily seem to be about
politics in the normative or philosophical sense, as "people place party loyalty
over
policy, and even over truth
." There are actually
relatively
weak correlations
between partisan identity and concrete policy preferences. "[P]artisan affect is inconsistently (and
perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes."
Indeed, strong partisanship is necessarily an impediment to ideological thinking insofar as ideology is predicated on an
integrated and consistent approach to policy questions, as against the blind, team‐rooting approach associated in the literature
with partisanship.
Ideological people, whatever their flaws, hold political actors and
government bodies to account.
Partisans change positions readily and shamelessly, depending on anything from who is
living in the White House, to the vagaries of party leaders, to what is perceived as popular at the moment. Further, individual
Americans' political opinions are remarkably unstable over time, vacillating between glaring contradictions, relying on
a confused amalgam of elite opinions. Partisanship as we know it rather seems to be
a holdover
from humankind's history of tribal loyalty
, with "
selective
pressures hav[ing] sculpted human minds to be tribal
." That is, evolution selected for just the kinds of cognitive biases we
find in partisans on both sides today (importantly, neither "team" is immune).
Partisanship quite literally makes one dumb -- or is it that dumb people are just more likely
to be committed partisans?
Zmigrod is careful to point out that the study can't give us the answer to that question,
that we would need longitudinal studies in order to better understand the causal direction and causal phenomena at play. As soon
as partisanship is introduced, as soon as a question mentions a politician or political party,
subjects
are unable to accurately assess basic facts
. Indeed, remarkably, tinging a question with a political shade renders many
subjects
unable to answer a simple question
even when they are given the answer
. Relatedly,
studies have shown that one's political affiliations
even
affect her ability to perform basic math
: given an operation that yields a statistic contradicting a subject's partisan view,
the subject will tend to question the result rather than updating based on the evidence or attempting to reconcile the new
information with her politics.
In a groundbreaking
study
published last summer
, a team of researchers led by the University of Exeter's Darren Schreiber attempted to address the lack
of brain imaging research specifically aimed at better understanding
nonpartisans
,
a group that has been neglected as almost all such research has focused on the differences between the brains of partisans of the
left and right. The study found that nonpartisans' brains are different from those of their brainwashed brethren, particularly in
"
regions
that are typically involved in social cognition.
"
It may be that the next stage in human evolution will involve rewiring our brains to accept the fact that current groups are
artificially and arbitrarily defined -- that all human beings are one people. For just as there is harmful, toxic tribalism, there
is also socially beneficial, cooperative, cosmopolitanism. As social policy expert
Elizabeth
A. Segal writes
, "Ultimately our goal should be to build the tribe we all belong to: that of humanity." Libertarians take
this lesson quite seriously, for we tend to see ourselves as part of a common global community of connected individuals who are
perfectly capable of dealing with one another through peaceful and mutually‐beneficial interactions. We celebrate social,
cultural, religious, and linguistic differences as the spice of life rather than see them as dividing lines or impediments to
willing collaboration. If we can understand and think clearly through partisanship, we can begin to build a freer world based not
on arbitrary divisions and compromised reasoning, but on mutual respect and renewed emphasis on rigorous critical thinking.
Freezing Texas should commission a monument: Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates save the Texans
from global warming by turning them into icicles. So much for global warming, the reddest
herring ever caught in the Gulf of Mexico!
... ... ...
Even the direction of the climate drift is not certain. The Warmers (like Greta) say our
planet is warming up because of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by mankind. Many experts say the
planet is actually enters the new Ice Age due to diminished solar activity ( here ),
connecting it to Maunder Minimum or Gleissberg Minimum.
In Israel, a popular
expert Chaim Noll says the real problem is desertification, while CO2 is good for plants
and prevents semi-arid areas turning into desert. Still others say the changes are perfectly
normal; we have been through such changes before.
LINK BOOKMARK We really do
not know for sure what's going on and whether we can or should do anything about it. And now,
at the time of the great freeze, Bill Gates has temerity to publish his Warmer's Manifesto,
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. The book was heavily promoted, and got
fawning reviews, though it is as silly as any of these books. Gates wants us to stop travelling
(unless you can afford a private jet, of
the kind Gates has invested in), stop
eating meat (worms should be good enough for the hoi polloi, or synthetic meat produced by
the same Gates, for cows fart, and farting is warming the planet). Knowing his and his ilk's
ability to mobilise the media, I wouldn't be amazed if he succeeds in convincing the West. And
any disaster in meat-producing Texas would be grist to Gates' mill.
Besides being silly, this guy knows too much! In 2015, Gates gave a "prescient warning about
the threat of a pandemic", says a
reviewer . To what extent was it "prescient" if in the same 2015, Gates patented a coronavirus quite similar to
the one that attacked mankind in 2020? Perhaps he is prescient "for the same reason that
arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires", as Ron
Unz remarked .
Besides being silly, this guy knows too much! In 2015, Gates gave a "prescient warning about
the threat of a pandemic", says a
reviewer . To what extent was it "prescient" if in the same 2015, Gates patented a coronavirus quite similar to
the one that attacked mankind in 2020? Perhaps he is prescient "for the same reason that
arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires", as Ron
Unz remarked .
Bill Gates never went to college, so I doubt he knows the carbon cycle. He thinks he can
talk nonsense because he is rich, and the nonsense will then make sense.
There is no global warming, but global cooling, as there was snow even in Israel:
It has now become commonplace to accuse anyone who opposes covid lockdowns of being "antiscience."
This
sort of treatment persists
even
when published scientific studies suggest
the usual prolockdown narrative is wrong. support the antilockdown position.
There are sociological, economic, and cultural reasons why experts will
take the
politically popular position, even when the actual scientific evidence is weak or nonexistent.
Experts Are Biased and Are Self-Interested like Everyone Else
Though we are often encouraged to listen to experts because of their intelligence and expertise,
there
is a strong case for us to be skeptical of their pronouncements.
Beliefs serve a social function by indicating one's position in society. Hence
to
preserve their status in elite circles, highly educated experts may subscribe to incorrect positions, since doing do so can
confer benefits.
Refusing to hold a politically popular viewpoint could damage one's career. And since upper-class
professionals are more
invested
in
acquiring status than working people, we should not expect them to jettison incorrect beliefs in the name of pursuing truth.
Cancel
culture
has
taught us that promoting the world view of the elite is more important than truth to decision makers.
So why should we listen to experts when they give greater primacy to appeasing elites
than solving national problems?
In contrast to what some would want you to believe -- revolting against experts is not
an attack on science, considering that little evidence suggests that they care about scientific truth. Let us not fool
ourselves. People occupying powerful offices are uninterested in being toppled from positions of influence, and as such, they
will seek to minimize views that threaten their professional or intellectual authority. As a result, expecting influential
bureaucrats to value truth is unwise. Truth to a bureaucrat is merely the consensus of the intelligentsia at any given time.
Of note is also the lesser ability of
intelligent
people
to identify their own bias.
Stemming from their greater levels of cognitive
development, it is easier for intelligent people to rationalize nonsense.
Justifying extreme assumptions requires a
lot of brainpower, so this could possibly explain why highly intelligent people -- specifically, people "higher in verbal
ability" -- are
inclined
to
express more extreme opinions. Our culture has immense faith in expert opinion, although the evidence indicates that such
confidence must be tempered by skepticism. Intelligent people, whether they be experts or politicians, do not have a monopoly
on rationality.
Admittedly, intelligence may act as a barrier to objective thinking. Brilliant people are adept at forming arguments,
therefore even when confronted with compelling data, they are still able to offer equally riveting counterpoints. Smart people
can engage opponents without resorting to a bevy of studies to buttress their conclusions.
Thus,
clearly, the proposals of experts ought to be held to a higher standard primarily
because
they
are smarter than average.
The capacity of an intelligent person to provide coherent arguments in favor of his ideas can be impressive, and may only
serve to solidify him or her in his or her conclusions.
For instance, in the arena of
climate
change
experts have recommended policies that are consistent with data on nothing but the claim that a consensus supports
such proposals.
Promoting the wide-scale use of renewables, for example, is usually touted as a sustainable climate
strategy despite the fact that
studies
argue
the
reverse
.
Counter to the rantings of the intelligentsia, we should implore more people to express
skepticism of experts.
Due to their high intelligence, experts tend to be more inflexible and partisan than other
people. This is solid justification for ordinary people to be skeptical of the intellectuals in charge of national affairs.
Unlike
wealthy bureaucrats, who are insulated from the economic fallout of their bad ideas, the poor usually bear the burden.
The globalists found just the economics they were looking for.
The USP of neoclassical economics – It concentrates wealth.
Let's use it for globalisation.
Mariner Eccles, FED chair 1934 – 48, observed what the capital accumulation of
neoclassical economics did to the US economy in the 1920s. "a giant suction pump had by 1929 to 1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion
of currently produced wealth. This served then as capital accumulations. But by taking
purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied themselves the kind of
effective demand for their products which would justify reinvestment of the capital
accumulation in new plants. In consequence as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by
borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped"
This is what it's supposed to be like.
A few people have all the money and everyone else gets by on debt.
James @ 168: I still like going to seminars and talks but in the current pandemic
environment this has been difficult. I don't really like having to use Zoom to attend online
talks but so many places use it now, it is unavoidable in spite of its security issues.
I wouldn't say that not accepting things at face value is a "bad habit" though this has
caused me problems in the past and still does. Being sceptical and open-minded should be
healthy attitudes. Of course having such attitudes does come with its own pitfalls, but this
is how we have evolved as humans so they have some survival value.
I've been following her work for several months now and think her premises much sounder
than Matthew Ehret's, who are actually on the same Canadian team. Generally, the three of us
are working on exposing the rise and spread of what's now known as Neoliberalism. And of
course, there's Dr. Hudson who's ahead of us all.
The line of investigation initiated by Upton Sinclair into the shared Board memberships at
key elite universities within the USA that erased the traditional teaching of
political-economy and replaced it with the mathematical economics which lie at the root of
Neoliberalism's Junk Economics
I see as very promising as they're also prominent bankers and Old Money with social
connections to England's Royalty and Nobility--the primary members of Europe's Rentier
Class . When I look over the comments, many have forgotten just what Class owns the
Duopoly and controls the federal government. Trump was never allowed into their circle but
was used by some of its members in the pursuit of interests that are still shrouded in fog.
My working hypothesis there is they were quite worried that too much industrial capacity had
been foreclosed and moved such that it caused a real threat to national security; thus the
need for MAGA.
With the rise of the Eurasian Bloc, the "threat" isn't military; it's economic. As I wrote
earlier today, an economy based on consumerism will collapse when the consumers can no longer
consume. Hudson's 100% correct that debt's that can't be repaid won't. The current degree of
economic polarization is miniscule compared to what might ensue if the Bidenites don't
forestall it--200 Million people bankrupt while 100 Million have good paying jobs and can
afford their debts--the remaining 40-50 Million are mostly impoverished children. This time
the part of the public that gets shafted as in 2009 under Obama isn't going to sit still, and
what happened in DC will be repeated elsewhere with meaning this time. A genuine MAGA Fascist
wanting control will need to disarm the Rentier Class and the Swamp thus ousting the
current "Friendly Fascist" regime--and that would require a paramilitary since that's
basically what composes the Swamp--Civil War between two Factions of Reaction that would also
split the military. Wonder what barflies think of all that?
Earlier in the week I linked to the latest Renegade Inc program which had Dr.
Hudson as one of the guests. That show's
transcript is now available. Here's an excerpt with Ross Ashcroft asking a question:
"Ross: What do you think are the megatrends that we should be looking at in 2021? What do
you think is the direction of travel, if you like, for so-called developed economies?
"Michael Hudson: Well, the big trend in any economy is the growth of debt, because the
debt grows exponentially. The economy has painted itself into a debt corner. We can see that
in real estate. We can see that for small business. There's also almost no way to recover.
The Federal Reserve has been printing quantitative easing to keep stock and bonds high. But
for the real economy, the trend is polarization and lower employment.
"The trend also is that state and local finances are broke, especially in the biggest
cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. They're not getting income tax revenue
from the unemployed or closed businesses. They're not getting the real estate tax with so
many defaults and mortgage arrears. In New York City there's talk of cutting back the subways
by 70 percent. People will be afraid to take the subways when they're overcrowded with people
with the virus. So you're having a breakdown not only in state and local finances, but of
public services that are state run – public transportation services, health services,
education is being downsized. Everything that is funded out of state and local budgets is
going to suffer.
"And living standards are going to be very sharply downward as people realize how many
services they got are dependent on public infrastructure."
And this one I must also include:
"Ross: What is the one thing that has really surprised you in 2020? What have you laughed
at? What has given you a chuckle?
"Michael Hudson: The surprise – that I really shouldn't have been surprised at
– is how naive Bernie Sanders supporters were in thinking that they were going to get a
fair deal and that the elections were going to be fair. The illusion is that people were
actually going to have a fair election when the last thing the vested interests wanted was
Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or any kind of reformer. So what happened to Sanders is
what happened to Corbyn in Britain and the Labour Party's neoliberal leadership.
"So what's for laughs? I guess, Tulsi Gabbard's takedown of Kamala Harris was absolutely
wonderful. Everybody just broke out laughing, cheering for her. And of course, that's why she
was marginalized, and now we have Kamala Harris as the senior vice president."
Of course, none of the dire economic news is being reported with the focus instead on Wall
Street's markets, with much of the public just as brainwashed about it as Trump. The last
third focuses on politics, which is what most barflies want to read about. So, click the link
and read what Dr. Hudson sees in the tea leaves.
"... "Some people's own incompetence somehow gives them a stupid sense that anything they do is first rate. They think it's great." ..."
"... Extreme views often stem from people feeling they understand complex topics better than they do. ..."
"... David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute, told interviewer Steve Paulson, for Nautilus , stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence. "Stupidity is ... where adding more data doesn't improve your chances of getting [a problem] right," Krakauer said. "In fact, it makes it more likely you'll get it wrong." ..."
Why aren't there more people studying the science behind stupidity?
Nautilus
On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification
of Germany, the philosopher wrote "The Triumph of Stupidity," attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid
and brutal people -- two qualities, he noted, that "usually go together."
He went on to
make one of his most famous observations, that the "fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure
while the intelligent are full of doubt." Russell's quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias -- the Dunning --
Kruger effect -- that has been so resonant that it has penetrated popular culture, inspiring, for example, Russell's quip
"Some people's own incompetence somehow gives them a stupid sense that anything they do is first rate. They think it's
great."
No surprise, then, that psychologist
Joyce Ehrlinger prefaced a 2008
paper she wrote with David
Dunning and Justin Kruger, among others, with Russell's comment -- the one he later made in his 1951 book, New Hopes for a Changing
World :
"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding
are filled with doubt and indecision." "By now," Ehrlinger noted in that paper, "this phenomenon has been demonstrated even for
everyday tasks, about which individuals have likely received substantial feedback regarding their level of knowledge and skill."
Humans have shown a tendency, in other words, to be a bit thick about even the most mundane things, like how well they drive.
Stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence.
Russell, who died in 1970 at 97 years of age, probably would not be surprised to hear news of this new
study , published in Nature Human Behaviour
: "Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most." The researchers, led by Philip Fernbach,
cognitive scientist and co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone , analyzed survey responses from a nationally
representative sample of U.S. adults.
They obtained similar results, they write, "in a parallel study with representative samples from the United States, France and
Germany, and in a study testing attitudes about a medical application of genetic engineering technology (gene therapy)."
It was nevertheless consistent with prior work exploring the Dunning -- Kruger effect and the psychology of extremism, he Fernbach
called their result "perverse." It was nevertheless consistent with prior work exploring the Dunning -- Kruger effect and the psychology
of extremism, he
said . " Extreme views often stem from people feeling they understand complex topics better than they do. " Now as ever,
societies need to know how to combat this. But what exactly is stupidity?
David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute,
told interviewer Steve Paulson, for Nautilus
, stupidity is not simply the opposite of intelligence. "Stupidity is ... where adding more data doesn't improve your chances of
getting [a problem] right," Krakauer said. "In fact, it makes it more likely you'll get it wrong."
Intelligence, on the other hand ... allows you to solve complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. "Stupidity is a very
interesting class of phenomena in human history, and it has to do with rule systems that have made it harder for us to arrive at
the truth," he said.
... ... ...
Brian Gallagher is the editor of Facts So Romantic, the Nautilus blog.
The biggest shakeup to my world view came with Russiagate.
I had previously believed that intelligence sat at the top of the hierarchy for how people
process information and get their belief systems.
Now I know that intelligence is a sub-layer in the hierarchy, and not even second.
Levels:
1) People identify with groups and get their beliefs from that group - herds.
2) People mimic their herd.
3) People apply intelligence to rationalize the beliefs that they already hold.
Trying to deprogram a headline-reader or ingestor of the MSM (aka MIC-mouthpiece)
by interacting with them at level #3 is like "spooning against the tide". You are not even
getting close to level #1.
This is actually reinforcing people's delusion that they are operating primarily from an
intelligence level - a catch-22.
You are telling them that their beliefs originate from intelligently gathered information.
That isn't helping them.
Start paying attention to how often you trigger a mimic's cliche function.
It can be amusing. Then notice that you yourself were under the delusion that their beliefs
originated intelligently.
That is why you are interacting with them in intelligent conversation, isn't it?
You believe that something that was birthed from intelligence can be untangled with your
intelligent argument. Think again.
They have their beliefs that they mimic and then "confirmation bias" cements it,
and cementing it is the function of the endlessly repeated lies of the MIC-mouthpieces.
The repeated lies are kept fresh by putting them into new forms - Russiagate became
Ukrainegate became Bountygate became Vaccinegate
(with occasional side trips into such places as MH17-gate, Skripal-gate and Assange-gate,
etc).
You can spend your time showing them, for example, that the Skripal false-flag was a clown
performance at best - the facts are out there for all to read.
But then, even if successful with that one, "what about this-gate and that-gate" - you
haven't even scratched the surface of their
collective McCarthyism and thus by informing them about Skripal-gate "you are defending
Russia". Good luck with that.
People are mimics that let their herd do their thinking for them. They have various skill
levels at rationalizing to themselves the beliefs that they already hold.
p.s.
Put the three-level hierarchy to the test by considering people's religious beliefs.
People are typically born into those religious groups - level 1. They will consistently
mimic the same cliches, for example, "G-d will curse those that do not support the Jews",
"Jesus will throw you into a Lake of Fire", "Have a Blessed Day".
Do you think they all independently discovered these identical "Truths" on their own, and
so, so many more, by their own personal study of the Bible?
They are mimicking - level 2. Now go and approach them at level 3 - the intelligence level
- but don't neglect to carry a barf bag with you. Maybe you can succeed in reinforcing their
delusion that their religious beliefs are intelligence based, but you will not even nudge
them from their identity group - level 1. And you will only get for your trouble an ear full
of mimicry.
---
I wrote the above last summer. Since then there have been more "-gates" such as the latest
Multiple-US-agencies-Solarwinds-hack-gate. I mentioned Vaccinegate above and I had to stop
and think about what that had been about as the public is being hosed with so much crap these
days. Vaccinegate - supposedly the Russians had hacked our vaccine research.
---
recommended reading: https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
@librul #2
I think you overegg your view.
A significant part of the "me too" views these days is "rice bowl religion" - that is, belief
maintained because the holder think they have to, in order to continue the economic
prosperity.
Another significant part comes from the pervasiveness of mainstream media - both traditional
and social media.
librul @ 2
Thanks Librul. Very insightful and accurate framing and description. Caitlin Johnstone also
lays out the same perspective but yours stands alone as impressive.
Hope we're in the same herd! LOL!
"social media is notorious for the way it creates tightly insulated echo chambers which
masturbate our confirmation bias and hide any information which might cause us cognitive
dissonance by contradicting it. Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon "
.
So-called "social" media is a cancer eating away at our humanity and our sense of community
with every passing moment. It is a devil's brew of the worst of human thought and behavior
that seeks to lower the level of human interaction with every click and toxic retort. It may
be the tool that actually does us in even more than the other big threats to our
existence.
.
"Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even
communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace
impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful."
.
People today have short attention spans. They don't have any depth of thinking and they
certainly don't want shades of grey. The Dark Powers successfully exploit this weakness to
their benefit with little pushback from an easily amused public. Those who love simplicity
don't want anything more challenging and they certainly aren't the least bit concerned about
those who are actively doing them in.
.
"You should not be afraid of your government being too nice to China. What you should worry
about is the US-centralized power alliance advancing a multifront new cold war conducted
simultaneously against two nuclear-armed nations for the first time ever in human history.
"
.
We should indeed be concerned about Empires measuring the size of their manhoods against each
other but since that has nothing to do with reporting on our neighbors for not wearing masks
or the speed of our internet connections or the latest video of some fool acting the fool on
the web we won't be concerned about it. You gotta have priorities, you know.
Postmodernist, in this context, usually means something like 'based on self-confident
assertions that have no connection with reality'. Or 'based on truthness '.
What is the dominant guiding principle of western societies today?
At the risk of sounding crass, let me suggest that it is the "cover your ass" or CYA
principle. This principle has always been fairly prominent in participative democracies. But
now it has gone into hyper-drive - so much so, that the CYA principle is also now an important
driving force even in financial markets.
CYA and Covid-19
Take the response to Covid-19 as an example of the CYA principle in action. Is there any
doubt that the rush to lock down economies and suspend normal civil rights -- to go to church,
to attend school, to visit friends -- in the face of Covid was driven largely by policymakers'
fears that if large numbers of people died, they would be held accountable in the court of
public opinion?
Of course, no policymakers want a surge in deaths on their watch. But economies did not get
shut down during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, nor during Sars in 2003, the Hong Kong flu
pandemic of 1969, nor even the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. So what changed between the time
of Sars and the time of Covid? One obvious answer is the rise of social media.
Now that every policy choice is reviewed and debated in real time by millions of people
around the world, CYA has become all-important. Politicians have to put policies in place to
hedge against the wildest tail risks imaginable. At the same time, the first instinct of
policymakers (and of investors -- but more on this later) is to avoid doing anything that
diverges too far from the pack. Any policymaker anywhere looking at the opprobrium heaped on
Sweden will surely agree with John Kenneth Galbraith's observation that "it is far, far safer
to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone".
Once Denmark and Norway had decided to follow Italy's lead and lock down their populations,
any western government that did not follow suit risked being accused of playing Russian
roulette with people's lives, regardless of the epidemiological evidence. Unfortunately, we
still seem stuck in this mindset, even as the weekly death tolls across western countries have
dipped to generational lows, almost regardless of the Covid policies they adopted (see the
chart below).
So, we should all be grateful that Donald Trump appears to be bouncing back from his brush
with Covid having taken little harm. Firstly, of course, Trump is human, and it doesn't do to
wish harm on another human. Secondly, if Covid were to have taken Trump's life, it would have
claimed the highest profile victim possible. And after the death of the US president, who can
doubt that anti-Covid measures would become even more liberticidal. Regardless what you think
of Trump, that would be a very bearish development, at least for "Covid-victims" such as energy
names, airlines, casinos, hotels, and restaurants , all of which are desperate for policymakers
to acknowledge that Covid-19 no longer seems to be as lethal as it was six months
ago.
CYA and the fiscal and monetary policy mix
Moving on to the far less controversial fiscal and monetary policy responses to the
recession, can there be any doubt -- again -- that policy is being driven above all by the CYA
principle? What policymaker wants to espouse the Hippocratic principle of "first, do no harm,"
and let markets and prices find their own footing? None. As Anatole has argued, policymakers
are scrambling always to do more, with ever-bigger budget deficits funded by ever-more money
printing ( see Will A Keynesian Phoenix
Arise From Covid? ).
Can this new enthusiasm for budget deficits and money printing guarantee prosperity? It
seems to for some individual stocks. But for the broad market? Perhaps not, or at least not in
"real terms". Take the equal-weighted S&P 500 as a proxy for the typical equity portfolio
(appropriate now a handful of mega-cap names dominate the cap-weighted index), and discount it
by the gold price to get a picture of equity returns adjusted for currency debasement.
When US governments keep spending under control, as Bill Clinton's did in the 1990s or the
Tea-Party-led Congress did after 2011, the broad equity market goes through long phases of
"rerating" against gold (see the chart below).
And when the government embraces expanding budget deficits funded by the Federal Reserve, as
with George W Bush's "guns and butter" policies or Donald Trump's rapid deficit expansion, gold
massively outperforms the broad equity market. Where does this leave us today? Since 2014, the
equal-weighted S&P 500 has delivered the same returns as a pet rock -- gold. This is
because the index has lost a third of its value since making a high in September 2018, and has
basically been flat-lining since late April (see the chart below).
This may help to put the current debate on US stimulus into context. First, does anyone
doubt that the US government will release a tsunami of new spending after the election? Because
of the CYA principle, what policymaker will want to be seen to be blocking recovery? Secondly,
will this increase in budget deficits, funded by the printing press, trigger stronger economic
growth? If so, why weren't we doing it before? Will it lead to higher asset prices? If so, why
are we so far off the 2018 high? Or will it mean further currency debasement? Looking at the
ratio between the equal-weighted S&P 500 and the gold price, will a new round of stimulus
mean a return to the February 2020 high? Or will it see the March 2020 low taken out?
Another way to look at this problem is through the prism of the US dollar. Will another
round of fiscal stimulus be dollar-bullish? Or will it be dollar-bearish? The answer matters
greatly to all those foreign investors currently seeking shelter in US equities. For them, the
return on US equities has been flat since late May - and going further back, flat since
mid-2019.
So, if another round of stimulus weakens the US dollar, as seems likely if the stimulus is
funded by the Fed, then foreign investors will have to hope that increased equity values will
more than compensate for their foreign exchange losses.
CYA and indexing
This brings me to what is likely the most important element of all this for readers: the CYA
principle and investing. Gavekal has written at length about the dangers of indexing (see, for
example, Exponential Optimization). We have also argued that indexing is the new in-vogue form
of socialism. Capital is not allocated according to its marginal return -- the foundation on
which capitalism rests. Instead, capital is allocated according to the size of companies. Just
as in the days of the old Soviet Union or Maoist China, the bigger you are, the more capital
you get. It is hard to think of a stupider way to allocate one of the key resources on which
future growth relies. So why is indexing so popular? Simple: it is the ultimate CYA
strategy.
As Charlie Munger likes to say: "Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome."
In a world where every money manager is told his or her target is to achieve a performance
close to that of the index, it is hardly surprising that ever-more money ends up getting
indexed ( see Indexation = Parasitism
). As a consequence, over the years the dispersion of results among money managers has become
smaller and smaller.
Now, the Holy Grail of money management is to achieve decent long term returns combined with
low volatility in those returns. However, in a world where ever-more capital is directed into
investments that outperform -- playing momentum rather than mean reversion -- you inherently
end up with greater volatility all round. Take the past few years as an example: since January
2018, the S&P 500 equal-weighted index has suffered six corrections of -10% or greater,
including one -20% drop and one -40% drop. In contrast, in the preceding two years -- January
2016 to January 2018 -- the S&P 500 did not see a single -10% drop, while the July 2016 to
January 2018 period didn't even see a -5% drop. Clearly, something in the environment has
changed.
More indexing makes sense from a CYA perspective, but ends up delivering lower returns and
higher volatility all round. This stands to reason. If capital is allocated only according to
marginal variations in the price of an asset, then the more the asset's price rises, the more
capital money managers will allocate to that asset. And the more an asset's price falls, the
less capital is allocated to it. Such momentum-based investing inevitably creates an
explosive-implosive system, which swings wildly from booms to busts and back again. And in the
process, capital gets misallocated on a grand scale.
In the 20th century, the goal of every socialist experiment was for everybody to earn the
same salary. In the 21st century, it seems that the goal of indexing is for everybody to earn
the same return. As we now know, fixing everyone's return on labor at the same price was a
disaster. People stopped working, and economic growth plummeted. Fast forward to today, and why
should we expect a different outcome if the end-goal of our investment strategy is to ensure
that everyone gets the same return, not on the their labor but on their capital? Isn't the
entire world of money management now oriented towards delivering this remarkable ambition?
And should we really be surprised if the growth rates of our economies continue to slip? Why
should we expect a positive growth outcome from an epic misallocation of capital? Take the
current Big Tech craze as an example: everything is organized for investors to sink ever more
capital into those very companies that need it least, and whose best use for this gusher of
money is typically to buy back their own shares.
This CYA investment-decision-making process appears to be one of the key drivers behind the
recent divergence between the S&P 500 market-capitalization-weighted index, and the S&P
500 equal-weighted index.
But it may also explain an interesting point raised by my friend Vincent Deluard, strategist
at StoneX. In a recent tweet (he's well
worth following) he noted that each of the last four major market corrections bottomed out
in the last week of the quarter, just after the index futures expired. Now, this could be a
remarkable coincidence. On the other hand, it might say a great deal about how capital is
allocated today.
Conclusion
In A Study Of History, Arnold Toynbee reviewed the rise and fall of the world's major
civilizations. He showed that throughout history, when any civilization was confronted with a
challenge, one of two things could occur. The elite could step up and tackle the problem,
allowing the civilization to continue to thrive. Alternatively, the elite could fail to deal
with the problem. In this case, as the problem grew, their failure led to one of three
outcomes.
1) A change of elite. An example is the clear-out of the French political class at the
time of decolonization. As the old Fourth Republic stalwarts struggled to meet the challenges
of Asian and African independence movements, they were replaced by Charles de Gaulle who
brought in new personnel and established the institutions of the Fifth Republic.
2) A revolution. Obvious examples include the French revolution, with the bourgeoisie
taking over from the aristocracy, and the American revolution, with the local elite taking
power from the British king.
3) A civilizational collapse. Examples include the collapse of the Aztec, Mayan and Inca
civilizations following the arrival of the conquistadores. Another is the disappearance of
the Visigoths in Spain and North Africa following the Arab-Muslim invasions at the start of
the eighth century.
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With this framework in mind, how does CYA as an organizational policy approach help in
dealing with challenges? The obvious answer is that if CYA is your guiding principle, the
problems you chose to tackle will be those where there is little controversy within the elite
about the required solutions.
This explains the constant hectoring about tackling climate change. Here, policymakers can
promise to spend lots of money, without leaving their backsides too exposed. This accounts for
the dramatic divergence between the performance of green energy producers (who produce energy)
and carbon energy producers (who also produce energy).
It may also explain the rush towards ever-more European integration, as if the real
challenge facing Europe today is a resurgence of the Franco-German rivalry that tore the
continent apart in the 19th and 20th centuries. Policymakers can spend entire weekends in
summit meetings debating European integration. This allows them to feel useful and important,
even if their debates increasingly seem about as relevant as the debates of the Byzantines over
the gender of angels even as the Turks were storming their city. But while pushing for more
European integration might not tackle any of the issues European voters actually care about, at
least it doesn't leave your behind exposed.
This brings me back to Karl Popper's theory that at any one time, there is a set amount of
risk in the system. Any attempt to contain this risk either displaces it to somewhere else, or
stores it up for later. If Popper was right, then the extreme aversion of our policymakers to
taking risks means that the risk must appear elsewhere. But where? Perhaps in financial
markets? It does seem not only that spikes in the Vix have been getting sharper lately, but
that the Vix is also staying more elevated than you would expect in the middle of a roaring
bull market.
Or, to put it another way, over the past few years, it does seem that the "downside gaps" in
markets have started to become more vicious.
So perhaps CYA makes sense in today's financial markets. The challenge, of course, has
become finding the instruments that allow you to cover your posterior. In March 2020, as equity
markets tanked, government bonds did not diversify portfolios adequately. And in September, as
equities fell -10% from peak to trough, bonds also failed to deliver offsetting positive
returns.
This new development -- that US treasuries no longer offer CYA protection for equity
investors in difficult times -- is an important one. It makes allocating capital to either
equities or bonds a lot more challenging. Or at least it becomes a lot more challenging if you
are compelled to follow contemporary western society's all-important guiding principle:
CYA.
Michael
Hudson's newest interview on the Macro N Cheese Podcast either as a transcript or via
audio is all about the coming debt deflation and what he calls the Neofeudal Empire.
If you haven't already known, Hudson reminds you that:
Who is the dumbest economic Nobel Prize winner? [Paul Krugman?] Paul Krugman. That's right.
He was given a Nobel Prize for not understanding what money was. If he would have
understood it, that would've excluded him from getting the Nobel Prize.
I know, take chess for example, where the highest rank is the title of "Master." Someone
should change this. Also note the "black" always move second, the queen serves the king and
her highest glory is to "sacrifice" herself for him. Protect the MAN! The game is so
structurally racist and sexist, is it any wonder there has never been a black or female world
champion? Sheez
Bolshevism stupidities first played as a great tragedy, which cost many scientists their life
or who were pushed into exile, now the same stupidity with the exchange of "proletarian
scientists" to "black scientist" is re-played as a farce in the USA
Some science-relevant extracts from Heather's article:
The dean of the Jacobs School of
Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, Albert ("Al") P. Pisano [ Email him ] pronounced
himself "absolutely dedicated" to turning the engineering school into an "anti-racist
organization." Doing so "crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,"
he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission,
say, was unspecified.
[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
Recently
I had things to say about wokeness at the fine old magazine Scientific American .
Their September issue had run a long article, headlined Reckoning With Our
Mistakes, in which the editors groveled, rent their garments, heaped ashes on their
heads, and flagellated themselves with guilt over shamefully un-Woke things the magazine had
published back in the 19th century.
All that was bad enough -- distressing enough, I should say, for an old science geek like
myself who, in his youth, looked to Scientific American for instruction and amusement on
science and math topics, delivered in a spirit of objective enquiry.
Can you guess which one? Of course you can! Quote:
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its
people -- because he rejects evidence and science.
There follow several hundred words about how ineptly the Administration has coped with the
COVID-19 pandemic, with some supplementary remarks on healthcare in general and environmental
issues. Then this concluding paragraph:
The Scientific American editorial is, in short, just cut'n'pasted from Biden campaign
talking points.
For more on the ongoing corruption of American science by ideology, see Heather Mac Donald's
article Conformity To A Lie in the
summer issue of City Journal .
Heather quotes the revolting statements of self-abasement issuing from college presidents
and faculty heads about how they must strive harder to purge their institutions of "systemic
racism" and "white privilege."
Some science-relevant extracts from Heather's article:
The dean of the Jacobs School of
Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, Albert ("Al") P. Pisano [ Email him ] pronounced
himself "absolutely dedicated" to turning the engineering school into an "anti-racist
organization." Doing so "crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,"
he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission,
say, was unspecified. The chairman of the earth and planetary sciences department at the
University of California at Davis, announced an "anti-racist reading group" for faculty and
students. The group's purpose was to confront the "structural racism that pervades" the field
of geology. Such structural racism in the study of igneous rocks is apparently so obvious that
the chair did not bother to elaborate further. The American Astronomical Society held
color-coded Zoom meetings, one for white astronomers to "discuss direct actions to support
Black astronomers," one for black
astronomers to "talk, vent, connect, and hold space for each other," and one for "non-Black
people of color to discuss direct actions to support Black astronomers." See
AAS Endorses #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia & #Strike4BlackLives , AAS website,
June 9,
This kind of thing is what has led VDARE.com's Lance Welton to say, repeatedly, that science is
entering a new Dark Age:
In that piece by Heather Mac Donald that I mentioned, one of the college presidents
confessing his
institution's sinful racism is Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton University.
President Eisgruber [ Email him ] has, Heather tells us,
ordered the school's top faculty and administrators to submit plans on how they will
"combat systemic racism within and beyond the University." Every aspect of Princeton will be
reexamined with a "bias toward action," Eisgruber said.
That caught the eye of Betsy DeVos, or one of her underlings.
The Department of Education has sent a letter to Eisgruber reminding him that Princeton has
received more than $75 million in federal aid during his seven years as president on the
understanding, repeatedly confirmed by Princeton, that Princeton complies with the
1964 Civil Rights Act by being scrupulously non-discriminatory. [
Princeton's "systemic racism" captures the government's attention , By Paul Mirengoff,
PowerLineBlog, September 17, 2020]
How, the Department wants to know, can that square with those
confessions of "systemic racism within the University"?
They have opened an investigation.
Yesssss! The weasel is caught in its own trap!
Here's a toast to Secretary DeVos! And please, let's see more of this.
Every university that has made pronouncements like those made by Princeton should be
formally investigated. Further, I think the government should immediately suspend all
payments to those universities, pending the outcome of those investigations. I mean, we
wouldn't want to support racist institutions. would we? Even for a little while.
As to Scientific American, it has been garbage for some time now. But the increasing
wokeness of science faculties and scientific societies is particularly worrisome. I expect
the enterprise of science to decline in the West.
Great article Derb'. Agree totally with the following.
"Objective, reasoned scientific inquiry is the crowning glory of Western civilization."
Would only add that close, in 2nd place, is Western Art -- & philosophy. In many ways,
Western Letters generally, made Science possible (ie Aristotle, Leonardo, Erasmus etc)
The radicalized political left in the U.S. today resides in the democratic party. They are
the servants of anti-American big tech and globalism over nationalism.
He was a Mechanical Engineering professor at Berzerkely, His concentration was mechanisms
and computer optimization methods in design. He went to Washington, FS to run a program to
dole out grant money for research in MEMS (at least that's what it was called then), M
icro E lectro M echanical S ystems. That was well before most people
understood the point of it.
That he issued that statement as the Dean of Engineering at UC San Diego makes me question
my assumption that people who push this stuff are all dummies who are just in these positions
due to AA and lots of student loan money allowing bloated staffs. This guy, I mean, he is top
0.01% sharp! From this, I gather it was: either issue a statement like this or get in trouble
with higher ups. Dr. Pisano was all about the engineering, not politics. The only other thing
I can think of is that he got brainwashed by his time in the Washington, Federal
Shithole.
I'm sorry if this bores most of the readers, but it is not off topic. Following is more
from Dr. Pisano's 1 year-old Curriculum
Vitae . I only picked out this diversity part, but you can see the guy's amazing,
illustrious career in his field, if you read the rest. You just can't go disparaging a man
like this after you read through the description of his life's work.
None of the stuff below involves big money. Even with what sounds like a mini-career in
D.I.E, in this long paragraph (I didn't want to put my own breaks in), I still maintain that
all this could easily just be a way of deflecting and problems that would keep Dr. Pisano
from doing what he loves, doing cutting-edge research and inventing new devices in the modern
age.
As the Chair of Mechanical Engineering [This was at Berkeley.] , Professor
Pisano prosecuted a strong agenda of diversity, working diligently toward equity and
inclusion for faculty, staff and students of the department. Using externally-raised
philanthropic funds, Professor Pisano established a $50,000 per year fund (to run for 5
years for a total of $250,000) for Equity and Inclusion in the Department of Mechanical
Engineering as well as in the College of Engineering. Professor Pisano re-constituted the
Mechanical Engineering Department Committee for Affirmative Action, changing it to the
Mechan- ical Engineering Department Committee for Equity and Inclusion, and reformulated
the committee membership to include student and staff membership (3 faculty, 2 staff and 7
students). Retention of female faculty has always been a top priority to Professor Pisano.
In one instance, Professor Pisano successfully convinced the faculty member to return to UC
Berkeley after she had accepted the position at Notre Dame, bought a home in Indiana, and
packed her belongings on the moving van. To help increase the diversity of the staff of the
department, Professor Pisano has hired an African American, an African, an Indian, two
Filipina and a Hispanic to the Department staff. Of these 6 new hires there were 5 women.
To demonstrate the sincerity of the department's commitment to equity and inclusion for
students, Professor Pisano instituted semester meetings between the Department Chair and
all student groups. He also initiated a policy of significant financial support ($1,000 per
semester per student group) for student groups who were engaged in the cause of diversity.
These student groups include Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Black Engi- neering and
Science Students Association (BESSA), Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students
Association (BGESS), Latino/a Association for Graduate Students in Engineering and Science
(LAGSES), Pi Tau Sigma Mechan- ical Engineering Student Honor Society (PTS), Tau Beta Pi
Engineering Student Honor Society (TBP), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
student chapter, UC Berkeley Solar Car Team (CalSol), UC Berkeley For- mula SAE Racing Car
Team (Formula SAE).
Professor Pisano has worked hard to recruit women and underrepresented minorities to his
research laboratory. During his later years at UC Berkeley, Professor Pisano was the Ph.D.
advisor to 13 female graduate students and 12 male graduate students. This is a 52% ratio
of women to men in a lab in a Department where the overall percentage of women is less than
12%.
Also, think about this: Until recently at least, with the diversity business influencing
admissions and becoming more important than all the rest, this professor must have run into
only the very, very top, say 0.1% of the non-white students, grad students, and others in his
field. It's hard to get a picture from that of what the country WILL run into once whites are
marginalized.
Oh, I left out one point. In that paragraph, if you know the amount of money that is
around at these big research universities, you can see that the amounts described there are
just peanuts. Never mind the "significant financial support" bit for the money going to these
rainbow student groups. A thousand bucks doesn't get you much.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to
being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that
the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the
people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand
it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of
identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and
reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I
cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new
activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences,
interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies,
lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in
which one had to, was 'expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been
important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies,
coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not
to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. 'One had no time to think. There
was so much going on.'"
@Achmed E. Newman grandfather -- a landlord, a butcher and a wrestler -- told me so when
I was not even six years old -- with exactly these words.
***** tact and culture is required -- and that means a decent social context. -- To
put it in Erich Fromm's words: You have to try to achieve The sane society (The title
of one of Fromm's good books). You can't (and will not) be sane all by yourself. And you will
find it not that easy to work for a sane society -- after peak stupidity , so to speak
-- because it will always be a tad against human nature -- civilization brings with it
(necessary) discontents. In other words: Becoming civilized is not necessarily a pleasure and
all in all -- -- -- no task for snowflakes .
"University life may have racism
mixed in, and we have to unmix it,
looking at every aspect of the place," says him.
"Whether broken or not, we must fix it."
@Dieter Kief r, thanks for the reply and neat phrasing. I think by nature engineers are
seekers of the truth, though. This guy was no modern-era, 1000 SAT score, high-school B
average, barely squeaking by using old tests and "rubrics" engineering student. I could see
the latter type just joining with the flow of an insane society, as you say.
I think it's one or a combination of these 3:
1) The only non-white people he's dealt with on any consistent basis are pretty damn
bright.
2) He spent too much time in Washington, FS.
3) He really doesn't believe in this stuff, but is going along to get along, as he's had such
a productive life and does not want to be cancelled. It's gotta be an annoyance, in this
case, but just one of those things, like the university bureaucracy and the politics, that he
has to deal with quickly so he can get on with the cool projects.
In an ideal world, the technician would understand that society at times needs him badly
not only as a technician/engineer, but also in his role as a citizen (at least in
crucial situations -- and it seems as if the actual western front would -- slowly but
steadily -- morph into a rather serious Twilight Zone -- At the Darkness on the Edge of
Town -- if not -- at the edge of civilization. If this is somewhat the case, how much
longer should the brilliant engineer wait before he acts in a civilized and rational and
maybe even a bit courageous way in the public realm? -- I wish I had his nerves -- because I
sure don't think there'd be much time left over for waiting any longer.
Agreed. It makes me laugh when I see new home builders refusing to call a master bedroom a
master bedroom, instead calling it a 'main' or 'primary' bedroom. Just to avoid triggering
people who see evil everywhere.
The word 'master' is not and should not necessarily be associated with slavery. The word
can signify mastery over totally benign things, like being a master of a given craft or
endeavour.
The fact that people are demanding that we dispose of the word speaks volumes about their
idiocy, their lack of capacity to think critically, and their solipsism.
For the past seventy years, the people that run things have been marinated in a stew of
Frankfurt School nonsense. What Rudi Dutschke called the "March through the Institutions", an
instantiation of that heretical Marxist's, Antonio Gramsci's, neo-Marxist program, is in its
final stages. The current anti-science "science", negrolatry, Soros-funded destruction of
social order, and other manifestations of madness are the culmination of a century or two of
prog effort. At least temporarily, the mad are running the asylum. Currently there is not
much the small, sane minority can do. Right now history is not on our side..
@Dieter Kief i>Unz Review though? I don't see HOW, with all that he's done and has
going on -- please read that CV.
I wouldn't say this guy lives in an ivory tower, as engineers are practical-minded too.
Unlike for a Sociology or Literature professor, some common sense is required or you get
nowhere. I would say, Dieter, that Dr. Pisano just doesn't realize where our society is in
this sense, with not enough time for politics outside his university system stuff and living
in a somewhat cloistered environment. He doesn't know that society needs him to take a stand,
well, and of course, many more people like him.
I'm just trying to think of an explanation and explain it myself, not cover his ass, as
it's not like we are friends. This whole thing just came to me when I saw the name, and I
thought "wait, this is no SJW dummy -- far, far from it! How can this be?"
I know, take chess for example, where the highest rank is the title of "Master." Someone
should change this. Also note the "black men" always move second, the queen serves the king
and her highest glory is to "sacrifice" herself for him. Protect the MAN! The game is so
structurally racist and sexist, is it any wonder there has never been a black or female world
champion? Sheez
@Snert pidity.com/index.php?post=793"> "The Plantation Mentality and Misogyny of
the Engineers and Technicians" , how can engineers, technicians, and car mechanics deal
with this stupid shit? Are we going to change all the manuals for brakes and clutches?
What about electrical connectors? Do these idiots know that many are not just male or
female (you shouldn't have to ask why), but also what I call hermaphroditic, with male pins
vs. sockets but the overall "D" connector or whatever being female on the part with the pins
and male on the part with the sockets?
Yes, Peak Stupidity is nigh!
.
Oh, and because I ran out of [AGREE]s, chalk up one for Jus' Sayin' about the Frankfurt
School and Realist about the SA magazine and disgraces to the scientific profession.
The difference between religion and ideology is the latter can linger in the secular
fields.
While ideology can be treated like a religion, as with Marxism-Leninism, it is officially
defined as a political system of ideas or theory of justice. So, ideology can slip into
modern science in ways that religion cannot.
What the true secularists should do is reject anything that is religionist, i.e. even if
it's not a religion, if it is treated like a religion with sacraments and taboos, it is
antithetical to reason and logic.
What does one expect what with ObamaCore aka Common Core, where 2 + 2 = 5?
Mostly IMHO it's just a "go along to get along" thing because while no "scientist" wants
to be cancel cultured, neither does a "scientific" publication .the dollars, doncha know.
But that's okay at some point the "culture cancelers" as is their wont will waaayyyyy over
play their hand. I can "re-imagine" that happening just about every day, and I'm not talking
the movie "Idiocracy" either. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
DARPA, the govt. agency that brought us the internet and stealth technology, has a new
"twitter for scientists" called polyplexus. yes, it's as dumb as it sounds.
as part of it, they have ask me anything Q&As, typically with program managers to
discuss their research interests and upcoming funding opportunities. recently, one of them
was called "Systems Thinking From [sic] an Indigenous Lens" ( https://twitter.com/polyplexors/status/1309526281780953091
) do you think China's DARPA hosts the same nonsense?
Good way to be. I'm explaining this distinguished professor, not myself. If you were to
ask "what would YOU do?", then my answer would be that I would never be in this situation
because, leaving all other reasons aside, I wouldn't get that far with my attitude, which is
"to thine own self be true". It can be a major hindrance
"It makes me laugh when I see new home builders refusing to call a master bedroom a master
bedroom, instead calling it a 'main' or 'primary' bedroom."
So they took down the "master" bedroom, eh?
Let's hit 'em where it hurts, then: the *Master's* degree! Since it's apparently the rage
among females these days to enlist the aid of a sugar daddy to fund their educations, how
about -- the Mistress degree! For the ladies, of course. But given the dispositions of the
male academics these days, that label quite suits them as well.
1) The only non-white people he's dealt with on any consistent basis are pretty damn
bright.
2) He spent too much time in Washington, FS.
3) He really doesn't believe in this stuff, but is going along to get along, as he's had such
a productive life and does not want to be cancelled."
@El Dato but the number of pages devoted to ads at least doubled and probably tripled, or
more, starting from the early 1970s.
Same trend in radio and television, though not as dramatic. They actually changed how they
wrote many TV shows, in order to make room for the ads -- to my mind, they became more
insipid -- shorter hooks. My theory is that the profusion of ads helped mitigate the risk of
trying to move the Overton window, in both the ads and the product.
One of the hidden reasons for the way Eastern Europe is more traditional might be because,
for the most part, they lacked ads during communism. Well, that's just my crazy theory -- if
it is true it is just a small part of the explanation, which no doubt contains larger
factors.
Science is not entering a new Dark Age, American Science is entering a dark age. And it
ain't causation on the Left or Causation on the Right, Americans just don't want to do the
hard stuff anymore.
In the early 1980s, students of color at Harvard Law School organized protests in various
forms to problematize the lack of racial diversity in the curriculum, as well as among students
and faculty. These students supported Professor Derrick Bell, who left Harvard Law in 1980 to
become the dean at University of Oregon School of Law. During his time at Harvard, Bell had
developed new courses which studied American law through a racial lens that students of color
wanted faculty of color to teach in his absence. However, the university, ignoring student
requests, hired two white civil rights attorneys instead. In response, numerous students,
including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda, boycotted and organized to develop an
"Alternative Course" using Bell's Race, Racism, and American Law (1973, 1st edition) as a core
text and included guest speakers Richard Delgado and Neil Gotanda.[11][12]
The theory itself is a kind of Lysenkoism in this particular area. Read voodoo science. This pseudoscience includes
several themes (Wikipedia)
Critique of liberalism: CRT scholars favor a more aggressive approach to social
transformation, as opposed to liberalism's more cautious approach; a race-conscious approach
to transformation rejecting liberal embrace of affirmative action, color blindness, role
modeling, or the merit principle; and an approach that relies more on political organizing,
in contrast to liberalism's reliance on rights-based remedies.
Storytelling, counter-storytelling, and "naming one's own reality": The use of narrative to illuminate and explore
experiences of racial oppression. B
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress: Criticism
of civil-rights scholarship and anti-discrimination law, such as Brown v. Board of Education.
Derrick Bell, one of CRT's founders, argued that civil rights advances for blacks coincided
with the self-interest of white elitists. Likewise, Mary L. Dudziak performed extensive
archival research in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice, including the
correspondence by U.S. ambassadors abroad, and found that U.S. civil rights legislation was
not passed because people of color were discriminated against. Rather, it was enacted in
order to improve the image of the United States in the eyes of third-world countries that the
US needed as allies during the Cold War.
Applying insights from social science writing on race and racism to legal problems.
Intersectional theory: The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and
sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings, e.g., how the
needs of a Latina female are different from those of a black male and whose needs are the
ones promoted.
Essentialism: Reducing the experience of a category (gender or race) to the
experience of one sub-group (white women or African-Americans). In essence, all oppressed
people share the commonality of oppression. However, such oppression varies by gender, class,
race, etc., and therefore, the aims and strategies will differ for each of these groups.
Non-white cultural nationalism and separatism (incl. Black nationalism): The
exploration of more radical views that argue for separation and reparations as a form of
foreign aid.
Legal institutions, critical pedagogy , and minority
lawyers in the bar.
Structural determinism : Exploration of how "the
structure of legal thought or culture influences its content," whereby a particular mode of
thought or widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually occurring
without conscious knowledge. As such, theorists posit that our system cannot redress certain
kinds of wrongs.
White
privilege : Belief in the notion of a myriad of social advantages, benefits, and
courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race (i.e. white people). A clerk
not following you around in a store or not having people cross the street at night to avoid
you, are two examples of white privilege.
Microaggression : Belief in the
notion that sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions have the power to mar the everyday
of oppressed individuals. These include small acts of racism consciously or unconsciously
perpetrated, whereby an analogy could be that of water dripping on a rock wearing away at it
slowly. Microaggressions are based on the assumptions about racial matters that are absorbed
from cultural
heritage .
Empathetic fallacy : Believing that one can change a narrative by offering an
alternative narrative in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take
over. Empathy is not enough to change racism as most people are not exposed to many people
different from themselves and people mostly seek out information about their own culture and
group.
Critique
Any rational legal scholar should reject CRT as voood science. But somehow it crioped in many federal againces.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical
race theory training sessions.
“The President signed an Executive Order to end training sessions based on race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating in
the Federal workforce, the Uniformed Services, and among Federal contractors,” the White House said in an announcement.
“This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting training that promotes race stereotyping,
for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth.”
The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which included a seminar recently held by
the Treasury Department that promoted the message that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are,
contribute to racism.” The same seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea that
Americans should be “more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”
In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity, was found to have stated in
training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white
male[s].” The training materials also asked the trainees to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.
The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy, was found to have stated in its
training materials that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.” It also characterized statements like “color
blindness” and “meritocracy” as “action of bias.”
The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where one of the museum’s graphics
asserted that concepts such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work” being “the key to success,” the “nuclear
family,” and belief in a single god are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and not values that would unite Americans. The
museum also stated that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness,
or fear,” according to the order.
Many rational legal scholars have criticized CRT as pseudoscience and voodoo: CRT scholars'
reliance on narrative and storytelling, or CRT's critique of objectivity.
Judge Richard
Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has "labeled critical race theorists and
postmodernists the 'lunatic core' of 'radical legal egalitarianism.'" He wrote:
What is most arresting about critical race theory is that it turns its back on the Western
tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal
logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories – fictional,
science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal – designed to expose
the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned
argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of
nonwhites.
Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that critical race theorists
have constructed a philosophy which makes a valid exchange of ideas between the various
disciplines unattainable:
The radical multiculturalists' views raise insuperable barriers to mutual understanding.
Consider the "Space Traders" story. How does one have a meaningful dialogue with Derrick
Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable, one quickly reaches a dead end after either
accepting or rejecting his assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to
the aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews, particularly those who
risked life and limb by actively participating in the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
Bell clearly implies that this was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is
Bell's insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl who perished in
the Holocaust – as close to a saint as Jews have. A Jewish professor who invoked the
name of Rosa Parks so derisively would be bitterly condemned – and rightly so.
Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry have argued that critical race theory, along with critical
feminism and critical legal studies, has anti-Semitic and anti-Asian implications, has worked
to undermine notions of democratic community, and has impeded dialogue.
Jeffrey J. Pyle wrote in the Boston College Law Review:[40]
Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the [classical] liberal legal
order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral
principles of constitutional law. These liberal values, they allege, have no enduring basis
in principle, but are mere social constructs calculated to legitimate white supremacy. The
rule of law, according to critical race theorists, is a false promise of principled
government, and they have lost patience with false promises.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, considers CRT a "grievance
ideology" and an "absurdity". He sees the central tenet of "white racism in the American legal
system" to be shown false because of items such as the 14th Amendment, the Voting Rights Acts,
and Brown v. Board of Education.[41] Critics including George Will saw resonances between
critical race theory's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses challenges to
objective judgments in the US and the acquittal of O. J. Simpson.[42][43]
In September 2020, the White House Office of Management and Budget took steps to cancel
funding for training in critical race theory among federal agencies on the basis that it
constituted "divisive, un-American propaganda".[
Controversies Critical race theory has stirred controversy since the 1980s over such issues
as its:
deviation from the ideal of color blindness; promotion of the use of narrative in legal
studies;
advocacy of "legal instrumentalism" as opposed to ideal-driven uses of the law;
analysis of the U.S. Constitution and existing law as constructed according to and
perpetuating racial power;
and encouragement of legal scholars to be partial on the side of promoting racial
equity.[43]
In 2010, the Mexican American Studies Department Programs in Tucson, Arizona were
effectively banned due to their connection to CRT, which was seen to be in violation of a
recently-passed state law that "prohibits schools from offering courses that 'advocate ethnic
solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals'."[46] The ban included the
confiscation of books, in some cases in front of students, by the Tucson Unified School
District.
Matt de la Peña's young-adult novel Mexican WhiteBoy was banned for containing CRT,
However, this ban was later deemed unconstitutional on the grounds that the state showed
discriminatory intent. "Both enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus,"
federal Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in the ruling.
Derrick Bell as the founder of
critical rase thory and black racism
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) became the first tenured
African-American professor of law at Harvard Law School, and he is often credited as one of the
originators of critical race theory along with Richard Delgado, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda,
and Patricia Williams. He promoted quota systems for racial groups in faculty which is a racist
stance in itself.
He was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law[3] from 1991 until his
death. For five years he was also a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law.
He was hired by Harvard Law School In the 1970s, with the help of protests from black
Harvard Law School students for a minority faculty member. At Harvard, Bell established a new
course in civil rights law, published a book, Race, Racism and American Law, and produced
several law review articles.
In 1980, he started a five-year tenure as dean of the University of Oregon School of Law,
interrupted by his resignation after the university refused to hire an Asian-American woman he
had chosen to join the faculty.
Returning to Harvard in 1986, after a year-long stint at Stanford University, Bell staged a
five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to two professors
on staff, both of whose work promoted critical race theory. The sit-in was widely supported by
students, but divided the faculty, as Harvard administrators claimed the professors were denied
tenure for substandard scholarship and teaching.[8]
In 1990, Harvard Law School had 60 tenured professors. Three of these were black men, and
five of them were women, but there were no African-American women among them -- a dearth Bell
decided to protest with an unpaid leave of absence.[8][11] Students supported the move which
critics found "counterproductive," while Harvard administrators cited a lack of qualified
candidates, defending that they had taken great strides in the previous decade to bring women
and black people onto the faculty.[8] The story of his protest is detailed in his book
Confronting Authority.
Bell's protest at Harvard stirred angry criticism by opposing Harvard Law faculty who
called him "a media manipulator who unfairly attacked the school," noting that other people had
accused him of "depriv[ing] students of an education while he makes money on the lecture
circuit."[12]
Bell took his leave of absence and accepted a visiting professorship at NYU Law, starting in
1991. After two years, Harvard had still not hired any minority women, and Bell requested an
extension of his leave, which the school refused, thereby ending his tenure.
Later in 1998, Harvard Law hired civil rights attorney and U.S. assistant attorney general
nominee Lani Guinier, who became the law school's first black female tenured
professor.[1][13]
In March 2012, five months after his death, Bell became the target of conservative media,
including Breitbart and Sean Hannity, in an exposé of President Barack Obama. The
controversy focused on a 1990 video of Obama praising Bell at a protest by Harvard Law School
students over the perceived lack of diversity in the school's faculty. Bell's widow stated that
Bell and Obama had "very little contact" after Obama's law school graduation. She said that as
far as she remembered, "He never had contact with the president as president."[14] An
examination of Senior Lecturer Obama's syllabus for his course on race and law at the
University of Chicago revealed significant differences between Obama's perspective and that of
Derrick Bell, even as Obama drew on major writings of critical race theory.[15]
NYU School of Law Bell's visiting professorship at New York University began in 1991. After
his two-year leave of absence, his position at Harvard ended and he remained at NYU where he
continued to write and lecture on issues of race and civil rights.
Bell and other legal scholars began using the phrase "critical race theory" (CRT) in the
1970s as a takeoff on "critical legal theory", a branch of legal scholarship that challenges
the validity of concepts such as rationality, objective truth, and judicial neutrality.
Critical legal theory was itself a takeoff on critical theory, a philosophical framework with
roots in Marxist thought.
Bell continued writing about critical race theory after accepting a teaching position at
Harvard University. He worked alongside lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the
country. Much of his legal scholarship was influenced by his experience both as a black man and
as a civil rights attorney. Writing in a narrative style, Bell contributed to the intellectual
discussions on race. According to Bell, his purpose in writing was to examine the racial issues
within the context of their economic and social and political dimensions from a legal
standpoint. Bell's critical race theory was eventually branched into more theories describing
the hardships of other races as well, such as AsianCrit (Asian), FemCrit (Women), LatCrit
(Latino), TribalCrit (American Indian), and WhiteCrit (White).[21] His theories were based on
the following propositions:
First, racism is ordinary, not aberrational.[22] Second, white-over-color ascendancy serves
important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group.[22] Third, "social
construction" thesis holds that race and races are products of social thought and
relations.[22] Fourth, how a dominant society racializes different minority groups at different
times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market.[22] Fifth, intersectionality and
anti-essentialism is the idea that each race has its own origins and ever-evolving history.[22]
Sixth, voice-of-color thesis holds that because of different histories and experiences to white
counterparts', matters that the whites are unlikely to know can be conveyed.[22] CRT has also
led to the study of microaggressions, Paradigmatic kinship, the historical origins and shifting
paradigmatic vision of CRT, and how in depth legal studies show law serves the interests of the
powerful groups in society. Microaggressions are subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or
visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously.[23]
For instance, in The Constitutional Contradiction, Bell argued that the framers of the
Constitution chose the rewards of property over justice. With regard to the interest
convergence, he maintains that "whites will promote racial advances for blacks only when they
also promote white self-interest." Finally, in The Price of Racial Remedies, Bell argues that
whites will not support civil rights policies that may threaten white social status. Similar
themes can be found in another well-known piece entitled, "Who's Afraid of Critical Race
Theory?" from 1995.[24]
His 2002 book, Ethical Ambition, encourages a life of ethical behavior, including "a good
job well done, giving credit to others, standing up for what you believe in, voluntarily
returning lost valuables, choosing what feels right over what might feel good right
now".[25]
Antifa and BLM are just shows with stunts designed to distract people from the level they are
fleeced by MIC and financial oligarchy. As well as restore the legitimacy of Clinton wing of
neoliberal oligarchy which was badly shaken during 2016 election, when their candidate was send
packing.
Nicholas Kristof is member of "Clinton gang of neoliberals" and a part of this effort to
distract people. The number of people who pay attention to Nicholas Kristof bloviations is
astounding. Few understand that we do not know the facts and the real issue if the tight grip of
MIC and financial oligarchy on the society. What is interesting is that s in California, there
are 8.5 million residents born outside the country and about 150,000 homeless. "The melting pot
burned over. It is now a ... salad.
For example, if money spend on wars were used to manage thoseforests with difficult terrain
and perioc drauts, would the outcome be different?
Can those fires and destruction be viewed as God punishment for war the USA unleashed? As
Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
BTW, the number of commenters with Russian paranoia symptom is frightening. Of course NYT
attracts specific audience, but still. In this sense NYT columnists including Nickolas Kristof
are just warmongering bottom feeders of MIC crumps. It is pathetic how he tries to hide the lack
of money for forest management and mismanagement if this issue by Oregon Dem politician under the
broad banner of "climate change" Existence of climate change does not mean that fire should burn
uncontrollably.
MIC steals half trillion dollars and then financial oligarchy steals probably another half,
if not more. What is left is not enough for proper maintenance of land, water and environment in
general. Stupid situation, but this is neoliberalism my friend, where "greed is good". And people
chose this mousetrap themselves in 1970th by electing first Carter and then Reagan and then
Clinton , allowing financial oligarchy to dismantle New Deal Capitalism. Clinton presidency was
especially destructive, In a way he should be views as the top villain in this story, a real
criminal boss.
Below I selected only more or less sane comment (which constitute probably less 1% of the
total)
Notable quotes:
"... How about a judicious Forrest management? ..."
"... So much for our useless 750 Billion dollar military budget. ..."
"... Amazing how ,close minded people become when, for them, everything is political. ..."
Wouldn't the conspiracy theories and concerns about antifa be lessened if progresses were as
vitriolic about violence committed in the name of equity, diversity and inclusion as they are
about violence committed in support of MAGA? Would the right have anything to crow about if
the NYT was as critical of physical altercations caused by social justice warriors as they
are of white supremacists? Wouldn't we all have more trust in MSM if they investigated the
facts before accusing Nick Sandman of racism or claiming a garbage pull was a noose? One
sided reporting and editorials like these fan the flames rather than squelch them.
It's amazing. You can write a column in the NY Times full of conspiracy theories -- all fully
believed by the left -- and accuse the right of being prone to believing conspiracy theories.
From Russia - collusion to rubes in the red states --a majority of dems share a set of
beliefs that are as delusional as anything a small group on the right might believe. But,
that's Kristof and the Ny Times for you.
People seemed to have lost a sense of what is plausible. While few of us know the news first
hand, we have to both trust and evaluate what is reported. Nothing is absolute. Jurors are
asked to decide cases beyond a reasonable doubt. That is how I feel taking in the news. But
within that sliver of doubt, within the fact that nothing is absolute is where conspiracy
theories begin to fester. It is where some have found solace to confirm what they want to
choose to believe despite how much there might be to question that. Events like this create
an opportunism to demonize those you hate and in doing so the essence of what we should be
debating is lost. How to prevent these fires in the first place? We will probably continue to
debate it despite the evidence on climate change, whether there is a deep state trying to
discredit Trump, whether the seriousness of covid is a hoax. Yes there is no absolute
certainty but there is taking an educated guess as opposed to an emotional response. I'll go
with the educated guess. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, I
will say it is a duck and accept that sliver of possibility I might be wrong.
Why do people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories?" It's actually quite simple. Take
QAnon for example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with
any religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while
offering a path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential
elements of cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever
you believe will be "validated." "Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories,
merely assertions. A theory is subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where
truth has no inherent monetary value, don't expect it. Why the rapid spread? To paraphrase
Bill Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability =
Profit That is the business model of the internet, a medium where "news" is whatever will
produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and until the youngest generation developes a
means of communication that does not depend on megacorporations, nothing will change. In the
Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had no honest access to the traditional media,
created its own, the "alternative press." Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their
own way to communicate that is reliable. It is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition"
becomes an actual threat to the profits of Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of
their ilk, they will be cut off.
The antifa movement has grown since the 2016 United States presidential election. As of
August 2017, approximately 200 groups existed, of varying sizes and levels of activity.[73]
It is particularly present in the Pacific Northwest.[74] Wikipedia
In an age when the US Justice Department is anything but just, more closely resembling
something akin to "just us," I call to mind Thomas Jefferson, in a somewhat different
context: "I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just."
We spend hundred of billions of dollars every year on the types of weapons that won WWII,
while the real threat to our Republic and yes, our civilization, is ,,, It's funny and
tragic, simultaneously.
Antifa has done a lot of things. They have chosen to step into the arena. Whether they did it
or not, this is accusation is a result of wading into the fight. If Antifa doesnt like to be
accused of things and cant handle it, then Antifa should step off. Or does Antifa only want
praise? Because that isnt going to happen. Many people dont like Antifa nor trust Antifa. And
rightfully so. Ask any career criminal how many times they've been wrongfully accused of
something. If an individual or group doesnt want to be accused of things, then dont get
involved from the start.
Except that about a dozen people have been arrested and charged with starting the forest
fires. Shouting "without evidence!" doesn't make it so. Facts matter.
@JQGALT There are always people who are setting fires whether accidentally or intentionally.
Do you have any proof that these arsonists were politically motivated I any way ?
Yet the Almeda fire in Oregon that destroyed more than 2,300 homes was, according to NYT
reporting, caused by human activity and is subject of a "criminal investigation." Perhaps it
would be wise to reserve total judgment until that investigation is completed.
Who needs rumors? The organization showed what it is made of when it created its free zone in
downtown Seattle and had the highest crime and murder rate per capita in its short life in
the country.
Rational people know that Antifa is not staring forest fires. However, burning and looting
and using fireworks as weapons in the recent riots make even the dumbest claims of Trump
supporters more believable.
Leftwing activists have literally been arrested for starting some of these fires. There is
video of arsonists being caught, yet the media ignores this, and actively denies it. Gee, why
could that be?
@LV Do you have any proof that these people were were left wing activist or just the kind of
people who are always starting fires ad they have in the past ?
The [neoliberal] left spends 24/7 preaching to their choir about Trump fascists dictatorship,
an illegal government installed by a foreign power, destroying the constitution while
preparing to seize power and ignore coming election results. There is a zero factual evidence
for it, such as a refusal to follow judicial injunctions for example, but their well educated
audiences are buying it whole day long. So what is so baffling that a rural audience after
watching night after night Portland burning by arson and accompanied by "peaceful protest"
graphics on TV would buy into arson speculations and rumors and ignore your disclaimers?
Facebook needs to be regulated since it has effectively organ-harvested the critical thinking
skills of a significant portion of the population. It'd be better if thinking people simply
deleted Facebook and let Facebook shrink and become the right-wing agit-prop tool that it
truly is. Mark Zuckerberg is happy to to destabilize society with his little toy invention.
You'd think with all that money, he could afford a conscience. What a wrecking ball Facebook
is.
"All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." Ya think?
@California Scientist Amen. We are more like an international terminal at this point. A bunch
of people gathered by happenstance, heading in different directions, and often with very
little in common.
@California Scientist: It is even worse than when Adlai Stevenson noted that there aren't
enough educated people to elect a liberal government in the US.
@LV - The point is that "urbanites" aren't able to boss anyone around. It's the low
population rural areas that have outsize political power thanks to the unfortunate design of
our government. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population, and that also
factors into the allocation of Electoral College votes, so that an EC vote from WY is worth 4
times as much as an EC vote from CA, for example. In 2016, Senate Democrats got 20 million
more votes than Senate Republicans, yet Republicans kept control. In 2018, Senate Democrats
got "only" 11.5 million more votes, and consequently lost seats. We're being governed by a
minority in may areas of the country, and nationally, yet the "rural rubes" or whatever you
want to call them, insist that they don't have nearly enough power.
Strange that anyone living in or just knowing the west would NOT know that arsonists could
not burn down huge chunks of forest if they where not so very dry.
Augury Unhappy Bird Watcher, State of Grave Doubt
Sept. 20
The ugly truth of Oregon's political past is asserting itself...we aren't in "Portlandia"
anymore Nick.
Ominous! There are two information ecosystems in this country and Americans increasingly live
in different realities. Much of the media is in the business of massaging the egos of their
readers by feeding them stories that confirm their biases and make them feel clever. There is
less and less fact based news and more and more propaganda. A lot of people aren't really
interested in facts. They just want to be told how right they are and how stupid and evil the
people who disagree with them are. Media corporations are providing the market with what it
desires, and what it desires is poisonous.
There is a reptilian brain need to believe this nonsense and to propagate it- because the
believers are so terrified of the facts of the truth (and the lack of knowing what might be
done to address those facts). The people who are true believers are pointless to discuss.
They are too frightened. They need to believe this stuff. It is hopeless to address them.
Dark times, indeed.
With the natural buildup of combustible matter, combined with houses everywhere now and
little land management, these fires will happen and will cause problems. Lots of things can
start them and they will.
You left out "a century of zero-tolerance policies toward wildland fires (creating
precariously dense underbrush), and resistance to traditional controlled burning at the
human/wilderness interface". It's not the whole story, but neither is climate change which,
due to global technological leveling, is evermore the responsibility of China and India than
Western civilization. Signed, a moderate progressive endlessly frustrated with breathless
liberalism
If only there were no arsonists. Here is a video of a woman who found a man on her property
with matches in his hand (and no cigarettes, which was his excuse for having matches in his
hand). She made a citizen's arrest. This happened in peaceful Oregon. Don't listen if you
can't handle harsh language by a woman who is trying to save her property. Arson is real, and
it is no joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW_M4pBCnY
A man was arrested for arson in Southern Oregon. His fire damaged or destroyed numerous
homes.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-charged-arson-connection-almeda-fire-southern-oregon/story?id=72960208
Rumors of antifa notwithstanding, people in Oregon were looking for arsonists because there
are arsonists.
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
"Conspiracy theories" are, for the most part, not theories, merely assertions. A theory is
subject to proof and disproof by evidence. In a world where truth has no inherent monetary
value, don't expect it. To paraphrase President Clinton, "It's the internet, Stupid!" Follow
the money: Agenda + Clickbaitability = Prominence That is the business model of the internet,
a medium where "news" is whatever will produce the most clicks. As in profit. Unless and
until the youngest generation developes a means of communication that does not depend on
megacorporations, nothing will change. In the Sixties, a generation which disbelieved and had
no honest access to the traditional media, created its own, the "alternative press."
Hopefully, today's teenagers will develope their own way to communicate that is reliable. It
is 100% guaranteed that if their "opposition" becomes an actual threat to the profits of
Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and the rest of their ilk, they will be cut off. As to why
people attach themselves to "conspiracy theories", it's actually quite simple. Take QAnon for
example: it is functionally just another religion competing for adherents. As with any
religion, it offers its believers an explanation of what they deem is wrong while offering a
path to right those wrongs. Certainty and simplicity: those are the essential elements of
cults/religion/bumpersticker politics. And the internet guarantees that whatever you believe
will be "validated."
" All this rumormongering leaves me feeling that the social fabric is unraveling, as if the
shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." You betcha.
(Palin doesn't look half bad compared to the current batch.) It's a simple formula: social
media driven disinformation + extreme capitalism which leaves us with no real will to address
it + legitimate grievances like racism and financial insecurity = craziness on all sides,
fanned by a president whose personal agenda takes precedence over absolutely everything. All
societies are constantly dealing with potentially destabilizing threats. Their institutions,
media, leadership, and understanding of a common good are their immune system. Ours is
compromised, we are destabilized.
How about a judicious Forrest management? We live in a period of global warming
because of our planet axis precision, aggravated by the presence of an unprecedented
population explosion needing more water, more food, the production of which needs more arable
land, cutting trees, displacing wild animals, exhausting the aquifer. Cutting trees increases
the CO2 in the atmosphere. More people in India, more cattle emitting methane, more old
fashioned way of cooking food and producing more CO2 ... Permanent frost melting also sends
more methane in the atmosphere ... The climate is extremely complex to permit exact modeling,
but it is clear that if we want to stay healthy, it is vital to regularly clear our western
forests of dead wood in order to prevent today's disaster of millions of people, particularly
children with asthma and old people breathing the heavily polluted air. It is time to move to
solar, wind power, electric trucks, cars etc. The technology is here. Let's hope that Biden
will support clean air as means to better health. If all these years instead of using
abstract terms like global warming or climate change, we have been appealing to people to
keep the air clean in order to have better health, perhaps they would have stopped buying the
behemoths cars, producing so much pollution?
As Nicholas and many readers on this page already know, this commentary is more evidence of
how needlessly and recklessly polarized our country has become. When tribal instincts push
people to look for anything - fact, fiction or fantasy - on social media or "rage commentary"
that supports and validates their identities they will glom onto it faster than maggots on
dead flesh. It is a sad state of affairs when so many people of all political persuasions
will not take the time - even a few minutes - to question and investigate the latest "truth"
being promoted. The new culture of low information consumers seems to be spreading as fast as
a pandemic despite the heroic efforts of honest journalism. I wonder if low information
consumption was so endemic to the citizens of Ancient Rome and Greece - long before Twitter,
Facebook and Rage TV? People, please take a moment to "click" one step further to see if the
latest conspiracy story is true. Why help propagate lies? It will only come back to haunt
you, or your children.
Antifa or not, at least some of the big fires have been started by arsonists. Of this fact we
have video proof. By downplaying or even denying it, the media are just as bad as the
conspiracy theorists in promoting disinformation.
This reminds me of a time when people saw "Reds" behind anything that was going wrong in the
country. Nothing new, but just as pathetically paranoid. I wonder how many people, or their
parents, fit into both groups?
Here's another urban myth. Ok, more a lefty myth. That we can just keep adding people to this
country (urban, suburban, rural, big city, anywhere and everywhere) and it won't have any
effect. With the corollary that it's just a matter of "green new deal" or everybody getting a
Prius or the dummies in the sticks realizing climate change is real and then we can just go
on like this forever. We can't. Not only is our much hated lifestyle, which from what I can
see, nobody really wants to give up, killing us, but believing 330 million Americans that add
2-3 million more a year is not a problem at all. Our entire way of life: endless population
and economic growth is unsustainable. We don't need to wait until 2050 to see it. Just step
outside.
It is very difficult to teach people that "research," doesn't mean you go to some TV show or
website you like and root around for stuff that tells you what you want to hear. One prob
seems to be really simple: it takes actual work to do it right. Another is that research,
done well, has an ugly habit of forcing you to think at least a little about whether your own
ideas make any sense. And a third is that people really, really don't like it when their
political views start getting contradicted by reality. It seems to be easier to change
reality than to change views, even a little. Oh, and another prob? Too few Americans really
read anything worth reading. I'm all for funsies (and I've probably read more crummy science
fiction than all y'all put together) but one of the joys of walking around in Paris is seeing
that the kiosks and bookstores still sell a ton of stuff on philosophy, lit, economics, and
that everywhere, people actually read them. Books teach thought. Newsmax don't.
@Beer Can Boyd: As a native-born American, I think the US fell down when the Congress put
"under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, ostensibly to preclude anyone thinking
about Godless communism, and gave itself a stroke.
The melting pot burned over. It is now a word salad. But appears there is a method to the
madness. It is hard for the world to tell the madness from the method
@Carolyn then there are the lies and the demonization of China and Russia by both parties to
top it off. How can voters believe anything and decide before they vote?
Supporting this atmosphere of potential violence are some of my republican friends. They are
mostly educated and not stupid. Yet they continue to support a man whom I think holds the
responsibility for most of the violence if it comes. Now I want to get down to my point about
these supporters. I believe they have succumbed to a cult-like dynamic. I say this because no
rational person could possibly support Trump. Religious cults create this same addiction and
irrationality. When my friends disagree with me, they try to put our friendship hostage to no
further discussion of politics. They are unwilling to even be confronted with objections to
their support of Trump. I have decided that I can always make new friends. What I do not want
to do is take on the task of building a new country because I stayed silent.
@Harcourt "They are mostly educated and not stupid." In my opinion, educated persons who
behave as you describe never benefited from their education. Even worse, to me it seems like
persons who behave like that are of the opinion that what they learnt in school is only for
the purpose of writing the exams they needed to pass to get out of school. It was all just
noise to them.
You nailed it. There is no longer "a shared reality" in America. So we have wildly different
views of who Joe Biden and Donald Trump are. And how serious climate change is. And whether
it's important to wear a mask. And if left-wing anarchists set forest fires. Thank you,
Internet. Thank you, social media barons who refuse to ban Russian propaganda and manipulated
videos. Thank you FCC that does not rein in Fox News and their promotion of lies. Who will
step in and stop this madness?
@CA I agree with you completely except for the refusal to stop Russian interference. We
can't. We can't unless we stop US interference in the process. The problem is that US
interference, and rumor mongering, are the business model of these platforms which happen to
be some of our largest companies. Extreme capitalism is preventing us from addressing any and
all issues propagated by these companies. Russia is just a speck.
Antifa adherents and wildfires ? Seems pretty far-fetched. Even ridiculous. But setting fire
to occupied apartment buildings in Portland ? Oh yes, definitely. It happened, and more is on
the menu, as well as municipal and federal buildings. Don't believe it ? Read the news
releases for yourself, on the Portland Police Bureau's website.
An excellent discussion of the perils of social media. Although newspapers, TV, radio,
magazines have a historical principal of "generally" telling the truth, social media has
opened up the world to every single Tom, Dick and Harry who with to spread their message. I
believe that how we, as a nation, as a species, handle social media will define what happens
over the next decade.
The state of this country is absolutely terrifying. While the shift to ever more
conservative, insular, xenophobic, coroporate-controlled government has been going on for
years, with the faux election of trump democracy is what has become fake, while common sense,
empathy, and both fiscal and environmental responsibility have virtually disappeared. The US
has gone off the deep end...
Years ago I read a science fiction short story that is unsettling in its analogy to this
situation. I starts with aliens visiting the Earth and accidently leaving behind a device
that can allow metal to be manipulated by softening it, then hardening it. The device gets
copied and mass produced. When they returned a year later, they come back and cannot fathom
how their device could have resulted in anarchy. THAT is the internet. 5 Recommend Share
Let me ask you all a question. If your neighbor told you the fire in a nearby Oregon town was
started by antifa, how would you disprove it? Since you cannot provide evidence for a
negative statement, it's difficult. There is actually some evidence that antifa did start the
fire: a voice said it on the radio, and tv showed them lighting fireworks in Portland. This
isn't very good evidence, but it is evidence, and you can't produce any evidence that antifa
did not do it (because there can't be any.) So you are in the position of asking your
neighbor to look at the quality of the evidence. This is something very few outside the legal
and scientific world are capable of. But that is all you have. Ultimately, it really does go
back to belief. How many of us could independently prove that the earth turns around the sun?
Those of us who aren't astronomers choose to accept this belief based on what we've been
told, and that's how it is with antifa starting the fires.
Kristof is afraid that fires in the West represent the new normal. The evidence suggests that
this fear is well-founded. He is concerned about the government's paralysis. That is partly
due to Trump, who stands a good chance of being reelected on November 3. He is worried about
ordinary citizens seeking oversimplified answers and finding them in the conspiracy theories
presenting the fire as the work of antifa. I am more worried about the breakdown in
credibility of news sources like the NY Times, which finds itself in competition with Fox
News and a host of online sources. Indeed, you-tube and facebook will select news stories for
you, confirming whatever bias you bring to your reading of the news. There is no guarantee
that democracy will survive. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the realization
that not only the right, but the left, is subject to oversimplified presentations of global
warming. Global warming is a consequence of too much population growth. But as we argue over
freedoms for LGBTQ minorities liberals have neglected the importance of freedom of speech.
And voices which have warned about population growth have been simply ignored by the left. It
isn't enough to shift from Fords using gasoline to Teslas running on electricity. We also
need to control population growth. The population of earth will double again by 2072 if
current rates continue. Population growth threatens to overwhelm the attempts to move to
clean energy. 2 Recommend
The scientific consensus will also conclude that not allowing wildfires to burn compounds the
problem. While what I am about to type is not science, continued development in fire prone
areas amplifies and compounds every aspect of the problem. From my perspective the system has
evolved to socializing cost and privatizing cost in every way. I don't see it getting better,
until such time as individuals are held accountable this should be considered normal.
@secular socialist dem PG&E just paid billions in fines and PLEADED GUILTY in starting
last year's Paradise fire. They also have already admitted fault in several fires started by
their faulty, untended grid. "Individuals" don't need to be held accountable unless there are
rules in place for them to follow regarding wildfire. There already are. Most already do. Why
do folks act so proud about their 'anti-science' opinion? It's not like this conversation
isn't ongoing; nobody argues that development in fire prone areas' carries risks. So does
rebuilding in Oklahoma, Florida and Louisiana..... You're right (although confused) about
socializing RISK and privatizing PROFIT. See PG&E above.
Unsure how people lighting fires directly indicates climate change is corroborated. The
fellow who was arrested in Tacoma, WA: https://thepostmillennial.com/antifa-activist-charged-for-fire-set-in-washington
Looking to past wildfires, like the one's in Montana & Idaho in 2008, 5.5 million acres
were burned and certain interest groups advocated for them to burn out because it's apart of
the natural cycle. Federal government shouldn't send assistance unless it's possibly to
communities in threat of burning, who are humans to say we ought to stop mother nature? It's
natural to let these fires burn, if you try to hinder it's course you are stopping the cycle.
Doug Terry Maryland, Washington DC metro
Sept. 20 Times Pick
Why do people believe wild stupid things more than actual facts? Partly it is because they
like the wild stupid thing more, it gives them some weird comfort. It is also because people
are busying with their lives and don't have time to gather enough information to counter the
wild rumor that flies around faster than the speed of sound. The most important aspect of
successful conspiracy theories is they impart to the person holding them the idea that they
are smarter than other people and have "cracked the code" that explains everything or a lot
of big things that people don't understand. Reading, thinking, considering and re-considering
can seem like hard work, particularly if it is foreign to one's experience and life training.
Why not just lock on to a cool idea that comes around, even if it is weird? .
This story highlights for me an equally growing problem, the "selective framing" by media
outlets on the left and right (NYT and Fox as just two examples). To read Mr Kristof's
version, you may believe that arsonists are wild figments of the unhinged radical right
imagination. To read the same story on Fox, Antifa arsonists are working their way up your
street.
"...the shared understanding of reality that is the basis for any society is eroding." And
yet reality still exist. Normally, if someone starts to exhibit the kind of behavior that
these "vigilantes" are - screaming about boogeymen, thinking people are out to get them,
engaging in aggressive behavior based on paranoid fantasies, creating self-reinforcing
delusions, becoming obsessed with baseless conspiracy theories - we would rightly diagnose
them as being mentally ill, and to the extent that they represent a danger to others, confine
them. I don't think we can afford to see this as just a time of extreme differences of
opinion. Facts, truth and reality are still actual, tangible things. And those who have
become so disassociated from them that they are stopping vehicles and hunting down their
fellow citizen need to be dealt with appropriately.
We have been witnessing the start of the Second Civil War in America. If we accept the
definition of a civil war as a conflict between factions of citizens for either secession or
control of the government--including organizations within the existing government--then we
are in the beginning stages of a Second Civil War. The question is what the level of violence
will be (not will there be violence, but how much violence). We are beginning to see
indications of that level. When naturally or accidentally caused wildfires are attributed to
one faction as a way to stoke the fires of civil violence, then physical violence between
factions is a heartbeat away simply because of the falsity and extremity of the accusations.
The era of peaceful protest has passed because of the intensity of feelings on both sides;
the anger produced when a government begins denying civil rights, e.g., Freedom of Speech and
the Right to Assemble, through legal actions where protest organizers could be charged with
sedition (see Barr's comments, 9/16/2020, NYT), which then suggests that all protests become
illegal, the fires of violence are stoked. With a heavily-armed populace on both sides,
gunfire is a hair-trigger pull away. If Trump and the Republican's intention was to remake
America in their image (I leave it to you to supply that image), they are succeeding. If
Putin's intention was to bring down America, he is succeeding. If Xi's intention was to
dominate the world, he is on that path. Vote 33 Recommend Share
... There's an old saying "Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad." I have come
to the conclusion that America has gone qute a long way down that road.
And yet, Mr. Kristoff, you never make mention of the real threat that groups like Antifa and
other radical left rioters pose to this country (forgetting about attacks on federal
buildings in Portland? Attempts to firebomb courthouses? Violence against law enforcement
officers?). No, instead it's always Trump, or Trump supporters who are your focus. I do not
know whether Antifa has been involved in any of these recent fires, but I do know that these
violent elements on the left pose a massive danger to our democracy. You are correct about
one thing, though: We should brace ourselves. It's just "what" we need to brace for that is
off mark in your article...
It's heartbreaking to watch these three West Coast states burned. For days, the sky was red
and the air was unbreathable. But the saddest part was the feeling of helplessness.
40 years ago, I hitchhiked around the Pacific Northwest during the summer after Mt. St.
Helens blew up. Mt. Rainier was ash-coated, as were the wild blueberries I often ate. Epic
and Biblical are words inadequate to describe that destruction near Mt. St. Helens, with
millions of huge, old trees blown down, piles of mud, and rivers diverted. Yet I and others
knew that eventually, that land would regrow, and it did.
I see a lot of egotism and self-love on both sides. The so-called progressives in our
community are breeding at baby boom levels, driving SUVs, and, before the pandemic, you'd see
a dozen school buses idling outside every school. Development is out of control as people
flee from the city, and people flee from here, or downsize, and breed and breed and breed.
Two years ago, we had a flash flood and our street was under water, and there was a lot of
damage all over town. Hurricane Irene in 2011 left many with over a foot of water in their
basements. And let's not even start on Sandy. My friend lives in Pensacola; their downtown
area is under three or four feet of water from Hurricane Sally. It's not just fire, it's
floods, and it's not just the GOP which is the problem...
I don't blame anyone for guarding their roads if they think arsonists are about. The
Tillamook Burn was larger and more devastating than these fires but are we to blame climate
change ? Environmentalists and Liberals who do not even live out West, who did not rely upon
Logging, placed their concerns about the Spotted Owl and Virgin Forests about the danger of
Forest Fires and the livelihood of Loggers and the Towns and Peoples who depended upon
Logging. Managed Logging of Forests is not an inherently evil act. Clearing the bush and dead
trees is not bad in and of itself. Let Logging companies responsibly manage sections of the
Forrests, let Towns clear fire breaks around their perimeters. Place large Water towers in
strategic points throughout the Forests, huge mounds of dirt/sand/gravel next to them so that
the Firefighters have what they need to fight the fires. Force developers to build houses 50
feet apart. Require fireproof roofs, require thinning of trees in housing developments.
Require volunteer Fire Departments in every neighborhood so that if they do nothing else,
they can cut a fire break, water down the grasses around their neighborhoods, chase and
extinguish embers, something/anything versus fleeing their homes without putting up a fight.
"... dry conditions exacerbated by climate change coupled with an unusual windstorm ..." May
I add that a couple of other things have also contributed to making the fires worse or making
them harder to manage? For a century or so, in California, Oregon and Washington we have not
been letting the normal, periodic fires burn. Consequently, a great deal of fuel has built up
on the forest floor. Second, folks have increasingly been building homes or even
neighborhoods in places which have historically seen such normal, periodic fires.
@Robert Yes. But now controlled burns are a bit problematic, given the droughts, the heat,
the massive fuel loads from all the dead trees. It's just so easy for the controlled burns to
get out of control.
Hi, I am from Clackamas County metro. Every time a FaceBook "Friend" (and I personally know
all of mine) posted a rumor, I tried to find the footage from any of our 4 local news
stations to depute their post but they just shared another one. One said she didn't trust KGW
8 the local NBC station and when I told her the same story was on KPTV 12, the local Fox
station. She said, "I'm just stressed"
@David Biesecker Remember that half the people are of below average intelligence. That may
answer the existence of the small percentage of conspiracy theorists. One problem is social
media provides free and outsized loudspeaker systems that enables them to find each other.
@M.i. Estner First, let me identify myself as a liberal Democrat who has a masters degree. I
find it more than disheartening when half of the country, or half of rural or not formally
educated folks are said to have low intelligent quotas, critical thinking skills or
analytical abilities. You better believe that when a highly trained Eastern Oregon
firefighter is assessing how to save peoples lives, homes and land, has to quickly act with
their many faceted skill set and are calling on abilities you or I would not be able to
fathom. Same with farmers of large pieces of complicated crops and land. Same with city
managers, librarians, and social workers for the elderly--all having low city budgets. What
about the veterinarians, doctors and nurses in rural areas? This is exactly the same as
calling Black or Hispanics people of lower intelligence. And, there are different types of
intelligence. I know a literary critic, a liberal Democrat, who doesn't have the critical
thinking skills to run her own home or raise her children. If you look, you can see these
same differences in any group. It has to do with the way people are raised, what they are
using their skill sets for, what information they are used to consuming, money, ideology,
etc...And it has to do with being devalued for growing your food, producing your meat,
chicken and eggs. I'm not excusing the violence, guns, racism and hatred. These divides have
been with us for ages. Please don't stoke the fires.
If we have a selfish federal government, then we will have selfish states and people.
Everyone is for himself or herself. No one will think about other people or public good. It
all started from the top
In 2017, 2018, and 2019 northern California's new phenomenon of forceful 40 to 60 miles per
hour winds - in Fall, no less - caused old and aging electrical equipment to malfunction. As
a consequence, too much of Santa Rosa burnt to the ground, and the entire town of Paradise
ceased to exist. This year during the heat of a hotter than usual summer following yet
another dry winter, we had dry lightning strikes from Sonoma County to Santa Clara County and
beyond.
Yes, the science is clear and you fail to mention it. The forest fires reach critical mass
and spread because of the surplus of dead or dying trees. They are there because the federal
government essentially no longer allows logging on its vast landholdings and also fails to
allow controlled burns to clean out the tinderbox. I won't bother attaching a link because
any Google search proves the point. Why focus on hysteria and rumermongering among the
Deplorables? Come on, Mr. Kristof, you were a Deplorable once (when you were a kid growing up
in the countryside) as was I. Please defend them sometimes, particularly when the actual
causes are so well documented.
@Stuck on a mountain Western States are working to clear the brush from forests where, due to
our previous incomplete understanding of forest ecology, fires were suppressed for a century.
However, the cost is astronomical and there are millions of acres left to clear. Spending
their entire forest management budgets fighting current wildfires doesn't help. We've been
doing controlled burns for decades but in many areas, they're now too dangerous. Dry forests
and a dense understory can quickly turn a "controlled burn" into a conflagration. Many
ranchers and timber companies who profit from our state and national forests seem unwilling
to pay to keep those forests healthy. People who live in or near forests mostly have incomes
too low to pay for forest management. The National Forest Service, Department of the Interior
and USDA have made some progress, but the problem is huge. Saying we can prevent forest fires
by allowing larger timber harvests is an oversimplification. No solution to this complex
issue will be simple, perfect or cheap.
Wacky conspiracy theories to explain seemingly bizarre and unusual occurrences have been
around since the dawn of human cognition. But in an electronic/social media age, these get
spread even faster than a wind-blown fire climbs a canyon hillside. Previously, they were
spread one set of ears at a time; now millions of eyes can read them every second. And that
is a major part of the problem.
As a grad student in sociology, having lived through the 60s and participated in the
counterculture, I was deeply intrigued by the social construction of reality - how we come to
share a taken-for-granted world. This is a long-standing concern within sociological social
psychology. We examined how language, interpersonal communications, media and social
structure shaped ones perception of one's self, what is real, what's important. At the time,
however, this was considered theoretical and academic. 40 years later, understanding how
Americans' realities have come to diverge is no longer armchair social science. It's urgent
and in our faces, as is the question of how can we heal this terrible fracturing of our
world?
@DeHypnotist Yes. When studying for the degree in and then teaching sociology in my early
years, I learned that, too. But, I have to admit, it's actually taken all the decades of life
since then, and now the obvious confirmation of it by this current 'reality' to actually
realize, deep down in my guts, that we 'make up' our so-called 'social reality' simply to
serve the most basic of biological requirements: the need to dominate in the deadly
completion with the other 'tribes' of our species just to survive. We are, after all, animals
like all the others, no matter how much we blab about how much 'smarter' we are.
@Alex B The primal driver, deep in the core of our brain, is usefully thought of as
"reptilian." Cold-blooded. Egoistic. Hedonistic. And, in extreme cases, narcissistic, and,
heaven forbid when all three are present...
I lived for a few years in Brazil when it was a dictatorship. The similarities between Brazil
and what is happening in the US is startling. The police were being used to quell peaceful
protesters and the justice system co-opted by authorities, fear mongering were present, just
as now in the US....
I didn't live in the US from 1977-1999, only visiting on short trips. That enabled me to see
changes in society that were slow and not seen by those residing here. And when I came back
permanently I could feel immediately a deep change....
Perhaps an apt metaphor for the "danger sign ahead" is the approach of a Category three
hurricane and it's increasing in intensity. One of the stark disconnects is between the
message in an article like this and the politicians and citizens who are little concerned
about tempering rhetoric and elevating the importance of eschewing misinformation. We are in
the Misinformation Age and the victims of a cyber war, evolving into a civil war.
@ML What is happening here? These are the beginnings of what happened in Germany in the 30s.
Over there the reason was the loss of WWI. Here, is the obvious decline of the American
lifestyle and we have not seen anything yet. The range of the economic decline is covered by
7 trillion dollars in phony money. I fervently hope and pray that is not too late to stop the
process. All men and women of goodwill have to rally to restore a sane, and one, country .
Stay safe! It is going to get worse before it gets better.
@FunkyIrishman Right on. Water is an enormous issue waiting to happen here -- and Wisconsin
is estimated to have between 10 and 20 percent of the world's fresh water (depending on how
it's calculated and whether that includes some of Lakes Michigan and Superior. A Dept. of
Climate, Weather and Water would be a logical cabinet department.
@FunkyIrishman And polluting the potable water continues sometimes by the most resolvable
modern approaches: sewers and water treatment plants. Reagan ended federal funding for sewers
leaving septic systems (and now ancient sewers) where sewers would lead to protected fresh
water. All the medicines, chemicals, and toxins seep unseen but very real into fresh and also
salt water. We are not a modern nation any more.
Being a secular religion, neoliberalism produced a series of pseudo scientific perversions with the critical race theory as
one of the most interesting examples. This reincarnation of Lysenkoism is pretty dangerous.
Notable quotes:
"... Under CRT, Martin Luther King's dream is abolished, as racial identification is mandatory, and white children are taught self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable, elevates subjective experience above objective reality, and crumbles under intellectual scrutiny. ..."
"... Contorting the meaning of "activist" to suit an ideological need, and claiming that all "activists" have "empathy" and "show compassion" is the kindergarten equivalent of teaching "war is peace,""freedom is slavery," and "ignorance is strength." ..."
"... Do the "activists" of the Westboro Baptist Church, Antifa, or KKK "have empathy" and "show compassion" ? And what about Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Osama Bin Laden? None of these were profiles in empathy and compassion either, but they, too, started out as what one might call "activists." ..."
"... George Orwell wrote, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." It seems obvious that CRT has corrupted the language used by my child's school, and that this corrupted language is intended, in turn, to corrupt the thoughts and minds of young students. ..."
"... This isn't education – this is blatant indoctrination. The school isn't teaching children how to think, but rather what to think. ..."
"... The school claims its mission is to develop "critical thinking" but does misinforming children about the definition of "activist" spur critical thinking? I've asked the leadership of the school this question, as well as for their specific definition of "equity" and "anti-racism" – terms they frequently espouse. Does "equity" mean "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome" ? Does "anti-racism" mean "opposing discrimination in all its forms" or "discriminating to benefit minorities" ? These questions have been entirely ignored. ..."
"... At best, CRT is an intellectually flaccid and insidiously vacuous ideology that focuses on "unlearning" alleged "implicit bias" at the expense of learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. At worst, it is a malevolent, mendacious, and cancerous cult that demands discrimination against some children under the guise of "equity." ..."
"... Indoctrinating children with CRT is akin to systemic child abuse, as it steals innocence, twists minds, and crushes spirits. Parents must move heaven and earth to protect their children, and they can start by coming together and rooting out CRT from their schools by any and all legal means necessary. ..."
Woke teachers and school
administrators are waging a culture war for the minds of kids as young as five, by inculcating
them with toxic social justice teachings.
This summer, I got an unpleasant initiation into the culture war when, in the wake of the
George Floyd killing, my five-year-old child's elementary-middle public charter school here in
Los Angeles went from being an academic institution interested in preparing students for the
workplace and college to an ideological hotbed devoted to promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT)
over all other subjects.
CRT is a philosophy of hyper-racialization that looks to radically transform our
"inherently racist" society, including children. Under CRT, Martin Luther King's dream
is abolished, as racial identification is mandatory, and white children are taught
self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable,
elevates subjective experience above objective reality, and crumbles under intellectual
scrutiny.
A shameless example of CRT indoctrination in action is that the very first lesson taught to
my child's kindergarten class this autumn was "how to be an activist."
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines activist as "a person who uses or supports strong
actions (such as public protests) in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial
issue." My child's school decided to perniciously redefine "activist" as "someone
who notices that a system is unfair to another person, group of people, or animals, and then
creates a new system that ensures fairness for every person, group of people, or
animal."
Redefining "activist" is as Orwellian as it gets. Words have meaning and meaning
matters. Calling an ass an eagle doesn't make it sprout wings and fly. But the mendacity
doesn't stop there. The school also teaches the four traits of an "activist," which they
claim to be "Observe. Ask questions. Have empathy. Show compassion." But these positive
traits are more defining of a good neighbor or a good friend, rather than an
"activist."
Contorting the meaning of "activist" to suit an ideological need, and claiming that
all "activists" have "empathy" and "show compassion" is the kindergarten
equivalent of teaching "war is peace,""freedom is slavery," and "ignorance is
strength."
Do the "activists" of the Westboro Baptist Church, Antifa, or KKK "have
empathy" and "show compassion" ? And what about Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao
Zedong, and Osama Bin Laden? None of these were profiles in empathy and compassion either, but
they, too, started out as what one might call "activists."
George Orwell wrote, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought." It seems obvious that CRT has corrupted the language used by my child's school,
and that this corrupted language is intended, in turn, to corrupt the thoughts and minds of
young students.
This intentionally deceptive "activist" lesson runs throughout the school year and is
accompanied by the "activist song," that's sung everyday to the tune of 'Row, Row, Row
Your Boat'. The lyrics are "I am an activist, I look and I observe, I ask questions and find
out, what has been unheard / Having empathy, helps me understand, I can make a change, working
hand in hand."
This isn't education – this is blatant indoctrination. The school isn't teaching
children how to think, but rather what to think.
The school claims its mission is to develop "critical thinking" but does misinforming
children about the definition of "activist" spur critical thinking? I've asked the
leadership of the school this question, as well as for their specific definition of
"equity" and "anti-racism" – terms they frequently espouse. Does
"equity" mean "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome" ? Does
"anti-racism" mean "opposing discrimination in all its forms" or
"discriminating to benefit minorities" ? These questions have been entirely ignored.
I also asked if my child would face discrimination at the school, and the principal and CEO
steadfastly refuse to answer that question too, which, unfortunately, seems like an answer unto
itself, and one that may carry legal liability.
That this taxpayer-funded charter school – which, according to
reports , just received between $2 million and $5 million in pandemic-related Paycheck
Protection Program loans from the federal government – refuses to say it won't
discriminate against a five-year-old, is quite an indictment. It reveals the ethical rot at the
center of CRT, and the catastrophic error the American education system is making by embracing
it.
At best, CRT is an intellectually flaccid and insidiously vacuous ideology that focuses on
"unlearning" alleged "implicit bias" at the expense of learning the basics of
reading, writing, and arithmetic. At worst, it is a malevolent, mendacious, and cancerous cult
that demands discrimination against some children under the guise of "equity."
Parents should be in charge of their children's moral and ethical education, and if parents
want CRT taught to their kids, let them teach it at home. Just as I wouldn't impose my Catholic
faith on other people's children, I don't want their CRT cult imposed on mine.
Many parents privately tell me they're horrified that CRT is being taught in kindergarten,
but are reluctant to speak out for fear of being labeled 'racist'. This is part of the 'social
justice' game, in which people are shamed into silence and compliance by scurrilous labels. But
parents must screw their courage to the sticking place and fight back now, because the war for
children's minds is being waged, and teachers' unions, school boards, and woke
faculty members and administrators are moving fast and pushing hard to make CRT the default
foundation for all education in America.
Indoctrinating children with CRT is akin to systemic child abuse, as it steals innocence,
twists minds, and crushes spirits. Parents must move heaven and earth to protect their
children, and they can start by coming together and rooting out CRT from their schools by any
and all legal means necessary.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be
read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog . He is also the host of the popular cinema
podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota.
Nice take on imbecilization of important and complex topics by the US MSM and politicians.
Money quote about neoliberal Dems like Obama and Biden "
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept.
Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They
see human suffering as a means to increase their power."
Another money quote: "in the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's everywhere and
it's deadly."
Notable quotes:
"... But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering as a means to increase their power. ..."
"... Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden. ..."
"... One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management. ..."
"... Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles." ..."
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Massive wildfires continue to sweep across huge portions of the Pacific Northwest.
In Oregon, half a million residents have been forced to evacuate -- one out of every ten people in the state.
Dozens are dead tonight, including small children. But the fires still aren't close to contained. Watch this report from Fox's
Jeff Paul:
Video report
And it continues as we speak, walls of flame consuming everything in their path: homes, animals, human beings. Tragedy on a
massive scale.
When something this awful happens, decent people pause. They put aside their own interests for a moment. They consider how they
can help. We've seen that kind of selflessness before.
This is, remember, the anniversary of 9-11.
But there are others for whom altruism is an alien concept. Self-interest is all
they know. These people never pause. They relentlessly press for any advantage, under any circumstances. They see human suffering
as a means to increase their power.
These are the people who turn funerals into political rallies and feel no shame for doing it.
As Americans burned to death, people like this swung into action immediately. They went on television with a partisan talking
point: Climate change caused these fires, they said. They didn't explain how that happened. They just kept saying it.
In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: you can't see it, but it's everywhere,
and it's deadly. And, like systemic racism, it's your fault: The American middle class did it. They ate too many hamburgers,
drove too many SUVs, had too many children.
A lot of them wear T-shirts to work and didn't finish college. That causes climate change too. And, worst of all, some of them
may vote for Donald Trump in November.
If there's anything that absolutely, definitively causes climate change -- and literally over a hundred percent of scientists
agree with this established fact -- it's voting for Donald Trump. You might as well start a tire fire. You're destroying the ozone
layer.
Joe Biden has checked the science, and he agrees. Yesterday, the people on Biden's staff who understand the internet tweeted out
an image of the wildfires, along with the message, "Climate change is already here -- and we're witnessing its devastating effects
every single day. We have to get President Trump out of the White House."
Again, by voting for Donald Trump, you've made hundreds of thousands of Oregonians homeless tonight. You've killed people.
Joe Biden's closest friend in the world, a prominent Martha's Vineyard kite-surfer called Barack Obama, echoed that message
with his trademark restraint. Obama declawed that your "life" depends on voting for Joe Biden.
At a time when sea levels are rising and we're about to see killer whales in the Rockies? Honestly, it doesn't seem like Obama is
overly concerned about climate change? And by the way, didn't he go to law school? When he did become a climate expert?
Those seem like good questions. But lawyers pretending to be scientists are now everywhere in the Democratic Party.
Here's the governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, a proud graduate of Willamette University law school, explaining that he's already
figured out the "cause" of the fires. Watch:
INSLEE: Fires are proof we need a stronger liberal agenda Sept 8 TRT: 18 Inslee: And these are conditions that are exacerbated
by the changing climate that we are suffering. And I do not believe that we should surrender these subdivisions or these houses
to climate change-exacerbated fires. We should fight the cause of these fires.
This is a crock. In fact, there is not a single scientist on earth who knows whether, or by how much, these fires may have been
"exacerbated" by warmer temperatures caused by "climate change," whatever that means anymore.
All we have is conjecture from a handful of scientists, none of whom have reached any definitive conclusions.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, for example, has admitted that it's, quote, "hard to determine whether climate change
played a role in sparking the fires."
Meanwhile, investigators have determined that the massive El Dorado fire in California, which has torched nearly 14,000 acres,
was caused by morons setting off some kind of fireworks. And then on Wednesday, police announced that a criminal investigation is
underway into the massive Almeda fire in Ashland, Oregon.
The sheriff there said it's too early to say what caused the fire, but he's said human remains were found at the suspected origin
point. Nothing is being ruled out, including arson.
The more you know, the more complicated it is, like everything. Serious people are just beginning to gather evidence to determine
what happened to cause this disaster.
But at the same time, unserious people are now everywhere on the media right now, drowning out nuance. Don't worry about the
facts, they say. Just trust us -- the sky orange is orange over San Francisco because households making $40,000 a year made the
mistake of voting for a Republican.
Therefore you must hand us total control of the nation's economy. Watch amateur arson detective Nancy Pelosi explain:
PELOSI: Mother Earth is angry. She's telling us, whether she's telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the
west, whatever it is, the climate crisis is real and has an impact.
Mother Nature is angry. Please. When was the last time Nancy Pelosi went outside? No one asked her. All we know is what she said:
climate change caused this. Of course.
No matter the natural disaster -- hurricanes, tornadoes, whatever -- climate change did it. Keep in mind, Nancy Pelosi owns two
sub-zero freezers. They cost $10,000 apiece.
We know because she showed them off on national television. Those use a lot of energy. Like Barack Obama, she constantly flies
private between her multi-million dollar estates all over the country.
Obviously, she doesn't care about climate change. And neither do her supporters -- otherwise, they'd be trying to destroy the
mansions she owns, not the hair salons that expose her hypocrisy.
For the left, this is really about blaming and ritually humiliating the middle-class for the election of Donald Trump. Joe Biden
knows that the Pennsylvanians who would be financially ruined by his
fracking
ban
are the same Pennsylvanians who flipped the state red in 2016 for the first time in a generation.
That's the whole point. One of the reasons Joe Biden is barely allowed outside is that he has no problem showing his contempt for
the middle-class he supposedly cares so much about.
In 2019, he openly
mocked
coal miners
and suggested they just get programming jobs once they're all fired. Watch:
BIDEN: I come from a family, an area where's coal mining – in Scranton. Anybody, that can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine,
sure as hell can learn how to program as well.
Learn to code! Hilarious. Joe Biden should try it. But there isn't time. The world is ending. Last summer, Sandy Cortez [AOC] did
the math and calculated we only have
12
years left to live
.
If that sounds bad, consider this -- Just four months after that warning, Sandy Cortez tweeted that we only have 10 years to "cut
carbon emissions in half."
Think about the math here. We lost two years in just four months. At that rate, we could literally all die unless Joe Biden wins
in November. Which is of course what they're saying.
On Tuesday, California Gavin Newsom pretty much said it Newsom abandoned science long ago. Science is too stringent, too western,
too patriarchal.
Newsom is a man of faith now. He's decided
climate
change caused all of this
, and that's final. He's not listening to any other arguments. Watch:
NEWSOM: I have no patience. And I say this lovingly, not as an ideologue, but as someone who prides himself on being open to
argument, interested in evidence. But I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers. It simply follows completely
inconsistent, that point of view, with the reality on the ground.
People like Gavin Newsom don't want to listen to any "climate change deniers." What's a "climate change denier?" Anyone who
thinks our ruling class has no idea how to run their states or protect their citizens.
Are we "climate change deniers" if we point out that California has failed to implement meaningful deforestation measures that
would have dramatically slowed the spread of these wildfires?
In 2018, a state oversight agency in California found that years of poor or nonexistent
forest
management policies
in the Sierra Nevada forests had contributed to wildfires.
One of the few Republicans who still hold elected office in California, state Assemblyman Heath Flora, last year called on
using the state's $22 billion budget surplus to implement vegetation management.
Fires don't spread as well without huge connected forests functioning as kindling. It's obvious, which is why it's
unthinkable to mention it in some Democratic circles."
Presumably, you're also a climate-change denier if you point out that six of the Oregon National Guard's wildfire-fighting
helicopters are currently in Afghanistan.
Instead of dropping water to suppress blazes, the Chinook aircraft are busy supplying a war effort that's been going on for
nearly 20 years. That seems significant. Has anyone asked Gavin Newsom or Jay Inslee about that? Do any of the Democrats who
control these states even care?
The answer, of course, is probably not. It was just last week that Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti admitted on-the-record that
his city has become completely third-world.
Of course, Garcetti didn't blame himself for this turn of events. He blamed you. Quote: "It's almost 3 p.m," Garcetti tweeted.
"Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead, turn off excess lights and unplug any
appliances you're not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part."
"Please do your part." Garcetti wants his constituents to suffer to try to solve a problem that Democrats in his state created.
Even now, as residents in Northern California are facing sweeping power outages in addition to wildfires.
In the meantime, Gavin Newsom has vowed that 50 percent of California's energy grid will be based on quote "renewable" energy
sources within a decade.
That means sources like wind and solar power -- which can't be dialed up to meet periods of extreme demand, like California is
seeing right now during its heatwave.
Newsom was asked last month whether he would consider revising this stance given the blackouts that have left millions of
Californians without power.
Newsom responded, quote, "We are going to radically change the way we produce and consume energy." In other words, The blackouts
will continue until morale improves. So will the wildfires. Get used to it.
Fox News
6.2M subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but it's
everywhere and it's deadly.
#FoxNews
#Tucker
This is a direct result of Gavin Newsom eliminating forestation controls. Jerry Brown kept them in place, the only thing he
did correctly. Democrats are to blame for all of this.
When environmentalists pushed through their "leave forests alone, allow nature to be undisturbed" bs, California and other
states stopped clearing underbrush, also known as fire fuel and now we see a perfect example of cause and effect.
Don't get me wrong I am a conservatist , but with common sense , we can't conserve unless we protect and nurture nature to
thrive. In fact extremism in environmentalism destroys as we see. People dead, animals dead, homes destroyed, forest destroyed
because of extremism.
The narrative to leave forests alone happened long before Trump, believing otherwise makes you a useful idiot.
Congratulations.
You could Google this old narrative but will you find it, well it's Google, you have to find the people who heard and lived
the so called natural environmental push narrative, we remember and we remember the warnings. Congratulations, your ignorance
has caused harm.
In the days, weeks, and months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans,
South Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Sikh-Americans were the targets of widespread
hate violence. Many of the perpetrators of these acts of hate violence claimed they were
acting patriotically by retaliating against those responsible for 9/11.
...
Just after September 11, numerous Arabs, Muslims, and individuals perceived to be Arab or
Muslim were assaulted, and some killed, by individuals who believed they were responsible
for or connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The first backlash
killing occurred four days after September 11.
Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15 as he was planting flowers outside
his Chevron gas station. The man who shot Sodhi, Frank Roque, had told an employee of an
Applebee's restaurant that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel heads." Roque
mistakenly thought Sodhi was Arab because Sodhi, an immigrant from India, had a beard and
wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. After shooting Sodhi, Roque drove to a Mobil gas
station a few miles away and shot at a Lebanese-American clerk. He then drove to a home he
once owned and shot and almost hit an Afghani man who was coming out the front door. When
he was arrested two hours later, Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way."
The next two killings were committed by a man named Mark Stroman. On September 15, 2001,
Stroman shot and killed Waquar Hassan, an immigrant from Pakistan, at Hassan's grocery
store in Dallas, Texas. On October 4, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an
immigrant from India and a naturalized U.S. citizen, while Patel was working at his Shell
station convenience store. A store video camera recorded the killing, helping police to
identify Stroman as the killer. Stroman later told a Dallas television station that he shot
Hassan and Patel because, "We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate
against those who retaliated against us."
Beyond these killings, there were more than a thousand other anti-Muslim or anti-Arab
acts of hate which took the form of physical assaults, verbal harassment and intimidation,
arson, attacks on mosques, vandalism, and other property damage.
Instead of "calming prejudice" the GB Bush administration institutionalized hate
crimes:
First, in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks, the government began
secretly arresting and detaining Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men. Within the first two
months after the attacks, the government had detained at least 1,200 men.
...
Second, in November 2001, the Department of Justice began efforts to "interview"
approximately 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Muslim nations
who had arrived in the United States within the previous two years on a temporary student,
tourist, or business visa and were lawful residents of the United States. Four months
later, the government announced it would seek to interview an additional 3,000 men from
countries with an Al Qaeda presence.
...
Third, in September 2002, the government implemented a "Special Registration" program also
known as NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System), requiring immigrant men
from 26 mostly Muslim countries to register their name, address, telephone number, place of
birth, date of arrival in the United States, height, weight, hair and eye color, financial
information and the addresses, birth dates and phone numbers of parents and any foreign
friends with the government.
Besides all that a rather useless security theater was installed at U.S. airports which
has costs many billions in lost time and productivity ever since. The Patriot Act was
introduced which allowed for unlimited spying on private citizens. Wars were launched that
were claimed to be justified by 9/11. These were "mass outbreaks of anti-Muslim sentiment and
violence. Many were killed and maimed in them. People were tortured and vanished. All of this
happened largely to applause of a majority of the U.S. people which were glued to 24 and dreamed of being "terrorist
hunters".
Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that.
I find it a bit humorous b that you are critical of Krugman for his 911 dementia when for
years many of us finance types have railed about how morally corrupt the logic and thinking
of Paul Krugman is.
Paul Krugman is to economics what Bernie Sanders has become for the purported "left" side
of the "right wing" uni-party....a sheep dog for the easily led.
Paul Krugman is an acolyte for the God of Mammon/global private finance elite.
While spreading anger and hate toward Arab people, The Bush Administration rescued the
many members of the Kingdom's family from all around the US and escorted their flights out of
the US to safety in Saudi Arabia.
Distracting the public big time was Dick Cheney, VP, who insisted from the very next day
that the plot to hit the Twin Towers was Saddam's plot.
So, the historical record and US response was skewed from the getgo. AQ and Bin Laden
didn't concern the neocons. They wanted the US to go to Iraq again, and this time start a
wide war that would spread to Syria and Lebanon and Iran.
It was easy times to spread fear and hate, and Cheney and the war mongers of CENTCOM were
riding high. Americans were scared of all Arabs, all Sunnis, all Shiites, from anywhere. They
were all the same in the public's mind. Enemies.
It was perfect and has led to 19 years of endless wars. Add ISIS and al Nusra and the
Taliban and you have an endless soup of enemies.
krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st
century
at my age, I shouldn't really be surprised any more by what american "intellectuals" and
"nobel prize winners" say about anything..... but I am.
He's neo-liberal interventionist moron of the first rank, and saying what he did actually
normalizes the war mania and war-mongering which has become so staple in mainstream thought
and the "think tanks" and is now practically part of the american DNA and "culture".
shame on krugman
...
It appears the Deep State has attacked the USA's people twice in two decades--on 911 and with
the decision to let as many die as possible by deliberately not doing anything to mitigate
the impact of COVID-19 and allowing the real economy to atrophy so even more will die in the
long run.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 11 2020 19:40 utc | 34
Talking about tilting at windmills - I'll never forget Robert Fisk angrily pointing out
that the Yankees knew where to find Al CIA-duh because they extended the cave complex at Tora
Bora to help Al CIA-duh, equipped with 10,000 US Stinger Missiles, kick the Russians out of
Afghanistan in the 1980s!!!
(The Yankees had to wait for 10+ years to invade Afghanistan because it takes that long
for Stingers to pass their Use By date)
@michaelj72. "krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of
the 21st century"
Actually, Paul Krugman was a strong and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since early
2003 and possibly earlier. He was amongst the few mainstream liberal commentators to take
that stand.
If MoA readers and commenters were to read the entire series of Krugman's tweets, six in
all, they will see mention of how the Bush govt began exploiting the events of 11 September
2001 almost immediately. Though the example Krugman actually uses would make most people
cringe at what it suggests about the bubble he lives in and how far removed it is from most
people's lives and experiences, and his reference to a "horrible war" does not mention either
Afghanistan or Iraq.
It has to be said that Twitter is not designed very well for the kind of informal
conversational commentary that people often use it for. But then you would think Krugman
would use something other than Twitter to discuss and compare 9/11 with the impact of
COVID-19.
The real issue I have with Krugman's Tweet is that he is revising history and bending over
backwards to apologise for Dubya in a way to criticise Donald Trump's performance as
President.
b " Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that. "
Careful with that axe b, you are talking about Biden's chief economic adviser and likely
appointee as Chair of the Fed. How does this look?
Volker
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
Powell
Krugman
Reading Krugman's columns in 2016, I had a strong to overwhelming sense that this was a
person revving up for a spot in Hillary's White House or cabinet. For some reason it isn't
hitting me as strongly this time around – he may not have as close connections in
Biden's circle – but it certainly would not be a surprise to see him take a turn
through the media/government revolving door if Trump loses (though, fwiw, I don't think it
will be a job at the Fed).
Yep. Pretty staggering how a few disgruntled ex-CIA contractors managed to, deliberately
or not, help the US Gov't launch the biggest world war operation right under the noses of the
brainwashed masses.
99% of Westerners still are clueless as to explaining the last 20 years in a broader
geopolitical context.
#28: "The antiwar protests in the US were small and insignificant."
No they were not. Millions of people demonstrated against the planned war, in the US,
in the UK, and around the world...
We mustn't forget how the vast majority of those who allegedly were anti-war suddenly went
totally pro-war silent upon Obama coming in.
But that pales compared to the vile spectacle of all the self-alleged
"anti-authoritarians", "anti-propagandists" "dissidents", who suddenly regard the government
media as the literal voice of God, where their alleged God speaks of Covid.
His book, End this Depression Now, is pretty weak. He has no theory of why the crash
occurred. He critiques the austerity agenda but doesn't understand that government spending
CAN create tax liabilities for capital down the road and eat into profits, thus blocking
expanded investments and growth. Moronic libertarians hate Krugman just because they are
right wing assholes who think, like fairies, that a free market without the state will work
fine and self correct. Marx debunked this fairy tale thoroughly in Capital Volume 1, showing
that, even if we start with the mythical free market of libertarian morons, capitalism will
still operate according to the general law by which concentration and centralization lead to
class polarization. In any case, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops his laws of crisis,
showing that the cycles of expansion and depression under capitalism follow the movements of
the rate of profit, which itself is determined by the ratio of the value of sunk capital in
production technologies to the rate of exploitation (profits/wages). If the former rises more
than the latter, the rate of profit sinks, along with investment, output and employment.
Financial crises then set in.
The empirical evidence in the data bears out Marx's theory, not Krugman's dumb notion of
aggregate demand, or the stupid libertarian focus on interest rates.
We could discuss here all day about the sociological subject of the American people's true
positioning in the aftermath of 9/11. It would be, sincerely, a waste of time.
The important thing to grasp over this episode - from the point of view of History - is
this: it was a strategic victory for al-Qaeda . The USA took the bait (all scripted?)
and went into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, the surplus the USA had
accumulated with the sacking and absorption of the Soviet space during Bill Clinton
evaporated and became a huge deficit in the Empire's accounts. Not long after, the 2008
financial meltdown happened, burying Bushism in a spectacular way.
There's a debate about the size of the hole the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the
American Empire. Some put it into the dozens of billions of USDs; others put it into the
trillions of USDs range. We will never know. What we know is that the hole was big enough to
both erase the American surplus and to not avoid the financial meltdown of 2008.
Either the expansion through the Middle East wasn't fast and provided riches enough to
keep up with the Empire's voracious appetite or the invasion itself already represented a
last, desperate attempt by the Empire to avoid its imminent collapse. We know, however, that
POTUS Bush had a list of countries he wanted to invade beyond Iraq (the "Axis of Evil") which
contained a secret country (Venezuela). He was conscious Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be
enough. Whatever the case, he didn't have the time, and the financial meltdown happened in
his last year in the White House.
They knew who the perps of 9/11 were: their "own" Saudi irregulars in the CIA's US main
land training camps, who started practicing on the "wrong"- domestic American- targets. These
guys were officially entered without any background checks.
The Bush and Bin Laden families go way back in money making. That is why George had to ponder
so long in that Florida kindergarten after hearing about the attacks: he had a suspicion. The
Saudi only fly out after 9/11 confirms that.
Paul Krugman Is a pro. Completely owned by Deep State. His purpose is to deflect
discussion and prevent questioning the official version of 9/11 , and get people chasing
something completely irrelevant. Well done Paul, most have taken the bait.
In a sense the USA is a theocratic society with neoliberal religion as the state religion. Not that different from the
USSR whioch also was a theocratic society with some perversion of Marxism as the state religion.
I capitulate. Ron you are correct, we are post peak.
Post Peak
OK, now what?
It is so strange to be post-peak and not have high prices for crude,
and food.
I guess that will be coming.
note- biofuels should not be counted in liquids tally. It is a different animal, with the
source being dependent on farming and soil, not drilling and geology. Just because ethanol is
used for propulsion shouldn't matter- electrons and batteries aren't counted either, and
rightly so. Those belong in a different category- transportation energy.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high priced
phenomenon.
The most overrated law in economics is that of supply and demand. This law suffers from
what Richard Feynman called "vagueness" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
). The problem is that it is always satisfied and hence gives absolutely no information about
prices.
Another problem with market theory (beyond vagueness) is that it lacks a time axis.
The theory states that the relationship between price and supply moves along the demand
curve, but doesn't say how fast, just that "in the long run" the system will reach
equilibrium. Being in equilibrium means being somewhere on the demand curve.
So for example, if prices go up, the demand quantity is expected to go down. The question
is when.
Where does this go wrong? In classical market theory, for example, unemployment is
impossible, because if labor supply outstrips demand prices (wages) should fall until until
equilibrium is attained. This has been observed to be false on many occasions, including
right now.
As Feymann states in the video, "If it disagrees with experiment, it's WRONG! That's all
there is to it." Classical economics isn't just too vague, it is wrong.
Keynes joked about this that in the long term we'll all be dead. He meant equilibrium will
never be reached, so we are never on the demand curve. He argued that "sticky prices",
meaning the unwillingness to accept pay cuts, kept labor markets permanently out of
equilibrium.
It's worth pondering whether oil prices are "sticky" as well. Saying yes is saying the law
of supply and demand doesn't apply (in the short term). This year we have seen that both
OPEC's politicking and panicky traders can cause wild swings in price unrelated to supply and
demand.
Where market theory is vague is the shape of the demand curve. For example, if oil supply
can't meet demand in the near future, as some here have posited, how high will prices go?
Some claim it will go over $200, as people get desperate for it. Some claim that higher
prices would increase efforts to find and drill more, putting a lid on prices. Some claim the
shortage would crash the world economy, depressing prices. Some claim that faced with oil
shortages, the world would simply switch to EVs, or stop wasting the gunk on poorly designed
transportation systems, so prices would stay more or less the same.
Who is right? Nobody knows. So we don't know the shape of the demand curve. The theory is
hopelessly vague.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high
priced phenomenon.
Schinzy,
The price of crude oil is only part of the Peakoil phenomenon. How much is left in the
ground counts, however more important is at which velocity the remaining Gb can be
extracted. I am not a geologist, but common sense says that when an oilfield is well depleted
(50-70%) the most of the remaining barrels will be extracted at a much lower speed, even at
very high oilprices. With secondary and tertiary EOR technology most conventional oilfields
will not produce the same or close to the same amount of barrels/day as before for many more
years. That's also my conclusion from what I have read more than a decade ago.
Of course with high oilprices new, relatively small, oil fields will come online and (more
advanced) EOR will start in other fields, but no matter how you look at it: depletion never
stops. With most oilfields in the world past-peak, only a tremendous amount of money (needed
to develop EOR) can prevent world crude oilproduction from falling like a rock. And all those
EOR technologies will deplete oilfields faster. Big gains in the beginning, more
disappointments later.
Will there be significant amount of shale oil developed in the future in other countries than
the U.S. ? If so, is that wise, regarding an already existing runaway climate change ?
I capitulate. Ron you are correct, we are post peak.
Post Peak
OK, now what?
It is so strange to be post-peak and not have high prices for crude,
and food.
I guess that will be coming.
NOTE:
biofuels should not be counted in liquids tally. It is a different animal, with the
source being dependent on farming and soil, not drilling and geology.
Just because ethanol is
used for propulsion shouldn't matter -- electrons and batteries aren't counted either, and
rightly so. Those belong in a different category- transportation energy.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high priced
phenomenon.
The most overrated law in economics is that of supply and demand. This law suffers from
what Richard Feynman called "vagueness" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
). The problem is that it is always satisfied and hence gives absolutely no information about
prices.
Another problem with market theory (beyond vagueness) is that it lacks a time axis. The theory states that the relationship between price and supply moves along the demand
curve, but doesn't say how fast, just that "in the long run" the system will reach
equilibrium. Being in equilibrium means being somewhere on the demand curve.
So for example, if prices go up, the demand quantity is expected to go down. The question
is when.
Where does this go wrong? In classical market theory, for example, unemployment is
impossible, because if labor supply outstrips demand prices (wages) should fall until until
equilibrium is attained. This has been observed to be false on many occasions, including
right now.
As Feymann states in the video, "If it disagrees with experiment, it's WRONG! That's all
there is to it." Classical economics isn't just too vague, it is wrong.
Keynes joked about this that in the long term we'll all be dead. He meant equilibrium will
never be reached, so we are never on the demand curve. He argued that "sticky prices",
meaning the unwillingness to accept pay cuts, kept labor markets permanently out of
equilibrium.
It's worth pondering whether oil prices are "sticky" as well. Saying yes is saying the law
of supply and demand doesn't apply (in the short term). This year we have seen that both
OPEC's politicking and panicky traders can cause wild swings in price unrelated to supply and
demand.
Where market theory is vague is the shape of the demand curve. For example, if oil supply
can't meet demand in the near future, as some here have posited, how high will prices go?
Some claim it will go over $200, as people get desperate for it. Some claim that higher
prices would increase efforts to find and drill more, putting a lid on prices. Some claim the
shortage would crash the world economy, depressing prices. Some claim that faced with oil
shortages, the world would simply switch to EVs, or stop wasting the gunk on poorly designed
transportation systems, so prices would stay more or less the same.
Who is right? Nobody knows. So we don't know the shape of the demand curve. The theory is
hopelessly vague.
I have argued for several years that peak oil is a low price phenomenon, not a high
priced phenomenon.
Schinzy,
The price of crude oil is only part of the Peakoil phenomenon.
How much is left in the
ground counts, however more important is at which velocity the remaining Gb can be
extracted. I am not a geologist, but common sense says that when an oilfield is well depleted
(50-70%) the most of the remaining barrels will be extracted at a much lower speed, even at
very high oilprices.
With secondary and tertiary EOR technology most conventional oilfields
will not produce the same or close to the same amount of barrels/day as before for many more
years. That's also my conclusion from what I have read more than a decade ago.
Of course with high oilprices new, relatively small, oil fields will come online and (more
advanced) EOR will start in other fields, but no matter how you look at it: depletion never
stops.
With most oilfields in the world past-peak, only a tremendous amount of money (needed
to develop EOR) can prevent world crude oil production from falling like a rock. And all those
EOR technologies will deplete oilfields faster.
Big gains in the beginning, more
disappointments later.
Will there be significant amount of shale oil developed in the future in other countries than
the U.S. ? If so, is that wise, regarding an already existing runaway climate change ?
Science now is a highly politicized science and that's a huge problem. Ask USSR scientists
about possible consequences. Is Kapitsa noted long ago in his obitiary on Ernest Rutherford death
as soon as science become rich it lost its freedom. "
"The year that Rutherford died (1938) there
disappeared forever the happy days of free scientific work which gave us such delight in our
youth. Science has lost her freedom. Science has become a productive force. She has become rich
but she has become enslaved and part of her is veiled in secrecy. I do not know whether
Rutherford
would continue to joke and laugh as he used to.
Lysenkoism in Stalins's USSR was the first robin of this process. Now it became commonplace.
That's why we see so many pseudo-scientists -- politicians who pretend to be scientists like
Fauci. and so much corruption like among Professors of economics (all those neoclassical economic
scoundrels)
"...a permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms and it doesn't occur."
- Susan Sontag, AIDs and its Metaphors
"I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. I call
this a misuse, for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures
and not an hour's paper. Another alternative would have been to give you what's called a
popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you
understand a thing which actually you don't understand, and to gratify what I believe to be
one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the
latest discoveries of science. I rejected these alternatives."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics
If you're reading this, then you've probably been called a conspiracy theorist. Also
you've been derided and shamed for questioning the "science" of the Covid debacle.
The idea of science is now a badly corrupted idea. In a nation, today, (the USA) which in
educational terms ranks 25th globally in science skills and reading, and well below that in
math; all one hears is a clarion call to science. In reading skills the US placed below
Malta, Portugal, and right about the same as Kazakhstan.
But in a nation that no longer reads, and *can* no longer read, it is not surprising that
knowledge is absorbed via the new hieroglyphics of gifs (interestingly the creator of gifs
wanted it pronounced with a soft g the more to sound like a peanut butter brand) and
memes.
So-called 'response memes' are the new version of conversation, and most register and
communicate (sic) confusion. As beer ad marketers know, the state of your brain after
consuming a six pack is pretty much the standard target ideal for advertising. And it relays
a message that six pack confusion is actually a good and perhaps even sexy state in which to
find oneself.
Education is for those with money, those who can afford the proper foundational skills to
get into Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech and the Stanford. For everyone else science is Star Trek.
But I digress. The point is that most Americans imagine that they revere science, and they
ridicule anyone they think of as unscientific. But they think of it in cult terms, really.
Its a religion of sorts. The only people who don't are those 'real' religious zealots,
Dominionist and Charismatic Christians (like Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos
et al) who hold positions of enormous power in the US government under the least scientific
president in history.
The Christian right doesn't like any science, ANY science. But for most of that target
demographic (the educated mostly white 30%), the cry is to "trust the science" even the great
Greta says to "trust the science".
The problem is, science is not neutral, its as politicized as media and news and the
pronouncements of celebrities.
In May 2020, The Lancet published an article revisiting the 1957 and 1968 Influenza
pandemics.
The 1957 outbreak was not caused by a coronavirus -- the first human coronavirus would
not be discovered until 1965 -- but by an influenza virus. However, in 1957, no one could
be sure that the virus that had been isolated in Hong Kong was a new pandemic strain or
simply a descendant of the previous 1918–19 pandemic influenza virus.
The result was that as the UK's weekly death count mounted, peaking at about 600 in the
week ending Oct 17, 1957, there were few hysterical tabloid newspaper headlines and no
calls for social distancing. Instead, the news cycle was dominated by the Soviet Union's
launch of Sputnik and the aftermath of the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in the
UK.
By the time this influenza pandemic -- known colloquially at the time as "Asian flu" --
had concluded the following April, an estimated 20 000 people in the UK and
80 000 citizens in the USA were dead. Worldwide, the pandemic, sparked by a new H2N2
influenza subtype, would result in more than 1 million deaths.
To date, Covid 19 has not reached the million death marker in the US, and yet we are
seeing the most draconian lockdowns in modern history, the total suspension of democratic
process and a level of hysteria (especially in the U.S. and UK) unprecedented. I wrote about
some aspects of this on my blog here , mostly touching on the
cultural effects
Allow me to quote The Lancet again.
The subsequent 1968 influenza pandemic -- or "Hong Kong flu" or "Mao flu" as some
western tabloids dubbed it -- would have an even more dramatic impact, killing more than
30 000 individuals in the UK and 100 000 people in the USA, with half the
deaths among individuals younger than 65 years -- the reverse of COVID-19 deaths in the
current pandemic.
Yet, while at the height of the outbreak in December, 1968, The New York Times described
the pandemic as "one of the worst in the nation's history", there were few school closures
and businesses, for the most, continued to operate as normal.
I remember the 68 Hong Kong flu. I was in my last year of high school. The summer after
was Woodstock, the 'summer of love'. Not a lot of social distancing going on. But we are past
numbers and statistics having any real meaning. The Covid narrative is now in the realm of
allegory.
The media perspective is utterly predictable. Liberal outlets that have the inside track
to government are seen to be reinforcing the mainstream story (VOX, Slate, Huff Post, The
Guardian and Washington Post). In a recent VOX article the message was only a sociopath would
NOT wear a mask and that the 'science' was unanimous.
Of course its no such thing. But the message of sites like VOX, or Daily Beast, or Wa Po
or the truly reprehensible Guardian, are always going to be to hammer away 'on message'. The
same is true for what passes for moderate news organs like the NY Times, ABC News, The Hill,
and BBC. There has been virtually no dissenting opinions expressed in these rags.
All these news outlets are given clear messages by the spin doctors in government, by the
White House, and by contacts within the State Department and Pentagon. And by the advertising
firms employed by the state (such as Ruder Finn).
"Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science."
- Dr. Arnold S. Relman (Madison Ave. Has Growing Role In the Business of Drug
Research, NY Times 2002)
The WHO, the CDC, and most every other NGO or government agency of any size hires
advertising firms. The WHO, which is tied to the United Nations, is a reasonably sinister
organization, actually.
Just picking up a random publication from the WHO, on what they call 'the tobacco
epidemic' and you find on page 33 the following chapter heading "Objective: Effective
surveillance, monitoring and evaluation systems in place to monitor tobacco use."
Reading further and all this is really saying is that the populace of any country is best
put under surveillance. It's for their own good, you see.
Institutions of medicine, global and national possess
no more integrity than your average NGO (Amnesty International, Médecins Sans
Frontières, Oxfam et al). And that means not very much.
To understand the nature of institutional corruption one must understand Imperialism. The
institutions of Imperialist nations are going to further Imperialist ideology. (see Antonio
Gramsci, ideological hegemony). The US is not
in the business of helping Americans .
Modern monopoly forms better reflect that scientific knowledge, and its advanced
application to production, are concentrated, ultimately, not in physical objects but in
human beings and human interaction with those objects. It is monopoly of the labour power
of the most highly educated workers, by both imperialist states and Multi National
Corporations, that forms the ultimate and most stable base of imperialist reproduction.
– Sam King (Lenin's theory of imperialism: a defence of its relevance in the
21st century, MLR)
The idea of super-exploitation needs to be conceptually generalised at the necessary
level of abstraction and incorporated in the theory of imperialism. Super-exploitation is a
specific condition within the capitalist mode of production [ ] the hidden common essence
defining imperialism.
he working class of the oppressed nations/Third World/Global South is systematically
paid below the value of labour power of the working class of the oppressor nations/First
World/Global North. This is not because the Southern working class produces less value, but
because it is more oppressed and more exploited.
– Andy Higginbottom (Structure and Essence in Capital 1, quoted by John
Smith Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century)
The US jobless rate just hit 2.1 million. Officially. Making the total something over
forty million. Its much higher in reality. Nobody has work. There is no work and we are at
the start of a period of massive evictions, foreclosures, and delinquencies - and the
homeless population will soon reach Biblical proportions (in some cities, such as Los
Angeles, its already Biblical). Will be simply of a magnitude never before seen.
Hence the authoritarian policing of lockdowns in, for example, New Zealand, suggests
something like a practice run. The ruling class in western nations knows full well this is
coming. And one wonders if it's not, in fact, a part of the plan (oh here is where someone
says conspiracy theory probably Louis Proyect).
Yes it's a fucking conspiracy theory. It is a theory based on evidence, however.
Why are the US and UK and a host of other countries deliberately ensuring a massive
depression? Because they care about your health? They are worried we all might catch the flu?
Has the US ever demonstrated a concern with your health and well being before?
Remember how many discretionary tax dollars go to health care and how much to defense.
Conspiracies do occur. The denial of that fact seems to be a hallmark of the pseudo or false
left. Does the suspension of democratic process not cause this soft left any problems at all?
Look at Sweden, at Belarus no lockdown and no problem.
It should be noted that there are a great many terrific doctors in the US. Dedicated and
brilliant, often. But they are not the system. The system is run for profit.
With about three-fourths of Americans under lockdown, the unintended consequences will
be vast. There has been a notable decrease in the number of heart attack and stroke
patients arriving at hospitals, presumably because they are afraid of catching the
coronavirus or of not finding a hospital bed.
As the economy spirals downward, we can also expect an increase in mental health crises,
domestic violence and suicides. While lockdown supporters say that to have a functioning
economy, we must have good public health, the reverse is also true: To have good public
health, we must have a functioning economy.
– Alex Berezow PhD (Geopolitical Futures, 2020)
Alfred Willener wrote an interesting book in 1970, analysing May 68 in France. He analyses
the answers students gave to various questionnaires they responded to. The section regarding
science is worth quoting.
'The scandalous fact is that, for all the means that science has put at our disposal,
most people live not much better than in the Middle Ages'. The system benefits from science
in the following way: through the atom bomb, through 'the power of statistical research',
through computers, through the chemical industry being 'in the hands of the state', through
space research.
'In the end, you realize', concludes one reasonably logical reply, 'that technological
progress, which makes economic growth possible, does not satisfy the fundamental needs of
man and is used above all to maintain and strengthen the system'.
Lastly, I should like to quote one quite unexpected reply, which forms the extreme point
of pessimism: ' Everyone is oppressed by science.'
– Alfred Willener (The Action-Image of Society on Cultural
Politicization)
I doubt seriously one would get such responses today in any European or North American
country. The contemporary indoctrination regards science is acute. And the media abounds in
junk science. Click bait science. And this is where most people have their opinions formed
for them.
There is a paper put out by one of the founders of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab,
called The Great Reset. The conclusion of the book reads
...at a global level, if viewed in terms of the global population affected, the corona
crisis is (so far) one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced over the
last 2000 years."
In other words, a mortality of .06% is simply not commensurate with the extreme measures
the governments of the world (the West in particular) are taking.
There is no question, none, that those measures, the lockdown, the masks, the distancing,
and the attending *diseases of despair*, will kill more people by a factor of ten than the
virus itself.
This is not even to begin discussing the psychological harm done, in particular to
children. And not just harm to children, but severe
harm to the most vulnerable .
What is being internalized by children is three fold. One, there is something inherently
sick and contagious about ME. Two, everyone MIGHT be a threat to my health. And three, obey
authority, because you don't want to end up like those smelly homeless people were are trying
to hard to avoid.
Children take things personally. They tend to blame themselves. Even in the comparative
sanity of Norway, where I reside, children are increasingly anxious about the world. How
could they not be? All this for a health risk of .06%.
But it is more than just the decimation of the economy in the US and UK. It is a
dismantling of the culture. One in three museums closed because of Covid will not re-open.
Ever. Where does all that art go?
Just a guess but probably very wealthy collectors will gobble it up at wholesale
prices.
The predictable outcome of these lockdowns, certainly in the US, is a guaranteed minimum
income. Very minimum. Restrictions on travel, all freedom of movement in fact, will not soon
return to normal. Various forms of surveillance and tracking, as well as health
certifications, are the goal of the state.
Also, if this pandemic succeeded so well, with so little resistance, why not have another?
And there is another aspect to the SWAT mask police, and that is that western society is
becoming alarmingly hypochondriacal. Children are kept out of school for runny noses. If all
kids with snotty noses were kept out of class, nobody would get an education.
There is a dire future of two or three generations now developing and maturing with very
weak immune systems. So that if a natural mutation takes place one day, from a Corona virus
or any other, a genuinely serious pandemic could kill tens of millions.
It is not a speculation that there are people who prosper and even benefit during an
economic crisis -- as smaller business owners struggle, large corporations and banks
benefit from huge government subsidies, giving them more power to buy failing small
businesses, for example. And it is a fact that many of those people have enormous economic
power to shape the policies that can benefit themselves.
It is not a speculation that they would appreciate having strict measures of control
against the people by limiting their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to
travel, or by installing means of surveillance, check points and official certifications
for activities that might give freedom to the people beyond the capitalist framework.
It is not a speculation that they would benefit from moving our social interactions to
the digital realm, which can commodify our activities as marketable data for the
advertising industry, insurance industry and any other moneyed social institutions
Including education, political institution, legal institution, and financial
institution.
Such matters should be seen within the context of the western history being shaped by
unelected capitalists with their enormous networks of social institutions.
– Hiroyuki Hamada (Wrong Kind of Green, April 2020)
The collapse of retail is accelerating. This is emerging as a monopolization of retail.
Few shops will remain, in fact, except luxury stores in select gated areas. The rest will be
online and probably rudimentary. The culture and the economy are being strip-mined and
recreated for a select clientele. The collapse of the economy means the collapse of the
bottom 90% or so.
The very richest men and corporations on the planet are making huge profits.
And yet, there are precious few voices of dissent to the master narrative in the US. In
Norway, the lockdown was about five weeks. But its a sparsely populated country and one
hardly noticed it save for the kids being home and not in school. But schools reopened and
the Prime Minister actually made a speech apologizing, in effect, for an *unnecessary*
lockdown. She had been frightened.
But now, with a mild uptick in positive cases the country is considering stricter
limitations on travel. Why?
There is no uptick in deaths, only in positive test results. The fact remains the virus
attacks the aged and the already sick. But this is very telling, I think. The Norwegian
government doesn't want to be seen as disobedient. They don't want to not follow the grand
plan provided by western agencies and experts. Even if they seemingly don't really believe
it.
(The saddest aspect is the voice of Dr. Mads Gilbert, a known advocate for Palestinian
rights, who has weighed in on the side of fear. Why? I have no idea. But it is worth noting
his predictions
from March 2020 were staggeringly wrong.)
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But clearly the groupthink pressure is powerful and small nations do not want to be
singled out for bucking the *science* . There are economic coercions threatened, tacitly, as
well. The pressure to conform is huge and it takes a Herculean effort -- both individually
and as a nation, to resist. And *experts* seem to have a hard time admitting they were
wrong.
The science has been consistently wrong from day one.
As I say, this is now allegory. Or fable. There is nothing reasonable or rational in the
lockdown measures of the US and UK and NZ. Or anywhere. And this is not even to touch upon
the criminality of the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates buying public influence and
visibility. Not trained in any medical discipline, Gates has somehow made himself one of the
faces of the pandemic.
And to deconstruct Gates' language is to find a disturbing quality of authoritarian
hubris. Gates utters declarations as if he were God speaking to his flock. All from a man who
has done little save steal from his partners and exploit the poor of India and Africa. One of
the most striking aspects of this whole last few months has been the enormous and coordinated
effort the Gates machine has put into rehabilitating his image.
If you google "Crimes of the Gates Foundation" for example, you will get ten different
fact-checkers officially denying any crimes and another half dozen articles ridiculing those
who question Gates motives, his profit from vaccines, or even his alignment with eugenicists
(depopulation adherents)– all are derided as, yes, conspiracy theorists.
If you dare to question the rushing of an untested vaccine you are called an
anti-vaxxer.
My children are vaccinated. I just don't like the idea of a hurried untested vaccine
produced for a virus that needs no vaccine. And one promoted by a creepy millionaire.
But clearly the Gates charm offensive is in overdrive. The pastel cardigan is everywhere.
And yet, his favorable rating in recent surveys is around 56%. That is actually not very high
given the amount of self-promotion involved. It's better than Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Biden,
though. Gates is not likeable. No amount of spin can change that.
The final factor to note is the Trump effect. Many liberals would literally rather see
dead in the street if it meant discrediting Trump. It is no longer quite a zero sum game,
though. But overall the hatred of Trump is now at a religious level, too.
And behold, the opposition is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. If you want a window in the
black heart of Biden, watch and/or listen to his testimony around the Waco inferno. The
inherent sadism and lack of humanity is glaringly apparent.
As for Kamala Harris:
As a San Francisco social worker, I sat on the school district committee that met with
families of chronically truant students. Once, when we asked a student why he didn't go to
school, he said there was too much police tape and shootings at his school bus stop.
Harris, as CA Attorney General, was putting parents/caregivers in jail if their child
was chronically truant. Also as Attorney General, she denied a DNA test to Kevin Cooper, a
very likely innocent man who came within hours of execution in 2004.
– Riva Enteen (Counterpunch Aug. 2020)
These are the servants of capital.
The left should be emphasising the economic aspect of lockdown because it is the working
class who are the principal victims of lockdown."
- Phil Shannon (Lockdown Skeptics, June 2020)
A Downing street tweet today:
We're putting tougher measures in place to target serious breaches of coronavirus
restrictions. Fines for not wearing a face-covering will double for repeat offences, up to
£3,200."
This is a class-based assault. The wealthy will not be fined for not wearing a
face-covering on their private beaches, or dinner parties at the yacht club.
If not this also about conformism? Social desirability == conformism.
Notable quotes:
"... Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, "Lies, damned lies and statistics." One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American Association for Public Opinion Research confirms that "national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump's support significantly more than Clinton's." ..."
"... Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling, whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent's true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially desirable way, or not answer at all. ..."
Many conservatives are concerned about polling results regarding conservative issues,
especially about President Trump. For example, the latest CNN poll
found that 51% of voters believe the president should be impeached. How much credence should
conservatives give these polls?
Mark Twain is credited with introducing into the American vernacular the phrase, "Lies,
damned lies and statistics." One of the pervasive damned lies people take for granted is the
results of political polls, especially in the Trump era. Most polls show him behind several of
the myriad candidates vying to represent Democrats in the 2020 election. But the American
Association for Public Opinion Research
confirms that "national polls in 2016 tended to under-estimate Trump's support
significantly more than Clinton's."
We are inundated with the latest polling on President Trump's approval rating and how people
are likely to vote in the 2020 election. Both bode poorly for the president, but he doesn't
believe them and neither should we. As an academic, I ran a research center that conducted
local, state-wide and national public opinion polls and took a year's leave of absence from my
university to work for Lou Harris, founder of the Harris Poll.
Social Desirability
The reason why we shouldn't believe most of the current or future polling results about
President Trump can be summarized in two words: Social Desirability.
Social desirability is a concept first advanced by psychologist Allen L. Edwards in 1953. It
advances the idea that when asked about an issue in a social setting, people will always answer
in a socially desirable manner whether or not they really believe it. Political polling,
whether by telephone or online, is a social setting. Respondents know that there is an audience
who are posing the questions and monitoring their response. As a result, despite a respondent's
true belief, many will answer polling questions in what may appear to be a more socially
desirable way, or not answer at all.
When it comes to President Trump, the mainstream media and academics have led us to believe
that it is not socially desirable (or politically correct) to support him. When up against such
sizable odds, most conservatives will do one of three things:
1) Say we support someone else when we really support the president (lie);
2) tell the truth despite the social undesirability of that response;
3) Not participate in the poll (nonresponse bias).
This situation has several real consequences for Trump polling. First, for those in the
initial voter sample unwilling to participate, the pollster must replace them with people
willing to take the poll. Assuming this segment is made up largely of pro-Trump supporters,
finding representative replacements can be expensive, time-consuming and doing so increases the
sampling error rate (SER) while decreasing the validity of the poll. Sampling error rate is the
gold standard statistic in polling. It means that the results of a particular poll will vary by
no more than + x% than if the entire voter population was surveyed. All else being equal, a
poll with a sampling error rate of + 2% is more believable than one of + 4% because it has a
larger sample. Immediate polling on issues like President Trump's impeachment may provide
support to journalists with a point of view to broadcast, but with a small sample and high
sampling error rates, the results aren't worthy of one's time and consideration.
Some political pollsters often get around the necessity of repeated sampling over the course
of an election by forming a panel of people who match the demographics (party affiliation, age,
gender, race, location, etc.) of registered voting public. Polling companies often compensate
panel members and use them across the entire election cycle. Such panels are still subject to
the effects of social desirability and initial substitution error.
Interpretive Bias
Another factor to consider is the institution that is conducting the poll and those
reporting the data. Their progressive sensibilities are thumbing the scale of truth. In my
experience, polls conducted by media companies are less credible since they are often guilty of
the same biases seen in their news reports. The perfect example of this is The New York Times's
"
Poll Watch ," which provides a weekly review of their political poll. My experience is that
it reflects strongly the Times's negative opinions about President Trump and conservative ideas
and the paper's heavy political bias.
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Even the Harris Poll, when Lou was alive, suffered somewhat from this bias. Lou Harris was
the first person to conduct serious political polling on a national level and is credited with
giving John Kennedy the competitive advantage over Richard Nixon in the 1960 election. He made
political polling de require for future elections. While many people point to Nixon's twelve
o'clock shadow during the televised debate, Harris gave Kennedy the real competitive advantage
-- a more complete grasp of what issues voters thought were most important and how to tailor
his policy pitches toward that end.
I worked for Lou between 1999-2000. During the election season we would get the daily tab
read-outs. While the results were pristine, Lou would interpret those numbers on NPR and in
other media in a way that showed his clear Democrat bias. His wishful thinking that Al Gore
would beat George W. Bush would color his interpretation of what the numbers meant. In the end,
by a razon thin margin, Bush took the White House and Gore was relegated to inconvenient
environmental truths. Similarly, the 2016 election saw Trump beat favorite Hillary Clinton by a
significant electoral margin, despite
the vast majority of polls giving Mrs. Clinton the edge by between 3-5%.
Where We Go
from Here
Public opinion polling is generally not junk science although with some companies it can be.
Companies like Gallup and Pew consistently do a good job of chronicling political opinion in
America. At issue is the fact that these polling stalwarts don't work for media companies and
use large national samples from current voter rolls; they also tend to not put their thumbs on
the interpretation of data. President Trump is a president unlike any other and most of his
supporters don't participate in political polls. Even Trump's
own pollsters were surprised by his 2016 win. We would do well during these fractured times
to ignore political opinion polls for they will continue to be much to do about nothing.
Just be sure to vote your conscience and that is nobody's opinion but your own.
AntiSocial , 5 hours ago
The polls are skewed, intentionally by the pollsters and unintentionally by anyone with
the common sense not to identify as a Trump supporter.
Would you tell the Nazi Party questioner you were anti - Nazi? How do you feel about Josef
Stalin might be the last question someone would ever answer. Trump people have an
overwhelmingly justified reason to keep it to themselves. Especially in the age of digital
record keeping, and Neo fascism on the Left.
Trump vs: a man whose brain is dying should be a landslide, and could be. BUT the
democrats have succeeded in making the entire population sick to death of hearing about Trump
Is The Devil.
People en masse are not very intelligent and generally do what everyone else is doing,
whatever it is. This time they may know instinctively that the Biden regime will be American
history's biggest failure but they just don't want to hear about Trump anymore, or Covid, or
BLM, and will vote for Biden making just hoping to make it all go away. After that they will
find that when you make mistakes on purpose you usually get what you deserve.
Hawkenschpitt , 6 hours ago
There is another bias besides the article's "interpretive bias." I call it "assumption
bias."
I am one of those whom Pew samples on a regular basis, and across a wide range of issues.
In responding to their queries, I have in the back of my mind how I perceive my responses are
going to show up in the aggregations and the public reporting. It certainly is a
consideration when the survey question is double-edged. For example, given a series of
questions surrounding my perceptions of "climate change" overlooks the wide variance of what
is exactly meant by climate change: are the questions related to the natural dynamism of the
earth's climate, or are they surrogates for Anthropogenic Global Warming? Their questions
assume an agreed-upon definition, and my responses will vary, depending upon what I perceive
to be the underlying basis to the series of questions. This introduces a bias in my
responses.
A recent poll had a series of questions about my activities during these coronavirus
lock-downs: e.g. how does the lock-down affect various of my activities (charitable
donations, volunteer services, neighborly assistance)? Do I do more? Less? About the same?
The wording of the questions shows that they had made an underlying, but false, assumption
that the coronavirus affects my actions.
At the end of every Pew survey, they ask whether I perceived bias in the questions; they
also allow comments on the survey. I take them to task when I encounter these kind of things.
I can only hope that they take my remarks under consideration for their next efforts.
Homer E. Rectus , 6 hours ago
This article spends most of its words trying to convince us that polls are junk science
and then says Pew and Gallup are not. How are they not also junk if they fail to get truthful
answers?
isocratic , 6 hours ago
You have to be really special to trust polls after 2016.
Im4truth4all , 9 hours ago
Polls are just another example of the propaganda...
DrBrown314 , 10 hours ago
Public polls have been rubbish for decades. They average a 0.9% response rate. That is not
a random sample folks. If only 1 person in 100 will agree to take a poll you have a self
selecting sample. Pure garbage. The pollsters have resorted to using "invitation" polling on
the internet and claim this is a probability sample. It is not. It too is rubbish. But you
already knew that because of what the polls said in 2016 and what actually happened. qed.
Alice-the-dog , 10 hours ago
Not to mention that I'm sure there are many like me, who has lied profusely in answer to
every polling call I've gotten ever since I became eligible to vote in 1972. In fact, I
strongly suspect that Trump voters are the most likely demographic to do so.
The Herdsman , 11 hours ago
Bottom line; the polls are fake. We already saw this movie in 2016, we know how it ends.
Back in 2016 you might be fooled by the polls but we already know empirically that they are
rigged. We literally saw it all with our own eyes.... never let anyone talk you out of what
you saw.
Ex-Oligarch , 11 hours ago
This article gives way too much credit to the pollsters.
Polls are constructed to produce a desired result. The respondents selected and the
questions asked are designed to produce that result.
If they do not produce that result, the data can be altered. No one polices this sort of
manipulation, formally or informally.
Adding spin to the result when it is "interpreted" is only the last step. The narrative
promoted in this article that pollsters are honest social scientists carried away by
unconscious biases is a crock.
We have seen articles blaming the respondents for the failures of pollsters over and over
again. This narrative that Trump voters are ashamed of supporting him and so lie to the
pollsters is just more spin designed to make republicans look insincere, amoral and
devious.
Hook-Nosed Swede , 12 hours ago
Mark Twain was quoting Benjamin Disraeli and admitted he wasn't sure the PM actually ever
used that phrase. Incidentally, Twain threw his Confederate uniform away and headed West in
the middle of America's Civil War. I don't see support for Jefferson Davis or Abraham Lincoln
there.
whatisthat , 12 hours ago
I would observe every intelligent and experienced person knows that political based
polling data is suspect to corruption and used as propaganda...
hootowl , 13 hours ago
Political and media polls are used to persuade people to vote for the demonunists by
purposely exaggerating the numbers of demonunists in their polling samples to deceive the
public in order to try to swing the vote to the demonunists and/or to dissuqade conservatives
into believing it is futile to vote because the demonunists are too numerous to overcome.
Ignore the political polls because they are largely conducted by paid liars, manipulators,
and propagandists. The 2020 presidential election is easy to assess. Do you want to elect a
senile, old , treasonous, crook and his family into the WH; or a man, who may, at times make
you a little upset with his abrasive rhetoric, but can be trusted to do what he thinks is
best for his fellow Americans, while he is continuously beset by the worst political cadre of
communists, demonunists, lying MSM/academia, and anti-American deep state crooks in the
history of our great republic.
Gold Banit , 13 hours ago
This is the end for the corrupt racist DemoRat party.
The DemoRats and their fake news media are in a panic and are very desperate and this is
why they are promoting this rioting looting destroying and burning cause their internal
polling has Trump wining 48 states in a landslide....
Groupthink is all around us. Decision-making in government, in the media and at work. It's
slowly killing the world.
In the background of the most important events, the Covid-19 response and increasing tension
and conflict in the world, it might be worth looking through some of this in a bit more
detail.
I've experienced groupthink working for large organisations, most notably in my last job. We
were tasked with investigating and solving complex problems. Some technical expertise helped
but was not crucial to the role.
Critical thinking and balancing evidence and differing viewpoints was key.
Yet the organisation decided that this was no longer required and changed the whole
operating model to a one-size fits all type of call-centre. This new high-risk approach was
recommended to us by the outside consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) who were clueless
about our business.
Those of us who were experienced in the role argued that the model wouldn't work. But the
organisation ploughed on regardless. It was obvious from day one that the financials didn't
stack up which they tried to deny and later concealed.
The executive largely ignored our concerns to start but then paid limited lip-service when
the wheels started to come off. Anyway, in the end they offered us redundancy while employing
fresh university graduates to replace us. As far as I know the place is still in denial and
heading down the pan.
Groupthink is a term first used in 1972 by
social psychologist Irving L. Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which
people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own
personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.
People who are opposed to the decisions or overriding opinion of the group as a whole
frequently remain quiet, preferring to keep the peace rather than disrupt the uniformity of the
crowd'.
Groupthink is common where group members have similar backgrounds and particularly where
that group is placed under stress, resulting in irrational decision outcomes.
These are the main behaviors to watch out for:
Illusions of invulnerability lead members of the group to be overly optimistic and
engage in risk-taking.
Unquestioned beliefs lead members to ignore possible moral problems and ignore the
consequences of individual and group actions.
Rationalising prevents members from reconsidering their beliefs and causes them to
ignore warning signs.
Stereotyping leads members of the in-group to ignore or even demonise out-group members
who may oppose or challenge the group's ideas.
Self-censorship causes people who might have doubts to hide their fears or
misgivings.
"Mindguards" act as self-appointed censors to hide problematic information from the
group.
Illusions of unanimity lead members to believe that everyone is in agreement and feels
the same way.
Direct pressure to conform is often placed on members who pose questions, and those who
question the group are often seen as disloyal or traitorous.
There are two further observations I made in the workplace, particularly relevant to groups
going through major change or/and a crisis.
Firstly, they tend to swing from the status quo to the complete opposite. In our
organisation, we definitely needed some changes and tweaks but we lurched towards a model which
was completely unsuitable and unsustainable operationally and financially.
The other thing I noticed was our employers became control freaks. They started to talk down
to us and our customers like children. They introduced office slogans such as 'let's crack on'
or 'we're all in this together' and deflected from the problems of the disastrous
reorganisation towards 'celebrating diversity' in the workplace. Critical thinking, creativity
and expression were sucked out of the place.
The obvious analogy for all these behaviors is the response to Covid-19 when government
ministers were collectively panicked into making
extreme decisions on lockdown , using just one preferred source of 'expertise'.
At the same time, they sidelined dissenters and independent experts who could have offered a
calm, rational perspective and a targeted response to Covid-19.
In summing up this thinking and behavior, I'm reminded of these observations from Dr Malcolm
Kendrick and Lord Sumption about the response to Covid-19. Dr Kendrick
here :
We locked down the population that had virtually zero risk of getting any serious problems
from the disease, and then spread it wildly among the highly vulnerable age group. If you had
written a plan for making a complete bollocks of things you would have come up with this
one".
The Prime Minister, who in practice makes most of the decisions, has low political cunning
but no governmental skills whatever. He is incapable of studying a complex problem in depth.
He thinks as he speaks – in slogans.
These people have no idea what they are doing, because they are unable to think about more
than one thing at a time or to look further ahead than the end of their noses.
THE BBC – A CASE-STUDY
A large organisation which has
a high opinion of its news service . But of course, the reality is the opposite. There are
so many groupthink case-studies but the BBC is as good as any, particularly in terms of making
a bollocks of things.
The executives at the BBC and some senior correspondents will no doubt be aware that they
run a politicised agenda of bias and misinformation on a grand scale. Outsiders who've
researched their coverage will recognise this too. But this won't be obvious to the vast
majority of BBC employees, the victims of groupthink.
This came across in some of Andrew Marr's incredulous reactions to Noam Chomsky's
observations about the media during their
interview :
Andrew Marr: How can you know I'm self-censoring?
Noam Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you
say. But what I'm saying is if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where
you're sitting.
I believe the foreign affairs reporting of the BBC is where this problem stands out most.
Real expertise and impartiality has been completely absent from any reporting I've seen in
recent years.
First, while not unusual in this profession, most journalists employed by the BBC will have
a degree. Typically, when you look at today's 'top' BBC journalists, many have attended the
elite universities which tends to create a culture of like-minded people of similar
backgrounds. This has been identified as one cause of creating groupthink.
Also, the younger journalists will be impressionable within the BBC hierarchy to the views
and ways of the senior house-hold name journalists.
It's sometimes said that there aren't specific rules within the BBC and other media stating
what a journalist can and can't report and write and they generally don't knowingly mislead.
But they will learn almost instinctively to self-censor and operate within a set of unwritten,
unspoken rules and a strait-jacket narrative.
The other problem in foreign affairs reporting is that BBC journalists and most others
rarely visit the warzones. On Syria, they typically report from Lebanon or Turkey only
occasionally venturing into a government or relatively safe terrorist or Kurd held area. So
unlike previous conflicts, such as Bosnia where I remember at least a tiny degree of balance,
journalists seldom see what is actually going on.
Under the pressure of deadlines they rely on dubious sources such as
Al Qaeda terrorists and
Bellingcat and pre-determined assumptions which conveniently slot in with the anti-Assad
narrative of the BBC and establishment.
The investigations of Robert Stuart into a likely
previously staged incident involving BBC journalist s was swept under the carpet. Both
matters have been ignored because the BBC have no way or will to refute evidence which goes
against their bias.
On the other hand, the BBC are more than happy to provide extensive coverage to more
allegations against Russia and Trump from anonymous sources, providing no background or
balance within the overall of climate of related allegations which have collapsed or are
unproven.
It's well known BBC journalists are silent on malpractice. We saw this with the
Jimmy Savile scandal and decades of sexual abuse. This attitude is similar to what I
experienced with my employer who were very vocal and proud of their anti-bullying and mental
health policies. Yet when the staff were surveyed anonymously, bullying rates were through the
roof.
The other obvious signs of groupthink within the BBC, particularly during the Covid-19
crisis, is
dumbing-down and its slogan-filled website written as though their readers are idiots.
Another strong theme is a preoccupation with race and diversity, American affairs and
general tittle-tattle, to the detriment of more pressing matters such as the longer-term and
wider impact of the world's current problems.
Covid-19 and our response to it is probably the most important event of our lifetime but
there's barely a peep about whether the response is necessary and proportionate. Instead, this
totally rational viewpoint is only ever mentioned in the context of BBC articles about
Covid-19 'conspiracy theories' .
Many of the examples I've described neatly fit in with groupthink behaviors and experiences
I encountered in a large organisation.
But I think the biggest groupthink problem is with senior BBC journalists. Ultimately their
lazy arrogance has trickled down to the newer journalists and so over time, wrong behavior has
been normalised throughout.
THE BBC 'GRANDEES'
A few months ago Huw Edwards
made some comments about accusations of bias directed towards the BBC, defending the
corporation and journalists. These are some of the specific comments he made which to me showed
a complete lack of understanding of the concerns people have.
The BBC is not, to put it politely, run like some newspapers, with an all-powerful
proprietor and/or editor making his or her mark on the tone and direction of the coverage [ ]
BBC News is a rather unsettling mix of awkward, contrary and assertive people who (in my very
long experience) delight in either ignoring the suggestions of managers or simply telling
them where to get off. That's how it works."
Around this time, I also recall Edwards arguing on
Twitter on the subject and he said that it was ridiculous to say that journalists within
the BBC were willfully misleading the public. His Twitter opponent replied that this was not
what he had said and was simply stating that the BBC had fallen victim to groupthink. Edwards
just couldn't get his head past this, while continuing to attack and misrepresent BBC
critics.
This defensive attitude and stereotyping of critics is classic groupthink behavior in which
he,
Nick Robinson and others have taken part.
I used to admire John Simpson and in the 1980s he visited Iran post-revolution. He wrote a
book of the visit which I enjoyed. But in recent years, he has shown that he doesn't understand
modern geo-politics and like the BBC can only assess it in terms of the ethno-centric British
view on the world and our influence.
In this President Putin press conference he asked the most ridiculous question imaginable
which confirms he's lost the plot. His question was about Russian behavior in the world and
whether Putin wanted to create a new Cold War.
Putin
wiped the floor with him pointing out the hundreds of NATO bases and numerous wars which
put Simpson's aspersions into their rightful place.
Jeremy Bowen is another who has lost his way. I saw a
recent report from him from the position of a Christian militia unit fighting terrorists in
Syria.
Again,
BBC arrogance was on full display . His report made generalised comparisons between him
meeting Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s and these Syrian fighters, clearly indicating that he
doesn't listen and is not interested in Syrian views on western complicity and the White
Helmets.
In the usual group-speak he described the Syrian Government 'the regime' and Al Qaeda as
'rebels'. His report simply rubber-stamped the BBC coverage of the whole conflict.
This arrogance is typical of journalists who rely on their past achievements, creating an
air of gravitas to impress their audience. The reality is his reporting is based on no
substance and outdated and lazy assumptions.
THE MADNESS OF JOHN SWEENEYNEVER
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Ex-BBC nowadays, John Sweeney's arrogance is off the scale. These days he spends his time on
Twitter
attacking lockdown sceptics , like Peter Hitchens accusing him of 'killing' his Mail on
Sunday column readers with his views on Covid-19 lockdown.
Sweeney is off his trolley but the reality is he probably always was as this clip during his
BBC days shows.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mjlo4u_8g60
This behaviour, extreme as it is, certainly suggests groupthink played a big part somewhere
in his career.
AN ILLUSION OF SANITY
BBC Dateline is a current affairs TV panel discussion which I occasionally watched. The
panel which changed regularly were seemingly well qualified with foreign writers and
journalists which included Russia or Arab affairs experts.
Sitting around that table they gave the impression of people who knew what they were talking
about.
However, when you listened carefully to what they were saying, there was very little
substance. Their arguments, all based on a simple premise that Russia/Syria are bad, the West
is good, tempered with a little occasional criticism of western policy to give the illusion of
balance.
Occasionally you would have a more pro-Russia expert on but with the prevailing consensus of
the rest of the panel, his or her views would be ridiculed. It got to the point any dissenting
panel member started to self-censor to sound more credible, perhaps to remain on the panel.
This is the dilemma for any progressively minded BBC guest nowadays.
Peter Hitchens who complains the BBC never invite him on, appeared on Good Morning Britain
(GMB) recently. As is normal with many GMB debates, the discussion on Covid-19 descended to
retorts and abuse and was simply not the forum for Hitchens to get across his well thought
out points on the big picture.
But I don't think he would have fared any better on the BBC. The BBC create an illusion of
civilised, intelligent discussion but the reality is there is no substance, depth or balance.
The crucial discussion points about Covid-19 or conflict in the world don't get a hearing. The
premise and the rules are already set in stone before the guests arrive.
FINAL
THOUGHTS
There are many reasons why the world is in its current madness and on the brink of serious
conflict.
Groupthink in government, the media and the general public is probably a key factor as this
represents the thinking culture alongside and below the psychopaths and war criminals who pull
the strings.
It's almost impossible to break this cycle by chipping away at it. But it's possible a large
event connected to Covid-19 or a major war will be the catalyst which might shock us out of our
distorted view of reality.
In the meantime, independent commentators and ex-MSM like Peter Hitchens,
Anna Brees and
Tareq Haddad , are putting their careers on the line and self-interests aside. We can only
encourage others employed by the BBC and other media to be brave and do the same.
Certainly, the consequences will be far more disastrous doing nothing and not speaking
up.
In the sudden, new founded willingness to demonstrate on the streets perhaps those
participating might be better reflecting on who and what the real enemy is.
Party politics, Brexit and Black Lives Matter really don't matter.
Groupthink, escalating world conflict, All Lives Matter, including Syrians, Libyans,
Palestinians and Blacks,(including those outside of US,UK and Europe) together with the
post-Covid-19 march to an uncertain 'new normal', are the issues which matter right now.
Belief system is not chosen. The individual is indoctrinated into it via socialization process. Only few can break this bond.
Notable quotes:
"... Social or Cultural Norms are standards for behavior engendered from infancy by parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, and others in one's life. Social Norms are the shared expectations and rules that guide the behavior of people within social groups; Social Norms can go a long way toward maintaining social order. Engendered, Social or Cultural Norms can be enforced by something as subtle as a gesture, a look, or even the absence of any response at all. At the extremes, aberrant social behavior becomes a crime. One could adopt Social Norms as a part or all of their Belief System. ..."
"... Religions were an early form of Social Norms. Yet and still, all Religious Beliefs address Social Behavior, Social Norms. As with Social Norms, most, if not all, Religions have slowly evolved over time. As with Social Norms, Religious Beliefs are often engendered from infancy by parents; handed down from generation to generation. Most Religions require one's Believing; Believing that the precepts of the Religion come down to us from a supreme being or deity via a prophet or inspired teacher. Whereas science asks questions in the quest for knowledge, Abrahamic religions hold that any questioning of their particular beliefs is blasphemous, a great sin. Rather than welcome questions in re validity, religions insist that, first and foremost, adherents believe. Religions might be a part of the whole of one's Belief System. ..."
"... Can we even have stable societies without Belief Systems? Is it possible to build a Society around Science, Philosophy, and/or Reason? Can we, benefitting from Science and Philosophy: Improve the quality of our Belief Systems? Of our Religions? Can Beliefs become Informed Opinions? Will future societies' Belief Systems be based more on Science and Philosophy, and less on opinion and belief? Do they have a choice? It seems that the more successful societies have long since chosen to give the thinking of Science and Philosophy precedence over Believing. Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt. ..."
Belief Systems, these prisms through which we view the world, have been around from our earliest days. Not so long ago, the Ancient
Greeks separated the concept of what we might call belief into two concepts: pistis and doxa with pistis referring to trust and confidence
(notably akin the regard accorded science) and doxa referring to opinion and acceptance (more akin the regard accorded cultural norms).
In quest of a personal Belief System, should one: Go with the flow and adapt to the Social or Cultural Norm? Follow the Abrahamic
admonishment to first believe? Follow their own Reasoning? Or, should one look to Science?
Social or Cultural Norms are standards for behavior engendered from infancy by parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, and others
in one's life. Social Norms are the shared expectations and rules that guide the behavior of people within social groups; Social
Norms can go a long way toward maintaining social order. Engendered, Social or Cultural Norms can be enforced by something as subtle
as a gesture, a look, or even the absence of any response at all. At the extremes, aberrant social behavior becomes a crime. One
could adopt Social Norms as a part or all of their Belief System.
Most modern Religions are handed down from times long past, times before much was known about anything. Most, if not all, early
Religions were based on mythology. Later on, some Religions found more of their basis in whatever evidence and reasoning skills were
available to a people. From the earliest times, human cultures have developed some form or another of a Belief System premised on
Religion.
Humans are, uniquely it seems, given the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking in an orderly rational way; they are given
the faculty of Reason. To Reason is to use the faculty of Reason so as to arrive at conclusions; to discover, formulate, or conclude
by way of a carefully Reasoned Analysis. One might base a part or all of their Belief System on Reason.
Science can be seen as an endeavor to increase knowledge, to understand; to reduce ignorance and misunderstanding. Science encourages
active skepticism. Science, the word comes from the Latin word for knowledge, is premised on verifiable empirical evidence and best
thinking. Science employs our faculty to Reason. Belief is not a scientific criterion but is rather a bias to be filtered out of
any scientific experiment. We have confidence in the knowledge afforded us by Science to the extent that we have confidence in the
validity of the evidence and the rigor of the Reasoning, and in Scientific Methodology. Science can form the basis of one's Belief
System to the extent that they have confidence in Science.
Religions were an early form of Social Norms. Yet and still, all Religious Beliefs address Social Behavior, Social Norms. As with
Social Norms, most, if not all, Religions have slowly evolved over time. As with Social Norms, Religious Beliefs are often engendered
from infancy by parents; handed down from generation to generation. Most Religions require one's Believing; Believing that the precepts
of the Religion come down to us from a supreme being or deity via a prophet or inspired teacher. Whereas science asks questions in
the quest for knowledge, Abrahamic religions hold that any questioning of their particular beliefs is blasphemous, a great sin. Rather
than welcome questions in re validity, religions insist that, first and foremost, adherents believe. Religions might be a part of
the whole of one's Belief System.
As is to be expected, Science is often in conflict with religious beliefs. This dichotomy between the Reasoning of Science and
the Believing of Religion goes back at least to early Egypt, Greece, and India; has played, and still plays, a huge role for philosophers,
scientists, and others given to thought.
While most modern societies have moved away from a Religious dominance of their culture; at the extremes, we still have theocracies
where Religious Belief is given reign over culture and politics, and, to some extent or another, thought itself.
Preceding statute law, Religious associated Belief Systems played an important role in mankind's development. Down through the
centuries, religious behavioral standards have provided societies personal security, social stability. Religious Beliefs have long
been, are still being, codified into law.
Codified laws can also be based on 'Social Norms', on philosophy and reason ( love of learning, the pursuit of wisdom, a search
for understanding, ); or on yet other Belief Systems.
Can we even have stable societies without Belief Systems? Is it possible to build a Society around Science, Philosophy, and/or
Reason? Can we, benefitting from Science and Philosophy: Improve the quality of our Belief Systems? Of our Religions? Can Beliefs
become Informed Opinions? Will future societies' Belief Systems be based more on Science and Philosophy, and less on opinion and
belief? Do they have a choice? It seems that the more successful societies have long since chosen to give the thinking of Science
and Philosophy precedence over Believing. Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt.
He didn't say it quite that way, but that is what he meant.
This seeming need of humans to Believe can be abused. The atrocities of Colonial Spain and Portugal and the Era of Slavery were
ostensibly committed under the aegis of Christian Belief. Nazi Germany, Jonestown, ISIS, and a Trump Presidency are examples of some
of the more negative consequences of aberrant Belief Systems.
Demagogues prey on this need to Believe by telling the people what to Believe; by giving them something to Believe. Fox News,
by telling its viewers what to Believe, gives them this thing they need; something to Believe. All those arbiters of opinion we see
and read on the media are trying to sell Beliefs to their audience; an audience that needs something to Believe. Fox News has become
a Belief System for millions. So too, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Shawn Hannity.
Adolph Hitler and Jim Jones gave their needy followers something to Believe. Osama bin Laden/Al-Qaeda and ISIS gave their needy
followers something to Believe. Donald J. Trump is giving his needy followers something to Believe.
Thinking's too hard.
Obviously, existing well-meaning Belief Systems can be co-opted by unsavory persons, societies. Equally obvious, Belief Systems
can be instilled into a population. From the days of slavery and for these 150 yrs hence, whites in the Southern States have engendered
racism into their progeny. For 150 yrs now they propagated a false version of history in their schools. They created and propagated
a Belief System premised on mendacity.
Though many Belief Systems are based on Religious Tenets; we also see them based on economic models, personality cults, , even
in science. Economic dogma can be instilled in a society as a Belief System to the extent that any challenge thereto is considered
to be heretical, blasphemous. One can be born a Republican, a Baptist, or both, as were their parents and their parents' parents.
People have been being born Catholic for 2,000 yrs. Joseph Smith, a come lately, instilled.
Some positive consequences of Belief Systems include: higher moral standards, the great art and science flowing from the Renaissance;
the science, philosophy, and art from The Age of Reason/The Enlightenment. More recently: the ending of slavery, the ending of Colonialism,
the ending of apartheid, the codification of LGBT rights, and the struggle to end racism correlate with changes in Belief Systems.
Pending challenges for Belief Systems include such as freedom from hunger, access to housing, and alleviating economic disparity.
Belief Systems can carry us forward. Belief Systems can hold us back.
Is tweeting believing?
To what Belief System, if any, is this our Age of Technology attributable? Has Technology itself become a Belief System?
A very famous frog once said, "It is not easy being green."
Closely held, long-held, Beliefs are hard to give up; especially if they have been engendered via emulation, imprinting, repetition,
, since infancy. In America, the most technologically advanced economy ever known; our technology, our scientific achievements, are
all based on science. Yet today we have upwards of half of our politicians pandering to one or another Religious group that, for
the most part, denies Science. Quid pro quo: the pols get the Religious groups' vote, the Religious group gets the laws, and the
judges and justices, they want. Perhaps in part as a consequence of this support, most of this same group of politicians would govern
all the while making little effort to acquaint themselves with Science, with technology, in this day and age of Science and Technology.
Many, maybe most, of these same politicians hold fast to theories of economics and law that are, themselves, based on Belief.
John Prine, recently departed, not a frog, wrote the tune "In Spite of Ourselves".
In spite of ourselves, we humans mumble and fumble our way as is our wont.
Ron (RC) Weakley (a.k.a., Darryl for a while at EV) , June 22, 2020 8:35 am
" Darwin tells us that survival goes to those that adapt.
He didn't say it quite that way, but that is what he meant "
[No he did not say it that way because that is not what he meant. Human beings just like to misrepresent Darwin that way because
it follows along with their own narrative of innovative superiority and control of their own fate. To transpose biological mutation
from the natural selection process of biological evolution over to social evolution is a bit of a stretch, but clearly it would
favor diversity and freedom over rigid authoritarian orthodoxy. It comes with no guaranty of course, but it also more accidental
or incidental than contrived.]
Ron (RC) Weakley (a.k.a., Darryl for a while at EV) , June 22, 2020 9:18 am
Reason is not the same as logic, not pure logic at least. Impure logic is mostly sophistry. Reason is not necessarily sophistry,
but still depends upon assumptions which in life may be less reliable than in math.
Nietzsche and Machiavelli were notable philosophers of celebrated capacity for reason. By my own anti-intellectual biases I
have found them both intolerable as human beings and deceptive as arbiters of truth. Science, when correctly applied, has evolved
far beyond its roots in philosophy. I am skeptical of both incorrect science and any philosophy that I am not taking an active
roll in. Any valid philosophy should be about the present rather than the past. Kant and William James are tolerable, but still
insufficient despite their well meaning morality.
"... Failure to blame all problems suffered by minorities on racism ..."
"... Groupthink must be fun for many people. Emoting without as much as a thread of a connection to knowledge of history and careful ..."
"... But what today most scares me – a true liberal to my marrow – is the rabid mobthink on the political and ideological left. My fear is neither my forgiving nor tolerating the many prejudices and idiocies rampant on the right. I despise these unconditionally. But today – June 12th, 2020 – I fear more the prejudices and idiocies rampant on the left, if only because these seem to me to be today more widespread and socially encouraged. ..."
Reading David Henderson's recent EconLog post titled " Why Don't
People Speak Up? " prompts me to offer a more general yet personal point, which is
this:
These are, at least for me, especially scary times. I refer here not principally to the
covid lockdown (although that, too, is scary in its own way). Instead, I refer to the tsunami
of virtue signaling now drowning the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Frank
and honest disagreement with any parts of the narrative that dominates the mainstream media is
treated by too many people as proof of evil intentions or, at best, of indifference to
evil.
Underway now is something far more extreme than a mere loss of nuance. The world is now
painted exclusively in the darkest black and brightest white. (Please, do not
interpret my use of "black and white" as referring to anything other than the traditionally
used example of the starkest of distinctions.)
Failure
to blame all problems suffered by minorities on racism – failure to denounce
loudly and angrily American bourgeois society's allegedly inherent bigotry, greed, and
rapaciousness – failure to acknowledge that America today is a brutal and cruel place for
all but the elite, and hellish especially for blacks, women, and gay, bi, and transgender
people – is frequently interpreted as sympathy for dark-ages-like superstition and
prejudices.
Equally bad, in the eyes of the Virtuous, are attempts at offering historical perspective.
Even if accompanied by a sincere and express acknowledgement that serious problems remain, the
mere suggestion that at least some of these problems were more widespread and worse in the past
– the slightest hint that over time there's been some real improvement for anyone but
white, heterosexual, high-income Christian males – is treated as evidence of blindness or
malignant bias.
Groupthink must be fun for many people. Emoting without as much as a thread of a
connection to knowledge of history and careful consideration of the facts is the
practice of very many people today. And it's de rigueur now to treat one's emotions
– along with rioting-crowds' outrage and passions – as sources of understanding and
knowledge more reliable than an actual understanding of history and economics.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, this irrationality centered in the political left spawns
irrationality on the right. I've heard it said that George Floyd wasn't killed by Derek
Chauvin, or that Floyd deserved his fate. I hear it said that any success at reforming
government police departments would undermine law and order. Nonsense, of course. Pure
nonsense.
But what today most scares me – a true liberal to my marrow – is the rabid
mobthink on the political and ideological left. My fear is neither my forgiving nor tolerating
the many prejudices and idiocies rampant on the right. I despise these unconditionally. But
today – June 12th, 2020 – I fear more the prejudices and idiocies rampant on the
left, if only because these seem to me to be today more widespread and socially
encouraged.
Fauci clearly is a charlatan, a researcher who long ago became a politician and now cheats
like Pompeo. His mask wearng fiacto characterize him as a person who is unable to admin that he
was wrong. and admin the he lied in order to cover the shortage of masks for medical personnel
and complete unpreparedness of the country to the epidemic.
He also look like a boy who cried "wolf,wolf" way to many time, when no wolf was around.
This guy did absolutely nothing to understand and prepare for the epidemic from January to
Late March and then pushed for excessive measures like total quarantine. he should be fired for
incompetence. He is implicitly guilty for Ciumo idiotism in NY (horror hospital beds are running
out we need million of ventilators) and similar idiotism in NJ and other parts of the country,
which unnecessary closed businesses where wearing masks would suffice.
This charlatan never admitted his role in promotion of "gain of function" experiments and
financing them in Wuhan biolab.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the polarising director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, slammed everyday Americans for refusing to go along with 'authority' on
medical matters, and accused people of 'amazing denial' when it comes to 'truth'.
Speaking on a podcast called Learning Curve , produced by the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), Fauci charged that "unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science
bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not
understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority."
"So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it,
who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and
that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth, " Fauci asserted.
"It's amazing sometimes the denial there is, it's the same thing that gets people who are
anti-vaxxers , who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate
the safety of vaccines," Fauci proclaimed, adding "That's really a problem."
Fauci also has a long history of being the front man for a network of powerful Big Pharma
and Big Medicine interests, pushing vaccines
and medicines in a clear conflict of interest.
* * *
Following Fauci's blame-scaping the anti-science bias of (implicitly ignorant) Americans,
Thiel Capital MD Eric Weinstein unleashed a barrage of uncomfortable truths on Twitter
How dare this man.
Do you want to know why they are learning to hate scientists for real Dr Fauci?
Because your group lies about science & your ilk drove the truth telling scientists
out of their rightful places inside the institutions calling bullshit on your lying about
masks. pic.twitter.com/VJLTGT0GOe
Scientists like me who don't go along with cowards & crowds cannot disrupt your
group's lies because we are outside. Imagine if I was tweeting from the National Science
Foundation or MIT. It would be a national news story about how your cabal lies and degrades
faith in science: https://t.co/leYsCerG3o
"But you prattle on. We will one day find out later that you suspected all along that the
Wuhan BS-L 4 virology lab might well be involved, but that you didn't say so for this or that
political reason.
Because you aren't a scientist. You play one. You are an MD turned actor.
Even when I agree with the conclusions of your institutional pseudo science cabal, you
cheat to get to our shared conclusions on vaccines, viruses, climate, etc.
So you want people to believe in science again? Ok. Call-yourself-out. Admit that your
crowd **lied** about our masks.
And not to put too fine a point on it: your group is sitting in chairs reserved for people
who don't do what your cabal just did.
You just don't have what it takes sir. I'm sorry. But science isn't acting. It's not a
beauty pagent. It's not politics.
Science requires courage ."
y_arrow 1
Whoa Dammit , 2 minutes ago
Like the other many things that Mr.Fauci has gotten wrong, he fails to recognize the truth
that Americans don't believe him
Boing_Snap , 6 minutes ago
People don't believe Fauci, never been in the real world, vaccine patent holder,
TruthHunter , 6 minutes ago
Fauci, you're not a scientist. You're a politician...stop whining when you're treated like
one
JoePorkChop , 6 minutes ago
Are scientists and authority some incorruptible special breed? A very skeptical eye
towards any power structure is very neccesary, always.
artytom , 6 minutes ago
Good man Weinstein.
HowardBeale , 7 minutes ago
Is he phucking joking? Fauci has no idea what Fauci will say tomorrow...
SuperareDolo , 8 minutes ago
I don't know if it would surprise Fauci to know that the majority of epidemiologists are
among those he says, "Don't believe in science, or authority."
Combining those two terms is very telling. Science is skeptical empiricism, not belief.
It's kind of self-contradictory to believe in conclusions, since he's not talking about
belief in the validity of skeptical empiricism. He's talking about his authority, which he
wants people to believe in, because he's a scientist. That's technocracy, and nobody should
accept that.
diogi23 , 9 minutes ago
Fauci is the John Bolton of science. Why does Trump keep him around??
aelfheld , 6 minutes ago
Science is a process, not 'revealed wisdom'.
I d----d sure don't put much faith in scientists who try to speak ex cathedra .
ze_vodka , 11 minutes ago
I require evidence based reasoning to be presented for Science...
and
I require that those who seek to be called an "Authority" demonstrate the ability to lead
well with kindness and humility.
So...
I firmly reject arbitrary Totalitarianism... which is exactly what Fauci espouses and
proclaims.
Demystified , 12 minutes ago
Fauci is a medical MEATBALL, his credibility is in the toilet. A Flush is needed
urgently.
ze_vodka , 11 minutes ago
I require evidence based reasoning to be presented for Science...
and
I require that those who seek to be called an "Authority" demonstrate the ability to lead
well with kindness and humility.
So...
I firmly reject arbitrary Totalitarianism... which is exactly what Fauci espouses and
proclaims.
Demystified , 12 minutes ago
Fauci is a medical MEATBALL, his credibility is in the toilet. A Flush is needed
urgently.
YouThePeople , 13 minutes ago
Fauxi is a corrupted paid stooge...and a bad actor.
Slayer666 , 14 minutes ago
Old School Americans aren't very fond of blindly following authority. They/We have a
rebellious streak. That's why the globalists/NWO want to import a new, more docile
population. But if America falls, don't expect the rest of the world to remain the same. Yeah
I know a lot of people would welcome that, but don't be too sure that what comes into that
power vacuum wouldn't be way worse.
hugin-o-munin , 6 minutes ago
There is a big difference in allowing the US economy to fail and having the US fail. Two
different things. In fact I think the best remedy to the current hyper corrupt system is to
let the dollar implode. That removes these fvckers' power in a clean sweep move and then
something more genuine and honest can take its place.
Distant_Star , 15 minutes ago
What ********. I believe in Newton's laws of motion. I believe in the laws of
thermodynamics and many other scientific rules. I believe in the periodic table. I believe in
Avogadro's number and Boyle's Law.
I don't believe in the "China model" that Fauchi, the corrupt WHO, the inept CDC with
their flawed Chinese test kits and the progressive politicians worshipped from day 1. I don't
believe it was necessary to lock down whole populations. I don't believe in the political
jihad against hydroxychloriquine because Trump said it might have value, mounds of anecdotal
evidence supported its use, and many physicians endorse it.
I don't subscribe to the globalist horesehit from the Gates Foundation with his push for
undeveloped vaccines and quantum dots, and statements that, "we have to vaccinate 6 billion
people." I have contempt for craven people who demand that everyone else be locked down for
their benefit, and whine about how "We can never go back to the way it was. Boo-hoo."
I question the ever changing, often contradictory narrative on this virus. I heap scorn on
their wildly inaccurate models that caused this economic and social disaster. I call
horse**** on the "scientists" and progressive authoritarians who joyfully locked down
populations and businesses when it was not necessary. These same fools then remained totally
silent when thugs, demonstrators, looters, arsonists, anarchists and mobs filled the street
for a "higher cause." I condemn those such as the "hero" Andrew Cuomo who put infected people
into nursing homes where old and vulnerable people died by the thousands for no reason. I
guess that makes me and millions of others science "deniers." On the other hand, maybe
ordinary people know a ship of floundering fools when they see one, and express genuine
concern. You don't need scientific method to see a disaster in motion. Screw Fauchi.
theboxseat , 12 minutes ago
I believe in:
Fool me once shame on you...
Darn who can remember Dubya's version of this
LA_Goldbug , 11 minutes ago
He's busy looking for WMD with Colon Powell in Iraq. He'll be back in 50 yrs. because it
is there and he will not stop looking.
ken , 9 minutes ago
Lies, just remember the lies, and that stupid look on his face while he tells them.
hugin-o-munin , 5 minutes ago
“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in
Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you
can't get fooled again.”
Rocbottom , 15 minutes ago
SCIENCE doesn’t say jack ****. SCIENTISTS do. And this “scientist” is a
PROPAGANDIST not a doctor. THAT IS WHY no one believes what he says. He’s a paid
liar.
SteveNYC , 18 minutes ago
Joke of the day "American don't believe authority"
Tony, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? When you've been lied to, on a massive scale since 2001,
additional lies of which were put on steroids starting in 2016 - you'd be a FOOL to believe
"authority" or "EXPERTS" like you pal.
It's over.
k3g , 11 minutes ago
Lives Matter.
hugin-o-munin , 10 minutes ago
You must be a racist. :)
ken , 3 minutes ago
...not so much according to the Georgia Guidestones, the BMGF, U.S. Foreign Policy, and
the sacrificial babies used in blackmail to force it, by Israel.
sun tzu , 21 minutes ago
What science told the states in the northeast to send thousands of infected patients into
nursing homes?
Trezrek500 , 22 minutes ago
Science isn't about blind ideology.
B52Minot , 23 minutes ago
Faucci is nothing but a spoiled brat....and now he has a tantrum because Americans could
care less about what he says....why?? he wonders....Because Faucci has shown us the dark side
of science....how it can ruin you if you make the wrong decision about its true validity. If
we knew that the original estimate of deaths from COVID was a fraud Trump would never had
declared an emergency and agreed with a shut down....This entire COVID response has been one
big disaster....and a fraud with Faucci out there thinking he runs the place...
Time after time HE HAS BEEN WRONG..and his trust in the WHO and CHINA too has been
corrupted if not a fraud too...SO WHY IS HE STILL TRYING TO TELL US WHAT TO DO....Because he
thinks he is some sort of expert yet so flawed it oozes out of every pore...and NO ONE should
listen to him on anything. Just another crying kid having a tantrum....GO HOME and retire
Faucci...you really are worthless...and shut the hell up.
sun tzu , 24 minutes ago
Science is the truth, but scientists can and do lie.
BAMCIS , 24 minutes ago
Science has a PR problem. Mainly due to it only being accountable to itself and the fact
that for all it lofty aspirations, Science has not been able to achieve escape volatility
from the bounds of corruption that only Big Money can impose.
Plus Americans are culturally hard wired to view Science as an enemy. Luke, a dumb hick
farmer who used his faith and tenacity to destroy the crown jewel of the evil technocrats,
namely the Death Star. In most (if not all) James Bond movies the villains are mad scientists
or industrialists using science for "evil". In "The Hunger Games", Katniss Everdean is again
a bumpkin who wages war against the fancy people with their shiny tech in their decadent
cities. Its the Urban/Rural dichotomy. Same as it ever was.
bh2 , 27 minutes ago
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -- Feynman
vampirekiller , 29 minutes ago
No one believes a queertard that attempted to attribute a 100% preventable queer disease
confined to the queer population to the majority heterosexual population. No one believes a
queertard when current empirical data refutes his fearmongering.
Lux , 29 minutes ago
I'm still wondering why Fauci is even alive. Then again, the entire Pentagon is populated
by traitors with offshore bank accounts, so..
smacker , 33 minutes ago
Someone needs to tell Fauci the reason why people don't believe the science is because it
keeps changing and contradicts itself.
There is no centre of competence on this virus and conflicting advice, including from
him.
Voice-of-Reason , 35 minutes ago
Science originally said we didn't need masks and now we do. The problem I have with Mr
Fauci's form of science is that it is too easily manipulated by politics.
adr , 38 minutes ago
Hey Fauchole, is this science?
Upwards of 60% of people have natural immunity to Covid due to antibodies produced from
four or more common coronaviruses.
I reject your "science" and replace it with real research.
Well, yeah Dr. Fausti. We certainly did believe you. We didn't want to. But we are playing
along. You know like at work. And like living like free citizens in a supposedly free
country. By obliging you with shut-ins and shutdowns. And you terrorizing and bankrupting
millions. Yeah I think we played along. And had faith in government and science. Cuz you said
so. And would jail or punish those who did not. Take kids away. Send swat. Stuff like that.
Had bills to pay. Those bills just keep on coming. And the nerve of those people wanting to
like pay them! On time!
Government is only effective with the consent of the governed. You should know that. You
should also say something about how that was shown to be very selective enforcement. Cuz
riots or something. Do or don't matter? Confusing. They apparently can live of a billion
dollars from bank of America and starkbucks and Wal-Mart. Or just not pay their bills at all.
Or work. At a job. Where you have to show up on time, wear a mask and not burn **** down.
Stuff like that.
You are throwing a tantrum. Because everyone, not quite everyone. Still doesn't obey you.
Enough. To willingly line up for your vaccine. When it is ready. Of course. Seeing a little
scary times ahead for your authority. Who do you answer to Dr. Fausti? Are they getting a
little hot under your collar? Cuz science, right? Is what you most believe in. Not like
something else. And as long as we are here. Why do you work for Trump? Or more to the point.
Why does he employ you? Very confusing. Since he wants to maga. Supposedly.
Hal n back , 41 minutes ago
I wonder how he treats his subordinates who have different views
R2U2 , 40 minutes ago
Webster’s Dictionary, 1828:
JES'UITISM, noun
1. Cunning, deceit; hypocrisy; prevarication; deceptive practices to effect a purpose
"Two cankers are biting the very entrails of the United States today: the Romish and the
Mormon priests. Both are quietly at work to form a people of the most abject, ignorant and
fanatical slaves, who will recognize no other authority but their supreme pontiffs. Both are
aiming at the destruction of our schools, to raise themselves upon our ruins. Both shelter
themselves under our grand and holy principles of liberty of conscience, to destroy that very
liberty of conscience, and bind the world before their heavy and ignominious yoke.
The Mormon and the Jesuit priests are equally the uncompromising enemies of our
constitution and our laws; but the more dangerous of the two is the Jesuit—the Romish
priest, for he knows better how to conceal his hatred under the mask of friendship and public
good; he is better trained to commit the most cruel and diabolical deeds for the glory of
God.”
--Abraham Lincoln, 1864; "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,” Charles Chiniquy,
1888.
The CIA is roughly half Mormon and half Roman Catholic.
Stan Smith , 43 minutes ago
The reason people don't trust institutions is because they fail us time and time
again.
All why sucking up resources for research (good) and making sure people inside the system
are taken care of (less good).
The more Fauci talks the more he sounds like Al Gore. Not a good thing.
Lying about masks was bad. But lying about HC + Zinc is worse, at least in my mind.
To be fair to Fauci, that industry isnt the only one filled with dishonest schiesters.
They are everywhere.
Institutions aren't trusted because they've earned the distrust over decades. It's well
earned.
Sid Davis , 46 minutes ago
Fauci is a complete fraud.
He graduated from medical school and then spent 2 years working in hospitals. That is the
extent of his medical experience. For the last 50 years he has been a bureaucrat. He
obviously has a conflict of interest because of his ties to the Gates Foundation, Big Pharma,
and the Wuhan Lab where this mess started.
This guy belongs at the end of a rope, not at the top of the response team to this
scamdemic.
He is a sociopathic conman, and not even very good at that.
Stillontheroad , 50 minutes ago
Hey Fucci. How much money to you stand to gain from all your patents, all granted when you
worked for the Federal Government but because you had friends in Congress a law was passed
giving you the proceeds from those patents when in the real world said patents belong to the
USA
Voice-of-Reason , 52 minutes ago
Mr. Fauci,
We believe science. We just don't believe governmental controlled shutdowns are the answer
to this pandemic and that it ultimately does more damage to the economy than it protects
people from Covid19. And yes, we do not believe authority because they lie constantly, are
corrupt and generally are incompetent.
Krink26 , 53 minutes ago
When authorities weaponized everything including science, for political gain, people will
not trust your authority.
VideoEng_NC , 53 minutes ago
"Speaking on a podcast..."
This is the level of media Fauci seems to be relegated to plus his ever-welcoming friends
for interviews with the MSM. Would appear Hungarian Pengos here on ZH was correct on his
05/21 post regarding the ulterior motives behind the announcement of Pence staffers getting
the Wuhan virus making Fauci self isolate...for good. He doesn't even get to bake tree
cookies.
Longdriver , 1 hour ago
Fauci's true colors are being shown now. He's getting testy because he is watching his
future personal profits go up in smoke in controlled vaccines.
DoctorFix , 1 hour ago
"Dont believe science"? Sure, Dr. Falsey! I believe in the "science" you represent. The
science of lies and criminal deception. The science of propaganda and manipulation. The kind
of sciences that you wholeheartedly embrace.
k3g , 1 hour ago
Fauci's turn came, and he proved himself to be incompetent, a bureaucrat, a fraud.
**** you Tony. You flat out suck.
What is The Hedge , 1 hour ago
What Fauci is really saying is that Americans are no longer accepting the false narratives
promoted by those in charge. Maybe there's hope.
Lumberjack , 1 hour ago
Mr. Fauci;
I’m your age and have a pretty strong background in engineering, science and some
other practical skills.
Over the last 30 years science has been bastardized by politicization and liberalism has
finally reached the point of teaching kids 2+3= anything they want.
Political science is based on fraud and bull$hit and now the real deal is as contaminated
as Fukushima.
Your comment about “authotity” screams of idiocracy. Try watering your crops
with gatorade and fertilizing with MDMA.
I know and knew real Phd’s who were real scientists and that’s when science
was based on theory, tests, duplication and verification.
That is no longer the case. It’s idiots like you, book smart field stupid (
I’m being kind with book smart), The only thing you a$$wipes are looking for is 10
minutes of fame, a bunch of money and molesting your interns and students with big boobs that
need a passing grade.
When as usual your astrological prognotications are bad (which are 99% of the time), you
find convenient parties to blame.
It’s time to put real science into both science and leadership.
I have high hopes that this will happen sooner rather than later.
Kid’s take note and see how many times they claimed eggs are bad for you and then
they said eggs are good for you. That goes for many other items and issues too.
Yesireebob, You screwed the pooch Mr. Fauci and I’m calling PETA right now.
Lj
NotAGenius , 1 hour ago
Why the hell does ZH give Fauci the incredibly dishonest cruel idiot any venue. He's a
liar and is the cause of the destruction of the USA by telling Trump we'd have a million
covid-19 deaths unless it was shut down and everyone stayed home. So Trump wiped out the
country and all of our lives on Fauci's b.s. That is what Fauci is, at best. Do not give him
any public platform to lie even more yet to the cowardly stupid clueless Americans. Fauci
does not deserve any recognition or platform for lies anywhere in the USA. But he's given the
stage because the government apparently supports his lies. They are all guilty of treason and
mass destruction of civilization. I want both executed at best, or at least humiliated with
public avoidance.
brian91145 , 1 hour ago
he is owned by the Rockefllers and Gates. That's a fact
radical-extremist , 1 hour ago
Scientists that can never bring themselves to say "I don't know." , are not
scientists...they're blathering charlatans pumping their brand and feeding their egos. Fauci
is much like Paul Krugman. He speaks with such confidence and certainty about everything,
that surely he must be right. And when proven wrong will do it again with the opposing view,
ignoring the fact he ever said it to begin with...as if there's no internet.
SurfingUSA , 1 hour ago
Yes true scientists are extremely humble and cautious, bec. they know how much they don't
know.
FragNasty , 1 hour ago
Hee hee, greatings to all.
Science is meant to be based on evidence rather than faith. Maybe Fauci himself doesn't
believe in science with his inclination to the contrary. "Americans don't believe ..." The
man is a maniac! Maybe he is accidentally confessing to the state of "science" as a
counterpart to religion in it's role as an ideological control mechanism within the state of
politics today, more precisely the breakdown of such a control mechanism.
Often is man's best wisdom to be silent , 1 hour ago
Marionettes can easily be transformed into hanged persons. The ropes are already
there.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 1 hour ago
He is right...
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political
and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is
just as good as your knowledge.
~ Isaac Asimov
But he is also one of the reasons that the anti-intellectual movement can maintain
momentum. Too many of the "authoritative voices" in positions of power are total
charlatans.
Itchy and Scratchy , 1 hour ago
This yap flappin’ freak show in on the board of Gates controlled WHO & various
other big pharma boards! His crooked snoot is buried so far into the cash flow trough it
ain’t even funny! Embezzlement poster child!
Handful of Dust , 1 hour ago
"Fauci the Fraud" will go down in history who will not remember him kindly.
Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago
Fauci doesn't seem to understand WE DON'T BELIEVE HIM ANY LONGER!
SuperareDolo , 6 minutes ago
You never should have believed him. He was behind the attempt to steal credit for the
discovery of HIV by his underling, Gallo. There's a long story there.
Yog Soggoth , 1 hour ago
I believe Fauci gave the Wuhan lab $3.7 million.
We_The_People , 1 hour ago
That’s not entirely true, we just believe fraudulent agenda driven traitors like
you!
Fauci’s estimates were so off that the only 2 conclusions can be formed, gross
negligence or intentional deception, either way he has zero credibility left!
A strange mixture of Black nationalism with Black Bolshevism is a very interesting and pretty alarming phenomenon. It proved to
be a pretty toxic mix. But it is far from being new. We saw how the Eugène Pottier famous song
International lines "We have been naught we
shall be all." and "Servile masses arise, arise." unfolded before under Stalinism in Soviet Russia.
We also saw Lysenkoism in Academia before, and it was not a pretty picture. Some Russian/Soviet scientists such as Academician Vavilov
paid with their life for the sin of not being politically correct. From this letter it is clear that the some departments
already reached the stage tragically close to that situation.
Lysenkoism was "politically correct" (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with the broader Marxist doctrine.
Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living
under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans. Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man
"Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine. Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with
faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award. Lysenko and his
followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting
the advance of the new modern Marxism."
The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory
Notable quotes:
"... In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. ..."
"... any cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders . Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques. ..."
"... The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians ..."
"... Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict . This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. ..."
"... If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? ..."
"... Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history , and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position , which is no small number. ..."
"... The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. ..."
"... The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn't led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. ..."
"... Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices - as do Nigerian Americans , who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department . The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession. ..."
"... Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades ; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations. ..."
"... The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes , carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed. ..."
"... MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today . We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing? ..."
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely,
and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job,
and likely all future jobs in my field.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity
of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.
In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative
narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice
system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of
the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and
white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself,
such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject
a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders
. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the
form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should
be vigorously challenged by historians . Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration
of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and
our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.
Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi
Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion
of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However,
if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it
is anti-black .
Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see
that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated
at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict . This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple
jurisdictions in multiple countries.
And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation
that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt .
If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian
Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish
Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of
Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed
in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority
myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam.
These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to
silence and oppress discourse . Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are , common
to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently
exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.
Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history , and the department is
being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position.
Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those
of us in a precarious position , which is no small number.
I personally don't dare speak out against the BLM narrative , and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the
administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear
danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my
job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches
for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message
is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires
explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.
No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence.
This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the
point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention
of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders . Home invaders like George Floyd . For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality
of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.
For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.
The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical
claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn't led to equivalent
rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively.
Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform
white Americans on nearly all SES indices - as do Nigerian Americans , who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to
point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department . The explanation
is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation
is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.
Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention,
and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter,
an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately
redirected to ActBlue Charities , an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates.
Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American
cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis
itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades ; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat
administrations.
The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden
statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics
which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election
campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence . This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement
for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent
in academic circles . I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.
The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this
damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes
, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves
in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves,
many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity.
Fiat lux, indeed.
There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called 'race hustlers': hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking
the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal
political entrepreneurship.
Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth , we can regard ourselves as
a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at
harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically
segregationist.
MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today . We are training leaders who intend, explicitly,
to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively
racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global
political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?
As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was
a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at
her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children , playing no part in their
support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer,
a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors .
And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his
name to virtual sainthood . A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department,
corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA,
he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise . Americans are being
socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist . A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying
with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.
I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid,
as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.
It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color . My family have been
personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The
humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM , that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life,
is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward
in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively
on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating . No other group in America is systematically
demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping
and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.
No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites.
If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely
be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional
promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda
and the Party's uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his
disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd's death
and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything
other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end .
I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she
is free. play_arrow
Blacks will always be poor and fucked in life when 75% of black infants are born to single most likely welfare dependent mothers...
And the more amount of welfare monies spent to combat poverty the worse this problem will grow...
taketheredpill , 37 minutes ago
Anonymous....
1) Is he really a Professor at Berkeley?
2) Is he really a Professor anywhere?
3) Is he really Black?
4) Is he really a He?
LEEPERMAX , 44 minutes ago
BLM is an international organization. They solicit tax free charitable donations via ActBlue. ActBlue then funnels billions
of dollars to DNC campaigns. This is a violation of campaign finance law and allows foreign influence in American elections.
CRM114 , 44 minutes ago
I've pointed this out before:
In 2015, after the Freddie Gray death Officers were hung out to dry by the Mayor of Baltimore (yes, her, the Chair of the DNC
in 2016), active policing in Baltimore basically stopped. They just count the bodies now. The clearance rate for homicides has
dropped to, well, we don't know because the Police refuse to say, but it appears to be under 15%. The homicide rate jumped 50%
almost immediately and has stayed there. 95% of homicides are black on black.
The Baltimore Sun keeps excellent records, so you can check this all for yourself.
Looking at killings by cops; if we take the worst case and exclude all the ones where the victim was armed and independent
witnesses state fired first, and assume all the others were cop murders, then there's about 1 cop murder every 3 years, which
means that since has now stopped and the homicide rate's gone up...
For every black man now not murdered by a cop, 400 more black men are murdered by other black men.
taketheredpill , 46 minutes ago
"As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used
to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude
that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black ."
It is the RATIO of UNARMED BLACK MALES KILLED to UNARMED WHITE MALES KILLED in RELATION TO % OF POPULATION. RATIO.
RATIO. UNARMED.
BLACK % POPULATION 13% BLACK % UNARMED MEN KILLED 37%
WHITE % POPULATION 74% BLACK % UNARMED MEN KILLED 45%
Is there a trend of MORE Black people being killed by police?
No. But there is an underlying difference in the numbers that is bad.
>>>>> As of 2018, Unarmed Blacks made up 36% of all people UNARMED killed by police. But black people make up 13% of the (unarmed)
population.
There's a massive Silent Majority of Americans , including black Americans, that are fed up with this absurd nonsense.
While there's a Vocal Minority of Americans : including Democrats, the media, corporations and race hustlers, that wish to
continue to promulgate a FALSE NARRATIVE into perpetuity...because it's a lucrative industry.
Gaius Konstantine , 57 minutes ago
A short while ago I had an ex friend get into it with me about how Europeans (whites), were the most destructive race on the
planet, responsible for all the world's evil. I pointed out to him that Genghis Khan, an Asian, slaughtered millions at a time
when technology made this a remarkable feat. I reminded him the Japanese gleefully killed millions in China and that the American
Indian Empires ran 24/7 human sacrifices with some also practicing cannibalism. His poor libtard brain couldn't handle the fact
that evil is a human trait, not restricted to a particular race and we parted (good riddance)
But along with evil, there is accomplishment. Europeans created Empires and pursued science, The Asians also participated in
these pursuits and even the Aztec and Inca built marvelous cities and massive states spanning vast stretches of territory. The
only race that accomplished little save entering the stone age is the Africans. Are we supposed to give them a participation trophy
to make them feel better? Is this feeling of inferiority what is truly behind their constant rage?
Police in the US have been militarized for a long time now and kill many more unarmed whites than they do blacks, where is
the outrage? I'm getting the feeling that this isn't really about George, just an excuse to do what savages do.
lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago
"Truth is treason in an empire of lies."
George Orwell
You know that the reason he is anonymous is that Berkley would strip him of his teaching credentials and there would be multiple
attempts on his life...
Ignatius , 1 hour ago
" The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people . There are virtually no marches
for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The
message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence
requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly
is."
A former fed who trained the police in Buffalo believes the elderly protester who was hospitalized after a cop pushed him
to the ground "got away lightly" and "took a dive," according to a report.
The retired FBI agent, Gary DiLaura,
told The Sun
he thinks there's no chance Buffalo officers will be convicted of assault over the
now-viral video showing the
longtime
peace activist Martin Gugino fall and left bleeding on the ground.
" I can't believe that they didn't deck him. If that would have been a 40-year-old guy going up there, I guarantee you they'd
have been all over him, " DiLaura said.
" He absolutely got away lightly. He got a light push and in my humble opinion, he took a dive and the dive backfired because
he hit his head. Maybe it'll knock a little bit of sense into him, " added the former fed, who trained Buffalo police on firearms
and defensive tactics, according to the report...
It's a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one [is]
demoralization ; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number
of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of
the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American
students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).
The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals)
are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system.
You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. T hey are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain
stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you
prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other
words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need
another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting
in favor and in the interests of United States society.
Yuri Bezmenov
American Psycho , 16 minutes ago
This article was one of the most articulate and succinct rebuttals to the BLM political power grab. I too have been calling
these "allies" useful idiots and I am happy to hear this professor doing the same. Bravo professor!
If you are among the
two-thirds of Americans opposing calls by Black Lives Matter to defund the police, think
twice about saying so in public.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago is the latest example of what you might face. On Friday
it cut ties with a prominent University of Chicago economics professor, Harald Uhlig, who was a
scholar at the bank, as
reported by the Wall Street Journal. The Chicago Fed said it terminated Mr. Uhlig's
contract effective that day.
What was Uhlig's sin?
A series of tweets criticizing Black Lives Matter's call to defund police departments.
BLM had "just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice," Uhlig
tweeted.
"Time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest,
respectful conversations about it all We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need
to train them better," he wrote.
If you think those comments seem harmless, you are not alone. Beyond the two-thirds of
Americans who tell pollsters they oppose calls for defunding, you have to wonder how many more
are afraid to answer polls honestly.
Uhlig also knocked those who tried to redefine what defunding means by claiming "it just
means funding schools (who isn't in favor of that?!?)." He was absolutely right to do that.
We wrote just this week why calls to defund mean just that, which was affirmed by a New
York Times column
Friday headlined, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police."
The Chicago Fed wasn't the first to go after Uhlig for his tweets. Earlier reactions were
covered by both the
Wall Street Journal and
Business Insider , reactions the National Review
described as a mob attack on academic freedom.
Over the past few years we learned to expect, even to shrug off, charges of racism or
insensitivity over even the most sensible or innocuous comments.
What's new just in the past month, however, is far more frightening.
It's the surrender by so many companies and institutions to intimidation by the most radical
voices, such as those who would defund the police. Contributions to Black Lives Matter are
pouring in from corporate America and dissenting voices are being muzzled and punished. The
Federal Reserve Bank properly guards its independence, and its local banks pride themselves on
independence even from one another. But for the Chicago Fed, that independence apparently ends
when the mob shows up.
These are terrifying times for reasons far beyond law and order. This is about freedom of
expression and America itself.
Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate
educational training
Seems rather typical of those making policy, not knowing much about the area they're
assigned to. If a person did know Arabic and had an understanding of the culture they
wouldn't get hired as they'd be viewed with suspicion, suspected of being sympathetic to
Middle Easterners. How and why these neocons can come back into government is puzzling and
one wonders who within the establishment is backing them. Judging by the quotes her father
certainly seems deranged and not someone to be allowed anywhere near any policy making
positions.
Flynn also seems to be a dolt what with his 'worldwide war against radical Islam'. Someone
should clue him in that much of this radical Islam has been created and stoked by the US who
hyped up radical Islam, recruiting and arming them to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Bin
Laden was there, remember? Flynn, a general, is unaware of this? Islamic jihadists are
America's Foreign Legion and have been used all over the Muslim world, most recently in
Syria. Does this portend war with Iran? Possibly, but perhaps Trump wouldn't want to go it
alone but would want the financial support of other countries. They've probably war-gamed it
to death and found it to be a loser.
The coronavirus reminds us that the gap between what we think we know and what we
actually do know is enormous.
Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response
coordinator, shows off charts with members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing in
response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the
White House on Tuesday, March 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post via Getty Images)
May 13, 2020
|
12:01 am
Matt
Purple St. Louis Federal Reserve watchers, rejoice! And yes, I'm talking to both of you. The St.
Louis Fed is freshly relevant this week thanks to a paper it
published back in 2007 that examined the economic effects of the 1918 Spanish flu. Drawing
on old newspaper articles, local surveys, and other studies -- national data back then was
scarce -- the report found that the damage done to businesses by the outbreak was both severe
and short-lived. The impact on the next generation, however, was longer-lasting. Those in utero
during the pandemic went on to attain less education and lower incomes than had previous
generations.
What we wouldn't give for that kind of glimpse from the future today. The coronavirus has
killed hundreds of thousands while sledgehammering the economy, leaving close to a quarter of
working-age Americans either unemployed or
underemployed. And we still have no idea how it will end. It may be that this recession is
similar to the one in 1918, cutting deeply but easing rapidly. Or it may be that we're in for
another lost decade of stubborn unemployment and stagnant growth. It may be that the virus is
seen off this summer, remembered as a frightening but ultimately brief ordeal. Or it may be
that it lurks into the autumn, whereupon it comes roaring back.
We don't know, and we hate that we don't know. Consequently a cottage industry has sprung up
around our uncertainty, hawking models, projections, expert opinions. These things have valid
scientific purposes, of course, but thrown down the rabbit hole of our popular discourse,
they've taken on a kind of hysterical clairvoyance, supposedly able to tell us what's coming
and how we should respond. With climate change, we grew accustomed to the idea that scientists
could see into the future. Now we're demanding they do the same with the coronavirus. That's
despite the fact that so far, none of these projections have demonstrated any greater
predictive ability than your average call to Miss Cleo.
Take the government's official death toll projections. Back in January, the White House was
largely complacent over the coronavirus, with President Trump comparing it to the seasonal flu
and his health secretary
saying that Americans need "not worry for their own safety." Then in late March, the
pendulum swung towards apocalypse. Actually, the White House said,
200,000 Americans could die. Two weeks later, the death toll projection fell
to a far rosier 60,000 , and the country breathed a sigh of relief ahead of Easter weekend.
Then the projections ticked upwards yet again. Today, IHME, the White House's principal
modeler, predicts that 147,000 Americans will be killed
by August 4.
Some of the issue here may be the choice of models. IHME has been
criticized by epidemiologists , as have the Imperial College modelers in Britain (who have
lately been distracted by, er, more
extracurricular activities ). But the bigger problem is best summed up in a quote
to Politico by the head of IHME, explaining why his organization's projections
were so wrong. "We had presumed, perhaps naively," he said, "that given the magnitude of the
epidemic, most states would stick to their social distancing until the end of May." In other
words, the models are premised on assumptions that can be scrambled by real-world events,
whether political decisions or acts of God or the caprices of the virus itself. They aren't
showing us the future so much as extrapolating off of a snapshot, one that can easily change.
Yet we treat them as practically mystic. "200,000 could die!!" scream the headlines, with
"could" ever the weasel word.
We don't just do this with the death toll. On the economy, too, we seem hopelessly confused.
Here's a smattering of headlines from the past two months: "Unemployment rate could exceed 20%
by June, top White House adviser says." "Economists see uneven jobs recovery, high U.S.
unemployment through 2021." "Top JPMorgan investment advisor: It will take '10 to 12 years' for
U.S. employment levels to return." "The coronavirus recession will be deeper and faster than
the financial crisis." "Economists say quick rebound from recession is unlikely." "Trump's
baseless claim that a recession would be deadlier than the coronavirus." "U.N. warns economic
downturn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in 2020."
Stare into this blurry puddle long enough and you might conclude that no one has any idea
what the hell they're talking about. Or you might fall back on your own biases, choosing to
believe stories that buttress your political beliefs and speak to your own personal
circumstances. Either way, this kind of confusion can have long-reaching effects. Consider, for
example, a new study that was released last week, which found that there could be 75,000
so-called deaths of despair -- meaning suicides and drug and alcohol overdoses -- as a
result of the coronavirus recession. It called to mind another
social science finding , one of the most consequential of the last decade: that life
expectancy among less educated, middle-aged, white Americans was declining, driven primarily by
those deaths of despair.
That claim, courtesy of researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton , made
its way around the internet. It fed into the narrative of the populist right and Donald Trump.
It provided an empirical grounding for "American carnage." But wait: a less noticed study a
year later, which took Case's and Deaton's data and adjusted for age, found a more mixed
picture. According to research from
Columbia University , while middle-aged white women had indeed seen increased mortality
rates, middle-aged white men had reversed this trend back in 2005. And then came another study, in the
American Journal of Public Health , that challenged the very concept of "deaths of
despair," warning that "the gap between deaths of despair as a claim and deaths of despair as a
rigorously tested scientific concept is wide."
There is a Grand Canyon-sized gap between what we think we know and what we actually know.
How to navigate this chasm? Two maxims can help.
The first comes from Friedrich Hayek: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to
men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Hayek was concerned
with what he called the "fatal conceit," which he defined as the belief "that man is able to
shape the world around him according to his wishes." We might add a corollary: that man is able
to anticipate the world around him according to his wishes. Because knowledge is
complex and dispersed, Hayek argued, no one can ever marshal enough of it to centrally plan an
economy. Likewise even a sophisticated model can't have enough data to foresee how a pandemic
will play out. There are simply too many variables, drawing on too many areas of life.
The second maxim comes from a very different source: John Dickinson, perhaps our most
conservative founding father. "Experience must be our only guide," Dickinson said. "Reason may
mislead us." Of course, by reason, he didn't mean vast computer algorithms struggling to track
contagion across seven continents; he was thinking of 18th-century rationalism, which he
contrasted with the more reliable yardstick of historical experience. While what seemed
philosophically sound in the abstract could be tainted by personal bias or disconnected from
real life, precedent was far more settled. How something had worked in the past was a good
indication of how it would work in the future.
Unfortunately we have very little precedent when it comes to the coronavirus, though the
Spanish flu can perhaps offer some clues. The 1918 influenza, like the current pandemic, began
in the spring, only to enter a second wave in the fall that killed more people than the first.
A third wave then began that winter and stretched into the summer of 1919. That's chilling, yet
there's good news too: the recession that followed was short and quickly blossomed into the
1920s, one of the most dizzying economic expansions in our history.
So top hats and flapper dresses all around? Who knows? It's called the novel coronavirus for
a reason. The awful truth is that we have very little idea how long this will go on and how it
will ultimately turn out. And the reason for that is that we know so very much less than we
think we do.
I also remember some of early estimates of Mad Cow disease in humans in UK and they
turned out to be very exaggerated.
When the political class was trying to de-gay HIV/AIDS in 1987, they had Oprah tell
everyone that 20% of heterosexual people would be dead before 1990.
The first I learned of Oprah's jaw-droppingly sensationalist remarks, was in a piece a
couple of days ago on AmericanThinker (which sounds like a rare bird indeed, if not an
outright oxymoron – but it has good stuff from time to time).
Anyhow, it was an interesting piece – entitled
" Reflections on a Century of Junk Science " by the author of " Hoodwinked: How
Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture ", which I will acquire today. (The
book's 11 years old, but sounds like it will be along the same lines as Kendrick's "
Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense ", which was
excellent).
"... Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during this 'golden age', the British: Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers; Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs; Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports; Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and Colonized much of Africa and Asia. ..."
"... Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure. ..."
"... Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case. ..."
"When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!" (Alice
in Wonderland, Chapter 4, The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill)
Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
2020 starts with markets feeling optimistic due to a US-China trade deal and a reworked NAFTA in the form of the USMCA. However,
the tide towards protectionism may still be coming in, not going out.
The intellectual appeal of the basis for free trade, Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, where Portugal specializes in
wine, and the UK in cloth, is still clearly there. Moreover, trade has always been a beneficial and enriching part of human culture.
Yet the fact is that for the majority of the last 5,000 years global trade has been highly-politicized and heavily-regulated . Indeed,
global free-trade only began following the abolition of the UK Corn Laws in 1846, which reduced British agricultural tariffs, brought
in European wheat and corn, and allowed the UK to maximize its comparative advantage in industry.
Yet it took until 1860 for the UK to fully embrace free trade, and even then the unpalatable historical record is that during
this 'golden age', the British:
Destroyed the Indian textile industry to benefit their own cloth manufacturers;
Started the Opium Wars to balance UK-China trade by selling China addictive drugs;
Ignored the Irish Potato Famine and continued to allow Irish wheat exports;
Forced Siam (Thailand) to open up its economy to trade with gunboats (as the US did with Japan); and
Colonized much of Africa and Asia.
As we showed back in '
Currency
and Wars ', after an initial embrace of free trade, the major European powers and Japan saw that their relative comparative advantage
meant they remained at the bottom of the development ladder as agricultural producers, an area where prices were also being depressed
by huge US output; meanwhile, the UK sold industrial goods, ran a huge trade surplus, and ruled the waves militarily. This was politically
unsustainable even though the UK vigorously backed the intellectual concept of free trade given it was such a winner from it.
Regardless, the first flowering of free trade collapsed back into nationalism and protectionism - bloodily so in 1914. Free
trade was tried again from 1919 - but burned-out even more bloodily in the 1930s and 1940s. After WW2, most developed countries had
moderately free trade - but most developing countries did not. We only started to re-embrace global free trade from the 1990s onwards
when the Cold War ended – and here it is under stress again. In short, only around 100 years in a total of 5,000 years of civilization
has seen real global free trade, it has failed twice already, and it is once again coming under pressure.
What are we getting wrong? Perhaps that Ricardo's theory has major flaws that don't get included in our textbooks, as summarized
in this overlooked quote
"It would undoubtedly be advantageous to the capitalists of England [that] the wine and cloth should both be made in Portugal
[and that] the capital and labour of England employed in making cloth should be removed to Portugal for that purpose." Which is pretty
much what happens today! However, Ricardo adds that this won't happen because "Most men of property [will be] satisfied with a low
rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations," which
is simply not true at all! In other words, his premise is flawed in that:
It is atemporal in assuming countries move to their comparative advantage painlessly and instantly;
It assumes full employment when if there is unemployment a country is better off producing at home to reduce it, regardless
of higher cost;
It assumes capital between countries is immobile , i.e., investors don't shift money and technology abroad. (Which Adam Smith's
'Wealth of Nations', Book IV, Chapter II also assumes doesn't happen, as an "invisible hand" keeps money invested in one's home
country's industry and not abroad: we don't read him correctly either.);
It assumes trade balances under free trade - but since when has this been true? Rather we see large deficits and inverse capital
flows, and so debts steadily increasing in deficit countries;
It assumes all goods are equal as in Ricardo's example, cloth produced in the UK and wine produced in Portugal are equivalent.
Yet some sectors provide well-paid and others badly-paid employment: why only produce the latter?
As Ricardo's theory requires key conditions that are not met in reality most of the time, why are we surprised that most of reality
fails to produce idealised free trade most of the time? Several past US presidents before Donald Trump made exactly that point. Munroe
(1817-25) argued: " The conditions necessary for Free Trade's success - reciprocity and international peace - have never occurred
and cannot be expected ". Grant (1869-77) noted "Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer,
it too will adopt free trade".
Yet arguably we are better, not worse, off regardless of these sentiments – so hooray! How so? Well, did you know that Adam Smith,
who we equate with free markets, and who created the term "mercantile system" to describe the national-protectionist policies opposed
to it, argued the US should remain an agricultural producer and buy its industrial goods from the UK? It was Founding Father Alexander
Hamilton who rejected this approach, and his "infant industry" policy of industrialization and infrastructure spending saw the US
emerge as the world's leading economy instead. That was the same development model that, with tweaks, was then adopted by pre-WW1
Japan, France, and Germany to successfully rival the UK; and then post-WW2 by Japan (again) and South Korea; and then more recently
by China, that key global growth driver. Would we really be better off if the US was still mainly growing cotton and wheat, China
rice and apples, and the UK was making most of the world's consumer goods? Thank the lack of free trade if you think otherwise!
Yet look at the examples above and there is a further argument for more protectionism ahead. Ricardo assumes a benign global political
environment for free trade . Yet what if the UK and Portugal are rivals or enemies? What if the choice is between steel and wine?
You can't invade neighbours armed with wine as you can with steel! A large part of the trade tension between China and the US, just
as between pre-WW1 Germany and the UK, is not about trade per se: for both sides, it is about who produces key inputs with national
security implications - and hence is about relative power . This is why we hear US hawks underlining that they don't want to export
their highest technology to China, or to specialize only in agricultural exports to it as China moves up the value-chain. It also
helps underline why for most of the past 5,000 years trade has not been free. Indeed, this argument also holds true for the other
claimed benefit of free trade: the cross-flow of ideas and technology. That is great for friends, but not for those less trusted.
Of course, this doesn't mean liked-minded groups of countries with similar-enough or sympathetic-enough economies and politics
should avoid free trade: clearly for some states it can work out nicely - even if within the EU one could argue there are also underlying
strains. However, it is a huge stretch to assume a one-size-fits-all free trade policy will always work best for all countries, as
some would have it. That is a fairy tale. History shows it wasn't the case; national security concerns show it can never always be
the case; and Ricardo argues this logically won't be the case.
Yet we need not despair. The track record also shows that global growth can continue even despite protectionism, and in some cases
can benefit from it. That being said, should the US resort to more Hamiltonian policies versus everyone, not just China, then we
are in for real financial market turbulence ahead given the role the US Dollar plays today compared to the role gold played for Smith
and Ricardo! But that is a whole different fairy tale...
"... As the Gramscian theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau observed, our political identities are not a 'given' – something that emerges directly from the objective facts of our situation. We all occupy a series of overlapping identities in our day-to-day lives – as workers or bosses, renters or home-owners, debtors or creditors. Which of these define our politics depends on political struggles for meaning and power. ..."
"... The architects of neoliberalism understood this process of identity creation. By treating people as selfish, rational utility maximisers, they actively encouraged them to become selfish, rational utility maximisers. As the opening article points out, this is not a side effect of neoliberal policy, but a central part of its intention. As Michael Sandel pointed out in his 2012 book 'What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets' , it squeezes out competing values that previously governed non-market spheres of life, such as ethics of public service in the public sector, or mutual care within local communities. But these values remain latent: neoliberalism does not have the power to erase them completely. This is where the hope for the left lies, the crack of light through the doorway that needs to be prised open. ..."
"... More generally, there is some evidence that neoliberalism didn't really succeed in making us see ourselves as selfish rational maximisers – just in making us believe that everybody else was . For example, a 2016 survey found that UK citizens are on average more oriented towards compassionate values than selfish values, but that they perceive others to be significantly more selfish (both than themselves and the actual UK average). Strikingly, those with a high 'self-society gap' were found to be less likely to vote and engage in civic activity, and highly likely to experience feelings of cultural estrangement. ..."
"... Perhaps a rational system is one that accepts selfishness but keeps it within limits. Movements like the Chicago school that pretend to reinvent the wheel with new thinking are by this view a scam. As J.K. Galbraith said: "the problem with their ideas is that they have been tried." ..."
"... They tried running an economy on debt in the 1920s. The 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into the debt deflation of the Great Depression. No one realised the problems that were building up in the economy as they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical economics. ..."
"... Keynes looked at the problems of the debt based economy and came up with redistribution through taxation to keep the system running in a sustainable way and he dealt with the inherent inequality capitalism produced. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, which has influenced so much of the conventional thinking about money, is adamant that the public sector must not create ('print') money, and so public expenditure must be limited to what the market can 'afford.' Money, in this view, is a limited resource that the market ensures will be used efficiently. Is public money, then, a pipe dream? No, for the financial crisis and the response to it undermined this neoliberal dogma. ..."
"... The financial sector mismanaged its role as a source of money so badly that the state had to step in and provide unlimited monetary backing to rescue it. The creation of money out of thin air by public authorities revealed the inherently political nature of money. But why, then, was the power to create money ceded to the private sector in the first place -- and with so little public accountability? ..."
Lambert here: Not sure the soul is an identity, but authors don't write the headlines. Read
on!
By Christine Berry, a freelance researcher and writer and was previously Director of
Policy and Government for the New Economics Foundation. She has also worked at ShareAction and
in the House of Commons.
Originally published at Open Democracy .
"Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul." Understanding why Thatcher said
this is central to understanding the neoliberal project, and how we might move beyond it.
Carys Hughes and Jim Cranshaw's opening article poses a crucial challenge to the left in
this respect. It is too easy to tell ourselves a story about the long reign of neoliberalism
that is peopled solely with all-powerful elites imposing their will on the oppressed masses. It
is much harder to confront seriously the ways in which neoliberalism has manufactured popular
consent for its policies.
The left needs to acknowledge that aspects of the neoliberal agenda have been overwhelmingly
popular: it has successfully tapped into people's instincts about the kind of life they want to
lead, and wrapped these instincts up in a compelling narrative about how we should see
ourselves and other people. We need a coherent strategy for replacing this narrative with one
that actively reconstructs our collective self-image – turning us into empowered citizens
participating in communities of mutual care, rather than selfish property-owning individuals
competing in markets.
As the Gramscian theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau observed, our political
identities are not a 'given' – something that emerges directly from the objective facts
of our situation. We all occupy a series of overlapping identities in our day-to-day lives
– as workers or bosses, renters or home-owners, debtors or creditors. Which of these
define our politics depends on political struggles for meaning and power.
Part of the job of politics – whether within political parties or social movements
– is to show how our individual problems are rooted in systemic issues that can be
confronted collectively if we organise around these identities. Thus, debt becomes not a source
of shame but an injustice that debtors can organise against. Struggles with childcare are not a
source of individual parental guilt but a shared societal problem that we have a shared
responsibility to tackle. Podemos were deeply influenced by this thinking when they sought to
redefine Spanish politics as 'La Casta' ('the elite') versus the people, cutting across many of
the traditional boundaries between right and left.
The architects of neoliberalism understood this process of identity creation. By treating
people as selfish, rational utility maximisers, they actively encouraged them to become
selfish, rational utility maximisers. As the opening article points out, this is not a side
effect of neoliberal policy, but a central part of its intention. As Michael Sandel pointed out
in his 2012 book 'What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets' , it squeezes out
competing values that previously governed non-market spheres of life, such as ethics of public
service in the public sector, or mutual care within local communities. But these values remain
latent: neoliberalism does not have the power to erase them completely. This is where the hope
for the left lies, the crack of light through the doorway that needs to be prised open.
The Limits of Neoliberal Consciousness
In thinking about how we do this, it's instructive to look at the ways in which neoliberal
attempts to reshape our identities have succeeded – and the ways they have failed. While
Right to Buy might have been successful in identifying people as home-owners and stigmatising
social housing, this has not bled through into wider support for private ownership. Although
public ownership did become taboo among the political classes for a generation – far
outside the political 'common sense' – polls consistently showed that this was not
matched by a fall in public support for the idea. On some level – perhaps because of the
poor performance of privatised entities – people continued to identify as citizens with a
right to public services, rather than as consumers of privatised services. The continued
overwhelming attachment to a public NHS is the epitome of this tendency. This is partly what
made it possible for Corbyn's Labour to rehabilitate the concept of public ownership, as the
2017 Labour manifesto's proposals for public ownership of railways and water – dismissed
as ludicrous by the political establishment – proved overwhelmingly popular.
More generally, there is some evidence that neoliberalism didn't really succeed in making us
see ourselves as selfish rational maximisers – just in making us believe that
everybody else was . For example, a 2016 survey found that UK citizens
are on average more oriented towards compassionate values than selfish values, but that they
perceive others to be significantly more selfish (both than themselves and the actual UK
average). Strikingly, those with a high 'self-society gap' were found to be less likely to vote
and engage in civic activity, and highly likely to experience feelings of cultural
estrangement.
This finding points towards both the great conjuring trick of neoliberal subjectivity and
its Achilles heel: it has successfully popularised an idea of what human beings are like that
most of us don't actually identify with ourselves. This research suggests that our political
crisis is caused not only by people's material conditions of disempowerment, but by four
decades of being told that we can't trust our fellow citizens. But it also suggests that deep
down, we know this pessimistic account of human nature just isn't who we really are – or
who we aspire to be.
An example of how this plays out can be seen in academic studies showing that, in game
scenarios presenting the opportunity to free-ride on the efforts of others, only economics
students behaved as economic models predicted: all other groups were much more likely to pool
their resources. Having been trained to believe that others are likely to be selfish,
economists believe that their best course of action is to be selfish as well. The rest of us
still have the instinct to cooperate. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising: after all, as
George Monbiot argues in 'Out of the Wreckage' , cooperation is our species' main
survival strategy.
What's Our 'Right to Buy?'
The challenge for the left is to find policies and stories that tap into this latent sense
of what makes us human – what Gramsci called 'good sense' – and use it to overturn
the neoliberal 'common sense'. In doing so, we must be aware that we are competing not only
with a neoliberal identity but also with a new far-right that seeks to promote a white British
ethno-nationalist group identity, conflating 'elites' with outsiders. How we compete with this
is the million dollar question, and it's one we have not yet answered.
Thatcher's use of flagship policies like the Right to Buy was a masterclass in this respect.
Deceptively simple, tangible and easy to grasp, the Right to Buy also communicated a much
deeper story about the kind of nation we wanted to be – one of private, property-owning
individuals – cementing home-ownership as a cultural symbol of aspiration (the right to
paint your own front door) whilst giving millions an immediate financial stake in her new
order. So what might be the equivalent flagship policies for the left today?
Perhaps one of the strongest efforts to date has been the proposal for ' Inclusive Ownership
Funds ', first developed by Mathew Lawrence in a report for the New Economics Foundation,
and announced as
Labour policy by John McDonnell in 2018. This would require companies to transfer shares
into a fund giving their workers a collective stake that rises over time and pays out employee
dividends. Like the Right to Buy, as well as shifting the material distribution of wealth and
power, this aims to build our identity as part of a community of workers taking more collective
control over our working lives.
But this idea only takes us so far. While it may tap into people's desire for more security
and empowerment at work, more of a stake in what they do, it offers a fairly abstract benefit
that only cashes out over time, as workers acquire enough of a stake to have a meaningful say
over company strategy. It may not mean much to those at the sharpest end of our oppressive and
precarious labour market, at least not unless we also tackle the more pressing concerns they
face – such as the exploitative practices of behemoths like Amazon or the stress caused
by zero-hours contracts. We have not yet hit on an idea that can compete with the
transformative change to people's lives offered by the Right to Buy.
So what else is on the table? Perhaps, when it comes to the cutting edge of new left
thinking on these issues, the workplace isn't really where the action is – at least not
directly. Perhaps we need to be tapping into people's desire to escape the 'rat race'
altogether and have more freedom to pursue the things that really make us happy – time
with our families, access to nature, the space to look after ourselves, connection with our
communities. The four day working week (crucially with no loss of pay) has real potential as a
flagship policy in this respect. The Conservatives and the right-wing press may be laughing it
down with jokes about Labour being lazy and feckless, but perhaps this is because they are
rattled. Ultimately, they can't escape the fact that most people would like to spend less time
at work.
Skilfully communicated, this has the potential to be a profoundly anti-neoliberal policy
that conveys a new story about what we aspire to, individually and as a society. Where
neoliberalism tapped into people's desire for more personal freedom and hooked this to the
acquisition of wealth, property and consumer choice, we can refocus on the freedom to live the
lives we truly want. Instead of offering freedom through the market, we can offer
freedom from the market.
Proponents of Universal Basic Income often argue that it fulfils a similar function of
liberating people from work and detaching our ability to provide for ourselves from the
marketplace for labour. But in material terms, it's unlikely that a UBI could be set at a level
that would genuinely offer people this freedom, at least in the short term. And in narrative
terms, UBI is actually a highly malleable policy that is equally susceptible to being co-opted
by a libertarian agenda. Even at its best, it is really a policy about redistribution of
already existing wealth (albeit on a bigger scale than the welfare state as it stands). To
truly overturn neoliberalism, we need to go beyond this and talk about collective
ownership and creation of wealth.
Policies that focus on collective control of assets may do a better job of replacing
a narrative about individual property ownership with one that highlights the actual
concentration of property wealth in the hands of elites – and the need to reclaim these
assets for the common good. As well as Inclusive Ownership Funds, another way of doing this is
through Citizens' Wealth Funds, which socialise profitable assets (be it natural resources or
intangible ones such as data) and use the proceeds to pay dividends to individuals or
communities. Universal Basic Services – for instance, policies such as free publicly
owned buses – may be another.
Finally, I'd like to make a plea for care work as a critical area that merits further
attention to develop convincing flagship policies – be it on universal childcare, elderly
care or support for unpaid carers. The instinctive attachment that many of us feel to a public
NHS needs to be widened to promote a broader right to care and be cared for, whilst firmly
resisting the marketisation of care. Although care is often marginalised in political debate,
as a new mum, I'm acutely aware that it is fundamental to millions of people's ability to live
the lives they want. In an ageing population, most people now have lived experience of the
pressures of caring for someone – whether a parent or a child. By talking about these
issues, we move the terrain of political contestation away from the work valued by the market
and onto the work we all know really matters; away from the competition for scarce resources
and onto our ability to look after each other. And surely, that's exactly where the left wants
it to be.
The problem is that people are selfish–me included–and so what is needed is
not better ideas about ourselves but better laws. And for that we will need a higher level of
political engagement and a refusal to accept candidates who sell themselves as a "lesser
evil." It's the decline of democracy that brought on the rise of Reagan and Thatcher and
Neoliberalism and not some change in public consciousness (except insofar as the general
public became wealthier and more complacent). In America incumbents are almost universally
likely to be re-elected to Congress and so they have no reason to reject Neoliberal
ideas.
So here's suggesting that a functioning political process is the key to reform and not
some change in the PR.
Carolinian, like you, I try to include myself in statements about "the problem with
people." I believe one of the things preventing progress is our tendency to believe it's only
those people that are the problem.
Human nature people are selfish. It's like the Christian marriage vow – which I understand is a Medieval invention
and not something from 2,000 years ago – for better or worse, meaning, we share (and
are not to be selfish) the good and the bad.
"Not neoliberals, but all of us." "Not the right, but the left as well." "Not just Russia, but America," or "Not just America, but Russia too."
Perhaps a rational system is one that accepts selfishness but keeps it within limits.
Movements like the Chicago school that pretend to reinvent the wheel with new thinking are by
this view a scam. As J.K. Galbraith said: "the problem with their ideas is that they have
been tried."
My small brain got stuck on your reference to a 'Christian marriage vow'. I was just
sitting back and conceiving what a Neoliberal marriage vow would sound like. Probably a cross
between a no-liabilities contract and an open-marriage agreement.
"people are selfish"?; or "people can sometimes act selfishly"? I think the latter is the
more accurate statement. Appeal to the better side, and more of it will be forthcoming.
Neolib propaganda appeals to trivial, bleak individualism..
I'm not sure historic left attempts to appeal to "the better angels of our nature" have
really moved the ball much. It took the Great Depression to give us a New Deal and WW2 to
give Britain the NHS and the India its freedom. I'd say events are in the saddle far more
than ideas.
I rather look at it as a "both and" rather than an "either or." If the political
groundwork is not done beforehand and during, the opportunity events afford will more likely
be squandered.
And borrowing from evolutionary science, this also holds with the "punctuated equilibrium"
theory of social/political change. The strain of a changed environment (caused by both events
and intentionally created political activity) for a long time creates no visible change to
the system, and so appears to fail. But then some combination of events and conscious
political work suddenly "punctuates the equilibrium" with the resulting significant if not
radical changes.
Chile today can be seen as a great example of this: "Its not 30 Pesos, its 30 Years."
Carolinian, you provide a good illustration of the power of the dominant paradigm to make
people believe exactly what the article said–something I've observed more than enough
to confirm is true. People act in a wide variety of ways; but many people deny that altruism
and compassion are equally "human nature". Both parts of the belief pointed out
here–believing other people are selfish and that we're not–are explained by
projection acting in concert with the other parts of this phenomenon. Even though it's flawed
because it's only a political and not a psychological explanation, It's a good start toward
understanding.
"You and I are so deeply acculturated to the idea of "self" and organization and species
that it is hard to believe that man [sic] might view his [sic] relations with the environment
in any other way than the way which I have rather unfairly blamed upon the nineteenth-century
evolutionists."
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p 483-4
This is part of a longer quote that's been important to me my whole life. Worth looking up.
Bateson called this a mistake in epistemology–also, informally, his definition of
evil. http://anomalogue.com/blog/category/systems-thinking/
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of
time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that
glorifies it."
― Frédéric Bastiat
Doesn't mean it's genetic. In fact, I'm pretty sure it means it's not.
The Iron Lady once proclaimed, slightly sinisterly: "Economics is the method. The object
is to change the soul." She meant that British people had to rediscover the virtue of
traditional values such as hard work and thrift. The "something for nothing" society was
over.
But the idea that the Thatcher era re-established the link between virtuous effort and
just reward has been effectively destroyed by the spectacle of bankers driving their
institutions into bankruptcy while being rewarded with million-pound bonuses and munificent
pensions.
The dual-truth approach of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (thanks, Mirowski) has been
more adept at manipulating narratives so the masses are still outraged by individuals getting
undeserved social benefits rather than elites vacuuming up common resources. Thanks to the
Thatcher-Reagan revolution, we have ended up with socialism for the rich, and everyone else
at the mercy of 'markets'.
Pretending that there are not problems with free riders is naive and it goes against
people's concern with justice. Acknowledging free riders on all levels with institutions that
can constantly pursue equity is the solution.
At some points in life, everyone is a free rider. As for the hard workers, many of them
are doing destructive things which the less hard-working people will have to suffer under and
compensate for. (Neo)liberalism and capitalism are a coherent system of illusions of virtue
which rest on domination, exploitation, extraction, and propaganda. Stoking of resentment (as
of free riders, the poor, the losers, foreigners, and so on) is one of the ways those who
enjoy it keep it going.
The Iron Lady once proclaimed, slightly sinisterly: "Economics is the method. The object
is to change the soul." She meant that British people had to rediscover the virtue of
traditional values such as hard work and thrift. The "something for nothing" society was
over.
But the idea that the Thatcher era re-established the link between virtuous effort and
just reward has been effectively destroyed by the spectacle of bankers driving their
institutions into bankruptcy while being rewarded with million-pound bonuses and munificent
pensions.
The dual-truth approach of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (thanks, Mirowski) has been
more adept at manipulating narratives so the masses are still outraged by individuals getting
undeserved social benefits rather than elites vacuuming up common resources. Thanks to the
Thatcher-Reagan revolution, we have ended up with socialism for the rich, and everyone else
at the mercy of 'markets'.
Pretending that there are not problems with free riders is naive and it goes against
people's concern with justice. Acknowledging free riders on all levels with institutions that
can constantly pursue equity is the solution.
The Iron Lady had a agenda to break the labor movement in the UK.
What she did not understand is Management gets the Union (Behavior) it deserves. If there
is strife in the workplace, as there was in abundance in the UK at that time, the problem is
the Management, (and the UK class structure) not the workers.
As I found out when I left University.
Thatcher set out to break the solidarity of the Labor movement, and used the neo-liberal
tool of selfishness to achieve success, unfortunately,
The UK's poor management practices, (The Working Class can kiss my arse) and complete
inability to form teams of "Management and Workers" was, IMHO, is the foundation of today's
Brexit nightmare, a foundation based on the British Class Structure.
And exploited, as it ever was, to achieve ends which do not benefit workers in any
manner.
The left needs to acknowledge that aspects of the neoliberal agenda have been
overwhelmingly popular: it has successfully tapped into people's instincts about the kind
of life they want to lead, and wrapped these instincts up in a compelling narrative about
how we should see ourselves and other people.
Sigh, no this is not true. This author is making the mistake that everyone is like the top
5% and that just is not so. Perhaps she should get out of her personal echo chamber and talk
to common people.
In my travels I have been to every state and every major city, and I have worked with just
about every class of people, except of course the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful –
they have people to protect them from the great unwashed like me – and it didn't take
me long to notice that the elite are different from the rest of us but I could never explain
exactly why. After I retired, I started studying and I've examined everything from Adam
Smith, to Hobbes, to Kant, to Durkheim, to Marx, to Ayn Rand, to tons of histories and
anthropologies of various peoples, to you name it and I've come to the conclusion that most
of us are not neoliberal and do not want what the top 5% want.
Most people are not overly competitive and most do not seek self-interest only. That is
what allows us to live in cities, to drive on our roadways, to form groups that seek to
improve conditions for the least of us. It is what allows soldiers to protect each other on
the battlefield when it would be in their self interest to protect themselves. It is what
allowed people in Europe to risk their own lives to save Jews. And it is also what allows
people to live under the worst dictators without rebelling. Of course we all want more but we
have limits on what we will do to get that more – the wealthy and powerful seem to have
no limits. For instance, most of us won't screw over our co-workers to make ourselves look
better, although some will. Most of us won't turn on our best friends even when it would be
to our advantage to do so, although some will. Most of us won't abandon those we care about,
even when it means severe financial damage to us, although some will.
For lack of a better description, I call what the 5% have the greed gene – a gene
that allows them to give up empathy and compassion and basic morality – what some of us
call fairness – in the search for personal gain. I don't think it is necessarily
genetic but there is something in their makeup that cause them to have more than the average
self interest. And because most humans are more cooperative than they are competitive, most
humans just allow these people to go after what they want and don't stand in their way, even
though by stopping them, they could make their own lives better.
Most history and economics are theories and stories told by the rich and powerful to
justify their behavior. I think it is a big mistake to attribute that behavior to the mass of
humanity. Archeology is beginning to look more at how average people lived instead of seeking
out only the riches deposited by the elite, and historians are starting to look at the other
side of history – average people – to see what life was really like for them, and
I think we are seeing that what the rulers wanted was never what their people wanted. It is
beginning to appear obvious that 95% of the people just wanted to live in their communities
safely, to have about what everyone else around them had, and to enjoy the simple pleasures
of shelter, enough food, and warm companionship.
I'm also wondering why the 5% think that all of us want exactly what they want. Do they
really think that they are somehow being smarter or more competent got them there while 95%
of the population – the rest of us – failed?
At this point, I know my theory is half-baked – I definitely need to do more
research, but nothing I have found yet convinces me that there isn't some real basic
difference between those who aspire to power and wealth and the rest of us.
" ..and I've come to the conclusion that most of us are not neoliberal and do not want
what the top 5% want. Most people are not overly competitive and most do not seek
self-interest only. That is what allows us to live in cities, to drive on our roadways, to
form groups that seek to improve conditions for the least of us. It is what allows soldiers
to protect each other on the battlefield when it would be in their self interest to protect
themselves. "
I really liked your comment Historian. Thanks for posting. That's what I've felt in my gut
for a while, that the top 5% and the establishment are operating under a different mindset,
that the majority of people don't want a competitive, dog eat dog, self interest world.
I agree with Foy Johnson. I've been reading up on Ancient Greece and realizing all the
time that 'teh Greeks' are maybe only about thirty percent of the people in Greece. Most of
that history is how Greeks were taking advantage of each other with little mention of the
majority of the population. Pelasgians? Yeah, they came from serpents teeth, the end.
I think this is a problem from the Bronze Age that we have not properly addressed.
Mystery Cycles are a nice reminder that people were having fun on their own.
I have more or less the same view. I think the author's statement about neoliberalism
tapping into what type of life people want to lead is untenable. Besides instinct (are we all
4-year olds?), what people want is also very much socially constructed. And what people do is
also very much socially coerced.
One anecdote: years ago, during a volunteer drive at work, I worked side by side with the
company's CEO (company was ~1200 headcount, ~.5bn revenue) sorting canned goods. The guy was
doing it like he was in a competition. So much so that he often blocked me when I had to
place something on the shelves, and took a lot of space in the lineup around himself while
swinging his large-ish body and arms, and wouldn't stop talking. To me, this was very rude
and inconsiderate, and showed a repulsive level of disregard to others. This kind of behavior
at such an event, besides being unpleasant to be around, was likely also making work for the
others in the lineup less efficient. Had I or anyone else behaved like him, we would have had
a good amount of awkwardness or even a conflict.
What I don't get is, how does he and others get away with it? My guess is, people don't
want a conflict. I didn't want a conflict and said nothing to that CEO. Not because I am not
competitive, but because I didn't want an ugly social situation (we said 'excuse me' and
'sorry' enough, I just didn't think it would go over well to ask him to stop being obnoxious
and dominant for no reason). He obviously didn't care or was unaware – or actually, I
think he was behaving that way as a tactical habit. And I didn't feel I had the authority to
impose a different order.
So, in the end, it's about power – power relations and knowing what to do about
it.
Yep, I think you've nailed it there deplorado, types like your CEO don't care at all
and/or are socially unaware, and is a tactical habit that they have found has worked for them
in the past and is now ingrained. It is a power relation and our current world unfortunately
is now designed and made to suit people like that. And each day the world incrementally moves
a little bit more in their direction with inertia like a glacier. Its going to take something
big to turn it around
I too believe "most of us are not neoliberal". But if so, how did we end up with the kind
of Corporate Cartels, Government Agencies and Organizations that currently prey upon
Humankind? This post greatly oversimplifies the mechanisms and dynamics of Neoliberalism, and
other varieties of exploitation of the many by the few. This post risks a mocking tie to
Identity Politics. What traits of Humankind give truth to Goebbels' claims?
There definitely is "some real basic difference between those who aspire to power and
wealth and the rest of us" -- but the question you should ask next is why the rest of us
Hobbits blindly follow and help the Saurons among us. Why do so many of us do exactly what
we're told? How is it that constant repetition of the Neoliberal identity concepts over our
media can so effectively ensnare the thinking of so many?
Maybe it's something similar to Milgram's Experiment (the movie the Experimenter about
Milgram was on last night – worth watching and good acting by Peter Sarsgaard, my kind
of indie film), the outcome is just not what would normally be expected, people bow to
authority, against their own beliefs and interests, and others interests, even though they
have choice. The Hobbits followed blindly in that experiment, the exact opposite outcome as
to what was predicted by the all the psychology experts beforehand.
people bow to authority , against their own beliefs and interests, and others
interests, even though they have choice
'Don't Make Waves' is a fundamentally useful value that lets us all swim along. This can
be manipulated. If everyone is worried about Reds Under the Beds or recycling, you go along
to get along.
Some people somersault to Authority is how I'd put it.
Yep, don't mind how you put that Mo, good word somersault.
One of the amusing tests Milgram did was to have people go into the lift but all face the
back of the lift instead of the doors and see what happens when the next person got in. Sure
enough, with the next person would get in, face the front, look around with some confusion at
everyone else and then slowly turn and face the back. Don't Make Waves its instinctive to let
us all swim along as you said.
And 'some people' is correct. It was actually the majority, 65%, who followed directions
against their own will and preferred choice in his original experiment.
That's a pretty damn good comment that, Historian. Lots to unpick. It reminded me too of
something that John Wyndham once said. He wrote how about 95% of us wanted to live in peace
and comfort but that the other 5% were always considering their chances if they started
something. He went on to say that it was the introduction of nuclear weapons that made
nobody's chances of looking good which explains why the lack of a new major war since
WW2.
Good comment. My view is that it all boils down to the sociopathic personality disorder.
Sociopathy runs on a continuum, and we all exhibit some of its tendencies. At the highest end
you get serial killers and titans of industry, like the guy sorting cans in another comment.
I believe all religions and theories of ethical behavior began as attempts to reign in the
sociopaths by those of us much lower on the continuum. Neoliberalism starts by saying the
sociopaths are the norm, turning the usual moral and ethical universe upside down.
Your theory is not half-baked; it's spot-on. If you're not the whatever it takes, end
justifies the means type, you are not likely to rise to the top in the corporate world. The
cream rises to the top happens only in the dairy.
Your 5% would correspond to Altemeyer's "social dominators". Unfortunately only
75% want a simple, peaceful life. 20% are looking for a social dominator to follow. It's
psychological.
Excellent comment. Take into consideration the probability that the majority of the top 5%
have come from a privileged background, ensconced in a culture of entitlement. This "greed"
gene is as natural to them as breathing. Consider also that many wealthy families have
maintained their status through centuries of calculated loveless marriages, empathy and other
human traits gene-pooled out of existence. The cruel paradox is that for the sake of riches,
they have lost their richness in character.
This really chimes with me. Thanks so much for putting it down in words.
I often encounter people insisting humans are selfish. It is quite frustrating that this
more predominant side of our human nature seems to become invisible against the
propaganda.
I'm barely into Jeremy Lent's The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's
Search for Meaning , but he's already laid down his central thesis in fairly complete
form. Humans are both competitive and cooperative, he says, which should surprise no one.
What I found interesting is that the competitive side comes from primates who are more
intensely competitive than humans. The cooperation developed after the human/primate split
and was enabled by "mimetic culture," communication skills that importantly presuppose that
the object(s) of communication are intentional creatures like oneself but with a somewhat
different perspective. Example: Human #1 gestures to Human #2 to come take a closer look at
whatever Human #1 is examining. This ability to cooperate even came with strategies to
prevent a would-be dominant male from taking over a hunter-gatherer band:
[I]n virtually all hunter-gatherer societies, people join together to prevent powerful
males from taking too much control, using collective behaviors such as ridicule, group
disobedience, and, ultimately, extreme sanctions such as assassination [This kind of
society is called] a "reverse dominant hierarchy because rather than being dominated, the
rank and file manages to dominate.
yes, this chimes in with what I`ve been thinking for years after puzzling about why
society everywhere ends up as it does – ie the fact that in small groups as we evolved
to live in, we would keep a check on extreme selfish behaviour of dominant individuals. In
complex societies (modern) most of us become "the masses" visible in some way to the system
but the top echelons are not visible to us and are able to amass power and wealth out of all
control by the rest of us. And yes, you do have to have a very strange drive (relatively
rare, ?pathological) to want power and wealth at everyone else`s expense – to live in a
cruel world many of whose problems could be solved (or not arise in the first place) by
redistributing some of your wealth to little palpable cost to you
Africa over a few million years of Ice Ages seems to have presented our ancestors with the
possibility of reproducing only if you can get along in close proximity to other Hominids
without killing each other. I find that a compelling explanation for our stupidly big brains;
it's one thing to be a smart monkey, it's a whole different solution needed to model what is
going on in the brain of another smart monkey.
And communications: How could spoken language have developed without levels of trust and
interdependence that maybe we can not appreciate today? We have a word for 'Blue' nowadays,
we take it for granted.
There is a theory that language originated between mothers and their immediate progeny,
between whom either trust and benevolence exist, or the weaker dies. The mother's chances for
survival and reproduction are enhanced if she can get her progeny to, so to speak, help out
around the house; how to do that is extended by symbolism and syntax as well as example.
I recall the first day of Econ 102 when the Prof. (damned few adjuncts in those days)
said, "Everything we discuss hereafter will be built on the concept of scarcity." Being a
contrary buggah' I thought, "The air I'm breathing isn't scarce." I soon got with the program
supply and demand upward sloping, downward sloping, horizontal, vertical and who could forget
kinked. My personal favorite was the Giffen Good a high priced inferior product. Kind of like
Micro Economics.
Maybe we could begin our new Neo-Economics 102 with the proviso, "Everything we discuss
hereafter will be based on abundance." I'm gonna' like this class!
Neo-lib Econ does a great job at framing issues so that people don't notice what is
excluded. Think of them as proto-Dark Patternists.
If you are bored and slightly mischievous, ask an economist how theory addresses
cooperation, then assume a can opener and crack open a twist-top beer.
Isn't one of the problems that it's NOT really built on the concept of scarcity? Most
natural resources run into scarcity eventually. I don't know about the air one breaths,
certainly fish species are finding reduced oxygen in the oceans due to climate change.
If you would like that class on abundance you would love the Church of Abundant Life which
pushes Jesus as the way to Abundant Life and they mean that literally. Abundant as in Jesus
wants you to have lots of stuff -- so believe.
I believe Neoliberalism is a much more complex animal than an economic theory. Mirowski
builds a plausible argument that Neoliberalism is a theory of epistemology. The Market
discovers Truth.
Had a lovely Physics class where the first homework problem boiled down to "How often do
you inhale a atom (O or N) from Julius Caesar's last breath". Great little introduction to
the power and pratfalls of 'estimations by Physicists' that xkcd likes to poke at. Back then
we used the CRC Handbook to figure it out.
Anyway, every second breath you can be sure you have shared an atom with Caesar.
I don't think Maggie T. or uncle Milty were thinking about the future at all. Neither one
would have openly promoted turfing quadriplegic 70-year-olds out of the rest home. That's how
short sighted they both were. And stupid. We really need to call a spade a spade here. Milty
doesn't even qualify as an economist – unless economics is the study of the destruction
of society. But neoliberalism had been in the wings already, by the 80s, for 40 years. Nobody
took into account that utility-maximizing capitalism always kills the goose (except Lenin
maybe) – because it's too expensive to feed her. The neoliberals were just plain dumb.
The question really is why should we stand for another day of neoliberal nonsense? Albeit
Macht Frei Light? No thanks. I think they've got the question backwards – it shouldn't
be how should "we" reconstruct our image now – but what is the obligation of all the
failed neoliberal extractors to right society now? I'd just as soon stand back and watch the
dam burst as help the neolibs out with a little here and a little there. They'll just keep
taking as long as we give. This isn't as annoying as Macron's "cake" comment, but it's close.
I did like the last 2 paragraphs however.
Here's a sidebar. A universal one. There is an anomaly in the universe – there is
not enough accumulated entropy. It screws up theoretical physics because the missing entropy
needs to be accounted for for their theories to work to their satisfaction. It seems to be a
phenomenon of evolution. Thus it was recently discovered by a physics grad student that
entropy by heat dissipation is the "creator" of life. Life almost spontaneously erupts where
it can take advantage of an energy source. And, we are assuming, life thereby slows entropy
down. There has to be another similar process among the stars and the planets as well, an
evolutionary conservation of energy. So evolution takes on more serious meaning. From the
quantum to the infinite. And society – it's right in the middle. So it isn't too
unreasonable to think that society is extremely adaptable, taking advantage of any energy
input, and it seems true to think that. Which means that society can go long for its goal
before it breaks down. But in the end it will be enervated by lack of "resources" unless it
can self perpetuate in an evolving manner. That's one good reason to say goodbye to looney
ideologies.
For a view of humanity that is not as selfish, recommend "The Gift" by Marcel Mauss.
Basically an anthropological study of reciprocal gift giving in the oceanic potlatch
societies. My take is that the idea was to re-visit relationships, as giving a gift basically
forces a response in the receiver, "Am I going to respond in kind, perhaps even upping what
is required? Or am I going to find that this relationship simply isn't worth it and walk
away?"
Kind of like being in a marriage. The idea isn't to walk away, the idea is you constantly
need to re-enforce it. Except with the potlatch it was like extending that concept to the
clan at large, so that all the relationships within the clan were being re-enforced.
"Kind of like being in a marriage. The idea isn't to walk away, the idea is you constantly
need to re-enforce it. "
amen.
we, the people, abdicated.
as for humans being selfish by default i used to believe this, due to my own experiences
as an outlaw and pariah.
until wife's cancer and the overwhelming response of this little town,in the "reddest"
congressional district in texas.
locally, the most selfish people i know are the one's who own everything buying up their
neighbor's businesses when things get tough.
they are also the most smug and pretentious(local dems, in their hillforts come a close
second in this regard) and most likely to be gop true believers.
small town and all everybody literally knows everybody, and their extended family and those
connections are intertwined beyond belief.
wife's related, in some way, to maybe half the town.
that matters and explains my experience as an outcast: i never belonged to anything like that
and such fellowfeeling and support is hard for people to extend to a stranger.
That's what's gonna be the hard sell, here, in undoing the hyperindividualist, "there is no
such thing as society" nonsense.
I grew up until Junior High in a fishing village on the Maine coast that had been around
for well over a hundred years and had a population of under 1000. By the time I was 8 I
realized there was no point in being extreme with anyone, because they were likely to be
around for the rest of your life.
I fell in love with sun and warmth when we moved away and unfortunately it's all
gentrified now, by the 90s even a tar paper shack could be sold for a few acres up in
Lamoine.
Yep, small towns are about as close as we get to clans nowadays. And just like clans, you
don't want to be on the outside. Still when you marry in, it would be nice if the town would
make you feel more a member like a clan should / would. ;-)
But outside of the small town and extended families I think that's it. We've been atomized
into our nuclear families. Except for the ruling class – I think they have this quid
pro quo gift giving relationship building figured out quite nicely. Basically they've formed
their own small town – at the top.
By the way, I understand Mauss was an influence on Baudrillard. I could almost imagine
Baudrillard thinking how the reality of the potlatch societies was so different than the
reality of western societies.
That's the big problem I see in this discussion. We know, or at least think we know,
what's wrong, and what would be better; but we can't get other people to want to do something
about it, even those who nominally agree with us. And I sure don't have the answer.
Neoliberalism, in its early guise at least, was popular because politicians like Thatcher
effectively promised something for nothing. Low taxes but still decent public services. The
right to buy your council house without putting your parents' council house house in
jeopardy. Enjoying private medical care as a perk of your job whilst still finding the NHS
there when you were old and sick. And so on. By the time the penny dropped it was too
late.
If the Left is serious about challenging neoliberalism, it has to return to championing the
virtues of community, which it abandoned decades ago in favour of extreme liberal
individualism Unfortunately, community is an idea which has either been appropriated by
various identity warriors (thus fracturing society further) or dismissed (as this author
does) because it's been taken up by the Right. A Left which explained that when everybody
cooperates everybody benefits, but that when everybody fights everybody loses, would sweep
the board.
If the Left is serious about challenging neoliberalism, it has to return to championing
the virtues of community
I agree. The tenuous suggestions offered by the article are top down. But top-down
universal solutions can remove the impetus for local organization. Which enervates the power
of communities. And then you can't do anything about austerity, because your Rep loves the
PowerPoints and has so much money from the Real Estate community.
Before one experiences the virtue, or power, of a community, one has to go through the
pain in the ass of contributing to a community. It has to be rewarding process or it won't
happen.
"An example of how this plays out can be seen in academic studies showing that, in game
scenarios presenting the opportunity to free-ride on the efforts of others, only economics
students behaved as economic models predicted: all other groups were much more likely to pool
their resources. Having been trained to believe that others are likely to be selfish,
economists believe that their best course of action is to be selfish as well. The rest of us
still have the instinct to cooperate. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising: after all, as
George Monbiot argues in 'Out of the Wreckage', cooperation is our species' main survival
strategy."
Since so many people believe their job is their identity, would be interssting to know
what the job training or jobs were of the "others."
>so many people believe their job is their identity
Only because the social sphere, which in the medium and long term we *all depend
on* to survive, has been debased by 24/7/365 neolib talking points, and their purposeful
economic constrictions..
How many people have spent their lives working for the "greater good"? How many work
building some transcendental edifice from which the only satisfaction they could take away
was knowing they performed a part of its construction? The idea that Humankind is selfish and
greedy is a projection promoted by the small part of Humankind that really is selfish and
greedy.
Where does wealth creation actually occur in the capitalist system?
Nations can do well with the trade, as we have seen with China and Germany, but this comes
at other nation's expense.
In a successful global economy, trade should be balanced over the long term.
Keynes was aware of this in the past, and realised surplus nations were just as much of a
problem as deficit nations in a successful global economy with a long term future.
Zimababwe has lots of money and it's not doing them any favours. Too much money causes
hyper-inflation.
You can just print money, the real wealth in the economy lies somewhere else.
Alan Greenspan tells Paul Ryan the Government can create all the money it wants and there is
no need to save for pensions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
What matters is whether the goods and services are there for them to buy with that money.
That's where the real wealth in the economy lies.
Money has no intrinsic value; its value comes from what it can buy.
Zimbabwe has too much money in the economy relative to the goods and services available in
that economy. You need wheelbarrows full of money to buy anything.
It's that GDP thing that measures real wealth creation.
GDP does not include the transfer of existing assets like stocks and real estate.
Inflated asset prices are just inflated asset prices and this can disappear all too easily as
we keep seeing in real estate.
1990s – UK, US (S&L), Canada (Toronto), Scandinavia, Japan
2000s – Iceland, Dubai, US (2008)
2010s – Ireland, Spain, Greece
Get ready to put Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Hong Kong on the list.
They invented the GDP measure in the 1930s, to track real wealth creation in the economy
after they had seen all that apparent wealth in the US stock market disappear in 1929.
There was nothing really there.
How can banks create wealth with bank credit?
The UK used to know before 1980.
https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/uploads/monthly_2018_02/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13_53_09.png.e32e8fee4ffd68b566ed5235dc1266c2.png
Before 1980 – banks lending into the right places that result in GDP growth (business
and industry, creating new products and services in the economy)
After 1980 – banks lending into the wrong places that don't result in GDP growth (real
estate and financial speculation)
What happened in 1979?
The UK eliminated corset controls on banking in 1979 and the banks invaded the mortgage
market and this is where the problem starts.
Real estate does make the economy boom, but there is no real wealth creation in inflating
asset prices.
What is really happening?
When you use bank credit to inflate asset prices, the debt rises much faster than GDP.
https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/uploads/monthly_2018_02/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13_53_09.png.e32e8fee4ffd68b566ed5235dc1266c2.png
The bank credit of mortgages is bringing future spending power into today.
Bank loans create money and the repayment of debt to banks destroys money.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf
In the real estate boom, new money pours into the economy from mortgage lending, fuelling a
boom in the real economy, which feeds back into the real estate boom.
The Japanese real estate boom of the 1980s was so excessive the people even commented on the
"excess money", and everyone enjoyed spending that excess money in the economy.
In the real estate bust, debt repayments to banks destroy money and push the economy towards
debt deflation (a shrinking money supply).
Japan has been like this for thirty years as they pay back the debts from their 1980s
excesses, it's called a balance sheet recession. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk
Bank loans effectively take future spending and bring it in today.
Jam today, penury tomorrow.
Using future spending power to inflate asset prices today is a mistake that comes from
thinking inflating asset prices creates real wealth.
GDP measures real wealth creation.
Did you know capitalism works best with low housing costs and a low cost of living?
Probably not, you are in the parallel universe of neoliberalism.
William White (BIS, OECD) talks about how economics really changed over one hundred years
ago as classical economics was replaced by neoclassical economics.
He thinks we have been on the wrong path for one hundred years.
Some very important things got lost 100 years ago.
The Mont Pelerin society developed the parallel universe of neoliberalism from
neoclassical economics.
The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) saw the light once they discovered my equation
(Michael Hudson condensed)
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
"Wait a minute, employees get their money from wages and businesses have to cover high
housing costs in wages reducing profit" the CBI
It's all about the economy, and UK businesses will benefit from low housing costs. High housing costs push up wages and reduce profits. Off-shore to make more profit, you can pay lower wages where the cost of living is lower,
e.g. China; the US and UK are rubbish.
What was Keynes really doing?
Creating a low cost, internationally competitive economy. Keynes's ideas were a solution to the problems of the Great Depression, but we forgot why
he did, what he did.
They tried running an economy on debt in the 1920s. The 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into
the debt deflation of the Great Depression. No one realised the problems that were building
up in the economy as they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical
economics.
Keynes looked at the problems of the debt based economy and came up with redistribution
through taxation to keep the system running in a sustainable way and he dealt with the
inherent inequality capitalism produced.
The cost of living = housing costs + healthcare costs + student loan costs + food + other
costs of living
Disposable income = wages - (taxes + the cost of living)
High progressive taxation funded a low cost economy with subsidised housing, healthcare,
education and other services to give more disposable income on lower wages.
Employers and employees both win with a low cost of living.
Keynesian ideas went wrong in the 1970s and everyone had forgotten the problems of
neoclassical economics that he originally solved.
Classical economics – observations and deductions from the world of small state,
unregulated capitalism around them
Neoclassical economics – Where did that come from?
Keynesian economics – observations, deductions and fixes for the problems of
neoclassical economics
Neoclassical economics – Why is that back?
We thought small state, unregulated capitalism was something that it wasn't as our ideas
came from neoclassical economics, which has little connection with classical economics.
On bringing it back again, we had lost everything that had been learned in the 1930s, by
which time it had already demonstrated its flaws.
Ultimately, neoliberalism is about privatization and ownership of everything. This is why
it's so important to preserve the Common Good, the vital resources and services that support
earthly existence. The past 40 years has shown what happens when this falls out of balance.
Our value system turns upside down – the sick become more valuable than the healthy, a
violent society provides for the prisons-for-profit system and so on. The biggest upset has
been the privatization of money creation.
This latest secret bank bailout (not really secret as Dodd-Frank has allowed banks to
siphon newly created money from the Fed without Congressional approval. No more public
embarrassment that Hank Paulson had to endure.) They are now up to $690 billion PER WEEK
while the media snoozes. PPPs enjoy the benefits of public money to seed projects for private
gain. The rest of us have to rely on predatory lenders, sinking us to the point of Peak Debt,
where private debt can never be paid off and must be cancelled, as it should be because it
never should've happened in the first place.
"Neoliberalism, which has influenced so much of the conventional thinking about money,
is adamant that the public sector must not create ('print') money, and so public
expenditure must be limited to what the market can 'afford.' Money, in this view, is a
limited resource that the market ensures will be used efficiently. Is public money, then, a
pipe dream? No, for the financial crisis and the response to it undermined this neoliberal
dogma.
The financial sector mismanaged its role as a source of money so badly that the
state had to step in and provide unlimited monetary backing to rescue it. The creation of
money out of thin air by public authorities revealed the inherently political nature of
money. But why, then, was the power to create money ceded to the private sector in the
first place -- and with so little public accountability?And
if money can be created to serve the banks, why not to benefit people and the
environment? "
The Commons should have a shot at revival as the upcoming generation's desires are
outstripped by their incomes and savings. The conflict between desires and reality may give a
boost to alternate notions of what's desirable. Add to this the submersion of cities under
the waves of our expanding oceans, and one gets yet another concrete reason to think that
individual ownership isn't up to the job of inspiring young people.
A Commons of some sort
will be needed to undo the cost of generations of unpaid negative externalities. Fossil
fuels, constant warfare, income inequality, stupendous idiocy of kleptocratic government
these baked in qualities of neo-liberalism are creating a very large, dissatisfied, and
educated population just about anywhere one looks. Suburbia will be on fire, as well as
underwater. Farmlands will be parched, drenched, and exhausted. Where will Larry Summers dump
the garbage?
Political theorist Wendy Brown's latest book, In the Ruins of
Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West , traces the intellectual
roots of neoliberalism and reveals how an anti-democratic project unleashed monsters –
from plutocrats to neo-fascists – that its mid-20 th century visionaries
failed to anticipate. She joins the Institute for New Economic Thinking to discuss how the
flawed blueprint for markets and the less-discussed focus on morality gave rise to threats to
democracy and society that are distinct from what has come before.
Lynn Parramore: To many people, neoliberalism is about economic agendas. But your book
explores what you describe as the moral aspect of the neoliberal project. Why is this
significant?
Wendy Brown: Most critical engagement with neoliberalism focuses on economic policy
– deregulation, privatization, regressive taxation, union busting and the extreme
inequality and instability these generate. However, there is another aspect to neoliberalism,
apparent both in its intellectual foundations and its actual roll-out, that mirrors these moves
in the sphere of traditional morality. All the early schools of neoliberalism (Chicago,
Austrian, Freiburg, Virginia) affirmed markets and the importance of states supporting without
intervening in them.
But they also all affirmed the importance of traditional morality (centered in the
patriarchal family and private property) and the importance of states supporting without
intervening in it. They all supported expanding its reach from the private into the civic
sphere and rolling back social justice previsions that conflict with it. Neoliberalism thus
aims to de-regulate the social sphere in a way that parallels the de-regulation of markets.
Concretely this means challenging, in the name of freedom, not only regulatory and
redistributive economic policy but policies aimed at gender, sexual and racial equality. It
means legitimating assertions of personal freedom against equality mandates (and when
corporations are identified as persons, they too are empowered to assert such freedom). Because
neoliberalism has everywhere carried this moral project in addition to its economic one, and
because it has everywhere opposed freedom to state imposed social justice or social protection
of the vulnerable, the meaning of liberalism has been fundamentally altered in the past four
decades.
That's how it is possible to be simultaneously libertarian, ethnonationalist and patriarchal
today: The right's contemporary attack on "social justice warriors" is straight out of
Hayek.
LP: You discuss economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek at length in your book.
How would you distribute responsibility to him compared to other champions of conservative
formulations for how neoliberalism has played out? What were his blind spots, which seem
evidenced today in the rise of right-wing forces and angry populations around the world?
WB: Margaret Thatcher thumped Hayek's The Constitution of
Liberty and declared it the bible of her project. She studied it, believed it, and
sought to realize it. Reagan imbibed a lot of Thatcherism. Both aimed to implement the Hayekian
view of markets, morals and undemocratic statism. Both accepted his demonization of society
(Thatcher famously quotes him, "there's no such thing") and his view that state policies aimed
at the good for society are already on the road to totalitarianism. Both affirmed traditional
morality in combination with deregulated markets and attacks on organized labor.
I am not arguing that Hayek is the dominant influence for all times and places of
neoliberalization over the past four decades -- obviously the Chicago Boys [Chilean economists of the '70s
and '80s trained at the University of Chicago] were key in Latin America while Ordoliberalism [a German
approach to liberalism] has been a major influence in the European Union's management of the
post-2008 crises. "Progressive neoliberals" and neoliberalized institutions hauled the project
in their own direction. But Hayek's influence is critical to governing rationality of
neoliberalism in the North and he also happens to be a rich and complex thinker with a fairly
comprehensive worldview, one comprising law, family, morality, state, economy, liberty,
equality, democracy and more.
The limitations? Hayek really believed that markets and traditional morality were both
spontaneous orders of action and cooperation, while political life would always overreach and
thus required tight constraints to prevent its interventions in morality or markets. It also
needed to be insulated from instrumentalism by concentrated economic interests, from aspiring
plutocrats to the masses. The solution, for him, was de-democratizing the state itself. He was,
more generally, opposed to robust democracy and indeed to a democratic state. A thriving order
in his understanding would feature substantial hierarchy and inequality, and it could tolerate
authoritarian uses of political power if they respected liberalism, free markets and
individual freedom.
We face an ugly, bowdlerized version of this today on the right. It is not exactly what
Hayek had in mind, and he would have loathed the plutocrats, demagogues and neo-fascist masses,
but his fingerprints are on it.
LP: You argue that there is now arising something distinct from past forms of fascism,
authoritarianism, plutocracy, and conservatism. We see things like images of Italian right groups giving Fascist
salutes that have been widely published. Is that merely atavism? What is different?
WB: Of course, the hard right traffics in prior fascist and ultra-racist iconography,
including Nazism and the Klan. However, the distinctiveness of the present is better read from
the quotidian right than the alt-right.
We need to understand why reaction to the neoliberal economic sinking of the middle and
working class has taken such a profoundly anti-democratic form. Why so much rage against
democracy and in favor of authoritarian statism while continuing to demand individual freedom?
What is the unique blend of ethno-nationalism and libertarianism afoot today? Why the
resentment of social welfare policy but not the plutocrats? Why the uproar over [American
football player and political activist] Colin Kaepernick but not the Panama Papers [a massive
document leak pointing to fraud and tax evasion among the wealthy]? Why don't bankrupt workers
want national healthcare or controls on the pharmaceutical industry? Why are those sickened
from industrial effluent in their water and soil supporting a regime that wants to roll back
environmental and health regulations?
Answers to these questions are mostly found within the frame of neoliberal reason, though
they also pertain to racialized rancor (fanned by opportunistic demagogues and our mess of an
unaccountable media), the dethronement of white masculinity from absolute rather than relative
entitlement, and an intensification of nihilism itself amplified by neoliberal
economization.
These contributing factors do not run along separate tracks. Rather, neoliberalism's aim to
displace democracy with markets, morals and liberal authoritarian statism legitimates a white
masculinist backlash against equality and inclusion mandates. Privatization of the nation
legitimates "nativist" exclusions. Individual freedom in a world of winners and losers assaults
the place of equality, access and inclusion in understandings of justice.
LP: Despite your view of democratized capitalism as an "oxymoron," you also observe that
capitalism can be modulated in order to promote equality among citizens. How is this feasible
given the influence of money in politics? What can we do to mitigate the corruption of
wealth?
WB: Citizens United certainly set
back the project of achieving the political equality required by and for democracy. I
wrote about this in a previous book, Undoing the Demos , and Timothy
Kuhner offers a superb account of the significance of wealth in politics in Capitalism V. Democracy: Money in Politics
and the Free Market Constitution. Both of us argue that the Citizens
United decision, and the several important campaign finance and campaign speech decisions
that preceded it, are themselves the result of a neoliberalized jurisprudence. That is,
corporate dominance of elections becomes possible when political life as a whole is cast as a
marketplace rather than a distinctive sphere in which humans attempt to set the values and
possibilities of common life. Identifying elections as political marketplaces is at the heart
of Citizens United.
So does a future for democracy in the United States depend on overturning that decision?
Hardly. Democracy is a practice, an ideal, an imaginary, a struggle, not an achieved state.
It is always incomplete, or better, always aspirational. There is plenty of that aspiration
afoot these days -- in social movements and in statehouses big and small. This doesn't make the
future of democracy rosy. It is challenged from a dozen directions – divestment
from public higher education, the trashing of truth and facticity, the unaccountability of
media platforms, both corporate and social, external influence and trolling, active voter
suppression and gerrymandering, and the neoliberal assault on the very value of democracy we've
been discussing. So the winds are hardly at democracy's back.
I think Milton Friedman was vastly more important than Hayek is shaping the worldview of
American conservatives on economic policy. Until Hayek won the Nobel he was virtually
forgotten in the US. Don't know about the UK, but his leaving the London School of Economics
undoubtedly reduced his influence there. Hayek was very isolated at the University of Chicago
even from the libertarians at the Department of Economics, largely due to methodological
issues. The Chicago economists thought was really more of as philosopher, not a real
economist like them.
Friedman was working for Hayek, in the sense that Hayek instigated the program that
Friedman fronted.
I was amused by a BBC radio piece a couple of years ago in which some City economist was
trying to convince us that Hayek was a forgotten genius who we ought to dig up and worship,
as if he doesn't already rule the World from his seat at God's right hand.
Citizens United: The conservative originalists keep whining about activist judges making
up rights, like the "right to privacy" in Roe v. Wade. Yet they were able to come up with
Citizens United that gave a whole new class of rights to corporations to effectively give
them the rights of individuals (the People that show up regularly in the Constitution,
including the opening phrase). If you search the Constitution, "company", "corporation" etc.
don't even show up as included in the Constitution. "Commerce" shows up a couple of times,
specifically as something regulated by Congress. Citizens United effectively flips the script
of the Constitution in giving the companies doing Commerce the ability to regulate Congress.
I think Citizen's United is the least conservative ruling that the conservative court could
have come up with, bordering on fascism instead of the principles clearly enunciated
throughout the Constitution. It is likely to be the "Dred Scott" decision of the 21st
century.
2. Neo-liberalism is like Marxism and a bunch of other isms, where the principles look
fine on paper until you apply them to real-world people and societies. This is the difference
between Thaler's "econs" vs "humans". It works in theory, but not in practice because people
are not purely rational and the behavioral aspects of the people and societies throw things
out of kilter very quickly. That is a primary purpose of regulation, to be a rational
fly-wheel keeping things from spinning out of control to the right or left. Marxism quickly
turned into Stalinism in Russia while Friedman quickly turned into massive inequality and
Donald Trump in the US. The word "regulate" shows up more frequently in the Constitution than
"commerce", or "freedom" (only shows up in First Amendment), or "liberty" (deprivation of
liberty has to follow due process of law which is a form of regulation). So the Constitution
never conceived of a self-regulating society in the way Hayek and Friedman think things
should naturally work – writing court rulings on the neo-liberal approach is a radical
activist departure from the Constitution.
The foundation was laid for Citizens United long before, I think, when the Supreme
Court decided that corporations were essentially people, and that money was essentially
speech. It would be nice if some justice started hacking away at those erroneous decisions
(along with what they did with the 2nd Amendment in D.C. v Heller .)
I honestly think the corporations are people was good and the money is speech is terrible.
If most of the big corporations were actually treated like people those people would be in
jail. They are treated better than people are now. Poor people, anyway. When your corporation
is too big not to commit crimes, it's too big and should go in time out at least.
My understanding is that corporate personhood arose as a convenience to allow a
corporation to be named as a single entity in legal actions, rather than having to name every
last stockholder, officer, employee etc. Unfortunately the concept was gradually expanded far
past its usefulness for the rest of us.
"If most of the big corporations were actually treated like people those people would be
in jail."
Thats part of the problem: Corporations CANNOT be put in jail because they are
organizations, not people, but they are given the same 'rights' as people. That is
fundamentally part of the problem.
True, but corporations are directed by people who *can* be jailed. Often they are
compensated as if they were taking full liability when in fact they face none. I think its
long past time to revisit the concept of limited liability.
"Limited Liability" is basic to the concept of the corporation. How about some "limited
liability" for individuals? The whole point of neo-liberalism is "lawlessness" or the "Law of
the Jungle" in unfettered markets. The idea is to rationalize raw power, both over society
and the family, the last stand of male dominance, the patriarchy. The women who succeed in
this eco-system, eschew the nurturing feminine and espouse the predatory masculine. "We came,
we saw, he died." Psychopaths all!
The executives need to go to jail. Until then, corporate fines are just a cost of doing
business and white collar lawbreaking will continue. Blowing up the world's financial system
has less legal consequence than doing 80 in a 65 mph zone. Even if they just did civil asset
forfeiture on executives based on them having likely committed a crime while in their house
and using their money would go along ways to cleaning things up.
The whittling away of white collar crime by need to demonstrate intent beyond reasonable
doubt means the executives can just plead incompetence or inattention (while collecting their
$20 million after acquittal). Meanwhile, a poor person with a baggie of marijuana in the
trunk of their car goes to jail for "possession" where intent does not need to be shown, mere
presence of the substance. If they used the same standard of the mere presence of a fraud to
be sufficient to jail white collar criminals, there wouldn't be room in the prisons for poor
people picked up for little baggies of weed.
Actually, if you research the history, the court DID NOT decide that corporations are
people. The decision was made by the secretary to the court, who included the ruling in the
headnote to Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886. The concept was not
considered in the case itself nor in the ruling the judges made. However, it was so
convenient for making money that judges and even at least one justice on the supreme court
publicized the ruling as if it were an actual legal precedent and have followed it ever
since. I am not a lawyer, but I think that ruling could be changed by a statute, whereas
Citizens United is going to require an amendment to the constitution. On the other hand, who
knows? Maybe the five old, rich, Republican, Catholic Men will rule that it is embedded in
the constitution after all. I think it would be worth a try.
"Neo-liberalism is like Marxism and a bunch of other isms, where the principles look fine
on paper until you apply them to real-world people and societies."
Marx analysed 19th Century capitalism; he wrote very little on what type of system should
succeed capitalism. This is in distinct contrast to neo-liberalism which had a well plotted
path to follow (Mirowski covers this very well). Marxism did not turn into Stalinism; Tsarism
turned into Leninism which turned into Stalinism. Marx had an awful lot less to do with it
than Tsar Nicholas II.
+1000. I think it was Tsar Nicholas II who said, L'etat, c'est moi"./s; Lenin just
appropriated this concept to implement his idea of "the dictatorship of the proletariat."
"Neo-liberalism is like Marxism and a bunch of other isms, where the principles look fine
on paper until you apply them to real-world people and societies."
I'm sorry, but this is fundamentally intellectually lazy. Marxism isn't so much a way to
structure the world, like Neoliberalism is, but a method of understanding Capitalism and
class relations to capitalism.
Edit: I wrote this before I saw New Wafer Army's post since I hadnt refreshed the page
since I opened it. They said pretty much what I wanted to say, so kudos to them.
These critiques of neoliberalism are always welcome, but they inevitably leave me with
irritated and dissatisfied with their failure or unwillingness to mention the political
philosophy of republicanism as an alternative, or even a contrast.
The key is found in Brown's statement " It also needed to be insulated from
instrumentalism by concentrated economic interests, from aspiring plutocrats to the masses.
The solution, for him [von Hayek], was de-democratizing the state itself. He was, more
generally, opposed to robust democracy and indeed to a democratic state."
Contrast this to Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison's famous discourse on factions.
Madison writes that 1) factions always arise from economic interests ["But the most common
and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property."],
and 2) therefore the most important function of government is to REGULATE the clash of these
factions ["The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task
of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and
ordinary operations of the government."
In a very real sense, neoliberalism is an assault on the founding principles of the
American republic.
Which should not really surprise anyone, since von Hayek was trained as a functionary of
the Austro-Hungarian empire. And who was the first secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society that
von Hayen founded to promote neoliberalist doctrine and propaganda? Non other than Max Thurn,
of the reactionary Bavarian Thurn und Taxis royal family.
Madison's Federalist 10 is much like Aristotle's Politics and the better Roman historians
in correctly tracing back the fundamental tensions in any political community to questions of
property and class.
And, much like Aristotle's "mixed regime," Madison proposes that the best way of
overcoming these tensions is to institutionalize organs of government broadly representative
of the two basic contesting political classes–democratic and oligarchic–and let
them hash things out in a way that both are forced to deal with the other. This is a
simplification but not a terribly inaccurate one.
The problem though so far as I can tell is that it almost always happens that the
arrangement is set up in a way that structurally privileges existing property rights
(oligarchy) over social freedoms (democracy) such that the oligarchic class quickly comes to
dominate even those governmental organs designed to be "democratic". In other words, I have
never seen a theorized republic that upon closer inspection was not an oligarchy in
practice.
1) Support welfare for the banks (e.g. deposit guarantees) and the rich (e.g. non-negative
yields and interest on the inherently risk-free debt of monetary sovereigns).
2) Seek to regulate the thievery inherent in 1).
3) Bemoan the inevitable rat-race to the bottom when 2) inevitably fails because of
unenforceable laws, such as bans on insider trading, red-lining, etc.
Shorter: Progressives ENABLE the injustice they profess, no doubt sincerely at least in
some cases, to oppose.
Rather stupid from an engineering perspective, I'd say. Or more kindly, blind.
I'm fine with the federal government providing basic banking services (which would
inherently protect depositors) but your initial post didn't say anything about that. If we
continue with a private banking system I want deposit guarantees even if they somehow
privilege the banks better than nothing
I have read that originally conservatives (including many bankers) opposed deposit
insurance because it would lead people to be less careful when they evaluated the banking
institution they would entrust with their money. They did not seem to notice that however
much diligence depositors used, they ended up losing their life's savings over and over. Just
as they do not seem to notice that despite having employer-provided insurance tens of
thousands of people every year go bankrupt because of medical bills. Funny how that
works.
Adding that rather than deposit guarantees, the US government could have expanded the
Postal Savings Service to provide the population with what private banks had so miserably
failed to provide – the safe storage of their fiat.
The banking system was failing in 1932, as was the financial system in 2008, not
necessarily because of any lack of solvency of an individual business although some were, but
because of the lack of faith in the whole system; bank panics meant that every depositor was
trying to get their money out at the same time. People lost everything. It is only the faith
in the system that enables the use of bits of paper and plastic to work. So having a
guarantee in big, bold letters of people's savings is a good idea.
Personally, I see little distance between the Neo Liberal treatment of Market and Naked
Greed, coupled with a complete rejection of Rule of Law for the Common Good.
" It means legitimating assertions of personal freedom against equality mandates (and when
corporations are identified as persons, they too are empowered to assert such freedom)."
"We need to understand why reaction to the neoliberal economic sinking of the middle and
working class has taken such a profoundly anti-democratic form." Really? Does anybody here
believe that? This reads like another clumsy attempt to dismiss actual popular anger against
neoliberalism in favour of pearl-clutching progressive angst, by associating this anger with
the latest target for liberal hate, in this case blah blah patriarchy blah blah. The reality
is that liberalism has always been about promoting the freedom of the rich and the strong to
do whatever they feel like, whilst keeping the ordinary people divided and under control.
That's why Liberals have always hated socialists, who think of the good of the community
rather than of the "freedom" of the rich, powerful and well connected.
The "democracy" that is being defended here is traditional elite liberal democracy, full of
abstract "rights" that only the powerful can exert, dominated by elite political parties with
little to choose between them, and indifferent or hostile to actual freedoms that ordinary
people want in their daily lives. Neoliberalism is simply a label for its economic views
(that haven't changed much over the centuries) whereas social justice is the label for its
social wing (ditto).
I think of this every time I wall home through the local high street, where within thirty
metres I pass two elderly eastern European men aggressively begging. (It varies in France,
but this is slightly closer than the average for a city). I reflect that twenty years of
neoliberal policies in France have given these people freedom of movement, and the freedom to
sit there in the rain with no home, no job and no prospects. Oh, and now of course they are
free to marry each other.
I agree with your analysis and assessment of Wendy Brown, as she is portrayed in her
statements in this post. However I quibble your assertion: "Neoliberalism is simply a label
for its economic views (that haven't changed much over the centuries) whereas social justice
is the label for its social wing (ditto)." The word "Neoliberalism" is indeed commonly used
as a label as you assert but Neoliberalism as a philosophy is obscured in that common
usage.
At its heart I believe Neoliberalism might best be characterized as an epistemology based
on the Market operating as the all knowing arbiter of Truth. Hayek exercises notions of
'freedom' in his writing but I believe freedom is a secondary concern once it is defined in
terms of its relation to the decisions of the Market. This notion of the Market as
epistemology is completely absent from Wendy Brown's discussion of her work in this post.
Her assertion that "neoliberalism's aim [is] to displace democracy with markets, morals
and liberal authoritarian statism legitimates a white masculinist backlash against equality
and inclusion mandates" collapses once the Market is introduced as epistemology.
Neoliberalism does not care one way or another about any of Wendy Brown's concerns. Once the
Market decides -- Truth is known. As a political theorist I am surprised there is no analysis
of Neoliberalism as a tool the Elite have used to work their will on society. I am surprised
there is no analysis of how the Elites have allowed themselves to be controlled within and
even displaced by the Corporate Entities they created and empowered using their tool. I am
surprised there is no analysis of the way the Corporate Entities and their Elite have worked
to use Neoliberalism to subordinate nation states under a hierarchy driven by the decisions
of the World Market.
[I admit I lack the stomach to read Hayek -- so I am basing my opinions on what I
understand of Phillip Mirowski's analysis of Neoliberalism.]
I don't disagree with you: I suppose that having been involved in practical politics
rather than being a political theorist (which I have no pretensions to being) I am more
interested of the reality of some of these ideas than their theoretical underpinnings. I have
managed to slog my way through Slobodian's book, and I think your presentation of Hayek's
writing is quite fair: I simply wonder how far it is actually at the origin of the
destruction we see around us. I would suggest in fact that, once you have a political
philosophy based on the value-maximising individual, rather than traditional considerations
of the good of society as a whole, you eventually wind up where we are now, once the
constraints of religious belief, fear of popular uprisings , fear of Communism etc. have been
progressively removed. It's for that reason that I argue that neoliberalism isn't really new:
it represents the essential form of liberalism unconstrained by outside forces – almost
a teleological phenomenon which, as its first critics feared, has wound up destroying
community, family, industries, social bonds and even – as you suggest – entire
nation states.
Your response to my comment, in particular your assertion "neoliberalism isn't really new"
coupled with your assertion apparently equating Neoliberalism with just another general
purpose label for a "political philosophy based on the value-maximizing individual, rather
than traditional ", is troubling. When I put your assertions with Jerry B's assertion at 6:58
pm:
" many people over focus on a word or the use of a word and ascribe way to literal view of a
word. I tend to view words more symbolically and contextually."
I am left wondering what is left to debate or discuss. If Neoliberalism has no particular
meaning then perhaps we should discuss the properties of political philosophies based on the
value-maximizing-individual, and even that construct only has meaning symbolically and
contextually, which is somehow different than the usual notion of meaning as a denotation
coupled with a connotation which is shared by those using a term in their discussion -- and
there I become lost from the discussion. I suppose I am too pedantic to deviate from the
common usages of words, especially technical words like Neoliberalism.
Considering how elites throughout history have used religion as a bulwark to guard their
privileges, it should be of no surprise that they are building a new one, only this time they
are building one that appeals to the religious and secular alike. Neoliberalism will be very
difficult to dismantle.
But what ironies we create. Citizens United effectively gave political control to the big
corporations. In a time when society has already evolved lots of legislation to limit the
power and control of any group and especially in commercial/monopoly cases. So that what CU
created was a new kind of "means of production" because what gets "produced" these days is at
least 75% imported. The means of production is coming to indicate the means of political
control. And that is fitting because ordinary people have become the commodity. Like
livestock. So in that sense Marx's view of power relationships is accurate although
civilization has morphed. Politics is, more and more, the means of production. The means of
finance. Just another reason why we would achieve nothing in this world trying to take over
the factories. What society must have now is fiscal control. It will be the new means of
production. I'm a dummy. I knew fiscal control was the most important thing, but I didn't
quite see the twists and turns that keep the fundamental idea right where it started.
Exactly. The writer seems determined to tie in neoliberalism with a broader conservative
opposition to modern social justice movements, when in reality neoliberalism (the 'neo' part
anyway) was more than happy to co-opt feminism, anti-racism, etc., into its narrative. The
more the merrier, as 'rights' became associated entirely with social issues, and not economic
rights.
The co-optation neoliberalism has exacted on rights movements has dovetailed nicely with
postmodernism's social-constructivism, an anti-materialist stance that posits discourse as
shaping the world and one that therefore privileges subjectivity over material reality.
What this means in practice is that "identity" is now a marketplace too, in which
individuals are naming their identities as a form of personal corporate branding. That's why
we have people labeling themselves like this: demisexual queer femme, on the spectrum, saying
hell no to my tradcath roots, into light BDSM, pronouns they/them.
And to prove this identity, the person must purchase various consumer products to garb and
decorate themselves accordingly.
So the idea of civil rights has now become utterly consumerist and about awarding those
rights based on subjective feelings rather than anything to do with actual material
exploitation.
The clue is in the way the words "oppression" and "privilege" are used. Under those words,
exploitation, discrimination, disadvantage, and simple dislike are conflated, though they're
very different and involve very different remedies.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under
bridges and stealing bread = classical Liberalism.
The bizarre thing is to meet younger neoliberal middle class people whom neoliberalism has
priced out of major cities, who have hardly any real savings, and who still are on board with
the project. The dream dies hard.
David – I enjoy reading your comments on NC as they are well reasoned and develop an
argument or counter argument. The above comment reads more like a rant. I do not disagree
with most of your comment. From my experience with Wendy Brown's writing your statement below
is not off base.:
This reads like another clumsy attempt to dismiss actual popular anger against
neoliberalism in favour of pearl-clutching progressive angst, by associating this anger with
the latest target for liberal hate, in this case blah blah patriarchy blah blah
However, in reading Wendy Brown's comments I did not have the same emotional reaction that
comes across in your comment. I have read the post twice to make sure I understand the points
Wendy Brown is trying to make and IMO she is "not wrong" either. . I would advise you to not
"throw out the baby with the bathwater".
As KLG mentions below, WB is a very successful academic at Berkeley who worked with
Sheldon Wolin as a graduate student IIRC (Sheldon Wolin wrote a terrific book entitled
Democracy Incorporated), so she is not just some random journalist.
Much of WB's writing has gender themes in it and there are times I think she goes over the
top, BUT, IMO there is also some truth to what she is saying. Much of the political power and
economic power in the US and the world is held by men so that may be where WB's reference to
patriarchy comes in.
How could there be patriarchy with men begging in the streets is a valid point. And that
is where I divert with WB, in that the term patriarchy paints with too broad a brush. But
speaking specifically to neo-liberalism and not liberalism as you refer to it, that is where
WB's reference to patriarchy may have some merit. Yes, there are many exceptions to the
neoliberalism and patriarchy connection such as Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, etc., so
again maybe painting with too broad a brush, but it would be wise not to give some value.
The sociologist Raewyn Connell has written about the connection between neoliberalism and
version of a certain type of masculinity embedded with neoliberalism. Like Wendy Brown,
Connell seems to gloss over the examples of Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, and the class
based elite bourgeois feminism as counterpoints to neoliberal patriarchy. There are
exceptions to every rule.
Women have made enormous strides in politics and the boardroom. But in the halls of political
and economic power the majority of the power is still held by men, and until women become
close to 50% or more of the seats of power, to ignore the influence of patriarchy/oligarch
version of masculinity(or whatever term a person is comfortable with) on neoliberalism would
be foolish.
Neoliberalism is simply a label for its economic views (that haven't changed much over
the centuries) whereas social justice is the label for its social wing (ditto).
I disagree. IMO, neoliberalism is a different animal than the "traditional elite liberal
democracy", and neoliberalism is much darker and as WB mentions "Neoliberalism thus aims to
de-regulate the social sphere in a way that parallels the de-regulation of markets".
If you have not I would highly recommend reading Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism It is an excellent book.
I haven't read that book by Wolin, though his Politics and Vision is in the bookcase next
to me. I'll try to get hold of it. I didn't know she was his student either.
I think the issues she raises about gender are a different question from neoliberalism
itself, and that it's not helpful to believe that you can fight neoliberalism by
"legitimating assertions of personal freedom against equality mandates" whatever that means.
Likewise, it's misleading to suggest that "Privatization of the nation legitimates "nativist"
exclusions", since the actual result is the opposite, as you will realise when you see that
London buses have the same logo as the ones in Paris, and electricity in the UK is often
supplied by a French company, EDF. Indeed, to the extent that there is a connection with
"nativism" it is that privatisation has enabled an international network of distant and
unaccountable private companies to take away management of national resources and assets from
the people. Likewise, neoliberalism is entirely happy to trample over traditional gender
roles in the name of efficiency and increasing the number of workers chasing the same
job.
In other words, I was irritated (and sorry if I ranted a bit, I try not to) with what I saw
as someone who already knows what the answer is, independent of what the question may be. I
suspect her analysis of, say, Brexit, would be very similar. I think that kind of person is
potentially dangerous.
==I think the issues she raises about gender are a different question from neoliberalism
itself==
Again as I said in my comment I would agree in a theoretical sense that gender and
neoliberalism are different issues but again I believe there is a thread of gender, i.e.
oligarchic patriarchy, of the type of neoliberalism that WB talks about.
===not helpful to believe that you can fight neoliberalism by "legitimating assertions of
personal freedom against equality mandates" whatever that means===
What I think that means is the more libertarian version of neoliberalism. That maybe where
our differences lie, in that my sense is WB is talking about a specific form of neoliberalism
and your view is broader.
===it's misleading to suggest that "Privatization of the nation legitimates "nativist"
exclusions"===
On this I see your disagreement with WB and understand your reference to "that
privatisation has enabled an international network of distant and unaccountable private
companies to take away management of national resources and assets from the people".
Where I think WB is coming from is the more nationalistic, Anglosphere that the Trump
administration is pushing with his border wall, etc. In this WB does expose her far left
priors but again there is some value in her points. From her far left view my sense it Wendy
Brown is reacting to the sense that Trump wants to turn the US into the US of the 1950's and
60's and on many fronts that ship has sailed.
=== Indeed, to the extent that there is a connection with "nativism" it is that
privatisation has enabled an international network of distant and unaccountable private
companies to take away management of national resources and assets from the people. Likewise,
neoliberalism is entirely happy to trample over traditional gender roles in the name of
efficiency and increasing the number of workers chasing the same job. ===
Excellent point and having read some of Wendy Brown's books and paper is a point she would
agree with while still seeing some patriarchial themes running through neoliberalism. To your
point above I would recommend reading some of Cynthia Enloe's work specifically Bananas,
Beaches and Bases.
====I think that kind of person is potentially dangerous====
Wow. Dangerous??? Clearly the post has hit a nerve. Many people in our current society are
dangerous but IMO Wendy Brown is not one of them. A bit hyperbolic in her focus on gender?
Maybe but not wrong. A bit too far left (of the bleeding heart kind)? Maybe. But to call
someone who worked for Sheldon Wolin dangerous. C'mon man.
I have gotten into disputes on NC as IMO many people over focus on a word or the use of a
word and ascribe way to literal view of a word. I tend to view words more symbolically and
contextually. I do not overreact to the use a word and instead try to step back and glean a
message or the word in context of what is the person trying to say? So for instance when WB
uses the phrase "Privatization of the nation" I am not going to react because my own
interpretation is WB is reacting to Trump's nationalism and not to the type of privatization
that your example of London shows.
I am disappointed that most of the comments to this post seem to take a critical view of
Wendy Brown's comments. Is she a bit too far left and gender focused (identity political) for
my tastes? Yes and that somewhat hurts her overall message and the arguments she is trying to
discuss which are not unlike her mentor Sheldon Wolin.
Thanks for the reply David. My sense is we have what I call a "positional" debate (i.e.
Tastes Great! Less Filling!). And positional debates tend to go nowhere.
When WB speaks of gender, note that she then mentions sex, followed by race. By "gender"
she is NOT talking about the rights and power of female people under neoliberalism.
She is speaking of the rights of people to claim, that they are the opposite sex and
therefore entitled to the rights, set-asides and affirmative discrimination permitted that
sex -- for instance, to compete athletically on that sex's sports teams, to be imprisoned if
convicted in that sex's prisons, to be considered that sex in instances where sex matters in
employment such as a job as a rape counselor or a health care position performing intimate
exams where one is entitled to request a same-sex provider, and to apply for scholarships,
awards, business loans etc. set aside for that sex.
WB, in addition to being a professor at Berkeley, is also the partner of Judith Butler,
whose book "Gender Trouble" essentially launched the postmodern idea that subjective sense of
one's sex and how one enacts that is more meaningful than the lived reality people experience
in biologically sexed bodies.
By this reasoning, a male weightlifter can become a woman, can declare that he's in fact
always been a woman -- and so we arrive at the farce of a male weightlifter (who, granted,
must under IOC policy reduce his testosterone for one year to a low-normal male range that is
5 standard deviations away from the female mean) winning a gold medal in women's
weightlifting in the Pan-Pacific games and likely to win gold again in the 2020 Olympics.
If that's not privileging individual freedom over collective rights, I don't know what
is.
>That's how it is possible to be simultaneously libertarian, ethnonationalist and
patriarchal today: The right's contemporary attack on "social justice warriors" is straight
out of Hayek.
Anyone who could write such a statement understands neither libertarianism nor
ethnonationalism. The last half-decade has seen a constant intellectual attack by
ethnonationalists against libertarianism. An hour's examination of the now-defunct Alt
Right's would confirm this.
Similarly, the contemporary attack on SJW's comes not out of Hayek, but from Gamergate. If
you do not know what Gamergate is, you do not understand where the current rightwing and
not-so-rightwing thrust of contemporary white identity politics is coming from. My guess is
Brown has never heard of it.
Far from trying to uphold patriarchy, Contemporary neoliberalism seeks a total atomization
of society into nothing but individual consumers of product. Thus what passes for
liberalization of a society today consists in little more than staging sham elections,
opening McDonalds, and holding a gay pride parade.
This is why ethnonationalism and even simple nationalism poses a mortal threat to
neoliberalism, in a way that so-called progressives never will: both are a threat to
globalization, while the rainbow left has shown itself to be little more than the useful
idiots of capital.
Brown strikes me as someone who has a worldview and will distort the world to fit that
view, no matter how this jibes with facts or logic. The point is simply to array her bugbears
into a coalition, regardless of how ridiculous it seems to anyone who knows anything about
it.
Actually, maybe not "Bingo," if by that you mean Wendy Brown is a typical representative
of "pearl clutching progressive angst." Yes, WB is a very successful academic at Berkeley who
worked with Sheldon Wolin as a graduate student IIRC (who was atypical in just about every
important way), but this book along with its predecessor Undoing the Demos are much
stronger than the normative "why are the natives so restless?" bullshit coming from my
erstwhile tribe of "liberals," most of whom are incapacitated by a not unrelated case of
Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Hayek was eloquent. Too bad he didn't establish some end goals. Think of all the misery
that would have been avoided. I mean, how can you rationalize some economic ideology to
"deregulate the social sphere" – that's just the snake eating its tail. That's what
people do who don't have boundaries. Right now it looks like there's a strange bedfellowship,
a threesome of neoliberal nazis, globalists, and old communists. Everybody and their dog
wants the world to work – for everyone. But nobody knows how to do it. And we are
experiencing multiple degrees of freedom to express our own personal version of Stockholm
syndrome. Because identity politics. What a joke. Maybe we need to come together over
something rational. Something fairly real. Instead of overturning Citizens United (which is
absurd already), we should do Creatures United – rights for actual living things on
this planet. And then we'd have a cause for the duration.
Well stated. The -isms seem like distractions, almost red herrings leading us down the
primrose path to a ceaseless is/ought problem. Rather than discuss the way the world is, we
argue how it ought to be.
Not to say theory, study, and introspection aren't important. More that we appear
paralyzed into inaction since everyone doesn't agree on the One True Way yet.
Let us not get to simplistic here. It helps to understand the origins of political,
economic, and even social ideals. The origin of modern capitalism, for there were
different and more limited earlier forms, was in the Dutch Republic and was part of the
efforts of removing and replacing feudalism; liberalism arose from the Enlightenment, which
itself was partly the creation of the Wars of Religion, which devastated Europe. The Thirty
Years War, which killed ½ of the male population of the Germanies, and is considered
more devastating to the Germans than both world wars combined had much of its energy from
religious disagreements.
The Age of Enlightenment, along with much of political thought in the Eighteenth Century,
was a attempt to allow differences in belief, and the often violent passions that they can
cause, to be fought by words instead of murder. The American Constitution, the Bill of
Rights, the whole political worldview, that most Americans unconsciously have, comes from
from those those times.
Democracy, Liberalism, even Adam Smith's work in the Wealth of Nations were
attempts to escape the dictatorship of kings, feudalism, serfdom, violence. Unfortunately,
they have all been usurped. Adam Smith's life's work has been perverted, liberalism has been
used to weaken the social bonds by making work and money central to society. Their evil child
Neoliberalism, a creation of people like Hayek, was supposed to reduce wars (most of the
founders were survivors of the world wars) and was supposed to be be partly
antidemocratic.
Modern Neoliberalism mutates and combines the partly inadvertent atomizing effects of the
ideas of the Enlightenment, Liberalism, Dutch and British Capitalism, the Free Markets of
Adam Smith, adds earlier mid twentieth century Neoliberalism as a fuel additive, and creates
this twisted flaming Napalm of social atomizing; it also clears out any challenges to money
is the worth of all things. Forget philosophy, religion, family, government, society. Money
determines worth. Even speech is only worth the money spent on it and not any inherent worth.
Or the vote.
"liberalism has been used to weaken the social bonds by making work and money central to
society"
I think you may have swapped the cart and the horse.
Money evolved as a way of aiding and organizing useful interactions within groups larger
than isolated villages of a hundred people.
It also enabled an overall increase in wealth through specialization.
Were it not for money, there would be a difficult mismatch between goods of vastly
differing value. A farmer growing wheat and carrots has an almost completely divisible supply
of goods with which to trade. Someone building a farm wagon a month, or making an iron plough
every two weeks has a problem exchanging that for items orders of magnitude less
valuable.
Specialization is a vital step in improving resources and capabilities within societies.
I've hung out with enough friends who are blacksmiths to know that every farmer hammering out
their own plough is a non-starter, for many reasons.
And I've followed enough history to know that iron ploughs mean a lot more food, which
allows someone to specialize in making ploughs rather than growing food for personal
consumption.
The obvious need is for a way of dividing the value of the plough into many smaller
amounts that can be used to obtain grain, cloth, pottery, and so on.
While the exact form of money is not rigidly fixed, at lower technological levels one
really needs something that is portable, doesn't spontaneously self destruct, and has a
clearly definable value . and exists in different concentrations of worth, to allow
flexibility in transport and use.
Various societies have come up with various tokens of value, from agricultural products to
bank drafts, each with different advantages and disadvantages, but for most of history,
precious metals, base metals, and coinage have been the most practical representation of
exchangeable value.
Money is almost certainly an inevitable and necessary consequence of the invention of
agriculture, and the corresponding increase in population density.
Agreed, but as I've suggested elsewhere liberalism always had the capacity within it to
destroy social bonds, societies and even nations, it's just that, at the time, this was
hidden behind the belief that a just God would not allow it to happen. I see liberalism less
as mutating or being usurped than finally being freed of controls. Paradoxically, of course,
this "freedom" requires servitude for others, so that no outside forces (trades unions for
example) can pollute the purity of the market. It's the same thing with social justice:
freedom for identity group comes through legal controls over the behaviour of others, which
is why the contemporary definition of a civil rights activist is someone who wants to
introduce lots of new laws to prevent people from doing things.
frankly, I don't believe the "monsters" neoliberalism has helped create are an unwanted
side effect of their approach, on the contrary, neoliberalism needs those "monsters", like
the authoritarian state, to impose itself on society (ask the mutilated gilets jaunes).
Repression, inequality, poverty, abuse, dispossession, disfranchisement, enviromental
degradation are certainly "monstrous" to those who have to endure them, but not to those who
profit the most from the system and sit on the most powerful positions. Of course, the degree
of exposure to those monstrosities is dependent on the relative position in the pyramid
shaped neoliberal society, the bottom has to endure the most. On the other side, the middle
classes tend to support the neoliberal model as long as it ensures them a power position
relative to the under classes, and the moment those middle classes feel ttheir position
relative to the under classes threatened, the switch to open fascism is not far, we can see
this in Bolivia.
"neoliberalism needs those "monsters", like the authoritarian state, to impose itself on
society"
If I understood Quinn Slobodian's "Globalists" correctly it was precisely this -- that the
neoliberal project while professing that markets were somehow "natural" spent an inordinate
amount of time working to ensure that legal structures be created to insulate them from the
dirty demos.
Their actions in this respect don't square with a serious belief that markets are natural
at all -- if they were, they wouldn't need so damned much hothousing, right?
I think the argument was that markets were "natural", but vulnerable to interference, and
so had to be protected by these legal structures. There's a metaphor there, but it's too late
here for me to find it.
===spent an inordinate amount of time working to ensure that legal structures be created
to insulate them from the dirty demos===
I enjoyed Slobodian's book as well. Interestingly, there is a new book out called The Code
of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor that discusses
those "legal structures".
If you check out Katharina Pistor on Twitter, you can also find good commentaries and even
videos of talks discussing the book and the matter – it is very edifying to open your
eyes to the fundamental role of law in creating such natural phenomena as markets and, among
other things, billionaires.
Thanks deplorado. I do not frequent Pistor's twitter page as much as I would like.
In reading Pistor's book and some of the interviews with Pistor and some of her papers
discussing the themes in the book, I had the same reaction as when I read some of Susan
Strange's books such as The Retreat of the State: complete removal of any strand of
naïveté I may have had as to how the world works. And how hard it will be to undo
the destruction.
As you mention the "dirty demos" above, one of Wendy Brown's recent books was Undoing the
Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution.
Never having read any of Susan Strange's writings, I decided to find a book review of The
Retreat of the State. I found this one and found it very interesting, enough so that I'll go
to abebooks.com and get a copy to read.
Hmm. Definitely Monsters from the Id at work here. I am going with the theory that the
wealthier class pushed this whole project all along. In the US, Roosevelt had cracked down
and imposed regulations that stopped, for example, the stock market from being turned into a
casino using ordinary people's saving. He also pushed taxes on them that exceeded 90% which
tended to help keep them defanged.
So lo and behold, after casting about, a bunch of isolated rat-bag economic radicals was
found that support getting rid of regulations, reducing taxes on the wealthy and anything
else that they wanted to do. So money was pumped into this project, think tanks were taken
over or built up, universities were taken over to teach this new theories, lawyers and future
judges were 'educated' to support their fight and that is what we have today.
If WW2 had not discredited fascism, the wealthy would have use this instead as both Mussolini
and Hitler were very friendly to the wealthy industrialists. But they were so instead they
turned to neoliberalism instead. Yes, definitely Monsters from the Id.
William White (BIS, OECD) talks about how economics really changed over one hundred years
ago as classical economics was replaced by neoclassical economics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iXBQ33pBo&t=2485s
He thinks we have been on the wrong path for one hundred years.
This is why we think small state, unregulated capitalism is something it never was when it
existed before.
We don't understand the monetary system or how banks work because:
Our knowledge of privately created money has been going backwards since 1856.
Credit creation theory -> fractional reserve theory -> financial intermediation
theory
"A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence" Richard
A. Werner http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477
This is why we come up with crazy ideas like "financial liberalisation".
If corporations are to be people, then they, like the extremely wealthy, need to be reined
in politically. One step we could take is to only allow money donations to political
campaigns to take place when the person is subject or going to be subject to the politicians
decisions. I live in Illinois, I should be able to donate money to the campaigns of those
running for the U.S> Senate from Illinois, but Utah? If I donate money to a Utah candidate
for the Senate, I am practicing influence peddling because that Senator does not represent
me.
If corporations are to be people, they need a primary residence. The location of their
corporate headquarters should suffice to "place" them, and donations to candidates outside of
their set of districts would be forbidden.
Of course, we do have free speech, so people are completely free to speak over the
Internet, TV, hire halls in the district involved and go speak in person. They just couldn't
pay to have someone else do that for them.
To allow unfettered political donations violates the one ma, one vote principle and also
encourages influence peddling. In fact, it seems as if our Congress and Executive operates
only through influence peddling.
"... Robert Pfaller: Until the late 1970s, all "Western" (capitalist) governments, right or left, pursued a Keynesian economic policy of state investment and deficit spending. (Even Richard Nixon is said to have once, in the early 1970ies, stated, "We are all Keynesians"). This lead to a considerable decrease of inequality in Western societies in the first three decades after WWII, as the numbers presented by Thomas Piketty and Branko Milanovic in their books prove. Apparently, it was seen as necessary to appease Western workers with high wages and high employment rates in order to prevent them from becoming communists. ..."
"... Whenever the social-democratic left came into power, for example with Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schroeder, they proved to be the even more radical neoliberal reformers. As a consequence, leftist parties did not have an economic alternative to what their conservative and liberal opponents offered. Thus they had to find another point of distinction. This is how the left became "cultural" (while, of course, ceasing to be a "left"): from now on the marks of distinction were produced by all kinds of concerns for minorities or subaltern groups. And instead of promoting economic equality and equal rights for all groups, the left now focused on symbolic "recognition" and "visibility" for these groups. ..."
"... Thus not only all economic and social concerns were sacrificed for the sake of sexual and ethnic minorities, but even the sake of these minorities itself. Since a good part of the problem of these groups was precisely economic, social and juridical, and not cultural or symbolic. And whenever you really solve a problem of a minority group, the visibility of this group decreases. But by insisting on the visibility of these groups, the policies of the new pseudo-left succeded at making the problems of these groups permanent – and, of course, at pissing off many other people who started to guess that the concern for minorities was actually just a pretext for pursuing a most brutal policy of increasing economic inequality. ..."
"... The connection to neoliberalism is the latter's totalitarian contention of reducing the entirety of human condition into a gender-neutral cosmopolitan self expressing nondescript market preferences in a conceptual vacuum, a contention celebrated by its ideologues as "liberation" and "humanism" despite its inherent repression and inhumanity. ..."
"... "..'identity politics,' which pretty much encapsulate the central concerns of what these days is deemed to represent what little of the 'left' survives, plays into the hands of the neoliberal ruling establishment(s), because at bottom it is a 'politics' that has been emptied of all that is substantively political.." ..."
"... Agreed. And the truth is that the message is much clearer than that of the critics, below. So it ought to be for the world, sliding into fascism, in which we live in might have been baked by the neo-liberals but it was iced by 57 varieties of Blairites . The cowards who flinched led by the traitors who sneered. ..."
"... 'identity politics,' which pretty much encapsulate the central concerns of what these days is deemed to represent what little of the 'left' survives, plays into the hands of the neoliberal ruling establishment(s), because at bottom it is a 'politics' that has been emptied of all that is substantively political, namely, the fight for an equitable production and distribution of goods, both material and cultural, ensuring a decent life for all. ..."
"... Why bother getting your hands dirty with an actual worker's struggle when you can write yet another glamorously "radical" critique of the latest Hollywood blockbuster (which in truth just ends up as another advert for it)? ..."
"... The One Per Cent saw an opportunity of unlimited exploitation and they ran with it. They're still running (albeit in jets and yachts) and us Proles are either struggling or crawling. Greed is neither Left or Right. It exists for its own self gratification. ..."
"... Actually, post-modernism doesn't include everybody -- just the 'marginalized' and 'disenfranchised' minorities whom Michel Foucault championed. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as the old capitalist strategy of playing off the Lumpenproletariat against the proletariat, to borrow the original Marxist terminology. ..."
"... if you don't mind me asking, exactly at what point do you feel capitalism was restored in the USSR? It was, I take it, with the first Five Year Plan, not the NEP? ..."
"... Also, the Socialist or, to use your nomenclature, "Stalinist" system, that was destroyed in the the USSR in the 1990s–it was, in truth, just one form of capitalism replaced by another form of capitalism? ..."
Robert Pfaller interviewed by Kamran Baradaran, via
ILNA
The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism. This is the ideological embellishment
that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies' welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in order to attain
a "human", "liberal" and "progressive" face.
Robert Pfaller is one of the most distinguished figures in today's radical Left. He teaches at the University of Art and Industrial
Design in Linz, Austria. He is a founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group 'stuzzicadenti'.
Pfaller is the author of books such as On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners , Interpassivity:
The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment , among others. Below is the ILNA's interview with this authoritative philosopher on
the Fall of Berlin Wall and "Idea of Communism".
ILNA: What is the role of "pleasure principle" in a world after the Berlin Wall? What role does the lack of ideological
dichotomy, which unveils itself as absent of a powerful left state, play in dismantling democracy?
Robert Pfaller: Until the late 1970s, all "Western" (capitalist) governments, right or left, pursued a Keynesian economic
policy of state investment and deficit spending. (Even Richard Nixon is said to have once, in the early 1970ies, stated, "We are
all Keynesians"). This lead to a considerable decrease of inequality in Western societies in the first three decades after WWII,
as the numbers presented by Thomas Piketty and Branko Milanovic in their books prove. Apparently, it was seen as necessary to
appease Western workers with high wages and high employment rates in order to prevent them from becoming communists.
Ironically one could say that it was precisely Western workers who profited considerably of "real existing socialism" in the
Eastern European countries.
At the very moment when the "threat" of real existing socialism was not felt anymore, due to the Western economic and military
superiority in the 1980ies (that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall), the economic paradigm in the Western countries shifted.
All of a sudden, all governments, left or right, pursued a neoliberal economic policy (of privatization, austerity politics, the
subjection of education and health sectors under the rule of profitability, liberalization of regulations for the migration of
capital and cheap labour, limitation of democratic sovereignty, etc.).
Whenever the social-democratic left came into power, for example with Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schroeder, they proved to
be the even more radical neoliberal reformers. As a consequence, leftist parties did not have an economic alternative to what
their conservative and liberal opponents offered. Thus they had to find another point of distinction. This is how the left became
"cultural" (while, of course, ceasing to be a "left"): from now on the marks of distinction were produced by all kinds of concerns
for minorities or subaltern groups. And instead of promoting economic equality and equal rights for all groups, the left now focused
on symbolic "recognition" and "visibility" for these groups.
Thus not only all economic and social concerns were sacrificed for the sake of sexual and ethnic minorities, but even the
sake of these minorities itself. Since a good part of the problem of these groups was precisely economic, social and juridical,
and not cultural or symbolic. And whenever you really solve a problem of a minority group, the visibility of this group decreases.
But by insisting on the visibility of these groups, the policies of the new pseudo-left succeded at making the problems of these
groups permanent – and, of course, at pissing off many other people who started to guess that the concern for minorities was actually
just a pretext for pursuing a most brutal policy of increasing economic inequality.
ILNA: The world after the Berlin Wall is mainly considered as post-ideological. Does ideology has truly decamped from our
world or it has only taken more perverse forms? On the other hand, many liberals believe that our world today is based on the
promise of happiness. In this sense, how does capitalism promotes itself on the basis of this ideology?
Robert Pfaller: The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism. This is the ideological
embellishment that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies' welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in
order to attain a "human", "liberal" and "progressive" face. This coalition between an economic policy that serves the interest
of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to "include" everybody is what Nancy Fraser has aptly called "progressive neoliberalism".
It consists of neoliberalism, plus postmodernism as its ideological superstructure.
The ideology of postmodernism today has some of its most prominent symptoms in the omnipresent concern about "discrimination"
(for example, of "people of color") and in the resentment against "old, white men". This is particularly funny in countries like
Germany: since, of course, there has been massive racism and slavery in Germany in the 20th century – yet the victims of this
racism and slavery in Germany have in the first place been white men (Jews, communists, Gypsies, red army prisoners of war, etc.).
Here it is most obvious that a certain German pseudo-leftism does not care for the real problems of this society, but prefers
to import some of the problems that US-society has to deal with. As Louis Althusser has remarked, ideology always consists in
trading in your real problems for the imaginary problems that you would prefer to have.
The general ideological task of postmodernism is to present all existing injustice as an effect of discrimination. This is,
of course, funny again: Since every discrimination presupposes an already established class structure of inequality. If you do
not have unequal places, you cannot distribute individuals in a discriminating way, even if you want to do so. Thus progressive
neoliberalism massively increases social inequality, while distributing all minority groups in an "equal" way over the unequal
places.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Abbreviate & reduce to lowest common denominator which is hyperinflation by today's standards given that we are indeed all
Keynesians now that leveraged debt no longer suffices to prop Wall Street up.
Welcome to the New World Disorder. Screw 'postmodernism' & Chicago School 'neoliberalism'!
MOU
Danubium
There is no such thing as "post-modernism".
The derided fad is an organic evolution of the ideologies of "modernity" and the "Enlightenment", and represents the logical
conclusion of their core premise: the "enlightened self" as the source of truth instead of the pre-modern epistemologies of
divine revelation, tradition and reason.
It does not represent any "liberation" from restrictive thought, as the "self" can only ever be "enlightened" by cult-like
submission to dogma or groupthink that gives tangible meaning to the intangible buzzword, its apparent relativism is a product
of social detachment of the intellectual class and its complete and utter apathy towards the human condition.
The connection to neoliberalism is the latter's totalitarian contention of reducing the entirety of human condition into
a gender-neutral cosmopolitan self expressing nondescript market preferences in a conceptual vacuum, a contention celebrated
by its ideologues as "liberation" and "humanism" despite its inherent repression and inhumanity.
The trend is not to successor or opponent, but rather modernism itself in its degenerative, terminal stage.
Monobazeus
Well said
bevin
"..'identity politics,' which pretty much encapsulate the central concerns of what these days is deemed to represent what little
of the 'left' survives, plays into the hands of the neoliberal ruling establishment(s), because at bottom it is a 'politics'
that has been emptied of all that is substantively political.."
Agreed. And the truth is that the message is much clearer than that of the critics, below.
So it ought to be for the world, sliding into fascism, in which we live in might have been baked by the neo-liberals but it
was iced by 57 varieties of Blairites . The cowards who flinched led by the traitors who sneered.
So cutting through all of the verbiage, the upshot of Pfaller's contentions seems to be that 'identity politics,' which pretty
much encapsulate the central concerns of what these days is deemed to represent what little of the 'left' survives, plays into
the hands of the neoliberal ruling establishment(s), because at bottom it is a 'politics' that has been emptied of all that
is substantively political, namely, the fight for an equitable production and distribution of goods, both material and cultural,
ensuring a decent life for all.
Difficult not to agree.
For indeed, "If you do not have unequal places, you cannot distribute individuals in a discriminating way, even if you want
to do so."
Capricornia Man
You've nailed it, Norman. In many countries, the left's obsession with identity politics has driven class politics to the periphery
of its concerns, which is exactly where the neoliberals want it to be. It's why the working class just isn't interested.
Martin Usher
It must be fun to sit on top of the heap watching the great unwashed squabbling over the crumbs.
Red Allover
The world needs another put down of postmodern philosophy like it needs a Bob Dylan album of Sinatra covers . . .
maxine chiu
I'm glad the article was short .I don't think I'm stupid but too much pseudo-intellectualism makes me fall asleep.
Tim Jenkins
Lol, especially when there are some galling glaring errors within " too much pseudo-intellectualism "
Thanks for the laugh, maxine,
Let them stew & chew (chiu) on our comments 🙂
Bootlyboob
As with any use of an -ism though, you need sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to using 'postmodernism'. Do you mean
Baudrillard and Delueze? or do you mean some dirty cunt like Bernard Henri-Levy. There is a bit of a difference.
Bootlyboob
Ok, so Levi is not really a postmodernist. But still, there are philosphers of postmodernism that were, and still are, worth
reading.
BigB
Postmodernism: what is it? I defy anyone to give a coherent and specific definition. Not least, because the one 'Classical
Liberal' philosopher who did – Stephen Hicks – used the term as a blanket commodification of all post-Enlightenment thought
starting with Rousseau's Romanticism. So PoMo has pre-Modern roots? When the left start playing broad and wide with political
philosophical categories too – grafting PoMo onto post-Classical roots as a seeming post-Berlin Wall emergence what actually
is being said? With such a depth and breadth of human inquiry being commodified as 'PoMo' – arguably, nothing useful.
Neoliberalism is Classic Liberalism writ large. The basic unit of Classicism is an individuated, independent, intentional,
individual identitarianism as an atom of the rational ('moral') market and its self-maximising agency. Only, the 'Rights of
Man' and the 'Social Contract' have been transfered from the Person (collectively: "We the People " as a the democratic sovereign
power) to the Corporation as the new 'Neo-Classicist' supranational sovereign. Fundamentally, nothing has changed.
As pointed out below: this was already well underway by November 1991 – as a structural-function of the burgeoning Euromarkets.
These were themselves on the rise as the largest source of global capital *before* the Nixon Shock in 1971. There is an argument
to be made that they actually caused the abandoning of Breton Woods and the Gold Standard. Nonetheless, 1991 is a somewhat
arbitrary date for the transition from 'High Modernity' to 'PostModernity'. Philosophers. political, and social scientists
– as Wittgenstein pointed out – perhaps are victims of their own commodification and naming crisis? Don't get me started on
'post-Humanism' but what does PoMo actually mean?
As the article hints at: the grafting of some subjectivist single rights issues to the ultra-objectivist core market rationality
of neoliberalism is an intentional character masking. Even the 'neoliberal CNS' (central nervous system) of the WEF admits
to four distinct phases of globalisation. The current 'Globalisation 4.0' – concurrent with the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'
– is a further development of this quasi-subjectivist propagandic ploy. Globalisation is now humanist, sovereigntist, environmentalist,
and technologist (technocratic). Its ultimate *telos* is 'fully automated luxury communism' or the harmoniousness of man and
nature under an ecolological *Tianxia* the sustainable 'Ecological Civilisation'. Which, I would hope, absolutely nobody is
gullible enough to believe?
Who says the leopard cannot change its spots? It can, and indeed does. Neoliberalism is a big-data micromarketing driven
technocratic engine of reproduction tailored to the identitarian individual. PoMo – in one sense – is thus the logical extremisation
of Classical Liberalism which is happening within the Classical Liberal tradition. It is certainly not a successor state or
'Fourth Political Theory' which is one of the few things Aleksandr Dugin gets right.
This is why the term needs defintion and precisification or, preferably, abandoning. If both the left and right bandy the
term around as a eupehemism for what either does not like – the term can only be a noun of incoherence. Much like 'antisemitism':
it becomes a negative projection of all undesirable effects onto the 'Other'. Which, when either end of the political spectrum
nihilates the Other leaves us with the vicious dehumanisation of the 'traditional' identitarian fascist centre. All binary
arguments using shared synthetic terminology – that are plastic in meaning depending on who is using the term – cancel each
other out.
Of which, much of which is objectified and commodified as 'PoMo' was a reaction against. A reaction that anticipated the
breakdown of the identitarian and sectarian 'technological postmodern' society. So how can that logically be a 'reaction against'
and an 'embelishment to' neoliberalism'?
This is not a mere instance of pedantry: I/we are witnessing the decoherence of language due to an extremisation of generalisation
and abstraction of sense and meaning. That meaning is deferred is a post-structuralist tenet: but one that proceeds from the
extreme objectivisation of language (one to one mapping of meaning as the analytical signified/signifier relationship) and
the mathematicisation of logic (post-Fregian 'meta-ontology') not its subjectivisation.
If PoMo means anything: it is a rich and authentic vein of human inquiry that was/is a creative attempt to rescue us from
a pure objectivist Hell (David Ray Griffin's "positive postmodernism"). One that was/is not entirely satisfactory; merely because
it has not yet completed. In the midst: we have the morbid hybrid symptomatology of the old Classical Libertarian fascism trying
to recuperate the new Universal Humanism for which PoMo is a meaningless label. Especially if it is used to character masque
the perennial philosophy of Humanism that has been dehumanised and subjugated by successive identitarian regimes of knowledge
and power since forever in pre-Antiquity.
We are all human: only some humans are ideologically more human than others is the counter-history of humanity. When we
encounter such ideologically imprecise degenerative labels as 'PoMo' – that can mean anything to anyone (but favours the status
quo) this makes a nonsense of at least 5,000 years of thought. Is it any wonder that we are super-ordinated by those who can
better dictate who we are? Language is overpower and writing is supra-sovereign administration and bureaucracy over the 'owness'
of identity. Its co-option by the pseudoleft is a complete denigration and betrayal of the potential of a new Humanism. The
key to which is the spiritual recovery and embodiment of who we really are – proto-linguistically and pre-ontologically – before
all these meaningless labels get in the way.
Bootlyboob
You said it better than I ever could.
Stephen Hick's book is quite the laugh. I tried to read it but it made no sense. From memory, it starts at Kant and Hegel
and gets them completely wrong, (he even draws little charts with their ideas in tabulated form, WTF?) so I quickly deleted
the .pdf. Any book that begins with a summary of these two philosophers and then thinks they can hold my attention until they
get to their take on 'postmodernism' is sorely mistaken. Postmodernism is a made up label for about four or five French intellectuals
in the 1970's that somehow took over the world and completely fucked it up. Why do I somehow not follow this line of 'thought'?
Reg
No, Postmodernism is a real thing, it is the capitalist assimilation of situationism to overcome the crisis of profit in the
70s caused by overproduction and the attempt by the 1% to recapture a greater a greater % of GDP that they had lost due to
the post war settlement. This was an increasingly a zero sum game economy after Germany and Japan had rebuilt their manufacturing
capacity, with the US constrained by a widening trade deficit and the cost of the cold and Vietnam war increasing US debt.
The inflation spikes in the 70s is only reflective of these competing demands.
The problem of modernism is than peoples needs are easily saited, particularly in conditions of overproduction. Postmodern
production is all about creating virtual needs that are unsatisfied. The desire for status or belonging or identity are infinite,
and overcomes the dead time of 'valourisation' (time taken for investment to turn into profit) of capital by switching to virtual
production of weightless capitalism. The creation of 'intangible asset's such as trade marks, while off shoring production
is central. This is a form of rentier extraction, as the creation of a trade mark creates no real value if you have offshored
not only production but R&D to China. This is why fiance, and free movement of capital supported by monetary policy and independent
central banks are central to Postmodern neo-liberal production. The problem being that intangible assets are easy to replace
and require monopoly protection supported by a Imperial hegemon to maintain rentier extraction. Why does China need a US or
UK trade mark of products where both innovation and production increasingly come from China? How long can the US as a diminishing
empire maintain rentier extraction at the point of a military it increasingly cannot afford, particularly against a military
and economic superpower like China? It is no accident US companies that have managed to monetise internet technologies are
monopolies, google, microsoft, Apple. An operating system for example has a reproduction cost of zero, the same can be said
of films or music, so the natural price is zero, only a monopoly maintains profit.
The connection to situationism is the cry of May 68 'Make your dreams reality', which was marketised by making peoples dreams
very interesting ones about fitted kitchens, where even 'self actualisation was developed into a product, where even ones own
body identity became a product to be developed at a price. This is at the extreme end of Marxist alienation as not only work
or the home becomes alienated, but the body itself.
David Harvey covers some of this quite well in his "The condition of Postmodernity". Adam Curtis also covers quite well in
'The Trap' and the 'Century of the self'.
BigB
I'm inclined to agree with everything you write. It would fall into what I called 'precisification' and actual definition.
What you describe is pure Baudrillard: that capitalism reproduces as a holistic system of objects that we buy into without
ever satisfying the artificial advertorial need to buy. What we actually seek is a holism of self that cannot be replaced by
a holism of objects hence an encoded need for dissatisfaction articulated as dissatisfaction a Hyperrealism of the eternally
desiring capitalist subject. But Baudrillard rejected the label too.
What I was pointing out was the idea of 'contested concept'. Sure, if we define terms, let's use it. Without that pre-agreed
defintion: the term is meaningless. As are many of our grandiloquent ideas of 'Democracy', 'Freedom', 'Prosperity', and especially
'Peace'. Language is partisan and polarised. Plastic words like 'change' can mean anything and intentionally do. And the convention
of naming creates its own decoherence sequence. What follows 'postmodernism'? Post-humanism is an assault on sense and meaning.
As is the current idea that "reality is the greatest illusion of all".
We are having a real communication breakdown due to the limitations of the language and out proliferation of beliefs. Baudrillard
also anticipated the involution and implosion of the Code. He was speaking from a de Saussurian (semiologic) perspective. Cognitive
Linguistics makes this ever more clear. Language is maninly frames and metaphors. Over expand them over too many cognitive
domains: and the sense and meaning capability is diluted toward meaninglessnes – where reality is no longer real. This puts
us in the inferiorised position of having our terms – and thus our meaning – dictated by a cognitive elite a linguistic 'noocracy'
(which is homologous with the plutocracy – who can afford private education).
Capitalism itself is a purely linguistic phenomena: which is so far off the beaten track I'm not even going to expand on
it. Except to say: that a pre-existing system of objects giving rise to a separate system of thoughts – separate objectivity
and subjectivity – is becoming less tenable to defend. I'd prefer to think in terms of 'embodiment' and 'disembodiment' rather
than distinct historical phases. And open and closed cognitive cycles rather than discreet psycholgical phases. We cannot be
post-humans if we never embodied our humanism fully. And we cannot be be post-modern when we have never fully lived in the
present having invented a disembodied reality without us in it, which we proliferated trans-historically the so-called 'remembered
present'.
Language and our ideas of reality are close-correlates – I would argue very close correlates. They are breaking down because
language and realism are disembodied which, in itself is ludicrous to say. But we have inherited and formalised an idealism
that is exactly that. Meaning resides in an immaterial intellect in an intangible mind floating around in an abstract neo-Platonic
heaven waiting for Reason to concur with it. Which is metaphysical bullshit, but it is also the foundation of culture and 'Realism'.
Which makes my position 'anti-Realist'. Can you see my problem with socio-philosophical labels now!? They can carry sense if
used carefully, as you did. In general discourse they mean whatever they want to mean. Which generally means they will be used
against you.
Ramdan
"the SPIRITUAL RECOVERY and embodiment of who we really are – PROTO-LINGUISTICALLY and PRE-ONTOLOGICALLY – BEFORE all these
MEANINGLESS LABELS get in the way."
Thanks BigB. I just took the liberty to add emphasis.
Robbobbobin
Smarty pants (label).
Robert Laine
A reply to the article worthy of another Off-G article (or perhaps a book) which would include at a minimum the importance
of non-dualistic thinking, misuse of language in the creation of MSM and government narratives and the need to be conscious
of living life from time to time while we talk about it. Thankyou, BigB.
Don't you love how all these people discuss postmodernism without ever bothering to define what it is. How confused. Hicks
and Peterson see postmodernists as Neo-Marxists and this guy sees them as Neoliberals. None of the main theorists that have
been associated with Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism and I'm thinking Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault here (not that
I see Foucault as really belonging in the group) would not even accept the term 'postmodernism' as they would see it as an
inappropriate form of stereo-typography with no coherent meaning or definition and that presupposing that one can simply trade
such signifiers in 'transparent' communication and for us all to think and understand the same thing that 'postmodernism' as
a body of texts and ideas might be 'constituted by' is a large part of the problem under discussion. I often think that a large
question that arises from Derrida's project is not to study communication as such but to study and understand miss-communication
and how and why it comes about and what is involved in our misunderstandings. If people don't get that about 'postmodern' and
post-structuralist theories then they've not understood any thing about it.
BigB
You are absolutely right: the way we think in commodities of identities – as huge generalizations and blanket abstractions
– tends toward grand narration and meaninglessness. Which is at once dehumanising, ethnocentric, exceptionalist, imperialist
in a way that favours dominion and overpower. All these tendencies are encoded in the hierarchical structures of the language
– as "vicious" binary constructivisms. In short, socio-linguistic culture is a regime of overpower and subjugation. One that
is "philosopho-political" and hyper-normalises our discrimination.
Deleuze went further when he said language is "univocal". We only have one equiprimordial concept of identity – Being. It
is our ontological primitive singularity of sense and meaning. Everything we identity – as "Difference" – is in terms of Being
(non-Being is it's binary mirror state) as an object with attributes (substances). Being is differentiated into hierarchies
(the more attributes, the more "substantial"- the 'greater' the being) which are made "real" by "Repetition" hence Difference
and Repetition. The language of Dominion, polarization, and overpower is a reified "grand ontological narrative" constructivism.
One dominated by absolutised conceptual Being. That's all.
[One in which we are naturally inferiorised in our unconscious relationship of being qua Being in which we are dominated
by a conceptual "Oedipal Father" – the singularity of the Known – but that's another primal 'onto-theocratic' narrative the
grandest of then all].
One that we are born and acculturated into. Which the majority accept and never question. How many people question not just
their processes of thought but the structure of their processes of thought? A thought cannot escape its own structure and that
structure is inherently dominative. If not in it's immediacy then deferred somewhere else via a coduit of systemic violence
structured as a "violent hierarchy" of opposition and Othering.
Which is the ultimate mis-communication of anything that can be said to be "real" non-dominative, egalitarian, empathic,
etc. Which, of course, if we realise the full implications we can change the way we think and the "naturalised" power structures
we collectively validate.
When people let their opinions be formed for them, and commodify Romanticism, German Idealism, Marxism, Phenomenology, Structuralism,
Post-Structuralism, Existentialism, etc as the pseudo-word "PoMo" – only to dismiss it they are unbeknowingly validating the
hegemony of power and false-knowledge over. Then paradoxically using those binary power structures to rail about being dominated!
Those linguistic power structures dominate politics too. The "political unconscious" is binary and oppositional which tends
toward negation and favours the status quo but how many people think in terms of the psychopolitical and psycholinguistic algorithms
of power and politics?
Derrida's project is now our project and it has hardly yet begun. Not least because cognitive linguistics were unkown to
Derrida. That's how knowledge works by contemporising and updating previous knowledge from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
to
Nihilating anything that can be called "PoMo" (including that other pseudo-label "Cultural Marxism") condemns us to another
200 years of Classical Liberalism which should be enough impetus to compel everyone to embrace the positive aspects of PoMo!
Especially post-post-structuralism that stupid naming convention again
I think a lot of people forget that both Derrida and Baudrillard died before the financial crisis. I don't think either of
them like myself at that time paid much attention to economics and markets as they worked within very specific and focused
fields. Derrida spent his whole life analysing phonocentrism and logocentrism throughout the history of philosophy and Baudrillard
was more a cultural sociologist then anything else. They like most people assumed that neoliberalism was working and they enjoyed
well paid jobs and great celebrity so they didn't have much cause to pay that much attention to politics. Following the Invasion
of Iraq Derrida did come out very strongly against the US calling it the biggest and most dangerous rogue state in the world
and he cited and quoted Chomsky's excellent work. We should also include the UK as the second biggest rogue state.
Once the GFC happened I realized that my knowledge on those subjects was virtually zero and I have since spent years looking
at them all very closely. I think Derrida and Baudrillard would have become very political following the GFC and even more
so now given current events with the yellow vests in France. Shame those two great thinkers died before all the corruption
of neoliberalism was finally revealed. I believe that would have had a great deal to say about it Derrida at least was a very
moral and ethical man.
Bootlyboob
I think you would like this essay if you have not read it already.
If anyone wants a good overview of postmodernism and post-structuralism Cuck philosophy has has some excellent videos covering
the subject matter and ideas. He explains how postmodernism has nothing to do with identity politics and shows how Hick and
Peterson have fundamentally misunderstood postmodernism. He also has 3 videos covering postmodern basics and some others on
Derrida and Baudrillard. You will not find the concepts explained better though one can never give a comprehensive review as
such things are essentially beyond us.
He puts too much weight on Foucault for my liking but that's just the fact that my understanding of postmodernism is obviously
different to his because all of our largely chance encounters with different texts at different times, which mean that we all
come away with slightly different ideas about what these things might mean at any given time. Even in relation to differences
in our own ideas from day to day or year to year.
Bootlyboob
Yes, that's why I mentioned the article in relation to your earlier comment. I don't think any of these philosophers would
have changed their stances based on the events 20 or 30 post their deaths. They essentially predicted the course that society
has taken.
Judith Butler took part in the occupy wall street movement and she's a post-structuralist so she has clearly changed her mind
since the GFC. Deleuze may have to a certain extent have predicted such things but that doesn't necessarily mean they would
have been happy about them. Derrida always spoke of the 'democracy' to come. Instead what we are looking forward to is tech
based technocratic totalitarianism. I don't go along with Deleuze on that matter anyway. I don't see a discreet transition
from one to the other but rather see us having to endure the combined worst of both scenarios.
Bootlyboob
In relation to Peterson. I did write an email to him once and he wrote back to me saying he does indeed like the writings of
Deleuze and Baudrillard. But it was a one line response. I'm still assuming he merely uses a false reading of Derrida as a
prop to advance his own arguments.
Peterson doesn't understand that postmodernism is not the source of identity politics or cultural marxism. That source is Anglo
sociology. I was doing an MSc in sociology back in 1994/95 and they had been transitioning away from Marx and class conflict
to Nietzsche and power conflicts understood within a very simplistic definition of power as a simple binary opposition of forces
between and 'oppressor' and a 'resistor'.
They borrow a bit from Foucault but they cannot accept his postmodern conclusions as power is necessarily revealed as a
positive force that actually constructs us all: in which case one cannot really object to it on political grounds. Let's face
it, these cultural ex-Marxists (now actually an elitist Nietzschean ubermench) don't seem to object to power's miss-functioning
at all on any kind of institutional level but solely concentrate on supposed power relations at the personal level.
That's all if you buy into 'power'at all as such. Baudrillard wrote 'Forget Foucault' and that 'the more one sees power
everywhere the less one is able to speak thereof'. I try and stay clear of any theory that tries to account for everything
with a single concept or perspective as they end up over-determining and reductionist.
A major benefit (for the elites) of postmodernism is its epistemological relativism, which denies the fundamentally important
commitments to objectivity, to facts and evidence. This results in the absurd situation where all the matters is the narrative.
This obvious fact is partially obscured by the substitution of emotion for evidence and logic.
https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/06/emotion-substitutes-for-evidence-and.html
Seamus Padraig
Yup. Among other things, po-mo 'theory' enables Orwell's doublethink .
BigB
This is exactly the misunderstanding of a mythical "po-mo 'theory'" – if such a thing exists – that I am getting at. 'Po-mo
theory' is in fact a modernity/postmodernity hybrid theory. Pomo theory is yet to emerge.
For instance: Derrida talked of the 'alterity' of language and consciousness that was neither subjectivist nor objectivist.
He also spoke of 'inversion/subversion' – where one bipolar oppositional term becomes the new dominant ie 'black over white'
or 'female over male'. This, he made specifically clear, was just as violent a domination as the old normal. How is this enabling
'doublethink'.
If you actually study where Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze; etc where taking their 'semiotics' it was to the 'Middle Way'
of language – much the same destination as Buddhism. This is the clear and precise non-domination of either extreme of language.
Only, they never supplied the praxis; and their followers and denigrators where not as prescient.
There is so much more to come from de Saussurian/Piercian semiotics and Bergsonian/Whiteheadian process philosophy. We have
barely scratched the surface. One possibility is the fabled East/West synthesis of thought that quantum physics and neuroscience
hint at.
What yo do not realise is that our true identity is lost in the language. Specifically: the Law of Identity and the Law
of the Excluded Middle of our current Theory of Mind prevent the understanding of consciousness. To understand why you actually
have to read and understand the linguistic foundations of the very theory you have just dismissed.
Robbobbobin
"Specifically: the Law of Identity and the Law of the Excluded Middle of our current Theory of Mind prevent the understanding
of consciousness."
Yes, but. What do you mean by " our current Theory of Mind"?
Tim Jenkins
Was that a promo for Po-mo theory, BigB ? (chuckle)
BigB
In fact: if followed through – PoMo leads to the point of decoherence of all narrative constructivism. Which is the same point
the Buddhist Yogacara/Madhyamaka synthesis leads to. Which is the same point quantum physics and contemporary cognitive neuroscience
leads to. The fact of a pre-existent, mind-independent, objective ground for reality is no longer tenable. Objectivism is dead.
But so is subjectivism.
What is yet to appear is a coherent narrative that accommodates this. Precisely because language does not allow this. It
is either subjectivism or objectivism tertium non datur – a third is not given. It is precisely within the excluded middle
of language that the understanding of consciouness lies. The reason we have an ontological cosmogony without consciousness
lies precisely in the objectification and commodification of language. All propositions and narratives are ultimately false
especially this one.
Crucially, just because we cannot create a narrative construction or identity for 'reality' – does not mean we cannot experience
'reality'. Which is what a propositional device like a Zen koan refers to
All linguistic constructivism – whether objective or subjective – acts as a covering of reality. We take the ontological
narrative imaginary for the real 'abhuta-parikalpa'. Both object and subject are pratitya-samutpada – co-evolutionary contingent
dependendencies. The disjunction of all dualities via ersatz spatio-temporality creates Samsara. The ending of Samsara is the
ending and re-uniting of all falsely dichotomised binary definitions. About which: we can say precisely nothing.
Does this mean language is dead? No way. Language is there for the reclamation by understanding its superimpositional qualitiy
(upacara). A metaphoric understanding that George Lakoff has reached with Mark Johnston totally independently of Buddhism.
I call it 'poetic objectivism' of 'critical realism' which is the non-nihilational, non-solipsistic, middle way. Which precisely
nihilates both elitism and capitalism: which is why there is so much confusion around the language. There is more at stake
than mere linguistics. The future of humanity will be determined by our relationship with our languages.
vexarb
@BigB: "The fact of a pre-existent, mind-independent, objective ground for reality is no longer tenable. Objectivism is dead."
Do you mean that there is more to life than just "atoms and empty space"? Plato, Dante and Blake (to name the first 3 who
popped into my head) would have agreed with that: the ground of objective reality is mind -- the mind of God.
"The atoms of Democritus, and Newton's particles of Light,
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright".
Tim Jenkins
Funnily enough, I was only writing just yesterday on OffG's 'India's Tryst with Destiny' article, just what poor standards
we have in the Education of our children today, in urgent need of massive revisions, which I've highlighted and how the guilt
lays squarely on the shoulders of Scientists & Academia in our Universities, from Physics to History & Law & the 'Physiology
of Psychology' these guys really just don't 'cut it' anymore resting on Laurels, living in Fear and corrupted by capitalism
>>> wholly !
Somebody should be shot, I say for Terrorist Acts !
Corruption is the Destruction of Culture &
"The Destruction of Culture is a Terrorist Act", now officially,
in international Law @UNESCO (thanks, Irina Bokova)
Would the author of this piece like to review & correct some obviously glaring errors ?
George
Good article. On this topic, I read an essay by the late Ellen Meiksins Wood where she noted that our splendid "new Left" are
all at once too pessimistic and too optimistic. Too pessimistic because they blandly assume that socialism is dead and so all
struggles in that direction are futile. Too optimistic because they assume that this (up till now) bearable capitalism around
them can simply continue with its shopping sprees, pop celebrity culture, soap operas, scandal sheets, ineffectual though comfortable
tut-tutting over corrupt and stupid politicians and – best of all – its endless opportunity for writing postmodernist deconstructions
of all those phenomena.
Why bother getting your hands dirty with an actual worker's struggle when you can write yet another
glamorously "radical" critique of the latest Hollywood blockbuster (which in truth just ends up as another advert for it)?
Fair Dinkum
During the 50's and 60's most folks living in Western cultures were happy with their lot: One house, one car, one spouse, one
job, three or four kids and enough money to live the 'good life'
Then along came Vance Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' and hell broke loose.
The One Per Cent saw an opportunity of unlimited exploitation and they ran with it.
They're still running (albeit in jets and yachts) and us Proles are either struggling or crawling.
Greed is neither Left or Right.
It exists for its own self gratification.
Seamus Padraig
Excellent article and very true. Just one minor quibble:
This coalition between an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to
"include" everybody is what Nancy Fraser has aptly called "progressive neoliberalism".
Actually, post-modernism doesn't include everybody -- just the 'marginalized' and 'disenfranchised' minorities whom
Michel Foucault championed. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as the old capitalist strategy of playing off the
Lumpenproletariat against the proletariat, to borrow the original Marxist terminology.
Stephen Morrell
The following facile claim doesn't bear scrutiny: "At the very moment when the "threat" of real existing socialism was not
felt anymore, due to the Western economic and military superiority in the 1980ies (that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall),
the economic paradigm in the Western countries shifted."
The economic paradigm shifted well before the 1980s and it had nothing to do with "Western economic and military superiority
in the 1980ies". The death knell of Keynesianism was sounded with the de-linking of the US dollar and the gold standard in
1971 and the first oil crisis of 1973. Subsequently, the 1970s were marked by a continuous and escalating campaign of capital
strikes which produced both high inflation and high unemployment ('stagflation') in the main imperial centres. These strikes
persisted until the bourgeoisie's servants were able to implement their desired 'free market' measures in the 1980s, the key
ones being smashing of trade union power and consequent devastation of working conditions and living standards, privatisation
of essential services, dissolution of social welfare and all the rest. All in the name of 'encouraging investment'.
The fear of 'existing socialism' (and of the military might of Eastern Europe and the USSR) persisted right up to the restoration
of capitalism in the USSR in 1991-92. The post-soviet triumphalism (to that moronic and ultimate post-modernist war cry, 'The
End of History') only opened the floodgates for the imposition of the neoliberal paradigm over the whole globe. The real essence
of the 'globalisation' ideology has been this imposition of imperial monopoly and hegemony on economically backward but resource-rich
countries that hitherto could gain some respite or succour from the USSR and Eastern Europe as an alternative to the tender
mercies of the World Bank and IMF whose terms correspondingly centred on the neoliberal paradigm.
The key class-war victories of the 1980s by the ruling class, especially in the main Anglophone imperial centres (exemplified
by the air traffic controllers strike in Reagan's US and the Great Coal Strike in Thatcher's England), were the necessary condition
to them getting their way domestically. However, the dissolution of the USSR not only allowed the imperialists to rampage internationally
(through the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc) but gave great fillip to their initial class-war victories at home to impose with impunity
ever more grinding impoverishment and austerity on the working class and oppressed -- from the 1990s right up to fraught and
crisis-ridden present. The impunity was fuelled in many countries by that domestic accompaniment to the dissolution of the
USSR, the rapidly spiralling and terminal decline of the mass Stalinist Communist parties, the bourgeoisie's bogeyman.
Finally, productivity in the capitalist west was always higher than in post-capitalist countries. The latter universally
have been socialised economies built in economically backward countries and saddled with stultifying Stalinist bureaucracies,
including in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Capitalist productivity didn't suddenly exceed that in the USSR or Eastern Europe
in the 1980s.
So, overall, the 'triumph' of the neoliberal paradigm didn't really have much to do with the imperialist lie of "Western
economic and military superiority in the 1980ies". That fairytale might fit into some post-modernist relativist epistemology
of everything being equally 'true' or 'valid', but in the real world it doesn't hold up empirically or logically. In Anglophone
philosophic academia at least, post-modernism really picked up only after Althusser strangled his wife, and hyper-objectivist
structuralism correspondingly was strangled by hyper-subjectivist post-modernism.
Seamus Padraig
The death knell of Keynesianism was sounded with the de-linking of the US dollar and the gold standard in 1971 and the
first oil crisis of 1973.
Not really, no. In fact, we still do have Keynesianism; but now, it's just a Keynsianism for the banks, the corporations
and the MIC rather than the rest of us. But check the stats: the governments of West are still heavily involved in deficit
spending–US deficits, in fact, haven't been this big since WW2! Wish I got some of that money
Tim Jenkins
I find this kind of a pointless discussion on Keynes & so on
"Capitalism has Failed." Christine Lagarde 27/5/2014 Mansion House
"Socialism for the Rich" (Stiglitz: Nobel Economic laureate, 2008/9)
More important is the structuring of Central Banks to discuss and
Richard A. Werner's sound observations in the link
Riddle me this Seamus: this year we just got a new statue of Woodrow Wilson in Plovdiv BG.
Last year we got a statue of John no-name McCain in Sofia Bulgaria
See the patterns in the most poverty stricken EU nation ?
Not difficult !
vexarb
Seamus, me too! At least, wish I could get some of my own money back.
Tim Jenkins
Whenever I think about some serious R.O.I. of time & money & family contributions to Tech. Designs, lost in the '80's, I have
to play some music or switch to Zen mode 🙂
vexarb
@Tim: "R.O.I (Return On Investment)". The first time I have come across that P.O.V (Point Of View) on this site. The essence
of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress: to slowly build on an initial slight advantage. The 80s (I was there), Maggie
Snatcher, Baroness Muck, no such thing as Society, the years that the Locust has eaten. Little ROI despite a tsunami of fiat
money swirling around the electronic world. Where is the ROI from capital in the WC.Clinton / B.Liar / Brown regimes, that
were so boastful of their economic policies. Where are the snows of yesteryear?
Tim Jenkins
Well said, Stephen: this wholly weird wee article certainly begs the question, how old is & where was this tainted memory &
member of academia in the 'Winter of '79' ? and how could he have possibly missed all the denationalisation/privatisation,
beginning with NFC and onwards, throughout the '80's, under Thatcher ? Culminating in screwing UK societal futures, by failing
to rollout Fibre Optic Cable in the UK, (except for the Square Mile city interests of London) which Boris now promises to do
today, nationwide,
a mere 30 years too damn late, when it would have been so cheap, back then and production costs could have been tied to
contracts of sale of the elite British Tech. at that time
Worth reading both part one & two of that link, imo scandalous !
Nice wholly suitable reference to Althusser 😉 say no more.
Talk about 'Bonkers' 🙂 we shan't be buying the book, for sure 🙂
Your comment was way more valuable. Do people get paid for writing things like this, these days. I was just outside Linz
for 2 months, just before last Christmas and I found more knowledgeable people on the street, in & around Hitler's ole' 'patch',
during his formative years, on the streets of Linz: where the joke goes something along the lines of
"If a homeless unemployed artist can't make it in Austria, he has nothing to fear, knowing that he can be on the road to
becoming the Chancellor of Germany in just another year "
BigB
I was right with you to the end, Stephen. Althusser killed his wife for sure: but he was deemed insane and never stood trial.
He was almost certainly suffering from a combination of conditions, exacerbated by a severe form of PTSD, as we would call
it now.
Whether or not one has sympathy for this has become highly politicised. Classic Liberals, anti-communists, and radical feminists
always seem to portray the 'murder' as a rational act of the misogynistic male in the grips of a radical philosophy for which
wife murder is as natural a consequence as the Gulag. His supporters try to portray the 'mercy' killing of Helene as an 'act
of love'. It wasn't that simple though, was it? Nor that black and white.
I cannot imagine what life was like in a German concentration camp for someone who was already suffering from mental illness.
From what I have read: the 'treatment' available in the '50s was worse than the underlying condition. He was also 'self-medicating'.
I cannot imagine what the state of his mind was in 1980: but I am inclined to cut him some slack. A lot of slack.
I cannot agree with your last statement. Althusser's madness was not a global trigger event – proceeding as a natural consequence
from "hyper-subjectivist post-modernism". Which makes for a literary original, but highly inaccurate metaphor. Not least because
Althusser was generally considered as a Structuralist himself.
Other than that, great comment.
Stephen Morrell
I understand your sentiments toward Althusser, and am sorry if my remarks about him were insensitive or offensive. However,
I know from personal experience of hardline Althusserian academic philosophers who suddenly became post-modernists after the
unfortunate incident. The point I was trying to make was that his philosophy wasn't abandoned for philosophical reasons but
non-philosophical, moral ones. It wasn't a condemnation of Althusser. It was a condemnation of many of his followers.
I made no claim that this was some kind of 'global trigger event'. Philosophy departments, or ideas as such, don't bring
change. If post-modernism didn't become useful to at least some sectors of the ruling class at some point, then it would have
remained an academic backwater (as it should have). Nor that post-modernism was some kind of 'natural consequence' of structuralism
(which is what I think you meant). Philosophically, it was a certainly one reaction to structuralism, one among several. Other
more rational reactions to structuralism included EP Thompson's and Sebastiano Timpinaro's.
As Marx said, "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" [German Ideology], and if the ruling class
finds some of them useful they'll adopt them. Or as Milton Friedman, one of the main proponents of neoliberalism, proclaimed:
"Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on
the ideas that are lying around." Post-modernism, as a philosophy 'lying around', serves as a nice philosophical/ideological
fit for the intelligentsia to rationalise the anti-science ideology the ruling class today is foisting on rest of the population.
Politically, Althusser was disowned by many French leftists for his support of the thoroughly counter-revolutionary role
of the Stalinist PCF in the 1968 May events. His authority lasted for over a decade longer in the Anglophone countries.
Lochearn
"In Anglophone philosophic academia at least, post-modernism really picked up only after Althusser strangled his wife, and
hyper-objectivist structuralism correspondingly was strangled by hyper-subjectivist post-modernism."
Wonderful sentence. I'll keep that – if I may – for some imaginary dinner table with some imaginary academic friends.
Tim Jenkins
I was thinking exactly the same and imagining the window of opportunity to provoke some sound conversation, after some spluttering of red w(h)ine
Stephen Morrell
Thank you. I'll rephrase it to improve it slightly if you like:
In Anglophone philosophic academia at least, post-modernism really picked up only after Althusser strangled his wife, and
in revenge hyper-objectivist structuralism was strangled by hyper-subjectivist post-modernism.
Red Allover
Mr. Morrell's use of the phrase "stultifying Stalinist bureaucracies," to describe the actually existing Socialist societies
of the Eastern bloc, indicates to me that he is very much of the bourgeois mind set that he purports to criticize. This "plague
on both your houses" attitude is very typical of the lower middle class intellectual in capitalist countries, c.f. Chomsky,
Zizek, etc.
Stephen Morrell
On the contrary, all the remaining workers states (China, North Korea, Viet Nam, Laos and Cuba) must be defended against imperialist
attack and internal counterrevolution despite the bureaucratic castes that hold political power in these countries. Political,
not social, revolutions are needed to sweep away these bureaucracies to establish organs of workers democracy and political
power (eg soviets) which never existed in these countries (unlike in the first years of the USSR).
To his last days, the dying Lenin fought the rising bureaucracy led by Stalin, but Russia's backwardness and the failure
of the revolution to spread to an advanced country (especially Germany, October 1923) drove its rise. Its ideological shell
was the profoundly reactionary outlook and program of 'Socialism in One Country' (and only one country). And while Stalin defeated
him and his followers, it was Trotsky who came to a Marxist, materialist understanding of what produced and drove the Soviet
Thermidor. Trotsky didn't go running off to the bourgeoisie of the world blubbering about a 'new class' the way Kautsky, Djilas,
Shachtman, Cliff, et al. did.
The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union was a profound defeat for the working class worldwide, as it would be
for the remaining workers states. Now if that's a 'bourgeois mindset' of a 'lower middle class intellectual', be my guest and
nominate the bourgeois or petty bourgeois layers that hold such views. Certainly Chomsky, Zizek et al. couldn't agree with
such an outlook, but it's only the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists who contend that the workers states are 'socialist' or 'communist'.
Only a true post-modernist could delude themselves into concurring, or claim that the political repression, censorship and
corrupting bureaucratism of the Stalinist regimes were indeed not stultifying.
Red Allover
Thanks for your intelligent response. I am very familiar with the Trotskyist positions you outline. I could give you the Leninist
rebuttal to each of them, but you are probably familiar with them as well. I don't want to waste your time, or mine. However,
if you don't mind me asking, exactly at what point do you feel capitalism was restored in the USSR? It was, I take it, with
the first Five Year Plan, not the NEP?
Also, the Socialist or, to use your nomenclature, "Stalinist" system, that was destroyed in the the USSR in the 1990s–it was,
in truth, just one form of capitalism replaced by another form of capitalism? Would this summarize your view accurately?
Stephen Morrell
Capitalism was restored in the USSR in 1991-92. Stalinism was not another form of capitalism, as the Third Campists would contend.
The Stalinist bureaucracy rested on exactly the same property relations a socialist system would which were destroyed with
Yeltsin's (and Bush's) counterrevolution. Last, I've never labelled the Stalinist bureaucracy as a 'system'.
Perhaps if you changed your moniker to: "Troll Allover" one could take you seriously, well, not really – 'seriously' – but
at least in a sort of weird, twisted & warped post-modern sense – eh?
Red Allover
I'm sorry, what is the argument you are making? I know name calling is beneath intelligent, educated people.
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism,
to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut,
The Undoing of Thought
Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities
for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison
des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway,
only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases
that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the
medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits,
moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals
,
1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics,
intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to
be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice
of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men,
Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and
formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to
the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal
of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward
in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted
men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon
is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian
hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close
altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the
lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in
the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little
more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the
greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement,
or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily
should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the
way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation
as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The
ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were
not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success."
It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas
the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek
sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates'
devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts
Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully
pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles
sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles
espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism
by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other
'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things
were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him.
To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche.
His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and
evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real
problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all
values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated
but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of
scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated
"one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality
of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral
if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence
against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul
which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is
measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human
mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.
The Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently
described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky,
erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless
in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication,
Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given
the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly
be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands
for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues
to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm
is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief
but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée
2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this
sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives
of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent
strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century
German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that
of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned
by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit."
Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he
writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists
are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions
of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction
of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the
mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular
tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s]
some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes
the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive
worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both
books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends
to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still
had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much
attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the
measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its
current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things,
this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual
divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not
fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is
"Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular
chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science":
these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism."
The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason
and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other
absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational
animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment.
Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine
-- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill
another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about
the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged
as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce,
anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and
moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to
tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which
substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality,
the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence
in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason
went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.
It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith
is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its
end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many
anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed
with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It
is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought
itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed
as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside,
by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason
of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's
scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual
in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty
the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic"
cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting
them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment
to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded
that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced?
In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points
out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular
age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond
reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection
of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological
practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been
greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in
the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences
hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality"
and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article
on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man
who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim,
in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition
that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive
forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he
explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic
matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed
that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly
think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given
culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces
from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels
(whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.
F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other
cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological
construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the
name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and
say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than
Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than
the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read
is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The
footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller,
are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.
The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high
culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone
who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum
of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed
up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition
demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its
own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which
its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity,
is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version
of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar
to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference:
Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of
the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this."
The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism
promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is
a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change
one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the
destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's
right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural
institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children
and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does
not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars
refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common
humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand
causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity"
meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but
the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier:
Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth."
Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as
their truth.
1The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928.
This translation is still in print from Norton.
2La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in
a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book
is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)
Japan has a shrinking population. Can you explain to me why on the Earth they need
economic growth?
This preoccupation with "growth" (with narrow and false one dimensional and very
questionable measurements via GDP, which includes the FIRE sector) is a fallacy promoted by
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism proved to be quite sophisticated religions with its own set of True
Believers in Eric Hoffer's terminology.
A lot of current economic statistics suffer from "mathiness".
For example, the narrow definition of unemployment used in U3 is just a classic example of
pseudoscience in full bloom. It can be mentioned only if U6 mentioned first. Otherwise, this
is another "opium for the people" ;-) An attempt to hide the real situation in the neoliberal
"job market" in which has sustained real unemployment rate is always over 10% and which has a
disappearing pool of well-paying middle-class jobs. Which produced current narco-epidemics
(in 2018, 1400 people were shot in half a year in Chicago (
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-weekend-shooting-violence-20180709-story.html
); imagine that). While I doubt that people will hang Pelosi on the street post, her
successor might not be so lucky ;-)
Everything is fake in the current neoliberal discourse, be it political or economic, and
it is not that easy to understand how they are deceiving us. Lies that are so sophisticated
that often it is impossible to tell they are actually lies, not facts. The whole neoliberal
society is just big an Empire of Illusions, the kingdom of lies and distortions.
I would call it a new type of theocratic state if you wish.
And probably only one in ten, if not one in a hundred economists deserve to be called
scientists. Most are charlatans pushing fake papers on useless conferences.
It is simply amazing that the neoliberal society, which is based on "universal deception,"
can exist for so long.
The key to the success of neoliberal was a bunch on bought intellectual prostitutes like Milton Friedman and the drive to
occupy economic departments of the the universities using money from the financial elite. which along with think tank continued
mercenary army of neoliberalism who fought and win the battle with weakened New Del capitalism supporters. After that
neoliberalism was from those departments like the centers of infection via indoctrination of each new generation of students.
Which is a classic mixture of Bolsheviks methods and Trotskyite theory adapted tot he need of financial oligarchy.
Essentially we see the tragedy of Lysenkoism replayed in the USA. When false theory supported by financial oligarchy and then
state forcefully suppressed all other economic thought and became the only politically correct theory in the USA and Western
Europe.
Notable quotes:
"... The neoliberal counterrevolution, in theory and policy, has reversed or undermined nearly every aspect of managed capitalism -- from progressive taxation, welfare transfers, and antitrust, to the empowerment of workers and the regulation of banks and other major industries. ..."
"... Neoliberalism's premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes are basically deserved; and that redistribution creates perverse incentives by punishing the economy's winners and rewarding its losers. So government should get out of the market's way. ..."
"... Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies has failed, even on their own terms. ..."
"... Economic power has resulted in feedback loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration. ..."
"... The culprit isn't just "markets" -- some impersonal force that somehow got loose again. This is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by economic elites, who revised rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as sound and necessary economics, and friendly politicians to put those theories into practice. ..."
"... The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. ..."
"... The British political economist Colin Crouch captured this anomaly in a book nicely titled The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism . Why did neoliberalism not die? As Crouch observed, neoliberalism failed both as theory and as policy, but succeeded superbly as power politics for economic elites. ..."
"... The neoliberal ascendance has had another calamitous cost -- to democratic legitimacy. As government ceased to buffer market forces, daily life has become more of a struggle for ordinary people. ..."
"... After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ours was widely billed as an era when triumphant liberal capitalism would march hand in hand with liberal democracy. But in a few brief decades, the ostensibly secure regime of liberal democracy has collapsed in nation after nation, with echoes of the 1930s. ..."
"... As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. ..."
"... Classically, the premise of a "free market" is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical, since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In Polanyi's words, "laissez-faire was planned." ..."
"... Around the same time, the term neoconservative was used as a self-description by former liberals who embraced conservatism, on cultural, racial, economic, and foreign-policy grounds. Neoconservatives were neoliberals in economics. ..."
"... Lavishly funded centers and tenured chairs were underwritten by the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and other far-right foundations to promote such variants of free-market theory as law and economics, public choice, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis, maximize-shareholder-value, and kindred schools of thought. These theories colonized several academic disciplines. All were variations on the claim that markets worked and that government should get out of the way. ..."
"... Market failure was dismissed as a rare special case; government failure was said to be ubiquitous. Theorists worked hand in glove with lobbyists and with public officials. But in every major case where neoliberal theory generated policy, the result was political success and economic failure. ..."
"... For example, supply-side economics became the justification for tax cuts, on the premise that taxes punished enterprise. ..."
"... Robert Bork's "antitrust paradox," holding that antitrust enforcement actually weakened competition, was used as the doctrine to sideline the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Supposedly, if government just got out of the way, market forces would remain more competitive because monopoly pricing would invite innovation and new entrants to the market. In practice, industry after industry became more heavily concentrated. ..."
"... Human capital theory, another variant of neoliberal application of markets to partly social questions, justified deregulating labor markets and crushing labor unions. Unions supposedly used their power to get workers paid more than their market worth. Likewise minimum wage laws. But the era of depressed wages has actually seen a decline in rates of productivity growth ..."
"... Financial deregulation is neoliberalism's most palpable deregulatory failure, but far from the only one ..."
"... Air travel has been a poster child for advocates of deregulation, but the actual record is mixed at best. Airline deregulation produced serial bankruptcies of every major U.S. airline, often at the cost of worker pay and pension funds. ..."
"... Ticket prices have declined on average over the past two decades, but the traveling public suffers from a crazy quilt of fares, declining service, shrinking seats and legroom, and exorbitant penalties for the perfectly normal sin of having to change plans. ..."
"... A similar example is the privatization of transportation services such as highways and even parking meters. In several Midwestern states, toll roads have been sold to private vendors. The governor who makes the deal gains a temporary fiscal windfall, while drivers end up paying higher tolls often for decades. Investment bankers who broker the deal also take their cut. Some of the money does go into highway improvements, but that could have been done more efficiently in the traditional way via direct public ownership and competitive bidding. ..."
"... The Affordable Care Act is a form of voucher. But the regulated private insurance markets in the ACA have not fully lived up to their promise, in part because of the extensive market power retained by private insurers and in part because the right has relentlessly sought to sabotage the program -- another political feedback loop. The sponsors assumed that competition would lower costs and increase consumer choice. But in too many counties, there are three or fewer competing plans, and in some cases just one. ..."
"... In practice, this degenerates into an infinite regress of regulator versus commercial profit-maximizer, reminiscent of Mad magazine's "Spy versus Spy," with the industry doing end runs to Congress to further rig the rules. Straight-ahead public insurance such as Medicare is generally far more efficient. ..."
"... Several forms of deregulation -- of airlines, trucking, and electric power -- began not under Reagan but under Carter. Financial deregulation took off under Bill Clinton. Democratic presidents, as much as Republicans, promoted trade deals that undermined social standards. Cost-benefit analysis by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was more of a choke point under Barack Obama than under George W. Bush. ..."
"... Dozens of nations, from Latin America to East Asia, went through this cycle of boom, bust, and then IMF pile-on. Greece is still suffering the impact. ..."
"... In fact, Japan, South Korea, smaller Asian nations, and above all China had thrived by rejecting every major tenet of neoliberalism. Their capital markets were tightly regulated and insulated from foreign speculative capital. They developed world-class industries as state-led cartels that favored domestic production and supply. East Asia got into trouble only when it followed IMF dictates to throw open capital markets, and in the aftermath they recovered by closing those markets and assembling war chests of hard currency so that they'd never again have to go begging to the IMF ..."
"... The basic argument of neoliberalism can fit on a bumper sticker. Markets work; governments don't . If you want to embellish that story, there are two corollaries: Markets embody human freedom. And with markets, people basically get what they deserve; to alter market outcomes is to spoil the poor and punish the productive. That conclusion logically flows from the premise that markets are efficient. Milton Friedman became rich, famous, and influential by teasing out the several implications of these simple premises. ..."
"... The failed neoliberal experiment also makes the case not just for better-regulated capitalism but for direct public alternatives as well. Banking, done properly, especially the provision of mortgage finance, is close to a public utility. Much of it could be public. ..."
The
invisible hand is more like a thumb on the scale for the world's elites. That's why market
fundamentalism has been unmasked as bogus economics but keeps winning politically.This article appears in the Summer 2019 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
Subscribe here .
Since the late 1970s, we've had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets
really do work best. This resurrection occurred despite the practical failure of laissez-faire
in the 1930s, the resulting humiliation of free-market theory, and the contrasting success of
managed capitalism during the three-decade postwar boom.
Yet when growth faltered in the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat.
This revival proved extremely convenient for the conservatives who came to power in the 1980s.
The neoliberal counterrevolution, in theory and policy, has reversed or undermined nearly every
aspect of managed capitalism -- from progressive taxation, welfare transfers, and antitrust, to
the empowerment of workers and the regulation of banks and other major industries.
Neoliberalism's premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is
inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the
market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes are basically deserved; and that
redistribution creates perverse incentives by punishing the economy's winners and rewarding its
losers. So government should get out of the market's way.
By the 1990s, even moderate liberals had been converted to the belief that social objectives
can be achieved by harnessing the power of markets. Intermittent periods of governance by
Democratic presidents slowed but did not reverse the slide to neoliberal policy and doctrine.
The corporate wing of the Democratic Party approved.
Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies
has failed, even on their own terms. Enterprise has been richly rewarded, taxes have been cut,
and regulation reduced or privatized. The economy is vastly more unequal, yet economic growth
is slower and more chaotic than during the era of managed capitalism. Deregulation has produced
not salutary competition, but market concentration. Economic power has resulted in feedback
loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration.
The culprit isn't just "markets" -- some impersonal force that somehow got loose again. This
is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by economic elites, who revised
rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as
sound and necessary economics, and friendly politicians to put those theories into
practice.
Recent years have seen two spectacular cases of market mispricing with devastating
consequences: the near-depression of 2008 and irreversible climate change. The economic
collapse of 2008 was the result of the deregulation of finance. It cost the real U.S. economy
upwards of $15 trillion (and vastly more globally), depending on how you count, far more than
any conceivable efficiency gain that might be credited to financial innovation. Free-market
theory presumes that innovation is necessarily benign. But much of the financial engineering of
the deregulatory era was self-serving, opaque, and corrupt -- the opposite of an efficient and
transparent market.
The existential threat of global climate change reflects the incompetence of markets to
accurately price carbon and the escalating costs of pollution. The British economist Nicholas
Stern has aptly termed the worsening climate catastrophe history's greatest case of market
failure. Here again, this is not just the result of failed theory. The entrenched political
power of extractive industries and their political allies influences the rules and the market
price of carbon. This is less an invisible hand than a thumb on the scale. The premise of
efficient markets provides useful cover.
The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact
do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more
efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on,
because it is so useful to society's most powerful people -- as a scholarly veneer to what
would otherwise be a raw power grab. The British political economist Colin Crouch captured this
anomaly in a book nicely titled The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism . Why did
neoliberalism not die? As Crouch observed, neoliberalism failed both as theory and as policy,
but succeeded superbly as power politics for economic elites.
The neoliberal ascendance has had another calamitous cost -- to democratic legitimacy. As
government ceased to buffer market forces, daily life has become more of a struggle for
ordinary people. The elements of a decent middle-class life are elusive -- reliable jobs and
careers, adequate pensions, secure medical care, affordable housing, and college that doesn't
require a lifetime of debt. Meanwhile, life has become ever sweeter for economic elites, whose
income and wealth have pulled away and whose loyalty to place, neighbor, and nation has become
more contingent and less reliable.
Large numbers of people, in turn, have given up on the promise of affirmative government,
and on democracy itself. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ours was widely billed as an
era when triumphant liberal capitalism would march hand in hand with liberal democracy. But in
a few brief decades, the ostensibly secure regime of liberal democracy has collapsed in nation
after nation, with echoes of the 1930s.
As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society,
ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with
dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs,
playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular.
It's also important to appreciate that neoliberalism is not laissez-faire. Classically, the
premise of a "free market" is that government simply gets out of the way. This is nonsensical,
since all markets are creatures of rules, most fundamentally rules defining property, but also
rules defining credit, debt, and bankruptcy; rules defining patents, trademarks, and
copyrights; rules defining terms of labor; and so on. Even deregulation requires rules. In
Polanyi's words, "laissez-faire was planned."
The political question is who gets to make the rules, and for whose benefit. The
neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman invoked free markets, but in practice the
neoliberal regime has promoted rules created by and for private owners of capital, to keep
democratic government from asserting rules of fair competition or countervailing social
interests. The regime has rules protecting pharmaceutical giants from the right of consumers to
import prescription drugs or to benefit from generics. The rules of competition and
intellectual property generally have been tilted to protect incumbents. Rules of bankruptcy
have been tilted in favor of creditors. Deceptive mortgages require elaborate rules, written by
the financial sector and then enforced by government. Patent rules have allowed agribusiness
and giant chemical companies like Monsanto to take over much of agriculture -- the opposite of
open markets. Industry has invented rules requiring employees and consumers to submit to
binding arbitration and to relinquish a range of statutory and common-law
rights.
Neoliberalism as Theory, Policy, and Power
It's worth taking a moment to unpack the term "neoliberalism." The coinage can be confusing
to American ears because the "liberal" part refers not to the word's ordinary American usage,
meaning moderately left-of-center, but to classical economic liberalism otherwise known as
free-market economics. The "neo" part refers to the reassertion of the claim that the
laissez-faire model of the economy was basically correct after all.
Few proponents of these views embraced the term neoliberal . Mostly, they called
themselves free-market conservatives. "Neoliberal" was a coinage used mainly by their critics,
sometimes as a neutral descriptive term, sometimes as an epithet. The use became widespread in
the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
To add to the confusion, a different and partly overlapping usage was advanced in the 1970s
by the group around the Washington Monthly magazine. They used "neoliberal" to mean a
new, less statist form of American liberalism. Around the same time, the term
neoconservative was used as a self-description by former liberals who embraced
conservatism, on cultural, racial, economic, and foreign-policy grounds. Neoconservatives were
neoliberals in economics.
Beginning in the 1970s, resurrected free-market theory was interwoven with both conservative
politics and significant investments in the production of theorists and policy intellectuals.
This occurred not just in well-known conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise
Institute, Heritage, Cato, and the Manhattan Institute, but through more insidious investments
in academia. Lavishly funded centers and tenured chairs were underwritten by the Olin, Scaife,
Bradley, and other far-right foundations to promote such variants of free-market theory as law
and economics, public choice, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis,
maximize-shareholder-value, and kindred schools of thought. These theories colonized several
academic disciplines. All were variations on the claim that markets worked and that government
should get out of the way.
Each of these bodies of sub-theory relied upon its own variant of neoliberal ideology. An
intensified version of the theory of comparative advantage was used not just to cut tariffs but
to use globalization as all-purpose deregulation. The theory of maximizing shareholder value
was deployed to undermine the entire range of financial regulation and workers' rights.
Cost-benefit analysis, emphasizing costs and discounting benefits, was used to discredit a good
deal of health, safety, and environmental regulation. Public choice theory, associated with the
economist James Buchanan and an entire ensuing school of economics and political science, was
used to impeach democracy itself, on the premise that policies were hopelessly afflicted by
"rent-seekers" and "free-riders."
Market failure was dismissed as a rare special case; government failure was said to be
ubiquitous. Theorists worked hand in glove with lobbyists and with public officials. But in
every major case where neoliberal theory generated policy, the result was political success and
economic failure.
For example, supply-side economics became the justification for tax cuts, on the premise
that taxes punished enterprise. Supposedly, if taxes were cut, especially taxes on capital and
on income from capital, the resulting spur to economic activity would be so potent that
deficits would be far less than predicted by "static" economic projections, and perhaps even
pay for themselves. There have been six rounds of this experiment, from the tax cuts sponsored
by Jimmy Carter in 1978 to the immense 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by Donald Trump. In
every case some economic stimulus did result, mainly from the Keynesian jolt to demand, but in
every case deficits increased significantly. Conservatives simply stopped caring about
deficits. The tax cuts were often inefficient as well as inequitable, since the loopholes
steered investment to tax-favored uses rather than the most economically logical ones. Dozens
of America's most profitable corporations paid no taxes.
Robert Bork's "antitrust paradox," holding that antitrust enforcement actually weakened
competition, was used as the doctrine to sideline the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Supposedly, if
government just got out of the way, market forces would remain more competitive because
monopoly pricing would invite innovation and new entrants to the market. In practice, industry
after industry became more heavily concentrated. Incumbents got in the habit of buying out
innovators or using their market power to crush them. This pattern is especially insidious in
the tech economy of platform monopolies, where giants that provide platforms, such as Google
and Amazon, use their market power and superior access to customer data to out-compete rivals
who use their platforms. Markets, once again, require rules beyond the benign competence of the
market actors themselves. Only democratic government can set equitable rules. And when
democracy falters, undemocratic governments in cahoots with corrupt private plutocrats will
make the rules.
Human capital theory, another variant of neoliberal application of markets to partly social
questions, justified deregulating labor markets and crushing labor unions. Unions supposedly
used their power to get workers paid more than their market worth. Likewise minimum wage laws.
But the era of depressed wages has actually seen a decline in rates of productivity growth.
Conversely, does any serious person think that the inflated pay of the financial moguls who
crashed the economy accurately reflects their contribution to economic activity? In the case of
hedge funds and private equity, the high incomes of fund sponsors are the result of transfers
of wealth and income from employees, other stakeholders, and operating companies to the fund
managers, not the fruits of more efficient management.
There is a broad literature discrediting this body of pseudo-scholarly work in great detail.
Much of neoliberalism represents the ever-reliable victory of assumption over evidence. Yet
neoliberal theory lived on because it was so convenient for elites, and because of the inertial
power of the intellectual capital that had been created. The well-funded neoliberal habitat has
provided comfortable careers for two generations of scholars and pseudo-scholars who migrate
between academia, think tanks, K Street, op-ed pages, government, Wall Street, and back again.
So even if the theory has been demolished both by scholarly rebuttal and by events, it thrives
in powerful institutions and among their political allies.
The Practical Failure of
Neoliberal Policies
Financial deregulation is neoliberalism's most palpable deregulatory failure, but far from
the only one. Electricity deregulation on balance has increased monopoly power and raised costs
to consumers, but has failed to offer meaningful "shopping around" opportunities to bring down
prices. We have gone from regulated monopolies with predictable earnings, costs, wages, and
consumer protections to deregulated monopolies or oligopolies with substantial pricing power.
Since the Bell breakup, the telephone system tells a similar story of re-concentration,
dwindling competition, price-gouging, and union-bashing.
Air travel has been a poster child for advocates of deregulation, but the actual record is
mixed at best. Airline deregulation produced serial bankruptcies of every major U.S. airline,
often at the cost of worker pay and pension funds.
Ticket prices have declined on average over
the past two decades, but the traveling public suffers from a crazy quilt of fares, declining
service, shrinking seats and legroom, and exorbitant penalties for the perfectly normal sin of
having to change plans. Studies have shown that fares actually declined at a faster rate in the
20 years before deregulation in 1978 than in the 20 years afterward, because the prime source
of greater efficiency in airline travel is the introduction of more fuel-efficient planes.
The
roller-coaster experience of airline profits and losses has reduced the capacity of airlines to
purchase more fuel-efficient aircraft, and the average age of the fleet keeps increasing. The
use of "fortress hubs" to defend market pricing power has reduced the percentage of nonstop
flights, the most efficient way to fly from one point to another.
Robert Bork's spurious arguments that antitrust enforcement hurt competition became the
basis for dismantling antitrust. Massive concentration resulted. Charles Tasnadi/AP Photo
In addition to deregulation, three prime areas of practical neoliberal policies are the use
of vouchers as "market-like" means to social goals, the privatization of public services, and
the use of tax subsides rather than direct outlays. In every case, government revenues are
involved, so this is far from a free market to begin with. But the premise is that market
disciplines can achieve public purposes more efficiently than direct public provision.
The evidence provides small comfort for these claims. One core problem is that the programs
invariably give too much to the for-profit middlemen at the expense of the intended
beneficiaries. A related problem is that the process of using vouchers and contracts invites
corruption. It is a different form of "rent-seeking" -- pursuit of monopoly profits -- than
that attributed to government by public choice theorists, but corruption nonetheless. Often,
direct public provision is far more transparent and accountable than a web of contractors.
A further problem is that in practice there is often far less competition than imagined,
because of oligopoly power, vendor lock-in, and vendor political influence. These experiments
in marketization to serve social goals do not operate in some Platonic policy laboratory, where
the only objective is true market efficiency yoked to the public good. They operate in the
grubby world of practical politics, where the vendors are closely allied with conservative
politicians whose purposes may be to discredit social transfers entirely, or to reward
corporate allies, or to benefit from kickbacks either directly or as campaign
contributions.
Privatized prisons are a case in point. A few large, scandal-ridden companies have gotten
most of the contracts, often through political influence. Far from bringing better quality and
management efficiency, they have profited by diverting operating funds and worsening conditions
that were already deplorable, and finding new ways to charge inmates higher fees for necessary
services such as phone calls. To the extent that money was actually saved, most of the savings
came from reducing the pay and professionalism of guards, increasing overcrowding, and
decreasing already inadequate budgets for food and medical care.
A similar example is the privatization of transportation services such as highways and even
parking meters. In several Midwestern states, toll roads have been sold to private vendors. The
governor who makes the deal gains a temporary fiscal windfall, while drivers end up paying
higher tolls often for decades. Investment bankers who broker the deal also take their cut.
Some of the money does go into highway improvements, but that could have been done more
efficiently in the traditional way via direct public ownership and competitive bidding.
Housing vouchers substantially reward landlords who use the vouchers to fill empty houses
with poor people until the neighborhood gentrifies, at which point the owner is free to quit
the program and charge market rentals. Thus public funds are used to underwrite a privately
owned, quasi-social housing sector -- whose social character is only temporary. No permanent
social housing is produced despite the extensive public outlay. The companion use of tax
incentives to attract passive investment in affordable housing promotes economically
inefficient tax shelters, and shunts public funds into the pockets of the investors -- money
that might otherwise have gone directly to the housing.
The Affordable Care Act is a form of voucher. But the regulated private insurance markets in
the ACA have not fully lived up to their promise, in part because of the extensive market power
retained by private insurers and in part because the right has relentlessly sought to sabotage
the program -- another political feedback loop. The sponsors assumed that competition would
lower costs and increase consumer choice. But in too many counties, there are three or fewer
competing plans, and in some cases just one.
As more insurance plans and hospital systems become for-profit, massive investment goes into
such wasteful activities as manipulation of billing, "risk selection," and other gaming of the
rules. Our mixed-market system of health care requires massive regulation to work with
tolerable efficiency. In practice, this degenerates into an infinite regress of regulator
versus commercial profit-maximizer, reminiscent of Mad magazine's "Spy versus Spy," with
the industry doing end runs to Congress to further rig the rules. Straight-ahead public
insurance such as Medicare is generally far more efficient.
An extensive literature has demonstrated that for-profit voucher schools do no better and
often do worse than comparable public schools, and are vulnerable to multiple forms of gaming
and corruption. Proprietors of voucher schools are superb at finding ways of excluding costly
special-needs students, so that those costs are imposed on what remains of public schools; they
excel at gaming test results. While some voucher and charter schools, especially nonprofit
ones, sometimes improve on average school performance, so do many public schools. The record is
also muddied by the fact that many ostensibly nonprofit schools contract out management to
for-profit companies.
Tax preferences have long been used ostensibly to serve social goals. The Earned Income Tax
Credit is considered one of the more successful cases of using market-like measures -- in this
case a refundable tax credit -- to achieve the social goal of increasing worker take-home pay.
It has also been touted as the rare case of bipartisan collaboration. Liberals get more money
for workers. Conservatives get to reward the deserving poor, since the EITC is conditioned on
employment. Conservatives get a further ideological win, since the EITC is effectively a wage
subsidy from the government, but is experienced as a tax refund rather than a benefit of
government.
Recent research, however, shows that the EITC is primarily a subsidy of low-wage employers,
who are able to pay their workers a lot less than a market-clearing wage. In industries such as
nursing homes or warehouses, where many workers qualified for the EITC work side by side with
ones not eligible, the non-EITC workers get substandard wages. The existence of the EITC
depresses the level of the wages that have to come out of the employer's
pocket.
Neoliberalism's Influence on Liberals
As free-market theory resurged, many moderate liberals embraced these policies. In the
inflationary 1970s, regulation became a scapegoat that supposedly deterred salutary price
competition. Some, such as economist Alfred Kahn, President Carter's adviser on deregulation,
supported deregulation on what he saw as the merits. Other moderates supported neoliberal
policies opportunistically, to curry favor with powerful industries and donors. Market-like
policies were also embraced by liberals as a tactical way to find common ground with
conservatives.
Several forms of deregulation -- of airlines, trucking, and electric power -- began not
under Reagan but under Carter. Financial deregulation took off under Bill Clinton. Democratic
presidents, as much as Republicans, promoted trade deals that undermined social standards.
Cost-benefit analysis by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was more of a
choke point under Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.
"Command and control" became an all-purpose pejorative for disparaging perfectly sensible
and efficient regulation. "Market-like" became a fashionable concept, not just on the
free-market right but on the moderate left. Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama's
anti-regulation czar,uses the example of "nudges" as a more market-like and hence superior
alternative to direct regulation, though with rare exceptions their impact is trivial.
Moreover, nudges only work in tandem with regulation.
There are indeed some interventionist policies that use market incentives to serve social
goals. But contrary to free-market theory, the market-like incentives first require substantial
regulation and are not a substitute for it. A good example is the Clean Air Act Amendments of
1990, which used tradable emission rights to cut the output of sulfur dioxide, the cause of
acid rain. This was supported by both the George H.W. Bush administration and by leading
Democrats. But before the trading regime could work, Congress first had to establish
permissible ceilings on sulfur dioxide output -- pure command and control.
There are many other instances, such as nutrition labeling, truth-in-lending, and disclosure
of EPA gas mileage results, where the market-like premise of a better-informed consumer
complements command regulation but is no substitute for it. Nearly all of the increase in fuel
efficiency, for example, is the result of command regulations that require auto fleets to hit a
gas mileage target. The fact that EPA gas mileage figures are prominently disclosed on new car
stickers may have modest influence, but motor fuels are so underpriced that car companies have
success selling gas-guzzlers despite the consumer labeling.
Image removed
Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, were big promoters of financial deregulation.
Politically, whatever rationale there was for liberals to make common ground with
libertarians is now largely gone. The authors of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made no attempt
to meet Democrats partway; they excluded the opposition from the legislative process entirely.
This was opportunistic tax cutting for elites, pure and simple. The right today also abandoned
the quest for a middle ground on environmental policy, on anti-poverty policy, on health policy
-- on virtually everything. Neoliberal ideology did its historic job of weakening intellectual
and popular support for the proposition that affirmative government can better the lives of
citizens and that the Democratic Party is a reliable steward of that social compact. Since
Reagan, the right's embrace of the free market has evolved from partly principled idealism into
pure opportunism and obstruction.
Neoliberalism and Hyper-Globalism
The post-1990 rules of globalization, supported by conservatives and moderate liberals
alike, are the quintessence of neoliberalism. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the use of fixed
exchange rates and controls on speculative private capital, plus the creation of the IMFand
World Bank, were intended to allow member countries to practice national forms of managed
capitalism, insulated from the destructive and deflationary influences of short-term
speculative private capital flows. As doctrine and power shifted in the 1970s, the IMF, the
World Bank, and later the WTO, which replaced the old GATT, mutated into their ideological
opposite. Rather than instruments of support for mixed national economies, they became
enforcers of neoliberal policies.
The standard package of the "Washington Consensus" of approved policies for developing
nations included demands that they open their capital markets to speculative private finance,
as well as cutting taxes on capital, weakening social transfers, and gutting labor regulation
and public ownership. But private capital investment in poor countries proved to be fickle. The
result was often excessive inflows during the boom part of the cycle and punitive withdrawals
during the bust -- the opposite of the patient, long-term development capital that these
countries needed and that was provided by the World Bank of an earlier era. During the bust
phase, the IMF typically imposes even more stringent neoliberal demands as the price of
financial bailouts, including perverse budgetary austerity, supposedly to restore the
confidence of the very speculative capital markets responsible for the boom-bust cycle.
Dozens of nations, from Latin America to East Asia, went through this cycle of boom, bust,
and then IMF pile-on. Greece is still suffering the impact. After 1990, hyper-globalism also
included trade treaties whose terms favored multinational corporations. Traditionally, trade
agreements had been mainly about reciprocal reductions of tariffs. Nations were free to have
whatever brand of regulation, public investment, or social policies they chose. With the advent
of the WTO, many policies other than tariffs were branded as trade distorting, even as takings
without compensation. Trade deals were used to give foreign capital free access and to
dismantle national regulation and public ownership. Special courts were created in which
foreign corporations and investors could do end runs around national authorities to challenge
regulation for impeding commerce.
At first, the sponsors of the new trade regime tried to claim the successful economies of
East Asia as evidence of the success of the neoliberal recipe. Supposedly, these nations had
succeeded by pursuing "export-led growth," exposing their domestic economies to salutary
competition. But these claims were soon exposed as the opposite of what had actually occurred.
In fact, Japan, South Korea, smaller Asian nations, and above all China had thrived by
rejecting every major tenet of neoliberalism. Their capital markets were tightly regulated and
insulated from foreign speculative capital. They developed world-class industries as state-led
cartels that favored domestic production and supply. East Asia got into trouble only when it
followed IMF dictates to throw open capital markets, and in the aftermath they recovered by
closing those markets and assembling war chests of hard currency so that they'd never again
have to go begging to the IMF. Enthusiasts of hyper-globalization also claimed that it
benefited poor countries by increasing export opportunities, but as the success of East Asia
shows, there is more than one way to boost exports -- and many poorer countries suffered under
the terms of the global neoliberal regime.
Nor was the damage confined to the developing world. As the work of Harvard economist Dani
Rodrik has demonstrated, democracy requires a polity. For better or for worse, the polity and
democratic citizenship are national. By enhancing the global market at the expense of the
democratic state, the current brand of hyper-globalization deliberately weakens the capacity of
states to regulate markets, and weakens democracy itself.
When Do Markets Work?
The failure of neoliberalism as economic and social policy does not mean that markets never
work. A command economy is even more utopian and perverse than a neoliberal one. The practical
quest is for an efficient and equitable middle ground.
The neoliberal story of how the economy operates assumes a largely frictionless marketplace,
where prices are set by supply and demand, and the price mechanism allocates resources to their
optimal use in the economy as a whole. For this discipline to work as advertised, however,
there can be no market power, competition must be plentiful, sellers and buyers must have
roughly equal information, and there can be no significant externalities. Much of the 20th
century was practical proof that these conditions did not describe a good part of the actual
economy. And if markets priced things wrong, the market system did not aggregate to an
efficient equilibrium, and depressions could become self-deepening. As Keynes demonstrated,
only a massive jolt of government spending could restart the engines, even if market pricing
was partly violated in the process.
Nonetheless, in many sectors of the economy, the process of buying and selling is close
enough to the textbook conditions of perfect competition that the price system works tolerably
well. Supermarkets, for instance, deliver roughly accurate prices because of the consumer's
freedom and knowledge to shop around. Likewise much of retailing. However, when we get into
major realms of the economy with positive or negative externalities, such as education and
health, markets are not sufficient. And in other major realms, such as pharmaceuticals, where
corporations use their political power to rig the terms of patents, the market doesn't produce
a cure.
The basic argument of neoliberalism can fit on a bumper sticker. Markets work;
governments don't . If you want to embellish that story, there are two corollaries: Markets
embody human freedom. And with markets, people basically get what they deserve; to alter market
outcomes is to spoil the poor and punish the productive. That conclusion logically flows from
the premise that markets are efficient. Milton Friedman became rich, famous, and influential by
teasing out the several implications of these simple premises.
It is much harder to articulate the case for a mixed economy than the case for free markets,
precisely because the mixed economy is mixed. The rebuttal takes several paragraphs. The more
complex story holds that markets are substantially efficient in some realms but far from
efficient in others, because of positive and negative externalities, the tendency of financial
markets to create cycles of boom and bust, the intersection of self-interest and corruption,
the asymmetry of information between company and consumer, the asymmetry of power between
corporation and employee, the power of the powerful to rig the rules, and the fact that there
are realms of human life (the right to vote, human liberty, security of one's person) that
should not be marketized.
And if markets are not perfectly efficient, then distributive questions are partly political
choices. Some societies pay pre-K teachers the minimum wage as glorified babysitters. Others
educate and compensate them as professionals. There is no "correct" market-derived wage,
because pre-kindergarten is a social good and the issue of how to train and compensate teachers
is a social choice, not a market choice. The same is true of the other human services,
including medicine. Nor is there a theoretically correct set of rules for patents, trademarks,
and copyrights. These are politically derived, either balancing the interests of innovation
with those of diffusion -- or being politically captured by incumbent industries.
Governments can in principle improve on market outcomes via regulation, but that fact is
complicated by the risk of regulatory capture. So another issue that arises is market failure
versus polity failure, which brings us back to the urgency of strong democracy and effective
government.
After Neoliberalism
The political reversal of neoliberalism can only come through practical politics and
policies that demonstrate how government often can serve citizens more equitably and
efficiently than markets. Revision of theory will take care of itself. There is no shortage of
dissenting theorists and empirical policy researchers whose scholarly work has been vindicated
by events. What they need is not more theory but more influence, both in the academy and in the
corridors of power. They are available to advise a new progressive administration, if
that administration can get elected and if it refrains from hiring neoliberal
advisers.
There are also some relatively new areas that invite policy innovation. These include
regulation of privacy rights versus entrepreneurial liberties in the digital realm; how to
think of the internet as a common carrier; how to update competition and antitrust policy as
platform monopolies exert new forms of market power; how to modernize labor-market policy in
the era of the gig economy; and the role of deeper income supplements as machines replace human
workers.
The failed neoliberal experiment also makes the case not just for better-regulated
capitalism but for direct public alternatives as well. Banking, done properly, especially the
provision of mortgage finance, is close to a public utility. Much of it could be public. A
great deal of research is done more honestly and more cost-effectively in public, peer-reviewed
institutions such as the NIH than by a substantially corrupt private pharmaceutical industry.
Social housing often is more cost-effective than so-called public-private partnerships. Public
power is more efficient to generate, less prone to monopolistic price-gouging, and friendlier
to the needed green transition than private power. The public option in health care is far more
efficient than the current crazy quilt in which each layer of complexity adds opacity and cost.
Public provision does require public oversight, but that is more straightforward and
transparent than the byzantine dance of regulation and counter-regulation.
The two other benefits of direct public provision are that the public gets direct evidence
of government delivering something of value, and that the countervailing power of democracy to
harness markets is enhanced. A mixed economy depends above all on a strong democracy -- one
even stronger than the democracy that succumbed to the corrupting influence of economic elites
and their neoliberal intellectual allies beginning half a century ago. The antidote to the
resurrected neoliberal fable is the resurrection of democracy -- strong enough to tame the
market in a way that tames it for keeps.
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at
Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American
Democracy . In addition to writing for the Prospect, he writes for HuffPost, The Boston
Globe, and The New York Review of Books.
This is a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. Not necessary right but they his some relevant
points.
Notable quotes:
"... The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. ..."
"... The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. ..."
"... While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand. ..."
"... The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5 ..."
"... This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis. ..."
"... The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6 ..."
"... If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment. ..."
"... The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market ..."
"... In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people ..."
"... In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. ..."
"... The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support. ..."
"... The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism. ..."
"... And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more. ..."
"... Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it. ..."
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth.
But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this
ideological prop.
Harry Magdoff's The Age of
Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not
negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it
follows in V. I. Lenin's footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at
the time operated globally. On the other hand, it raises a question that is less frequently
discussed in Marxist literature -- namely, the need for imperialism. Here, Magdoff not only
highlighted the crucial importance, among other things, of the third world's raw materials for
metropolitan capital, but also refuted the argument that the declining share of raw-material
value in gross manufacturing output somehow reduced this importance, making the simple point
that there can be no manufacturing at all without raw materials. 1
Magdoff's focus was on a period when imperialism was severely resisting economic
decolonization in the third world, with newly independent third world countries taking control
over their own resources. He highlighted the entire armory of weapons used by imperialism. But
he was writing in a period that predated the onset of neoliberalism. Today, we not only have
decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end.
Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting.
Globalization and
Economic Crisis
There are two reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end.
The first is an ex ante tendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the
only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price
bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the
economy back into crisis. In short, to use the words of British economic historian Samuel
Berrick Saul, there are no "markets on tap" for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as
had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the
post-Second World War period of dirigisme . 2
The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages
across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector
of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world
output. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital , following the lead of
Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, such a rise in the share of economic surplus, or a shift
from wages to surplus, has the effect of reducing aggregate demand since the ratio of
consumption to income is higher on average for wage earners than for those living off the
surplus. 3
Therefore, assuming a given level of investment associated with any period, such a shift would
tend to reduce consumption demand and hence aggregate demand, output, and capacity utilization.
In turn, reduced capacity utilization would lower investment over time, further aggravating the
demand-reducing effect arising from the consumption side.
While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous
phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an
explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy?
The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the
first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the
metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in
the latter and meet global demand.
Historically, while labor has not been, and is still not, free to migrate from the third
world to the metropolis, capital, though juridically free to move from the latter to the
former, did not actually do so , except to sectors like mines and plantations, which
only strengthened, rather than broke, the colonial pattern of the international division of
labor. 4
This segmentation of the world economy meant that wages in the metropolis increased with labor
productivity, unrestrained by the vast labor reserves of the third world, which themselves had
been caused by the displacement of manufactures through the twin processes of
deindustrialization (competition from metropolitan goods) and the drain of surplus (the
siphoning off of a large part of the economic surplus, through taxes on peasants that are no
longer spent on local artisan products but finance gratis primary commodity exports to
the metropolis instead).
The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to
the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and
take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of
the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the
third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the
real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was
marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5
At the same time, such relocation of activities, despite causing impressive growth rates of
gross domestic product (GDP) in many third world countries, does not lead to the exhaustion of
the third world's labor reserves. This is because of another feature of contemporary
globalization: the unleashing of a process of primitive accumulation of capital against petty
producers, including peasant agriculturists in the third world, who had earlier been protected,
to an extent, from the encroachment of big capital (both domestic and foreign) by the
postcolonial dirigiste regimes in these countries. Under neoliberalism, such protection
is withdrawn, causing an income squeeze on these producers and often their outright
dispossession from their land, which is then used by big capital for its various so-called
development projects. The increase in employment, even in countries with impressive GDP growth
rates in the third world, falls way short of the natural growth of the workforce, let alone
absorbing the additional job seekers coming from the ranks of displaced petty producers. The
labor reserves therefore never get used up. Indeed, on the contrary, they are augmented
further, because real wages continue to remain tied to a subsistence level, even as
metropolitan wages too are restrained. The vector of real wages in the world economy as a whole
therefore remains restrained.
Although contemporary globalization thus gives rise to an ex ante tendency toward
overproduction, state expenditure that could provide a counter to this (and had provided a
counter through military spending in the United States, according to Baran and Sweezy) can no
longer do so under the current regime. Finance is usually opposed to direct state intervention
through larger spending as a way of increasing employment. This opposition expresses itself
through an opposition not just to larger taxes on capitalists, but also to a larger fiscal
deficit for financing such spending. Obviously, if larger state spending is financed by taxes
on workers, then it hardly adds to aggregate demand, for workers spend the bulk of their
incomes anyway, so the state taking this income and spending it instead does not add any extra
demand. Hence, larger state spending can increase employment only if it is financed either
through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on capitalists who keep a part of their income
unspent or saved. But these are precisely the two modes of financing state expenditure that
finance capital opposes.
Its opposing larger taxes on capitalists is understandable, but why is it so opposed to a
larger fiscal deficit? Even within a capitalist economy, there are no sound economic
theoretical reasons that should preclude a fiscal deficit under all circumstances. The root of
the opposition therefore lies in deeper social considerations: if the capitalist economic
system becomes dependent on the state to promote employment directly , then this fact
undermines the social legitimacy of capitalism. The need for the state to boost the animal
spirits of the capitalists disappears and a perspective on the system that is epistemically
exterior to it is provided to the people, making it possible for them to ask: If the state can
do the job of providing employment, then why do we need the capitalists at all? It is an
instinctive appreciation of this potential danger that underlies the opposition of capital,
especially of finance, to any direct effort by the state to generate employment.
This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as
finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state,
the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second
World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is
globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a
nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large
fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse ,
causing a financial crisis.
The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews
direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since
that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their
social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument,
as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the
pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6
It may be thought that this compulsion on the part of the state to accede to the demand of
finance to eschew fiscal intervention for enlarging employment should not hold for the United
States. Its currency being considered by the world's wealth holders to be "as good as gold"
should make it immune to capital flight. But there is an additional factor operating in the
case of the United States: that the demand generated by a bigger U.S. fiscal deficit would
substantially leak abroad in a neoliberal setting, which would increase its external debt
(since, unlike Britain in its heyday, it does not have access to any unrequited colonial
transfers) for the sake of generating employment elsewhere. This fact deters any fiscal effort
even in the United States to boost demand within a neoliberal setting. 7
Therefore, it follows that state spending cannot provide a counter to the ex ante
tendency toward global overproduction within a regime of neoliberal globalization, which makes
the world economy precariously dependent on occasional asset-price bubbles, primarily in the
U.S. economy, for obtaining, at best, some temporary relief from the crisis. It is this fact
that underlies the dead end that neoliberal capitalism has reached. Indeed, Donald Trump's
resort to protectionism in the United States to alleviate unemployment is a clear recognition
of the system having reached this cul-de-sac. The fact that the mightiest capitalist
economy in the world has to move away from the rules of the neoliberal game in an attempt to
alleviate its crisis of unemployment/underemployment -- while compensating capitalists
adversely affected by this move through tax cuts, as well as carefully ensuring that no
restraints are imposed on free cross-border financial flows -- shows that these rules
are no longer viable in their pristine form.
Some Implications of This Dead End
There are at least four important implications of this dead end of neoliberalism. The first
is that the world economy will now be afflicted by much higher levels of unemployment than it
was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, when
the dot-com and the housing bubbles in the United States had, sequentially, a pronounced
impact. It is true that the U.S. unemployment rate today appears to be at a historic low, but
this is misleading: the labor-force participation rate in the United States today is lower than
it was in 2008, which reflects the discouraged-worker effect . Adjusting for this lower
participation, the U.S. unemployment rate is considerable -- around 8 percent. Indeed, Trump
would not be imposing protection in the United States if unemployment was actually as low as 4
percent, which is the official figure. Elsewhere in the world, of course, unemployment
post-2008 continues to be evidently higher than before. Indeed, the severity of the current
problem of below-full-employment production in the U.S. economy is best illustrated by capacity
utilization figures in manufacturing. The weakness of the U.S. recovery from the Great
Recession is indicated by the fact that the current extended recovery represents the first
decade in the entire post-Second World War period in which capacity utilization in
manufacturing has never risen as high as 80 percent in a single quarter, with the resulting
stagnation of investment. 8
If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a
beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the
United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen
the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the
United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already
appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be
because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping
unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we
look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment.
There has been some discussion on how global value chains would be affected by Trump's
protectionism. But the fact that global macroeconomics in the early twenty-first century will
look altogether different compared to earlier has not been much discussed.
In light of the preceding discussion, one could say that if, instead of individual
nation-states whose writ cannot possibly run against globalized finance capital, there was a
global state or a set of major nation-states acting in unison to override the objections of
globalized finance and provide a coordinated fiscal stimulus to the world economy, then perhaps
there could be recovery. Such a coordinated fiscal stimulus was suggested by a group of German
trade unionists, as well as by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
9
While it was turned down then, in the present context it has not even been discussed.
The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large
over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with
protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even
spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world
market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the
ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their
home market.
Such a transition will not be easy; it will require promoting domestic peasant agriculture,
defending petty production, moving toward cooperative forms of production, and ensuring greater
equality in income distribution, all of which need major structural shifts. For smaller
economies, it would also require their coming together with other economies to provide a
minimum size to the domestic market. In short, the dead end of neoliberalism also means the
need for a shift away from the so-called neoliberal development strategy that has held sway
until now.
The third implication is the imminent engulfing of a whole range of third world economies in
serious balance-of-payments difficulties. This is because, while their exports will be sluggish
in the new situation, this very fact will also discourage financial inflows into their
economies, whose easy availability had enabled them to maintain current account deficits on
their balance of payments earlier. In such a situation, within the existing neoliberal
paradigm, they would be forced to adopt austerity measures that would impose income deflation
on their people, make the conditions of their people significantly worse, lead to a further
handing over of their national assets and resources to international capital, and prevent
precisely any possible transition to an alternative strategy of home market-based growth.
In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over
third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits
in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or
that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even
domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people.
The fourth implication is the worldwide upsurge of fascism. Neoliberal capitalism even
before it reached a dead end, even in the period when it achieved reasonable growth and
employment rates, had pushed the world into greater hunger and poverty. For instance, the world
per-capita cereal output was 355 kilograms for 1980 (triennium average for 1979–81
divided by mid–triennium population) and fell to 343 in 2000, leveling at 344.9 in 2016
-- and a substantial amount of this last figure went into ethanol production. Clearly, in a
period of growth of the world economy, per-capita cereal absorption should be expanding,
especially since we are talking here not just of direct absorption but of direct and indirect
absorption, the latter through processed foods and feed grains in animal products. The fact
that there was an absolute decline in per-capita output, which no doubt caused a decline in
per-capita absorption, suggests an absolute worsening in the nutritional level of a substantial
segment of the world's population.
But this growing hunger and nutritional poverty did not immediately arouse any significant
resistance, both because such resistance itself becomes more difficult under neoliberalism
(since the very globalization of capital makes it an elusive target) and also because higher
GDP growth rates provided a hope that distress might be overcome in the course of time.
Peasants in distress, for instance, entertained the hope that their children would live better
in the years to come if given a modicum of education and accepted their fate.
In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with
neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological
prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop
and finds fascism. This changes the discourse away from the material conditions of people's
lives to the so-called threat to the nation, placing the blame for people's distress not on the
failure of the system, but on ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, the
other that is portrayed as an enemy. It projects a so-called messiah whose sheer
muscularity can somehow magically overcome all problems; it promotes a culture of unreason so
that both the vilification of the other and the magical powers of the supposed leader
can be placed beyond any intellectual questioning; it uses a combination of state repression
and street-level vigilantism by fascist thugs to terrorize opponents; and it forges a close
relationship with big business, or, in Kalecki's words, "a partnership of big business and
fascist upstarts." 10
Fascist groups of one kind or another exist in all modern societies. They move center stage
and even into power only on certain occasions when they get the backing of big business. And
these occasions arise when three conditions are satisfied: when there is an economic crisis so
the system cannot simply go on as before; when the usual liberal establishment is manifestly
incapable of resolving the crisis; and when the left is not strong enough to provide an
alternative to the people in order to move out of the conjuncture.
This last point may appear odd at first, since many see the big bourgeoisie's recourse to
fascism as a counter to the growth of the left's strength in the context of a capitalist
crisis. But when the left poses a serious threat, the response of the big bourgeoisie typically
is to attempt to split it by offering concessions. It uses fascism to prop itself up only when
the left is weakened. Walter Benjamin's remark that "behind every fascism there is a failed
revolution" points in this direction.
Fascism Then and Now
Contemporary fascism, however, differs in crucial respects from its 1930s counterpart, which
is why many are reluctant to call the current phenomenon a fascist upsurge. But historical
parallels, if carefully drawn, can be useful. While in some aforementioned respects
contemporary fascism does resemble the phenomenon of the 1930s, there are serious differences
between the two that must also be noted.
First, we must note that while the current fascist upsurge has put fascist elements in power
in many countries, there are no fascist states of the 1930s kind as of yet. Even if the fascist
elements in power try to push the country toward a fascist state, it is not clear that they
will succeed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that fascists in power
today cannot overcome the crisis of neoliberalism, since they accept the regime of
globalization of finance. This includes Trump, despite his protectionism. In the 1930s,
however, this was not the case. The horrors associated with the institution of a fascist state
in the 1930s had been camouflaged to an extent by the ability of the fascists in power to
overcome mass unemployment and end the Depression through larger military spending, financed by
government borrowing. Contemporary fascism, by contrast, lacks the ability to overcome the
opposition of international finance capital to fiscal activism on the part of the government to
generate larger demand, output, and employment, even via military spending.
Such activism, as discussed earlier, required larger government spending financed either
through taxes on capitalists or through a fiscal deficit. Finance capital was opposed to both
of these measures and it being globalized made this opposition decisive . The
decisiveness of this opposition remains even if the government happens to be one composed of
fascist elements. Hence, contemporary fascism, straitjacketed by "fiscal rectitude," cannot
possibly alleviate even temporarily the economic crises facing people and cannot provide any
cover for a transition to a fascist state akin to the ones of the 1930s, which makes such a
transition that much more unlikely.
Another difference is also related to the phenomenon of the globalization of finance. The
1930s were marked by what Lenin had earlier called "interimperialist rivalry." The military
expenditures incurred by fascist governments, even though they pulled countries out of the
Depression and unemployment, inevitably led to wars for "repartitioning an already partitioned
world." Fascism was the progenitor of war and burned itself out through war at, needless to
say, great cost to humankind.
Contemporary fascism, however, operates in a world where interimperialist rivalry is far
more muted. Some have seen in this muting a vindication of Karl Kautsky's vision of an
"ultraimperialism" as against Lenin's emphasis on the permanence of interimperialist rivalry,
but this is wrong. Both Kautsky and Lenin were talking about a world where finance capital and
the financial oligarchy were essentially national -- that is, German, French, or British. And
while Kautsky talked about the possibility of truces among the rival oligarchies, Lenin saw
such truces only as transient phenomena punctuating the ubiquity of rivalry.
In contrast, what we have today is not nation-based finance capitals, but
international finance capital into whose corpus the finance capitals drawn from
particular countries are integrated. This globalized finance capital does not want the world
to be partitioned into economic territories of rival powers ; on the contrary, it wants the
entire globe to be open to its own unrestricted movement. The muting of rivalry between major
powers, therefore, is not because they prefer truce to war, or peaceful partitioning of the
world to forcible repartitioning, but because the material conditions themselves have changed
so that it is no longer a matter of such choices. The world has gone beyond both Lenin and
Kautsky, as well as their debates.
Not only are we not going to have wars between major powers in this era of fascist upsurge
(of course, as will be discussed, we shall have other wars), but, by the same token, this
fascist upsurge will not burn out through any cataclysmic war. What we are likely to see is a
lingering fascism of less murderous intensity , which, when in power, does not
necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically
annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally.
But since its successor government, as long as it remains within the confines of the neoliberal
strategy, will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to
return to power as well. And whether the fascist elements are in or out of power, they will
remain a potent force working toward the fascification of the society and the polity, even
while promoting corporate interests within a regime of globalization of finance, and hence
permanently maintaining the "partnership between big business and fascist upstarts."
Put differently, since the contemporary fascist upsurge is not likely to burn itself out as
the earlier one did, it has to be overcome by transcending the very conjuncture that produced
it: neoliberal capitalism at a dead end. A class mobilization of working people around an
alternative set of transitional demands that do not necessarily directly target neoliberal
capitalism, but which are immanently unrealizable within the regime of neoliberal capitalism,
can provide an initial way out of this conjuncture and lead to its eventual transcendence.
Such a class mobilization in the third world context would not mean making no truces with
liberal bourgeois elements against the fascists. On the contrary, since the liberal bourgeois
elements too are getting marginalized through a discourse of jingoistic nationalism typically
manufactured by the fascists, they too would like to shift the discourse toward the material
conditions of people's lives, no doubt claiming that an improvement in these conditions is
possible within the neoliberal economic regime itself. Such a shift in discourse is in
itself a major antifascist act . Experience will teach that the agenda advanced as part of
this changed discourse is unrealizable under neoliberalism, providing the scope for dialectical
intervention by the left to transcend neoliberal capitalism.
Imperialist
Interventions
Even though fascism will have a lingering presence in this conjuncture of "neoliberalism at
a dead end," with the backing of domestic corporate-financial interests that are themselves
integrated into the corpus of international finance capital, the working people in the third
world will increasingly demand better material conditions of life and thereby rupture the
fascist discourse of jingoistic nationalism (that ironically in a third world context is not
anti-imperialist).
In fact, neoliberalism reaching a dead end and having to rely on fascist elements revives
meaningful political activity, which the heyday of neoliberalism had precluded, because most
political formations then had been trapped within an identical neoliberal agenda that appeared
promising. (Latin America had a somewhat different history because neoliberalism arrived in
that continent through military dictatorships, not through its more or less tacit acceptance by
most political formations.)
Such revived political activity will necessarily throw up challenges to neoliberal
capitalism in particular countries. Imperialism, by which we mean the entire economic and
political arrangement sustaining the hegemony of international finance capital, will deal with
these challenges in at least four different ways.
The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation
that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even
before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby
denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only
increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may
well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from
a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers
and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their
support.
Even if capital controls are put in place, where there are current account deficits,
financing such deficits would pose a problem, necessitating some trade controls. But this is
where the second instrument of imperialism comes into play: the imposition of trade sanctions
by the metropolitan states, which then cajole other countries to stop buying from the
sanctioned country that is trying to break away from thralldom to globalized finance capital.
Even if the latter would have otherwise succeeded in stabilizing its economy despite its
attempt to break away, the imposition of sanctions becomes an additional blow.
The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the
sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the
local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of
civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection
generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions,
imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political
elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of
neoliberalism.
And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic
warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military
warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third
world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when
revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more.
Two aspects of such intervention are striking. One is the virtual unanimity among the
metropolitan states, which only underscores the muting of interimperialist rivalry in the era
of hegemony of global finance capital. The other is the extent of support that such
intervention commands within metropolitan countries, from the right to even the liberal
segments.
Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing
for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First
World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state
intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only
occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11
Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize
itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist
intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against
it.
Samuel Berrick Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1966).
One of the first authors to recognize this fact and its significance was Paul Baran in
The Political Economy of
Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
For the role of such colonial transfers in sustaining the British balance of payments and the
long Victorian and Edwardian boom, see Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain,' or Transfers
from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism," in Agrarian
and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri , ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and
Utsa Patnaik (Delhi: Tulika, 2017), 277-317.
Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, "Capacity Utilization:
Manufacturing," February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org .
This issue is discussed by Charles P. Kindleberger in The World in Depression,
1929–1939 , 40th anniversary ed. (Oakland: University of California Press,
2013).
Joseph Schumpeter had seen Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace as
essentially advocating such state intervention in the new situation. See his essay, "John
Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)," in Ten Great Economists (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1952).
Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation (1987),
The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). Prabhat Patnaik
is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997),
The Value of Money(2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism(2011).
Thatcher was an English politico. It is not what she said, but what she did that counts. She is probably down in Dante's Inferno,
Ring 8, sub-rings 7-10. (Frauds and false councilors.) See, oh wayward sinners:
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle8b.html
Ah, you think that Milton should be at the bottom, eh? Then, I hope that he knows how to ice skate. (He was the worst kind
of 'class traitor.' [His parents were small store owner/managers.])
Ring 8 of the Inferno is for 'frauds' of all sorts, sub-rings 7-10 are reserved for Thieves, Deceivers, Schismatics, and Falsifiers.
Maggie should feel right at home there.
Excellent article, I agree.
As regards clear language and definitions, I much prefer Michael Hudson's insistence that, to
the liberal economists, free markets were markets free from rent seeking, while to the
neoliberals free markets are free from government regulation.
"As governments were democratized, especially in the United States, liberals came to endorse
a policy of active public welfare spending and hence government intervention, especially on
behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. neoliberalism sought to restore the centralized
aristocratic and oligarchic rentier control of domestic politics." http://michael-hudson.com/2014/01/l-is-for-land/
– "Liberal"
"... The USA hegemony is based on ideological hegemony of neoliberalism. And BTW both Russia and China are neoliberal countries. That's probably why President Putin calls the USA administration "partners," despite clearly anti-Russian policies of all US administrations since 1991. ..."
"... One fascinating fact that escapes my understanding is why the USA elite wasted colossal advantage it got after the collapse of the USSR in just 25 years or so. I always thought that the USA elite is the most shrewd out of all countries. ..."
"... May be because they were brainwashed by neocon "intellectuals." I understand that most neocons are simply lobbyists of MIC, and MIC has huge political influence, but still neocon doctrine is so primitive that no civilized elite can take it seriously. ..."
"... I also understand Eisenhower hypocritical laments that "train with MIC left the station" and that the situation can't be reversed (lament disguised as a "warning"; let's remember that it was Eisenhower who appointed Allen Dulles to head the CIA. ..."
>US hegemony is imposed militarily, both covertly and overtly, throughout the world. It is maintained through the petrodollar,
corporate power, and the Federal Reserve Bank and its overseas counterparts
All true, but the key element is missing. The USA hegemony is based on ideological hegemony of neoliberalism. And BTW both
Russia and China are neoliberal countries. That's probably why President Putin calls the USA administration "partners," despite
clearly anti-Russian policies of all US administrations since 1991.
Ability to use military is important but secondary. Without fifth column of national elites which support neoliberalism that
would be impossible, or at least more difficult to use. Like it was when the USSR existed (Vietnam, Cuba, etc). The USSR has had
pretty powerful military, which was in some narrow areas competitive, or even superior to the USA, but when the ideology of Bolshevism
collapsed, the elite changed sides and adopted a neoliberal ideology. This betrayal led to the collapse of the USSR and all its
mighty military and the vast KGB apparatus proved to be useless.
In this sense, the article is weak, and some comments are of a higher level than the article itself in the level of understanding
of the situation (Simon in London at December 21, 2018, at 9:23 am one example; longevity of neoliberalism partially is connected
to the fact that so far there is no clear alternative to it and without the crisis similar to Great Depression adoption of New
Deal style measures is impossible )
It is really sad that the understanding that the destiny of the USA is now tied to the destiny of neoliberalism (much like
the USSR and Bolshevism) is foreign for many.
So it might well be that the main danger for the US neoliberal empire now is not China or Russia, but the end of cheap oil,
which might facilitate the collapse of neoliberalism as a social system based on wasteful use on commodities (and first of all
oil)
One fascinating fact that escapes my understanding is why the USA elite wasted colossal advantage it got after the collapse
of the USSR in just 25 years or so. I always thought that the USA elite is the most shrewd out of all countries.
May be because they were brainwashed by neocon "intellectuals." I understand that most neocons are simply lobbyists of MIC,
and MIC has huge political influence, but still neocon doctrine is so primitive that no civilized elite can take it seriously.
I also understand Eisenhower hypocritical laments that "train with MIC left the station" and that the situation can't be reversed
(lament disguised as a "warning"; let's remember that it was Eisenhower who appointed Allen Dulles to head the CIA.
"... "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance. ..."
The evidence suggests that foreign policymakers do not seek insight from scholars, but
rather support for what they already want to do.
As Desch quotes a World War II U.S. Navy anthropologist, "the administrator uses social
science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars'
disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance.
"... Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message. ..."
"... The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; ..."
"... So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life? ..."
"... Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs ..."
"... Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well. ..."
"... Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia. ..."
"... Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory. ..."
"... Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it: Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics". ..."
"... As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?) ..."
"... The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title. ..."
Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is
to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed.
Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses,
is the message.
Another approach is to show visual illusions, such as getting estimates of line lengths in the Muller-Lyer illusion, or studying
simple line lengths under social pressure, as in the Asch experiment, or trying to solve the Peter Wason logic problems, or the puzzles
set by Kahneman and Tversky. All these appear to show severe limitations of human judgment. Psychology is full of cautionary tales
about the foibles of common folk.
As a consequence of this softening up, psychology students come to regard themselves and most people as fallible, malleable, unreliable,
biased and generally irrational. No wonder psychologists feel superior to the average citizen, since they understand human limitations
and, with their superior training, hope to rise above such lowly superstitions.
However, society still functions, people overcome errors and many things work well most of the time. Have psychologists, for one
reason or another, misunderstood people, and been too quick to assume that they are incapable of rational thought?
He is particularly interested in the economic consequences of apparent irrationality, and whether our presumed biases really result
in us making bad economic decisions. If so, some argue we need a benign force, say a government, to protect us from our lack of capacity.
Perhaps we need a tattoo on our forehead: Diminished Responsibility.
The argument leading from cognitive biases to governmental paternalism -- in short, the irrationality argument -- consists
of three assumptions and one conclusion:
1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.
2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.
3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.
4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public
toward better behavior.
The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever
learn or be educated out of their biases; instead governments need to step in with a policy called libertarian paternalism (Thaler
and Sunstein, 2003).
So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated.
For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that
we lack judgement in real life?
In Shepard's (1990) words, "to fool a visual system that has a full binocular and freely mobile view of a well-illuminated scene
is next to impossible" (p. 122). Thus, in psychology, the visual system is seen more as a genius than a fool in making intelligent
inferences, and inferences, after all, are necessary for making sense of the images on the retina.
Most crucially, can people make probability judgements? Let us see. Try solving this one:
A disease has a base rate of .1, and a test is performed that has a hit rate of .9 (the conditional probability of a positive
test given disease) and a false positive rate of .1 (the conditional probability of a positive test given no disease). What is
the probability that a random person with a positive test result actually has the disease?
Most people fail this test, including 79% of gynaecologists giving breast screening tests. Some researchers have drawn the conclusion
that people are fundamentally unable to deal with conditional probabilities. On the contrary, there is a way of laying out the problem
such that most people have no difficulty with it. Watch what it looks like when presented as natural frequencies:
Among every 100 people, 10 are expected to have a disease. Among those 10, nine are expected to correctly test positive. Among
the 90 people without the disease, nine are expected to falsely test positive. What proportion of those who test positive actually
have the disease?
In this format the positive test result gives us 9 people with the disease and 9 people without the disease, so the chance that
a positive test result shows a real disease is 50/50. Only 13% of gynaecologists fail this presentation.
Summing up the virtues of natural frequencies, Gigerenzer says:
When college students were given a 2-hour course in natural frequencies, the number of correct Bayesian inferences increased
from 10% to 90%; most important, this 90% rate was maintained 3 months after training (Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer, 2001). Meta-analyses
have also documented the "de-biasing" effect, and natural frequencies are now a technical term in evidence-based medicine (Akiet
al., 2011; McDowell and Jacobs, 2017). These results are consistent with a long literature on techniques for successfully teaching
statistical reasoning (e.g., Fonget al., 1986). In sum, humans can learn Bayesian inference quickly if the information is presented
in natural frequencies.
If the problem is set out in a simple format, almost all of us can all do conditional probabilities.
I taught my medical students about the base rate screening problem in the late 1970s, based on: Robyn Dawes (1962) "A note on
base rates and psychometric efficiency". Decades later, alarmed by the positive scan detection of an unexplained mass, I confided
my fears to a psychiatrist friend. He did a quick differential diagnosis on bowel cancer, showing I had no relevant symptoms, and
reminded me I had lectured him as a student on base rates decades before, so I ought to relax. Indeed, it was false positive.
Here are the relevant figures, set out in terms of natural frequencies
Every test has a false positive rate (every step is being taken to reduce these), and when screening is used for entire populations
many patients have to undergo further investigations, sometimes including surgery.
Setting out frequencies in a logical sequence can often prevent misunderstandings. Say a man on trial for having murdered his
spouse has previously physically abused her. Should his previous history of abuse not be raised in Court because only 1 woman in
2500 cases of abuse is murdered by her abuser? Of course, whatever a defence lawyer may argue and a Court may accept, this is back
to front. OJ Simpson was not on trial for spousal abuse, but for the murder of his former partner. The relevant question is: what
is the probability that a man murdered his partner, given that she has been murdered and that he previously battered her.
Accepting the figures used by the defence lawyer, if 1 in 2500 women are murdered every year by their abusive male partners, how
many women are murdered by men who did not previously abuse them? Using government figures that 5 women in 100,000 are murdered every
year then putting everything onto the same 100,000 population, the frequencies look like this:
So, 40 to 5, it is 8 times more probable that abused women are murdered by their abuser. A relevant issue to raise in Court about
the past history of an accused man.
Are people's presumed biases costly, in the sense of making them vulnerable to exploitation, such that they can be turned into
a money pump, or is it a case of "once bitten, twice shy"? In fact, there is no evidence that these apparently persistent logical
errors actually result in people continually making costly errors. That presumption turns out to be a bias bias.
Gigerenzer goes on to show that people are in fact correct in their understanding of the randomness of short sequences of coin
tosses, and Kahneman and Tversky wrong. Elegantly, he also shows that the "hot hand" of successful players in basketball is a real
phenomenon, and not a stubborn illusion as claimed.
With equal elegance he disposes of a result I had depended upon since Slovic (1982), which is that people over-estimate the frequency
of rare risks and under-estimate the frequency of common risks. This finding has led to the belief that people are no good at estimating
risk. Who could doubt that a TV series about Chernobyl will lead citizens to have an exaggerated fear of nuclear power stations?
The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students, not exactly a fair sample of humanity. The conceit of psychologists
knows no bounds. Gigerenzer looks at the data and shows that it is yet another example of regression to the mean. This is an apparent
effect which arises whenever the predictor is less than perfect (the most common case), an unsystematic error effect, which is already
evident when you calculate the correlation coefficient. Parental height and their children's heights are positively but not perfectly
correlated at about r = 0.5. Predictions made in either direction will under-predict in either direction, simply because they are
not perfect, and do not capture all the variation. Try drawing out the correlation as an ellipse to see the effect of regression,
compared to the perfect case of the straight line of r= 1.0
What diminishes in the presence of noise is the variability of the estimates, both the estimates of the height of the sons based
on that of their fathers, and vice versa. Regression toward the mean is a result of unsystematic, not systematic error (Stigler,1999).
Gigerenzer also looks at the supposed finding that people are over-confidence in predictions, and finds that it is another regression
to the mean problem.
Gigerenzer then goes on to consider that old favourite, that most people think they are better than average, which supposedly
cannot be the case, because average people are average.
Consider the finding that most drivers think they drive better than average. If better driving is interpreted as meaning fewer
accidents, then most drivers' beliefs are actually true. The number of accidents per person has a skewed distribution, and an
analysis of U.S. accident statistics showed that some 80% of drivers have fewer accidents than the average number of accidents
(Mousavi and Gigerenzer, 2011)
Then he looks at the classical demonstration of framing, that is to say, the way people appear to be easily swayed by how the
same facts are "framed" or presented to the person who has to make a decision.
A patient suffering from a serious heart disease considers high-risk surgery and asks a doctor about its prospects.
The doctor can frame the answer in two ways:
Positive Frame: Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive.
Negative Frame: Five years after surgery, 10% of patients are dead.
Should the patient listen to how the doctor frames the answer? Behavioral economists say no because both frames are logically
equivalent (Kahneman, 2011). Nevertheless, people do listen. More are willing to agree to a medical procedure if the doctor uses
positive framing (90% alive) than if negative framing is used (10% dead) (Moxeyet al., 2003). Framing effects challenge the assumption
of stable preferences, leading to preference reversals. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) who presented the above surgery problem, concluded
that "framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decisionmakers" (p. 40)
Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact:
how many survive without surgery. If you know that you have a datum which is more influential. These are the sorts of questions patients
will often ask about, and discuss with other patients, or with several doctors. Furthermore, you don't have to spin a statistic.
You could simply say: "Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive and 10% are dead".
Gigerenzer gives an explanation which is very relevant to current discussions about the meaning of intelligence, and about the
power of intelligence tests:
In sum, the principle of logical equivalence or "description invariance" is a poor guide to understanding how human intelligence
deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability
to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)
The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias.
One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and
others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed
to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.
Critics of examinations of either intellectual ability or scholastic attainment are fond of claiming that the items are "arbitrary".
Not really. Scholastic tests have to be close to the curriculum in question, but still need to a have question forms which are simple
to understand so that the stress lies in how students formulate the answer, not in how they decipher the structure of the question.
Intellectual tests have to avoid particular curricula and restrict themselves to the common ground of what most people in a community
understand. Questions have to be super-simple, so that the correct answer follows easily from the question, with minimal ambiguity.
Furthermore, in the case of national scholastic tests, and particularly in the case of intelligence tests, legal authorities will
pore over the test, looking at each item for suspected biases of a sexual, racial or socio-economic nature. Designing an intelligence
test is a difficult and expensive matter. Many putative new tests of intelligence never even get to the legal hurdle, because they
flounder on matters of reliability and validity, and reveal themselves to be little better than the current range of assessments.
In conclusion, both in psychology and behavioural economics, some researchers have probably been too keen to allege bias in cases
where there are unsystematic errors, or no errors at all. The corrective is to learn about base rates, and to use natural frequencies
as a guide to good decision-making.
Don't bother boosting your IQ. Boost your understanding of natural frequencies.
Good concrete advice. Perhaps even more useful for those who need to explain things like this to others than for those seeking
to understand for themselves.
"intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence,
the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)"
"The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias."
Actually I think this is an example of an increasingly common genre of malapropism, where the writer gropes for the right word,
finds one that is similar, and settles for that. The worst of it is that readers intuitively understand what was intended, and
then adopt the marginally incorrect usage themselves. That's perhaps how the world and his dog came to say "literally" when they
mean "figuratively". Maybe a topic for a future article?
In 2009 Google finished engineering a reverse search engine to find out what kind of searches people did most often. Seth Davidowitz
and Steven Pinker wrote a very fascinating/entertaining book using the tool called Everybody Lies
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics
to sports to race to sex, gender, and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn't vote
for Barack Obama because he's black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly
favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie
about our sex lives, and who's more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand
ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating
and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking
to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential – revealing biases deeply embedded
within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our
health – both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data every day, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody
Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
I shall treat this posting (for which many thanks, doc) as an invitation to sing a much-loved song: everybody should read Gigerenzer's
Reckoning with Risk. With great clarity it teaches what everyone ought to know about probability.
(It could also serve as a model for writing in English about technical subjects. Americans and Britons should study the English
of this German – he knows how, you know.)
Inspired by "The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students" I shall also sing another favorite song. Much of Psychology
is based on what small numbers of American undergraduates report they think they think.
" Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact:
how many survive without surgery. "
This one reminds of the false dichotomy. The patient has additional options! Like changing diet, and behaviours such as exercise,
elimination of occupational stress , etc.
The statistical outcomes for a person change when the person changes their circumstances/conditions.
@Tom
Welsh A disposition (conveyance) of an awkwardly shaped chunk out of a vast estate contained reference to "the slither of
ground bounded on or towards the north east and extending two hundred and twenty four meters or thereby along a chain link fence "
Not poor clients (either side) nor cheap lawyers. And who never erred?
Better than deliberately inserting "errors" to guarantee a stream of tidy up work (not unknown in the "professional" world)
in future.
Good article. 79% of gynaecologists fail a simple conditional probability test?! Many if not most medical research papers use
advanced statistics. Medical doctors must read these papers to fully understand their field. So, if medical doctors don't fully
understand them, they are not properly doing their job. Those papers use mathematical expressions, not English. Converting them
to another form of English, instead of using the mathematical expressions isn't a solution.
Regarding witnesses: When that jet crashed into Rockaway several years ago, a high percentage of witnesses said that they saw
smoke before the crash. But there was actually no smoke. The witnesses were adjusting what they saw to conform to their past experience
of seeing movie and newsreel footage of planes smoking in the air before a crash. Children actually make very good witnesses.
Regarding the chart. Missing, up there in the vicinity of cancer and heart disease. The third-leading cause of death. 250,000
per year, according to a 2016 Hopkins study. Medical negligence.
1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.
2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.
3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.
4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward
better behavior.
Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists"
from theirs.
So, behind the smoke of all words and rationalisations, the law is unchanged: everyone strives to gain and exert as much power
as possible over as many others as possible. Most do that without writing papers to say it is right, others write papers,
others books. Anyway, the fundamental law would stay as it is even if all this writing labour was spared, wouldn't it?
But then another fundamental law, the law of framing all one's drives as moral and beneffective comes into play the papers
and the books are useful, after all.
An interesting article. However, I think that the only thing we have to know about how illogical psychiatry is this:
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed
homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain
it.
The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance"
for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.
The article makes no mention of the fact that no "new science" was brought to support the resolution.
It appears that the psychiatrists were voting based on feelings rather than science. Since that time, the now 50+ genders have
been accepted as "normal" by the APA. My family has had members in multiple generations suffering from mental illness. None were
"cured". I know others with the same circumstances.
How does one conclude that being repulsed by the prime directive of every
living organism – reproduce yourself – is "normal"? That is not to say these people are horrible or evil, just not normal. How
can someone, who thinks (s)he is a cat be mentally ill, but a grown man thinking he is a female child is not?
Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going
along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well.
Thank you for this article. I find the information about the interpretation of statistical data very interesting. My take on the
background of the article is this:
Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia.
Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental
data that is inconsistent with that theory.
Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is
false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances.
Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like
to refer to a whole book about it:
Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics".
As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the
way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because
they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?)
We live in a strange world in which such people have control over university faculties, journals, famous prizes. But at least
we have some scientists who defend their area of knowledge against the spreading nonsense produced by economists.
The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply
a perfect title.
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your
own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the
Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore
what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up
caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case
of all those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.
One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the
sooner it's over the better for everyone.
"... I still find it incredible that this video by Samuelson essentially acknowledging that a key part of his multi-decade "core" textbook is religion, not science, is not more widely shared. ..."
Steve Keen of Kingston University, London gives an important high-level talk on the
considerable shortcomings of mainstream economics. Keen argues that a major objective of the
discipline is to justify the virtues of markets, which in turn leads them to adopt a strongly
ideological posture along with highly simplified models and narrow mathematical approaches to
reach conclusions that they find acceptable.
Keen has many informative asides, like the introductory level texts he used in the 1970s
were more advanced than many graduate level guides.
I still find it incredible that this video by Samuelson essentially acknowledging that a
key part of his multi-decade "core" textbook is religion, not science, is not more widely
shared.
OK the person who constructed the complete youtube vid has typos etc and editing
probably didn't help the cause. but still
Ágnes Heller's work is associated with Moral
Anthropology and "probing modernity's destiny for a non-predatory humanism that combines
the existential wisdom of ancient theory with modern values." [1]
Neomodernism accepts some aspects of postmodernism's critique of modernism, notably that
modernism elevated the world view of dominant groups to the status of objective fact, thereby
failing to express the viewpoint of " subaltern groups," such as women and ethnic
minorities. However, in her view, neomodernism rejects postmodernism as:
Unscientific: the ability of science to generate useful knowledge cannot be waved away as
" scientism ".
Journalism: as not giving any explanation as to how or why things happen.
Local: as being unable to recognise patterns that occur across time or location.
Unverified: as lacking any validation process, and therefore proceeding by fad and
hierarchy.
Victor Grauer
In 1982, Victor Grauer attacked "the cult of the new," and proposed that there had arisen a
"neo-modern" movement in the arts which was based on deep formal rigor, rather than on "the
explosion of pluralism." [2]
His argument was that post-modernism was exclusively a negative
attack on modernism, and had no future separate from modernism proper, a point of view which is
held by many scholars of modernism. [2]
Carlos
Escudé
In "Natural Law at War", a review essay published on 31 May 2002 in The Times Literary
Supplement (London, TLS No. 5174), Carlos Escudé wrote: "Postmodern humanity faces a
major challenge. It must solve a dilemma it does not want to face. If all cultures are morally
equivalent, then all human individuals are not endowed with the same human rights, because some
cultures award some men more rights than are allotted to other men and women. If, on the other
hand, all men and women are endowed with the same human rights, then all cultures are not
morally equivalent, because cultures that acknowledge that 'all men are created equal' are to
be regarded as 'superior,' or 'more advanced' in terms of their civil ethics than those that do
not." Escudé's brand of neomodernism contends with "politically-correct intellectuals
who prefer to opt for the easy way out, asserting both that we all have the same human rights
and that all cultures are equal."
Andre Durand and Armando Alemdar
Published their own Neomodernist Manifesto in 2001. The Neomodern Manifesto posits criteria
for a revitalised approach to works of art founded on history, traditional artistic
disciplines, theology and philosophy. Durand's and Alemdar's Neomodernism views art as an act
of expression of the sublime; in Neomodern painting as a representation of the visual
appearance of things with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for
beauty, truth, and good. Neomodern works of art via mimesis interpret and present the universe
and man's existence, in line with the belief that the reality we live is but a mirror of
another universe that can only be accessed through inspiration and imagination.
Gabriel Omowaye
Gabriel Lolu Omowaye, in his speech 'A new challenging time' to a group of college students
in Nigeria, in 2005, took a different approach to neomodernism. He viewed neomodernism as a
political philosophy that became more prominent in the early 21st century. To him, it involves
common goal and joint global effort - universalism - to address arising global challenges such
as population growth, natural resources, climate change and environmental factors, natural
causes and effects, and health issues. Omowaye posited that political will is the major driver
of economic necessities. As a result, he added that neomodernism involves limited
government-regulated liberalism along with high drive innovation and entrepreneurship, high
literacy rate, progressive taxation for social equity, philanthropism, technological
advancement, economic development and individual growth. He perceived the quest for equal
representation of men and women in the neomodern era as a strong signal for advent of
postmodernism. So also, the quest for youths engagement in resourceful and rewarding ways
especially in governance, peace building and self-productivity has not taken a formidable shape
than it is at this time. As far as he was concerned, he believed most of these challenges were
not adequately tackled in preceding eras and the arising challenges thus stated were not
prepared for and that cause for change in mentality and thinking which the neomodern era is
providing for solutions to the era's challenges, with a prospective view to global stability
and social inclusion. His philosophical thought premised on a fact that new times require new
approaches from new reasonings, even if some applicable ideas or methologies could be borrowed
from the past, an acute form of paradigm-shift.
Omowaye believed in idealism as guiding realism and in turn, realism as defining idealism.
Moral concepts cannot be wished away from social norms, but evolving social trends dissipate
morality in form of religion and logical standards and adheres to current norms in form of
'what should be'. Consequently, the manner at which 'what should be' is driven at in the modern
and postmodern eras, being widely accepted became 'what is'. The manner at which the damage of
the new 'what is' is hampering development process in the form of higher mortality rate and
decadence of cultural good, calls to question the ideology behind the norms that are less
beneficial to a wider society in form of globalization. The world as a whole through
technological advancement became a global community particularly, in the 21st century. Former
Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan then stated that the "suffering anywhere
concerns people everywhere". Champions of neomodern age such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson
in the field of philanthropy expounded their vision to encompass the global community in social
good such as alleviating poverty, eradicating diseases, enhancing literacy rates and addressing
climate changes.
Technological advancement of the neomodern era however has its downturns in that it added to
the decadence in cultural good such that people everywhere, especially high number of youths
follow the trends in the new 'what is', which include social celebrities in the form of
dressing, sexual activities, extravagancies, and less interest in learning and even, working
but more interest in making money. Money became a value-determinant than utility. This brought
about frauds in various sectors. This latter aspect is not limited to youths but even company
executives, and politicians of many societies. Technological advancement has made privacy less
safer for intrusion and people more safer for protection. The supposedly good of technological
advancement in the neomodern era has included whistle blow such as Wikileaks' Julian Assange.
The more good has been in the level of innovations and innovators it has sprung up such as
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and easier business models and broader social connectivity. This
latter part has lessened more amity in immediate environment and many people tend to live more
in the virtual world neomodern technological advancements have created.
Neomodernism checks more into the current relative way of living of people and the society
to correct necessary abnormalities and to encourage virtues and values within the global
community in the 21st century.
In furtherance, Gabriel Omowaye's view of neomodernism was that knowledge comes from
learning and experience, and wisdom primarily from intuition. Knowledge is a variable of set
occurrences of that which happens to a man and that which a man seeks to know. Knowledge is
vital and good for discretion but a minor part of discernment wherein what is known might not
be applicable. Intuition is a function of the mind and the mind, not seen, and yet unknown to
the carrier, is a function of what put the thoughts, ideas and discretion in it. Wisdom without
knowledge is vague, and knowledge without wisdom, unworthy. Wisdom perfects knowledge, and in
the absence of either, the sole is delusory.
There are many other clear traces of evolution (constantly developing antibiotic resistance of disease-causing bacteria being
one of the most obvious), but the funniest argument for evolution I know is this: "Bush junior is the best argument against intelligent
design: nobody intelligent would ever design that".
This looks like Ann Rand philosophy: "The people who needed protection were property owners,
and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of
voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a
Guarantor of Liberty (1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm
of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was
often more stark, warning the alleged "prey" of "parasites" and "predators" out to fleece
them."
Notable quotes:
"... By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst, Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
"... The Limits of Liberty ..."
"... Property as a Guarantor of Liberty ..."
"... Brown v. Board of Education ..."
"... Calhoun, called the "Marx of the Master Class" by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create "constitutional gadgets" to constrict the operations of government ..."
"... She argues out that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability. ..."
"... Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions -- all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge. ..."
"... MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan's brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools -- proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school's focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang: "Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems." ..."
"... Buchanan's school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better to focus on the rules themselves , and that required a "constitutional revolution." ..."
"... MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the '70s and sought the economist's input in promoting "Austrian economics" in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. ..."
"... With Koch's money and enthusiasm, Buchanan's academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan's ideas -- transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents -- could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a "revolution" in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable. ..."
"... At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project. ..."
"... To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. "40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary," writes MacLean, "had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum." ..."
"... Buchanan's role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security. ..."
"... The Limits of Liberty ..."
"... MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of The Vanishing Middle Class ..."
"... The One Percent Solution ..."
"... She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to "reform" public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around, even if you don't agree. Instead, MacLean contents, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive. ..."
"... MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers "to control the resultant popular anger." The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right's aggressive use of state power. ..."
Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual lynchpin of the Koch-funded attack on
democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean
Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America's burst of radical right-wing
attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically
mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and
laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you've taken several classes in
economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just
fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students
have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even
young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively
sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what
Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their
noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even
want to imagine, much less accept.
That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book,
Democracy in Chains , a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans
grapple with Donald Trump's chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are
taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place,
there may be no going back.
An Unlocked Door in Virginia
MacLean's book reads like an intellectual detective story. In 2010, she moved to North
Carolina, where a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party got control of both houses of the state
legislature and began pushing through a radical program to suppress voter rights, decimate
public services, and slash taxes on the wealthy that shocked a state long a beacon of southern
moderation. Up to this point, the figure of James Buchanan flickered in her peripheral vision,
but as she began to study his work closely, the events in North Carolina and also Wisconsin,
where Governor Scott Walker was leading assaults on collective bargaining rights, shifted her
focus.
Could it be that this relatively obscure economist's distinctive thought was being put
forcefully into action in real time?
MacLean could not gain access to Buchanan's papers to test her hypothesis until after his
death in January 2013. That year, just as the government was being shut down by Ted Cruz &
Co., she traveled to George Mason University in Virginia, where the economist's papers lay
willy-nilly across the offices of a building now abandoned by the Koch-funded faculty to a new,
fancier center in Arlington.
MacLean was stunned. The archive of the man who had sought to stay under the radar had been
left totally unsorted and unguarded. The historian plunged in, and she read through boxes and
drawers full of papers that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire
industrialist Charles Koch. That's when she had an amazing realization: here was the
intellectual lynchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.
A Theory of Property Supremacy
Buchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the
University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance
economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political
process.
Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how
institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and '60s, a time when economist John
Maynard Keynes's ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people
from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan, MacLean notes,
was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of
state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful
federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served
ordinary citizens and the poor?
In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that
you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In interview cited by
MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected
officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed -- that was a
belief he wanted, as he put it, to "tear down." His ideas developed into a theory that came to
be known as "public choice."
Buchanan's view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as
self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged
social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were
primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve
others was "romantic" fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and
so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control
others and wrest away their resources: "Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves," he
wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty .
Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be
secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on
them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty
(1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers
(entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often
more stark, warning the alleged "prey" of "parasites" and "predators" out to fleece them.
In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at the University of
Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University. MacLean describes how he trained
thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate
America's public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy
that enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather
than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who
knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.
All the while, a ghost hovered in the background -- that of John C. Calhoun of South
Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.
Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his
death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the "Marx of
the Master Class" by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern
oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create
"constitutional gadgets" to constrict the operations of government.
Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted
the two men's affinities, heralding Calhoun "a
precursor of modern public choice theory" who "anticipates" Buchanan's thinking. MacLean
observes that both focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to
restrict the latitude of voters. She argues out that unlike even the most property-friendly
founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of
corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer
prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions -- all these were tactics toward the
goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the
power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
Gravy Train to Oligarchy
MacLean explains that Virginia's white elite and the pro-corporate president of the
University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married into the DuPont family, found
Buchanan's ideas to be spot on. In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values,
Buchanan stated that he needed a "gravy train," and with backers like Charles Koch and
conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money,
Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to
widen.
MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan's brand of economic and political
thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and
Austrian schools -- proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an
international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But
the Virginia school's focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang: "Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a
sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark
side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody
knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from
believing that government could be the alternative to those problems."
The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on
abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded
in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing
short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an
administration several Buchanan students joined.
Buchanan's school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and
the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that
his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on who rules. It was much better
to focus on the rules themselves , and that required a "constitutional
revolution."
MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff
institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became
interested in his work in the '70s and sought the economist's input in promoting "Austrian
economics" in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate
theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch
preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his "Chicago boys" because, she says, quoting a
libertarian insider, they wanted "to make government work more efficiently when the true
libertarian should be tearing it out at the root."
With Koch's money and enthusiasm, Buchanan's academic school evolved into something much
bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan's ideas -- transmitted through stealth and
deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents -- could help take government down through
incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was
extremely radical, even a "revolution" in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make
his plans sound more palatable.
MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan's outpost at George Mason University was
able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of
corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors.
Together they could push economic ideas to public through media, promote new curricula for
economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.
At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan
and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law,
focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare,
expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill
public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the
scholars considered it a socialist project.
The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds
Buchanan's ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his
home country, the economist was deeply involved efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s
and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and
posit government as the "problem" rather than the "solution." The Koch-funded Virginia school
coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing
perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain,
Buchanan's work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her
political progeny.
To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom
Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal
judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had
participated. "40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary," writes MacLean, "had been treated to
a Koch-backed curriculum."
MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in
motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical
transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The
historian emphasizes that Buchanan's role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has
been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities,
Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military
junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required
balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs.
Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little
recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.
The dictator's human rights abuses and pillage of the country's resources did not seem to
bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. "Despotism may be the
only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe," the economist had
written in The Limits of Liberty . If you have been wondering about the end result of
the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.
A World of Slaves
Most Americans haven't seen what's coming.
MacLean notes that when the Kochs' control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the
financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the "shock-and-awe" tactics of shutting
down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens' basic
necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at
Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn't it just a new, particularly
vicious wave of partisan politics?
It wasn't. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.
MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a
hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the
society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of
The Vanishing Middle Class, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the
University of Oregon and author of The One Percent Solution , have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is
headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us
with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing's playbook.
She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like
privatization. Efforts to "reform" public education and Social Security are not just about a
preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head
around, even if you don't agree. Instead, MacLean contents, the goal of these strategies is to
radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power
and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing
the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be
held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how
destructive.
MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big
government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new
powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires
greatly expanding police powers "to control the resultant popular anger." The spreading use of
pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such
as living wage ordinances is another example of the right's aggressive use of state power.
Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless
citizens -- or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and
have . Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s?
Done . Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by
making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check . Gut public education to the
point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back?
Getting it done .
Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.
MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy
will look like -- it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed
for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency
and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city's water
supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center's lobbyists ensured that the law was
fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring. Tens
of thousands of children were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health
problems including brain damage.
Tyler Cowen has provided an
economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to
get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. "This includes
giving them the right to cut off people who don't -- or can't -- pay their bills," the
economist explains.
To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in
America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (2005), Buchanan considers the charge of
heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean
interprets his discussion to mean that people who "failed to foresee and save money for their
future needs" are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, "as subordinate members of the species,
akin to animals who are dependent.'"
Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all
possible exigencies? Then that means you.
Buchanan was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel Laureate whose sinister logic exerts
vast influence over America's trajectory. It is no wonder that Cowen, on his popular blog
Marginal Revolution, does not
mention Buchanan on a list of underrated influential libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere
on the blog, he expresses admiration for several of Buchanan's contributions and
acknowledges that the southern economist "thought more consistently in terms of 'rules of
the games' than perhaps any other economist."
The rules of the game are now clear.
Research like MacLean's provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan's may finally begin to
face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs' State Policy Network and the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative
lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly
notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck
against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens
United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American
politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of
corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.
"The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will
prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s," writes MacLean. "To value
liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation's governing
rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play,
is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form."
"... By Laura Basu, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Originally published at openDemocracy ..."
"... This ideology spread through the media from the 1980s ..."
"... Fast-forward to April 2009, barely 6 months after the announcement of a £500 billion bank bailout. A media hysteria was nowraging around Britain's deficit . While greedy bankers were still taking some of the blame, the systemic problems in finance and the problems with the free-market model had been forgotten. Instead, public profligacy had become the dominant explanation for the deficit. The timeline of the crisis was being erased and rewritten. ..."
"... These measures were a ramped-up version of the kinds of reforms that had produced the crisis in the first place. This fact, however, was forgotten. These 'pro-business' moves were enthusiastically embraced by the media, far more so than austerity. Of the 5 outlets analysed (The BBC, Telegraph, Sun, Guardian and Mirror), only the Guardian rejected them more frequently than endorsing them. ..."
"... "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." ..."
"... This post is disheartening in so many ways. Start with "media hysteria" -- adding yet another glib coinage to hide a lack of explanation behind a simple but innapt analogy like the endless "addictions" from which personifications of various abstract entities suffer. ..."
"... This coinage presupposes a media sufficiently free to be possessed by hysteria. Dancing puppets might with some art appear "hysterical". And the strange non-death of Neoliberalsm isn't so strange or poorly understood in 2018 though the detailed explanation hasn't reached as many as one might have hoped, including the authors of this brief post. Consider their unhappy mashup of thoughts in a key sentence of the first paragraph: "This power has been maintained with the help of a robust ideology centred on free markets (though in reality markets are captured by corporations and are maintained by the state) and the superiority of the private sector over the public sector." The tail of this sentence obviates the rest of the post. And we ought not ignore the detail that Neoliberalism believes in the Market as a solution to all problems -- NOT the 'free market' of neoclassical economics or libertarian ideology. ..."
"... From "media hysteria" the post postulates "amnesia" of a public convinced of "greedy bankers" who need regulation. In the U.S. the propaganda was more subtle -- at least in my opinion. We were fed the "bad apples" theory mocked in a brief series of media clips presented in the documentary film "Inside Job". Those clips suggest a better explanation for the swift media transitions from banking reform to balanced budgets and austerity with more tax cuts for the wealthy than "amnesia" or "hyper-amnesia". The media Corporations are tightly controlled by the same forces that captured Corporations and -- taking the phrase "the superiority of the private sector over the public sector" in the sense that a superior directs an inferior [rather than the intended(?) sense] -- direct and essentially own our governments. ..."
"... The remarkable thing about public discourse and political and economic news reporting is how superficial it has become, so devoid of a foundation of any kind in history or theory. You can not have an effective critique of society or the economy or anything, if you do not see a system with a history and think it matters. Neoliberalism has become what people say when they think none of it really matters; it is all just noise. ..."
"... "Neoliberalism has become what people say when they think none of it really matters; it is all just noise." ..."
"... I also think that the crisis of neoliberalism echos a problem caused by capitalism, itself. I think David Harvey stated that "capitalism doesn't solve problems, it often just moves them around". ..."
"... Matt Stoller tweet from August 2017, as germane now as ever: "The political crisis we are facing is simple. American commerce, law, finance, and politics is organized around cheating people." ..."
"... George Orwell noted that the middle class Left couldn't handle dealing with real working class people, although there isn't the same huge gulf these days, I believe there is still a vestige of it due to the British class system. The Fabians set up shop in the East End around the turn of the last century & directly rubbed shoulders with the likes of Coster Mongers – a combination that led to a strike that was one of the first success stories in the attempt to get a few more crumbs than what was usually allowed to fall from the top table. ..."
"... If Neoliberalism is now being noticed I imagine that it is because of it's success in working it's way up the food chain. After all these same Middle classes for the most part did not care much for the plight of the poor during those Victorian values. Many could not wait to employ maids of all work who slaved for up to fourteen hours a day with only Sunday afternoon's off. The Suffragettes had a real problem with this as their relatively comfortable lives would soon descend into drudgery without their servants. ..."
"... Coincidentally, the NYT article on Austerity Britain is the closest I have read to an accurate picture that I have seen for a good while. ..."
"... It's also not a new thing. British media worship of neoliberalism has been growing since the 1980s, at the same time as newspapers have been closing and media sources of all kinds laying off their staff. 2008 was a temporary blip, and since the average journalist has the attention span of a hamster, it was back to usual a few months later. Once the crash stopped being "news" old patterns reasserted themselves. I wonder, incidentally, how many economics journalists in the UK actually remember the time before neoliberalism? ..."
"... Consuming corporate media is increasingly a bizarro-world experience. Even something like the Trump scandal/constitutional crisis/investigation seems like the arrogant internecine warfare of corrupt factions of the establishment. Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly living out of their cars. ..."
"... 1. Oligarchs having captured thoroughly the media, the legislatures and the judiciary, (as well as large parts of what might be construed as "liberal" political organisations e.g. the Democratic Party of the USA) ..."
Posted on
May 29, 2018 by Yves Smith Yves here. I'm sure readers
could write a US version of this timeline despite the fact that we had a second crisis and
bailout, that of way more foreclosures than were warranted, thanks to lousy incentives to
mortgage servicers and lack of political will to intervene, and foreclosure fraud to cover up
for chain of title failures.
By Laura Basu, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and
Culture. Originally published at
openDemocracy
It hasn't escaped many people's attention that, a decade after the biggest economic crash of
a generation, the economic model producing that meltdown has not exactly been laid to rest.
The crisis in the
NHS and the
Carillion and Capital scandals are testament to that. Sociologist Colin Crouch wrote a book
in 2011 about the 'strange non-death of neoliberalism', arguing that the neoliberal model is
centred on the needs of corporations and that corporate power actually intensified after the
2008 financial meltdown. This power has been maintained with the help of a robust ideology
centred on free markets (though in reality markets are captured by corporations and are
maintained by the state) and the superiority of the private sector over the public sector. It
advocates privatisation, cuts in public spending, deregulation and tax cuts for businesses and
high earners.
This ideology
spread through the media from the 1980s , and the media have continued to play a key
role in its persistence through a decade of political and economic turmoil since the 2008
crash. They have done this largely via an acute amnesia about the causes of the crisis, an
amnesia that helped make policies like austerity, privatisation and corporate tax breaks appear
as common sense responses to the problems.
This amnesia struck at dizzying speed. My research carried out at Cardiff University shows
that in 2008 at the time of the banking collapse, the main explanations given for the problems
were financial misconduct ('greedy bankers'), systemic problems with the financial sector, and
the faulty free-market model. These explanations were given across the media spectrum,
with even the Telegraph and Sun complaining about a lack of regulation . Banking reform was
advocated across the board.
Fast-forward to April 2009, barely 6 months after the announcement of a £500
billion bank bailout.
A media hysteria was nowraging around Britain's deficit . While greedy bankers were still
taking some of the blame, the systemic problems in finance and the problems with the
free-market model had been forgotten. Instead, public profligacy had become the dominant
explanation for the deficit. The timeline of the crisis was being erased and
rewritten.
Correspondingly, financial and corporate regulation were forgotten. Instead, austerity
became the star of the show, eclipsing all other possible solutions to the crisis. As a
response to the deficit, austerity was mentioned 2.5 as many times as the next most covered
policy-response option, which was raising taxes on the wealthy. Austerity was mentioned 18
times more frequently than tackling tax avoidance and evasion. Although coverage of austerity
was polarized, no media outlet rejected it outright, and even the left-leaning press implicitly
(and sometimes explicitly) backed 'austerity lite'.
In 2010, the Conservative-Lib Dem government announced £99 billion in spending cuts
and £29 billion in tax increases per year by 2014-15. Having made these 'tough choices',
from 2011 the coalition wanted to focus attention away from austerity and towards growth (which
was, oops, being stalled by austerity). To do this, they pursued a zealously 'pro-business'
agenda, including privatisation, deregulation, cutting taxes for the highest earners, and
cutting corporation tax in 2011, 2012, 2013, and in 2015 and 2016 under a Conservative
government.
These measures were a ramped-up version of the kinds of reforms that had produced the
crisis in the first place. This fact, however, was forgotten. These 'pro-business' moves were
enthusiastically embraced by the media, far more so than austerity. Of the 5 outlets analysed
(The BBC, Telegraph, Sun, Guardian and Mirror), only the Guardian rejected them more frequently
than endorsing them.
The idea behind these policies is that what's good for business is good for everyone. If
businesses are handed more resources, freed from regulation and handed tax breaks, they will be
encouraged to invest in the economy, creating jobs and growth. The rich are therefore 'job
creators' and 'wealth creators'.
This is despite the fact that these policies have an impressive fail rate. Business
investment and productivity growth remain low, as corporations spend the savings not on
training and innovation but on share buy-backs and shareholder dividends. According to the
Financial Times, in 2014, the top 500 US companies
returned 95 per cent of their profits to shareholders in dividends and buybacks. Meanwhile,
inequality is spiralling and in the UK more than a million
people are using food banks .
Poverty and inequality, meanwhile, attracted surprising little media attention. Of my sample
of 1,133 media items, only 53 had a primary focus on living standards, poverty or inequality.
This
confirms other researchshowing a lack of media attention to these issues . Of these 53
items, the large majority were from the Guardian and Mirror. The coverage correctly identified
austerity as a primary cause of these problems. However, deeper explanations were rare. Yet
again, the link back to the 2008 bank meltdown wasn't made, let alone the long-term causes of
that meltdown. Not only that, the coverage failed even to identify the role of most of the
policies pursued since the onset of the crisis in producing inequality – such as
the bank bailouts, quantitative easing, and those 'pro-business' measures like corporation tax
cuts and privatisation.
And so it seems we are living with a hyper-amnesia , in which it is increasingly
difficult to reconstruct timelines and distinguish causes from effects. This amnesia has helped
trap us in a neoliberal groundhog day. The political consensus around the free market model
finally seems to be breaking. If we are to find a way out, we will need to have a lot more
conversations about how to organise both our media systems and our economies.
Tick-Tock.
It depends. Do you believe the worst can be avoided or do you believe the world is already
knee deep in all the things we're told to be afraid will happen? There is a big difference
between organizing for reform and organizing to break capture.
" Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand "
W.B. Yeats
I suppose we can take some succour from the fact that WWI (and the Spanish flu) seemed to
be a harbinger of worse to come but we're still here
The hyper-amnesia ground hog problem described in the post happens, in part, because the
'centre continues to hold'. It demonstrates the center can, and does, hold. We don't want the
centre to hold. We want it to disappear and get replaced by policies and perspectives keen on
an economy (and society) that works for all, not just some
I know what you're saying and I tend to agree. But the centre to Yeats (my interpretation,
anyway) is that there is a cultural centre both apart from but also part of the social
centre, and when that centre goes all hell breaks loose. Meaning of events becomes very
confused or impossible to understand on many levels.
Then, it's often the little people (and don't go making jokes about leprechauns) that get
crushed in the confusion.
We should reflect about the root causes of why our information is not informing us. How
can decades go by with the meme "smoking has not been conclusively proven to cause cancer" or
now "the science of climate change is inconclusive", not to mention countless similar horror
stories in pharma. Bullshit about the effectiveness of supply side economics is no
different.
Somehow we collectively need to expect and demand more objectivity from our information
sources. We fall for the fox guarding hen houses scam over and over, from TARP bailouts, to
FDA approvals to WMD claims. Not sure of the answer, but I know from talking with my boomer
parents, skepticism about information sources is not in the DNA of many information
consumers.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we
tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the
truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to
ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never
get it back."
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
One of Sagan's best, I loaned this out to a not terribly thoughtful acquaintance and I was
told it was "too preachy".
I guess Sagan proves himself correct time and time again.
It is also worth noting that a number of newspapers lauded Hitler's rise to power –
they overlooked violence against Jews because the trains ran on time. Nor should we ignore
disinformation campaigns, led by newspapers (e.g. Hearst and cannabis). In general, each
media outlet is a reflection of its owners, most of whom are rich and adverse to any
suggestion that we "tax the rich."
I've come to the conclusion that we don't have a media anymore. I was watching MSNBC this
AM discuss the "missing" 1500 immigrant children. The agency responsible says it calls the
people who now have the kids, but most of the people don't call back within the 30-day
requirement period.
Now the next logical questions to ask the rep would be: What happens after 30 days? Do you
keep calling them? Do send out investigators?" But are these questions asked? No. Instead we
get speculation or non-answers. It's the same with every issue.
The internet is not any better. Many articles are just repeating what appears elsewhere
with no one checking the facts, even on respected sites. I also got a chain email today
regarding petition for a Constitutional Convention. The impetus is a list of grievances
ranging from "a congressman can retire after just one term with a full pension" to "children
of congressmen don't have to pay back college loans." I already knew most of the claims
weren't true but the 131 recipients of the organization I belong to didn't. I did find out
that this chain email has been circulating on the internet for five years and it is the work
of a conservative groups whose real aim is to stop abortion and make Christianity the law of
the land. I was not surprised.
I have said for years that there is no news on the news. And I have repeated this meme for
just as long: There is a reason why America is called Planet Stupid.
Now the next logical questions to ask the rep would be: What happens after 30 days? Do
you keep calling them? Do send out investigators?" But are these questions asked? No.
Instead we get speculation or non-answers. It's the same with every issue.
Even competent reporting takes practice, time, and effort, even money sometimes. The same
with even half way competent governing. Neither is rewarded, and are often punished, for
doing nowadays; asking as a follow-up question "did you call the local police or send over a
pair of ICE officers just to politely knock on the door?" Police do people checks all the
time. "I haven't see so and so for a week", or "my relative hasn't returned my calls for a
month, can you?" It is possible that the paperwork just got lost and asking the
guardians/family some questions personally would solve.
But all that is boring bovine excrement, which is just not done.
This post is disheartening in so many ways. Start with "media hysteria" -- adding yet
another glib coinage to hide a lack of explanation behind a simple but innapt analogy like
the endless "addictions" from which personifications of various abstract entities suffer.
This coinage presupposes a media sufficiently free to be possessed by hysteria. Dancing
puppets might with some art appear "hysterical". And the strange non-death of Neoliberalsm
isn't so strange or poorly understood in 2018 though the detailed explanation hasn't reached
as many as one might have hoped, including the authors of this brief post. Consider their
unhappy mashup of thoughts in a key sentence of the first paragraph: "This power has been
maintained with the help of a robust ideology centred on free markets (though in reality
markets are captured by corporations and are maintained by the state) and the superiority of
the private sector over the public sector." The tail of this sentence obviates the rest of
the post. And we ought not ignore the detail that Neoliberalism believes in the Market as a
solution to all problems -- NOT the 'free market' of neoclassical economics or libertarian
ideology.
From "media hysteria" the post postulates "amnesia" of a public convinced of "greedy
bankers" who need regulation. In the U.S. the propaganda was more subtle -- at least in my
opinion. We were fed the "bad apples" theory mocked in a brief series of media clips
presented in the documentary film "Inside Job". Those clips suggest a better explanation for
the swift media transitions from banking reform to balanced budgets and austerity with more
tax cuts for the wealthy than "amnesia" or "hyper-amnesia". The media Corporations are
tightly controlled by the same forces that captured Corporations and -- taking the phrase
"the superiority of the private sector over the public sector" in the sense that a superior
directs an inferior [rather than the intended(?) sense] -- direct and essentially own our
governments.
The essayist complains that poverty and the manifest failures of neoliberalism get little
critical attention, but she leads off, "It hasn't escaped many people's attention . . ."
The remarkable thing about public discourse and political and economic news reporting is
how superficial it has become, so devoid of a foundation of any kind in history or theory.
You can not have an effective critique of society or the economy or anything, if you do not
see a system with a history and think it matters. Neoliberalism has become what people say
when they think none of it really matters; it is all just noise.
Another thing to recall was how quickly talk of nationalizing banks evaporated. Even Paul
Krugman, among others were supporting the idea that "real capitalists nationalize".
Once LIBOR came down, and the lending channels began to reopen, the happy talk ensued and
the amnesia kicked in strongly.
I also think that the crisis of neoliberalism echos a problem caused by capitalism,
itself. I think David Harvey stated that "capitalism doesn't solve problems, it often just
moves them around".
The financial crisis and austerity have now manifested themselves into a media crisis of
elites and elite legitimacy (BREXIT, Trump's election, etc). The ability to manufacture
consent is running into increased difficulty. I don't think the financial crisis narrative
shift helped very much at all. A massive crime requires an equally massive cover-up,
naturally.
Why, it's almost as if 90% of all media outlets are owned by 5 multibillion dollar
conglomerates, controlled by the top 0.1%, for the purposes of protecting their unearned
parasitic power, and the employees making six-to-low-seven figures are on the Upton Sinclair
"paycheck demands I not understand it" model.
Or it's amnesia.
Matt Stoller tweet from August 2017, as germane now as ever: "The political crisis we are
facing is simple. American commerce, law, finance, and politics is organized around cheating
people."
A big thumbs up for that! Sobotka was a hero in very dark times.
As my brother-in-law puts it: The American Dream used to be "work hard in a useful job,
raise a family of citizens, retire with dignity, and hand the controls to the next
generation." Now? It's just "Win the lottery."
Problem is, "The Lottery" is right out of Shirley Jackson.
Agreed. The author is inclined to interpret at the level of cumulative effect -- apparent
forgetting -- and to ignore how fear -- of editors, of owners -- plays any role. Her proposed
unveiling of a coercive process becomes yet another veiling of it.
Sadly the narrative of details is lost to history The German landesbanks who had
guaranteed payments in loan pools in the USA were allowed to skirt thru crash and burn by the
agencies (moody s&p and your little fitch too) fake and shake ratings process But all
things German are magical Having lived thru NYC Mac Corp effective bankruptcy of man hat
tan..
it was amusing watching the hand wave given when the city of Berlin actually defaulted
.
My own view for what it is worth is that the Guardian pays some lip service to the plight
of the UK's " Deplorables ", but like most of it's readership does not really give a damn. A
state of being exacerbated by Brexit similar to the situation in the US with Trump. It's much
easier to imagine hordes of racist morons who inhabit places that you have no direct
experience of, than to actually go & take a look. It's also very easy to be in favour of
mass immigration if it does not effect your employment, housing & never likely to spoil
your early morning dawn chorus with a call to prayer.
Unfortunately it has been left to the Right to complain about such things as the Rotherham
abuse scandal, which involved a couple of thousand young girls, who I suspect are worth less
to some than perhaps being mistaken as a racist. There are also various groups made up of
Muslim women who protest about Sharia councils behaviour to their sex, but nobody in the
media is at all interested.
George Orwell noted that the middle class Left couldn't handle dealing with real working
class people, although there isn't the same huge gulf these days, I believe there is still a
vestige of it due to the British class system. The Fabians set up shop in the East End around
the turn of the last century & directly rubbed shoulders with the likes of Coster Mongers
– a combination that led to a strike that was one of the first success stories in the
attempt to get a few more crumbs than what was usually allowed to fall from the top
table.
As for Mirror readers, I suspect that the majority are either the voiceless or are too
busy fighting to avoid the fate of those who find themselves availing of food banks, while
being labelled as lazy scroungers all having expensive holidays, twenty kids, about thirty
grand a year, while being subjected to a now updated more vicious regime of that which was
illustrated by " I, Daniel Blake ".
If Neoliberalism is now being noticed I imagine that it is because of it's success in
working it's way up the food chain. After all these same Middle classes for the most part did
not care much for the plight of the poor during those Victorian values. Many could not wait
to employ maids of all work who slaved for up to fourteen hours a day with only Sunday
afternoon's off. The Suffragettes had a real problem with this as their relatively
comfortable lives would soon descend into drudgery without their servants.
Coincidentally, the NYT article on Austerity Britain is the closest I have read to an
accurate picture that I have seen for a good while.
It's also not a new thing. British media worship of neoliberalism has been growing since
the 1980s, at the same time as newspapers have been closing and media sources of all kinds
laying off their staff. 2008 was a temporary blip, and since the average journalist has the
attention span of a hamster, it was back to usual a few months later. Once the crash stopped
being "news" old patterns reasserted themselves. I wonder, incidentally, how many economics
journalists in the UK actually remember the time before neoliberalism?
"And so it seems we are living with a hyper-amnesia"
Consuming corporate media is increasingly a bizarro-world experience. Even something like
the Trump scandal/constitutional crisis/investigation seems like the arrogant internecine
warfare of corrupt factions of the establishment. Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly
living out of their cars.
The corporate media forgets the causes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression,
and it put Trump in a position to be elected. Trump was the Republican nominee because he was
relentlessly promoted by the media -- because ratings, because neoliberal rigged markets.
Break up the media monopolies, roll back Citizens United, enforce the fairness
doctrine.
" Consuming corporate media is increasingly a bizarro-world experience the Trump
scandal/constitutional crisis/investigation is nothing other than internecine warfare between
corrupt factions of the establishment."
I think there are several issues here for Americans, which can partially be applied to the
Europeans.
First, the American nation as whole only has short term memory. It is our curse.
Second, those with the money spend a lot of money, time and effort the late 19th century
covering up, massaging, or sometimes just creating lies about the past. American and British
businesses, governments, and even private organizations are masters at advertising and
propaganda. Perhaps the best on Earth.
Third, the people and the institutions that would counter this somewhat, independent
unions, multiple independent media, tenured professors at functioning schools, even
non-neoliberalized churches, and social organizations like bowling, crocheting, or heck, the
Masons would all maintain a separate continuing body of memory and knowledge.
Lastly, we are all freaking terrified somewhere inside us. Those relative few who
are not are fools, and most people, whatever their faults, truly are not fools. Even if they
act like one. Whatever your beliefs, position, or knowledge, the knowing of the oncoming
storm is in you. Money or poverty may not save you. The current set of lies, while they are
lies, gives everyone a comfortable known position of supporting or opposing in the same old,
same old while avoiding thinking about whatever catastrophe(s) and radical changes we all
know are coming. The lies are more relaxing than the truth.
Even if you are one of society's homeless losers, who would welcome some changes, would
you be comfortable thinking about just how likely it is to be very traumatic? Hiding behind
begging for change might be more comfortable.
"Even if you are one of society's homeless losers, who would welcome some changes, would
you be comfortable thinking about just how likely it is to be very traumatic? Hiding behind
begging for change might be more comfortable."
On the contrary, the upheaval the "losers" have been subjected to will be turned around
and used as a just cause for rectification. Trumatic consequences can be unpredictable and
this is why society should have socio-economic checks and balances to prevent an economic
system running amok. Commonsense that necessitates amnesia for neoliberalism to seem
viable.
1. Oligarchs having captured thoroughly the media, the legislatures and the judiciary, (as
well as large parts of what might be construed as "liberal" political organisations e.g. the
Democratic Party of the USA)
2. the seemingly inexorable trend to wealth concentration in the hands of said
oligarchs
..one asks oneself.."What is one to do?"
My own response, (and I acknowledge straight off its limited impact), is to do the
following:
1. support financially in the limited ways possible media channels such as Naked
Capitalism that do their level best to debunk the lies and deceptions perpetrated by the
oligarchs
2. support financially social organisations and structures that are genuinely citizen
based and focused on a sustainable future for all
3. Do very very limited monitoring of the oligarch's "lies and deceptions" (one needs to
understand one's enemies to have a chance to counter them) and try on a personal level, in
one's day to day interactions, to present counter arguments
We cannot throw in the towel. We must direct our limited financial resources and personal
efforts to constructive change, as, for the 99%..there are no "bunker" to run to when the
"proverbial" hits the fan..as it must in the fullness of time.
Yep. One has to go ahead and do what one can. It all makes a difference. Thanks for your
strategy, Peter Phillips. Limited impact is not no impact, and we don't have the luxury of
despairing because there is only a bit we can do.
Yet this has been going on forever – – this past Sunday, for the first time I
recall, I finally heard an accurate Real News story filed on the Bobby Kennedy assassination
(50th anniversary coming this June 6, 2018) by the BBC World Service.
They actually noted that there were multiple shooters, that Sen. Kennedy was shot from
behind, not the front where Sirhan was located, etc., etc.
I guess we do occasionally witness Real News – – – just that it takes 50
years or so to be reported . . .
Like many high demand cults neoliberalism is a trap, from which it is very difficult to escape...
Notable quotes:
"... A large, open-border global free market would be left, not subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent. And the whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism. ..."
"... Globalists, as neoliberal capitalists are often called, also understood that democracy, defined by a smattering of individual rights and a voting booth, was the ideal vehicle to usher neoliberalism into the emerging world. Namely because democracy, as commonly practiced, makes no demands in the economic sphere. Socialism does. Communism does. These models directly address ownership of the means of production. Not so democratic capitalism. This permits the globalists to continue to own the means of production while proclaiming human rights triumphant in nations where interventions are staged. ..."
"... The enduring lie is that there is no democracy without economic democracy. ..."
This 'Washington Consensus' is the false promise promoted by the West. The reality is quite
different. The crux of neoliberalism is to eliminate democratic government by downsizing,
privatizing, and deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize that the state is the
last bulwark of protection for the common people against the predations of capital. Remove the
state and they'll be left defenseless .
Think about it. Deregulation eliminates the laws. Downsizing eliminates departments and their
funding. Privatizing eliminates the very purpose of the state by having the private sector take
over its traditional responsibilities.
Ultimately, nation-states would dissolve except perhaps for armies and tax systems. A large, open-border global free
market would be left, not subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent. And the
whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism.
Globalists, as neoliberal capitalists are often called, also understood that democracy, defined
by a smattering of individual rights and a voting booth, was the ideal vehicle to usher
neoliberalism into the emerging world. Namely because democracy, as commonly practiced, makes
no demands in the economic sphere. Socialism does. Communism does. These models directly
address ownership of the means of production. Not so democratic capitalism. This permits the
globalists to continue to own the means of production while proclaiming human rights triumphant
in nations where interventions are staged.
The enduring lie is that there is no democracy
without economic democracy.
What matters to the one percent and the media conglomerates that disseminate their worldview is
that the official definitions are accepted by the masses. The real effects need never be known.
The neoliberal ideology (theory) thus conceals the neoliberal reality (practice). And for the
masses to accept it, it must be mass produced. Then it becomes more or less invisible by virtue
of its universality.
"... In a short span of time in the 1970s, dozens of think tanks were established across the western world and billions of dollars were spent proselytizing the tenets of the Powell Memo in 1971, which galvanized a counter-revolution to the liberal upswing of the Sixties. The neoliberal economic model of deregulation, downsizing, and privatization was preached by the Reagan-Thatcher junta, liberalized by the Clinton regime, temporarily given a bad name by the unhinged Bush administration, and saved by telegenic restoration of the Obama years. ..."
"... Today think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institute, Stratfor, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, the Open Society Foundation, and the Atlantic Council, among many others, funnel millions of dollars in donations into cementing neoliberal attitudes in the American mind. ..."
"... The ideological assumptions, which serve to justify what you could call neocolonial tactics, are relatively clear: the rights of the individual to be free of overreach from monolithic institutions like the state. Activist governments are inherently inefficient and lead directly to totalitarianism. Markets must be free and individuals must be free to act in those markets. People must be free to choose, both politically and commercially, in the voting booth and at the cash register. ..."
"... This conception of markets and individuals is most often formulated as "free-market democracy," a misleading conceit that conflates individual freedom with the economic freedom of capital to exploit labor. So when it comes to foreign relations, American and western aid would only be given on the condition that the borrowers accepted the tenets of an (highly manipulable) electoral system and vowed to establish the institutions and legal structures required to fully realize a western market economy. ..."
In Christopher Nolan's captivating and visually dazzling film Inception, a practitioner of
psychic corporate espionage must plant and idea inside a CEO's head. The process is called
inception, and it represents the frontier of corporate influence, in which mind spies no longer
just "extract" ideas from the dreams of others, but seed useful ideas in a target's
subconscious.
Inception is a well-crafted piece of futuristic sci-fi drama, but some of the ideas it
imparts are already deeply embedded in the American subconscious.
The notion of inception, of hatching an idea in the mind of a man or woman without his or
her knowledge, is the kernel of propaganda, a black art practiced in the States since the First
World War. Today we live beneath an invisible cultural hegemony, a set of ideas implanted in
the mass mind by the U.S. state and its corporate media over decades. Invisibility seems to
happen when something is either obscure or ubiquitous. In a propaganda system, an overarching
objective is to render the messaging invisible by universalizing it within the culture.
Difference is known by contrast. If there are no contrasting views in your field of vision,
it's easier to accept the ubiquitous explanation. The good news is that the ideology is
well-known to some who have, for one lucky reason or another, found themselves outside the
hegemonic field and are thus able to contrast the dominant worldview with alternative opinions.
On the left, the ruling ideology might be described as neoliberalism, a particularly vicious
form of imperial capitalism that, as would be expected, is camouflaged in the lineaments of
humanitarian aid and succor.
Inception 1971
In a short span of time in the 1970s, dozens of think tanks were established across the
western world and billions of dollars were spent proselytizing the tenets of the Powell
Memo in 1971, which galvanized a counter-revolution to the liberal upswing of the Sixties.
The neoliberal economic model of deregulation, downsizing, and privatization was preached by
the Reagan-Thatcher junta, liberalized by the Clinton regime, temporarily given a bad name by
the unhinged Bush administration, and saved by telegenic restoration of the Obama years.
The
ideology that underlay the
model saturated academia, notably at the University of Chicago, and the mainstream media,
principally at The New York Times. Since then it has trickled down to the general populace, to
whom it now feels second nature.
Today think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings
Institute, Stratfor, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign
Relations, Carnegie Endowment, the Open Society Foundation, and the Atlantic Council, among
many others, funnel millions of dollars in donations into cementing neoliberal attitudes in the
American mind.
The ideological assumptions, which serve to justify what you could call neocolonial tactics,
are relatively clear: the rights of the individual to be free of overreach from monolithic
institutions like the state. Activist governments are inherently inefficient and lead directly
to totalitarianism. Markets must be free and individuals must be free to act in those markets.
People must be free to choose, both politically and commercially, in the voting booth and at
the cash register.
This conception of markets and individuals is most often formulated as
"free-market democracy," a misleading conceit that conflates individual freedom with the
economic freedom of capital to exploit labor. So when it comes to foreign relations, American
and western aid would only be given on the condition that the borrowers accepted the tenets of
an (highly manipulable) electoral system and vowed to establish the institutions and legal
structures required to fully realize a western market economy.
These demands were supplemented
with notions of the individual right to be free of oppression, some fine rhetoric about women
and minorities, and somewhat more quietly, a judicial understanding that corporations were
people, too. Together, an unshackled economy and an unfettered populace, newly equipped with
individual rights, would produce the same flourishing and nourishing demos of mid-century
America that had been the envy of humanity.
"... The post WW2 promotion process in the armed forces has produced a group at the top with a mentality that typically thinks rigorously but not imaginatively or creatively. ..."
"... These men got to their present ranks and positions by being conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board." ..."
"... If asked at the top, where military command and political interaction intersect, what policy should be they always ask for more money and to be allowed to pursue outcomes that they can understand as victory and self fulfilling with regard to their collective self image as warrior chieftains. ..."
"... In Trump's time his essential disinterest in foreign policy has led to a massive delegation of authority to Mattis and the leadership of the empire's forces. Their reaction to that is to look at their dimwitted guidance from on high (defeat IS, depose Assad and the SAG, triumph in Afghanistan) and to seek to impose their considerable available force to seek accomplishment as they see fit of this guidance in the absence of the kind of restrictions that Obama placed on them. ..."
"... Like the brass, I, too, am a graduate of all those service schools that attend success from the Basic Course to the Army War College. I will tell you again that the people at the top are not good at "the vision thing." They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers ..."
"... Academia reinforces the groupthink. The mavericks are shunned or ostracized. The only ones I have seen with some degree of going against the grain are technology entrepreneurs. ..."
"... "They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I have found this to be the case with 80 to 90% of most professions. A good memory and able to perform meticulously what they have been taught, but little thinking outside that narrow box. Often annoying, but very dangerous in this case. ..."
"... Since Afghanistan and the brass were mentioned in the editorial statement, here is an immodest question -- Where the brass have been while the opium production has been risen dramatically in Afghanistan under the US occupation? "Heroin Addiction in America Spearheaded by the US-led War on Afghanistan" by Paul Craig Roberts: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/heroin-addiction-america-spearheaded-us-led-war-afghanistan/ ..."
"... A simple Q: What has been the role of the CENTCOM re the racket? Who has arranged the protection for the opium production and for drug dealers? Roberts suggests that the production of opium in Afghanistan "finances the black operations of the CIA and Western intelligence agencies." -- All while Awan brothers, Alperovitch and such tinker with the US national security? ..."
"... God help the poor people of Syria. ..."
"... thanks pat... it seems like the usa has had a steady group of leaders that have no interest in the world outside of the usa, or only in so far as they can exploit it for their own interest... maybe that sums up the foreign policy of the usa at this point... you say trump is disinterested.. so all the blather from trump about 'why are we even in syria?', or 'why can't we be friends with the russia?' is just smoke up everyone's ass... ..."
"... Predictably there is always someone who says that this group is not different from all others. Unfortunately the military function demands more than the level of mediocrity found in most groups ..."
"... A lot of technology entrepreneurs--especially those active today--are stuck in their own groupthink, inflated by their sense that they are born for greatness and can do no wrong. ..."
"... The kind of grand schemes that the top people at Google, Uber, and Facebook think up to remake the universe in their own idea of "good society" are frightening. That they are cleverer (but not necessarily wiser) than the academics, borgists, or generals, I think, makes them even more dangerous. ..."
"... They [the generals] seem to have deliberately completely ignored the issues and policy positions Trump ran on as President. It isn't a case of ignorance but of wilful disregard. ..."
"... So true and as others commented this is a sad feature of the human race and all human organizations. Herd mentality ties into social learning ..."
"... Our massive cultural heritages are learned by observing and taken in as a whole. This process works within organizations as well. ..."
"... I suspect a small percentage of the human race functions differently than the majority and retains creative thinking and openness along with more emphasis on cognitive thinking than social learning but generally they always face a battle when working to change the group "consensus", i.e. Fulton's folly, scepticism on whether man would ever fly, etc. ..."
"... This is an interesting discussion. The top in organisations (civil and military) are increasingly technocrats and thinking like systems managers. They are unable to innovate because they lack the ability to think out of the box. Usually there is a leader who depends on specialists. Others (including laymen) are often excluding from the decision-making-proces. John Ralston Saul's Voltaires Bastards describes this very well. ..."
"... Because of natural selection (conformist people tend to choose similar people who resemble their own values and ways-of-thinking) organizations have a tendency to become homogeneous (especially the higher management/ranks). ..."
"... In combination with the "dumbing" of people (also of people who have a so-called good education (as described in Richard Sale's Sterile Chit-Chat ) this is a disastrous mix. ..."
"... That's true not only of the US military but of US elites in general across all of the spectra. And because that reality is at odds with the group-think of those within the various elements that make up the spectra it doesn't a hearing. Anyone who tries to bring it up risks being ejected from the group. ..."
"... "The United States spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses in the four years from 2014 through 2017, according to the former U.S. ambassador to the country. This $12 billion is in addition to the billions more spent to pursue regime change in Syria in the previous three years, after war broke out in 2011." https://goo.gl/8pj5cD ..."
"... "They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I've often pondered that concept. Notice how many of radical extremist leaders were doctors, engineers and such? Narrow and deep. ..."
"... Long ago when I was a professor, I advised my students that "the law is like a pencil sharpener, it sharpens the mind by narrowing it." I tried to encourage them to "think backwards". ..."
"... Col, I think it might help people to think of "the Borg" - as you have defined & applied it - in a broader context. It struck me particularly as you ID'd the launching of our modern military group-think / careerism behavior coming from the watershed of industrialized scale & processes that came out of WWII. ..."
"... We note parallel themes in all significant sectors of our civilization. The ever-expanding security state, the many men in Gray Flannel Suits that inhabit corporate culture, Finance & Banking & Big Health scaling ever larger - all processes aimed to slice the salami thinner & quicker, to the point where meat is moot ... and so it goes. ..."
"... I just finished reading Command & Control (about nuclear weapons policy, systems design & accidents). I am amazed we've made it this far. ..."
The Borgist foreign policy of the administration has little to do with the generals. To comprehend the generals one must understand their collective mentality and the process that raised them on high as a collective
of their own. The post WW2 promotion process in the armed forces has produced a group at the top with a mentality that typically
thinks rigorously but not imaginatively or creatively.
These men got to their present ranks and positions by being conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of
their guidance from on high. They actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board."
If asked at the top, where military command and political interaction intersect, what policy should be they always ask for
more money and to be allowed to pursue outcomes that they can understand as victory and self fulfilling with regard to their collective
self image as warrior chieftains.
In Obama's time they were asked what policy should be in Afghanistan and persuaded him to reinforce their dreams in Afghanistan
no matter how unlikely it always was that a unified Western oriented nation could be made out of a collection of disparate mutually
alien peoples.
In Trump's time his essential disinterest in foreign policy has led to a massive delegation of authority to Mattis and the
leadership of the empire's forces. Their reaction to that is to look at their dimwitted guidance from on high (defeat IS, depose
Assad and the SAG, triumph in Afghanistan) and to seek to impose their considerable available force to seek accomplishment as they
see fit of this guidance in the absence of the kind of restrictions that Obama placed on them.
Like the brass, I, too, am a graduate of all those service schools that attend success from the Basic Course to the Army War
College. I will tell you again that the people at the top are not good at "the vision thing." They are not stupid at all but they
are a collective of narrow thinkers. pl
IMO, this conformism pervades all institutions. I saw when I worked in banking and finance many moons ago how moving up the
ranks in any large organization meant you didn't rock the boat and you conformed to the prevailing groupthink. Even nutty ideas
became respectable because they were expedient.
Academia reinforces the groupthink. The mavericks are shunned or ostracized. The only ones I have seen with some degree of
going against the grain are technology entrepreneurs.
You remind me of an old rumination by Thomas Ricks:
Take the example of General George Casey. According to David Cloud and Greg Jaffe's book Four Stars, General Casey, upon learning
of his assignment to command U.S. forces in Iraq, received a book from the Army Chief of Staff. The book Counterinsurgency Lessons
Learned from Malaya and Vietnam was the first book he ever read about guerilla warfare." This is a damning indictment of the degree
of mental preparation for combat by a general. The Army's reward for such lack of preparation: two more four star assignments.
"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers."
I have found this to be the case with 80 to 90% of most professions. A good memory and able to perform meticulously what they
have been taught, but little thinking outside that narrow box. Often annoying, but very dangerous in this case.
Since Afghanistan and the brass were mentioned in the editorial statement, here is an immodest question -- Where the brass have
been while the opium production has been risen dramatically in Afghanistan under the US occupation? "Heroin Addiction in America
Spearheaded by the US-led War on Afghanistan" by Paul Craig Roberts:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/06/heroin-addiction-america-spearheaded-us-led-war-afghanistan/
" in 2000-2001
the Taliban government –with the support of the United Nations (UNODC) – implemented a successful ban on poppy cultivation. Opium
production which is used to produce grade 4 heroin and its derivatives declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001. The production
of opium in 2001 was of the order of a meager 185 tons. It is worth noting that the UNODC congratulated the Taliban Government
for its successful opium eradication program. The Taliban government had contributed to literally destabilizing the multibillion
dollar Worldwide trade in heroin.
In 2017, the production of opium in Afghanistan under US military occupation reached 9000 metric tons. The production of opium
in Afghanistan registered a 49 fold increase since Washington's invasion. Afghanistan under US military occupation produces approximately
90% of the World's illegal supply of opium which is used to produce heroin. Who owns the airplanes and ships that transport heroin
from Afghanistan to the US? Who gets the profits?"
---A simple Q: What has been the role of the CENTCOM re the racket? Who has arranged the protection for the opium production
and for drug dealers? Roberts suggests that the production of opium in Afghanistan "finances the black operations of the CIA and
Western intelligence agencies." -- All while Awan brothers, Alperovitch and such tinker with the US national security?
There needs to be a 're-education' of the top, all of them need to be required to attend Green Beret think-school, in other
words they need to be forced to think outside the box, and to to think on their feet. They need to understand fluid situations
where things change at the drop of a hat, be able to dance the two-step and waltz at the same time. In other words they need to
be able to walk and chew gum and not trip over their shoe-laces.
By no means are they stupid, but you hit the nail on the head when you said 'narrow thinkers'. Their collective hive mentality
that has developed is not a good thing.
thanks pat... it seems like the usa has had a steady group of leaders that have no interest in the world outside of the usa, or
only in so far as they can exploit it for their own interest... maybe that sums up the foreign policy of the usa at this point...
you say trump is disinterested.. so all the blather from trump about 'why are we even in syria?', or 'why can't we be friends
with the russia?' is just smoke up everyone's ass...
i like what you said here "conformist group thinkers who do not stray outside the "box" of their guidance from on high. They
actually have scheduled conference calls among themselves to make sure everyone is "on board." - that strikes me as very true
- conformist group thinkers... the world needs less of these types and more actual leaders who have a vision for something out
of the box and not always on board... i thought for a while trump might fill this bill, but no such luck by the looks of it now..
As a young person in eighth grade, I learned about the "domino theory" in regard to attempts to slow the spread of communism.
Then my generation was, in a sense, fractured around the raging battles for and against our involvement in Vietnam.
I won't express my own opinion on that. But I mention it because it seems to be a type of "vision thing."
So, now I ask, what would be your vision for the Syrian situation?
Westmoreland certainly, Macarthur certainly not. This all started with the "industrialization" of the armed forces in WW2.
we never recovered the sense of profession as opposed to occupation after the massive expansion and retention of so many placeholders.
a whole new race of Walmart manager arose and persists. pl
The idea of the Domino Theory came from academia, not the generals of that time. They resisted the idea of a war in east Asia
until simply ordered into it by LBJ. After that their instinct for acting according to guidance kicked in and they became committed
to the task. Syria? Do you think I should write you an essay on that? SST has a large archive and a search machine. pl
I am talking about flag officers at present, not those beneath them from the mass of whom they emerge. There are exceptions.
Martin Dempsey may have been one such. The system creates such people at the top. pl
Your usual animosity for non-left wing authority is showing. A commander like the CENTCOM theater commander (look it up) operates
within guidance from Washington, broad guidance. Normally this is the president's guidance as developed in the NSC process. Some
presidents like Obama and LBJ intervene selectively and directly in the execution of that guidance. Obama had a "kill list" of
jihadis suggested by the IC and condemned by him to die in the GWOT. He approved individual missions against them. LBJ picked
individual air targets in NVN. Commanders in the field do not like that . They think that freedom of action within their guidance
should be accorded them. This CinC has not been interested thus far in the details and have given the whole military chain of
command wide discretion to carry out their guidance. pl
"I am not sure that I understand what makes a Borgist different from a military conformist." The Borg and the military leaders
are not of the same tribe. they are two different collectives who in the main dislike and distrust each other. pl
Anna. Their guidance does not include a high priority for eradicating the opium trade. Their guidance has to do with defeating
the jihadis and building up the central government. pl
Predictably there is always someone who says that this group is not different from all others. Unfortunately the military function
demands more than the level of mediocrity found in most groups. pl
Trump would like to better relations with Russia but that is pretty much the limit of his attention to foreign affairs
at any level more sophisticated than expecting deference. He is firmly focused on the economy and base solidifying issues like
immigration. pl
The medical profession comes to mind. GP's and specialists. Many of those working at the leading edge of research seem much wider
thinking and are not locked into the small box of what they have been taught.
Combat Applications Group and SEALS don't even begin to compare, they're not in the same league as 'real deal' GBs. The GBs are
thinkers as well as doers, whereas Combat Applications Group and SEALs all they know is breach and clear, breach and clear.
There is more to life than breach and clear. Having worked with all in one manner or another, I'll take GBs any day hands down. It makes a difference when the brain is
engaged instead of just the heel.
A lot of technology entrepreneurs--especially those active today--are stuck in their own groupthink, inflated by their sense that
they are born for greatness and can do no wrong.
The kind of grand schemes that the top people at Google, Uber, and Facebook think
up to remake the universe in their own idea of "good society" are frightening. That they are cleverer (but not necessarily wiser)
than the academics, borgists, or generals, I think, makes them even more dangerous.
They are indeed "narrow thinkers", but I think the problem runs deeper. They seem to be stuck in the rut of a past era. When
the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to accept the
reality of the world as it is now.
Of course, these policies ensure that they continue to be well-funded, even if the US is bankrupting itself in the process.
They [the generals] seem to have deliberately completely ignored the issues and policy positions Trump ran on as President. It isn't a case of
ignorance but of wilful disregard.
I've been reading this blog for some time. My question was facetious and written with the understanding of your statement about
the generals not having a good grasp of "the vision thing" on their own.
So true and as others commented this is a sad feature of the human race and all human organizations. Herd mentality ties into
social learning. Chimps are on average more creative and have better short term memory than humans. We gave up some short term
memory in order to be able to learn quickly by mimicking. If shown how to open a puzzle box but also shown unnecessary extra steps
a chimp will ignore the empty steps and open the box with only the required steps. A human will copy what they saw exactly performing
the extra steps as if they have some unknown value to the process. Our massive cultural heritages are learned by observing and
taken in as a whole. This process works within organizations as well.
I suspect a small percentage of the human race functions differently than the majority and retains creative thinking and openness
along with more emphasis on cognitive thinking than social learning but generally they always face a battle when working to change
the group "consensus", i.e. Fulton's folly, scepticism on whether man would ever fly, etc.
One nice feature of the internet allows creative thinkers to connect and watch the idiocy of the world unfold around us.
"A natural desire to be part of the 'in crowd' could damage our ability to make the right decisions, a new study has shown."
The military by definition is a rigid hierarchical structure.
It could not function as a collection of individuals.
This society can only breed conforming narrow leaders as an "individual" would leave or be forced out.
That part of our brain responsible for the desire to be part of the 'in crowd' may affect our decision-making process, but it
is also the reason we keep chimps in zoos and not the other way around. Or, to put it another way; if chimps had invented Facebook,
I might consider them more creative than us.
This is an interesting discussion. The top in organisations (civil and military) are increasingly technocrats and thinking like systems managers. They are unable
to innovate because they lack the ability to think out of the box.
Usually there is a leader who depends on specialists. Others (including laymen) are often excluding from the decision-making-proces.
John Ralston Saul's Voltaires Bastards
describes this very well.
Because of natural selection (conformist people tend to choose similar people who resemble their own values and ways-of-thinking)
organizations have a tendency to become homogeneous (especially the higher management/ranks).
In combination with the "dumbing" of people (also of people who have a so-called good education (as described in Richard Sale's
Sterile Chit-Chat ) this is a disastrous
mix.
Homogeneity is the main culprit. A specialists tends to try to solve problems with the same knowledge-set that created these.
Not all (parts of) organizations and people suffer this fate. Innovations are usually done by laymen and not by specialists.
The organizations are often heterogeneous and the people a-typical and/or eccentric.
(mainly the analytical parts of ) intelligence organizations and investment banks are like that if they are worth anything.
Very heterogeneous with a lot of a-typical people. I think Green Berets are also like that. An open mind and genuine interest
in others (cultures, way of thinking, religion etc) is essential to understand and to perform and also to prevent costly mistakes
(in silver and/or blood).
It is possible to create firewalls against tunnel-vision. The
Jester performed such a role. Also think of the
Emperors New Clothes . The current trend
of people with limited vision and creativity prevents this. Criticism is punished with a lack of promotion, job-loss or even jail
(whistle-blowers)
IMO this is why up to a certain rank (colonel or middle management) a certain amount of creativity or alternative thinking
is allowed, but conformity is essential to rise higher.
I was very interested in the Colonel's remark on the foreign background of the GB in Vietnam. If you would like to expand on this
I would be much obliged? IMO GB are an example of a smart, learning, organization (in deed and not only in word as so many say
of themselves, but who usually are at best mediocre)
Would you then say that a rising military officer who does have the vision thing faces career impediments? If so, would you
say that the vision thing is lost (if it ever was there) at the highest ranks? In any case, the existence of even a few at the top, like Matthis or Shinseki is a blessing.
"When the US was indeed the paramount military power on the globe, and the US military reigned supreme. They can't seem to
accept the reality of the world as it is now."
That's true not only of the US military but of US elites in general across all of the spectra. And because that reality is at
odds with the group-think of those within the various elements that make up the spectra it doesn't a hearing. Anyone who tries
to bring it up risks being ejected from the group.
I forget an important part. I really miss an edit-button. Comment-boxes are like looking at something through a straw. Its easy
to miss the overview.
Innovations and significant new developments are usually made by laymen. IMO mainly because they have a fresh perspective without
being bothered by the (mainstream) knowledge that dominates an area of expertise.
By excluding the laymen errors will continue to be repeated. This can be avoided by using development/decision-making frameworks,
but these tend to become dogma (and thus become part of the problem)
Much better is allowing laymen and allowing a-typical people. Then listen to them carefully. Less rigid flexible and very valuable.
Apparently, according to the last US ambassador to Syria Mr. Ford, from 2014-17 US has spent 12 Billion on Regime change in Syria.
IMO, combinedly Iran and Russia so far, have spent far less in Syria than 12 billion by US alone, not considering the rest of
her so called coalition. This is a war of attrition, and US operations in wars, are usually far more expensive and longer than
anybody else's.
"The United States spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses in the four years from 2014 through
2017, according to the former U.S. ambassador to the country.
This $12 billion is in addition to the billions more spent to pursue regime change in Syria in the previous three years, after
war broke out in 2011." https://goo.gl/8pj5cD
It may "demand" it - but does it get it? Soldiers are just as human as everyone else.
I'm reminded of the staff sergeant with the sagging beer belly who informed me, "Stand up straight and look like a soldier..."
Or the First Sergeant who was so hung over one morning at inspection that he couldn't remember which direction he was going down
the hall to the next room to be inspected. I'm sure you have your own stories of less than competence.
It's a question of intelligence and imagination. And frankly, I don't see the military in any country receiving the "best and
brightest" of that country's population, by definition. The fact that someone is patriotic enough to enter the military over a
civilian occupation doesn't make them more intelligent or imaginative than the people who decided on the civilian occupation.
Granted, if you fail at accounting, you don't usually die. Death tends to focus the mind, as they say. Nonetheless, we're not
talking about the grunts at the level who actually die, still less the relatively limited number of Special Forces. We're talking
about the officers and staff at the levels who don't usually die in war - except maybe at their defeat - i.e., most officers over
the level of captain.
One can hardly look at this officer crowd in the Pentagon and CENTCOM and say that their personal death concentrates their
mind. They are in virtually no danger of that. Only career death faces them - with a nice transition to the board of General Dynamics
at ten times the salary.
All in all, I'd have to agree that the military isn't much better at being competent - at many levels above the obvious group
of hyper-trained Special Forces - any more than any other profession.
That is well put.most important is the grading system that is designed to fix a person to a particular slot thereby limiting his
ability to think "outside the box" and consider the many variables that exist in one particular instant.
Creative thinking allows
you to see beyond the storm clouds ahead and realize that the connectedness of different realities both the visible and invisible.
For
instance the picture of the 2 pairs of korean skaters in the news tells an interesting story on many levels. Some will judge them
on their grade of proffiency, while others will see a dance of strategy between 2 foes and a few will know the results in advance
and plan accordingly
"They are not stupid at all but they are a collective of narrow thinkers." I've often pondered that concept. Notice how many of radical extremist leaders were doctors, engineers and such? Narrow and
deep. STEM is enormously useful to us but seems to be a risky when implanted in shallow earth.
These narrow "but deep" thinkers were unable to grasp the nature of the Iraq War for the first couple of years. They thought
of it as a rear area security problem, a combat in cities problem, anything but a popular rebellion based on xenophobia and anti-colonialism
The IED problem? They spent several billion dollars on trying to find a technology fix and never succeeded. I know because they
kept asking me to explain the war to them and then could not understand the answers which were outside their narrow thought. pl
War College selectees, the national board selected creme de la creme test out as 50% SJs (conformists lacking vision) in Myers-Briggs
terms and about 15% NTs (intellectuals). To survive and move upward in a system dominated by SJs, the NTs must pretend to be what
they are not. A few succeed. I do not think Mattis is an intellectual merely because he has read a lot. pl
Long ago when I was a professor, I advised my students that "the law is like a pencil sharpener, it sharpens the mind by narrowing
it."
I tried to encourage them to "think backwards".
My favorite example was a Japanese fisherman who recovered valuable ancient Chinese
pottery. Everyone knew where an ancient ship had sunk, but the water was too deep to dive down to the wreck. And everyone knew
the cargo included these valuable vases. And the fisherman was the first to figure out how to recover them. He attached a line
to an octopus, and lowered it in the area, waited awhile, and pulled it up. Low and behold, the octopus had hidden in an ancient
Chinese vase. The fisherman was familiar with trapping octopuses, by lowering a ceramic pot (called "takosubo") into the ocean,
waiting awhile, then raising the vase with octopus inside. His brilliance was to think backwards, and use an octopus to catch
a vase.
the original GBS were recruited in the 50s to serve in the OSS role with foreign guerrillas behind Soviet lines in th event
of war in Europe. Aaron Bank, the founder, recruited several hundred experienced foreign soldiers from the likely countries who
wanted to become American. By the time we were in VN these men were a small fraction of GBs but important for their expertise
and professionalism. pl
Col, I think it might help people to think of "the Borg" - as you have defined & applied it - in a broader context. It struck
me particularly as you ID'd the launching of our modern military group-think / careerism behavior coming from the watershed of
industrialized scale & processes that came out of WWII.
We note parallel themes in all significant sectors of our civilization.
The ever-expanding security state, the many men in Gray Flannel Suits that inhabit corporate culture, Finance & Banking & Big
Health scaling ever larger - all processes aimed to slice the salami thinner & quicker, to the point where meat is moot ... and
so it goes.
I note many Borgs... Borgism if you will. An organizational behavior that has emerged out of human nature having difficulty adapting
to rapidly accelerating complexity that is just too hard to apprehend in a few generations. If (as many commenters on STT seem
to...) one wishes to view this in an ideological or spiritual framework only, they may overlook an important truth - that what
we are experiencing is a Battle Among Borgs for control over their own space & domination over the other Borgs. How else would
we expect any competitive, powerful interest group to act?
In gov & industry these days, we observe some pretty wild outliers... attached to some wild outcomes. Thus the boring behavior
of our political industries bringing forth Trump, our promethean technology sector yielding a Musk (& yes, a Zuckerberg).
I find it hard to take very seriously analysts that define their perspective based primarily upon their superior ideals & opposition
to others. Isn't every person, every tribe, team or enterprise a borglet-in-becoming? Everybody Wants to Rule the World ... &
Everybody Must Get Stoned... messages about how we are grappling with complexity in our times. I just finished reading Command
& Control (about nuclear weapons policy, systems design & accidents). I am amazed we've made it this far.
Unfortunately, I would
not be amazed if reckless, feckless leaders changed the status quo. I was particularly alarmed hearing Trump in his projection
mode; "I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity, without a major event where people pull together,
that's hard to do.
But I would like to do it without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing." It
strikes me that he could be exceptionally willing to risk a Major Event if he felt a form of unity, or self-preservation, was
in the offing. I pray (& I do not pray often or easily) that the Generals you have described have enough heart & guts to honor
their oath at its most profound level in the event of an Event.
As a time traveler from another age, I can only say that for me it means devotion to a set of mores peculiar to a particular
profession as opposed to an occupation. pl
Another springs to mind: James Lovelock (of Gaia hypothesis fame) was once part of the NASA team building the first probe to
go to Mars to look for signs of life. Lovelock didn't make any friends when he told NASA they were wasting their time, there was
none. When asked how he could be so sure, he explained that the composition of the Martian atmosphere made it impossible. "But
Martian life may be able to survive under different conditions" was the retort. Lovelock then went on to explain his view that
the evolution of microbial life determined the atmospheric composition on Earth, so should be expected to do the same if
life had evolved on Mars. Brilliant backwards thinking which ought to have earned him the Nobel prize IMHO (for Gaia). Lovelock,
a classic cross-disciplinary scientist, can't be rewarded with such a box-categorized honor, as his idea doesn't fit well into
any one.
Another example of cross-disciplinary brilliance was Bitcoin, which has as much to do with its creator's deep knowledge of
Anthropology (why people invented & use money) as his expertise in both Economics and Computer Science.
This is they key to creative thinking in my view - familiarity with different fields yields deeper insights.
"... Whitehead documents how hard a not guilty verdict is to come by for an innocent defendant. Even if the falsely accused defendant and his attorney survive the prosecutor's pressure to negotiate a plea bargain and arrive at a trial, they are confronted with jurors who are unable to doubt prosecutors, police, or witnesses paid to lie against the innocent defendant. ..."
"... The question is: why do Americans not only sit silently while the lives of innocents are destroyed, but also actually support the destruction of the lives of innocents? Why do Americans believe "official sources" despite the proven fact that "official sources" lie repeatedly and never tell the truth? ..."
"... The only conclusion that one can come to is that the American people have failed. We have failed Justice. We have failed Mercy. We have failed the US Constitution. We have failed Truth. We have failed Democracy and representative government. We have failed ourselves and humanity. We have failed the confidence that our Founding Fathers put in us. We have failed God. If we ever had the character that we are told we had, we have obviously lost it. Little, if anything, remains of the "American character." ..."
"... The failure of the American character has had tremendous and disastrous consequences for ourselves and for the world. At home Americans have a police state in which all Constitutional protections have vanished. Abroad, Iraq and Libya, two formerly prosperous countries, have been destroyed. Libya no longer exists as a country. One million dead Iraqis, four million displaced abroad, hundreds of thousands of orphans and birth defects from the American ordnance, and continuing ongoing violence from factions fighting over the remains. These facts are incontestable. Yet the United States Government claims to have brought "freedom and democracy" to Iraq. "Mission accomplished," declared one of the mass murderers of the 21st century, George W. Bush. ..."
"... The question is: how can the US government make such an obviously false outrageous claim without being shouted down by the rest of the world and by its own population? Is the answer that good character has disappeared from the world? ..."
"... Or is the rest of the world too afraid to protest? Washington can force supposedly sovereign countries to acquiesce to its will or be cut off from the international payments mechanism that Washington controls, and/or be sanctioned, and/or be bombed, droned, or invaded, and/or be assassinated or overthrown in a coup. On the entire planet Earth there are only two countries capable of standing up to Washington, Russia and China, and neither wants to stand up if they can avoid it. ..."
"... For whatever the reasons, not only Americans but most of the world as well accommodate Washington's evil and are thereby complicit in the evil. Those humans with a moral conscience are gradually being positioned by Washington and London as "domestic extremists" who might have to be rounded up and placed in detention centers. Examine the recent statements by General Wesley Clark and British Prime Minister Cameron and remember Janet Napolitano's statement that the Department of Homeland Security has shifted its focus from terrorists to domestic extremists, an undefined and open-ended term. ..."
"... Americans with good character are being maneuvered into a position of helplessness. ..."
"... When Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was asked if the Clinton's regime's sanctions, which had claimed the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children, were justified, she obviously expected no outrage from the American people when she replied in the affirmative. ..."
"... ... Americans are "intentionally ignorant" of other countries' rights and sovereignty while other countries had been well-informed of America's malicious intents of destroying other countries' rights and sovereignty ... ..."
"... No, I don't think Americans are intentionally ignorant, any more than other nationalities. What they are tribal. Tribal peoples don't care whether their policies are right or wrong; they are instinctively loyal to them and to those who formulate them. ..."
"... "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." -- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda ..."
"... "Americans need to face the facts. The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise." ..."
"... "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility." ..."
"... Look at the demographics of the Western Hemisphere. If you have a shred of honesty you just can't hang the blame on 'whites', put it on a bumper sticker or a #shittyhashtagmeme and go back to fucking off. The disgusting fraud of Manifest Destiny was a fig leaf to hide the enormity of these crimes; but, they are most obviously European crimes....& has Europe changed since the West was settled? Did Europeans even stop their warring amongst themselves? ..."
"... "The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise." ..."
"... I agree with Paul Craig Roberts. He asks "Why" and "How." Well, Paul, here is my answer. Decades of Public Education and over 50 years of mass media monopoly. In an age where FOX is the top rated News station and CNN is considered liberal? Where kids in Public school are offered Chocolate milk and frozen pizza for school breakfast before going to class rooms with 30-40 kids. When Texas political appointees chose school text book content for the nation? A nation where service has ended, replaced with volunteer soldiers signing up for pay and benefits, instead of just serving as service, like we did in the 70's? ..."
"... There is a difference between IGNORANCE and STUPIDITY. As Ron White said, "YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID". In todays information age, ignorance is a choice. ..."
"... The problem is that we have no "Constitution." That is a fable. The constitution of the separation of powers has been undermined from almost day one. Witness the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. ..."
"... Yes sir. Globalization has failed us. The infinite growth paradigm has failed us, as we knew it would. Castro's Cuba, based in a localized agrarian economy, is looking pretty good about now. Localization is the only way back to sustainability. ..."
"... Books? Who said books? You mean reading books? Let me throw a couple out there: I read 'The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America' last year, it was published 50+ years ago by a very recommended writer and accomplished historian. Boorstin's observations are truer today and even more concerning thanks to our modern, ubiquitous "connectivity". http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159979.The_Image ..."
"... Adorno famously pointed out in 1940 that the "Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse." ..."
"... He doesn't blame the masses because he simply points out the fact that Americans are completely ignorant and blindly believe anything MSM spoon-fed to them. ..."
"... Paul Craig Roberts believe that the people are capable of creating a better and more just society. Instead the people have voted against their own best interest and overwhelmingly believe the propaganda. ..."
"... "... the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise ..." ..."
"... Governments were created by the history of warfare, which was always organized crime developing on larger and larger scales. In the context, the greater problem is that people like Paul Craig Roberts are reactionary revolutionaries, who provide relatively good analysis, followed by bogus "solutions" based upon impossible ideals. ..."
"... The "American People" are the victims of the best scientific brainwashing that money could buy. As Cognitive Dissonance has previously stated on Zero Hedge: "The absolute best controlled opposition is one that doesn't know they are controlled." ..."
"... The article above was another illustration of the ways that the typical reactionary revolutionaries, Black Sheeple, or controlled opposition groups, respond to recognizing the more and more blatant degrees to which there has been an accelerating "transformation of government into a criminal enterprise." THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY CONTINUE TO STAY WITHIN THE SAME OLD-FASHIONED BULLSHIT-BASED FRAME OF REFERENCE, INSTEAD, AROUND AND AROUND WE GO, STUCK IN THE SAME DEEPENING RUTS, since they do NOT more fully "face the facts" regarding how and why the only realistic solutions to the real problems would require developing better organized crime. INSTEAD, they continue to promote the same dualities based upon false fundamental dichotomies, and the associate bogus "solutions" based upon impossible ideals ... ..."
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool's hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.-Bob Dylan, "Hurricane"
Attorney John W. Whitehead opens a recent posting on his Rutherford Institute website with these words from a song by Bob Dylan.
Why don't all of us feel ashamed? Why only Bob Dylan?
I wonder how many of Bob Dylan's fans understand what he is telling them. American justice has nothing to do with innocence or
guilt. It only has to do with the prosecutor's conviction rate, which builds his political career. Considering the gullibility of
the American people, American jurors are the last people to whom an innocent defendant should trust his fate. The jury will betray
the innocent almost every time.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book (2000, 2008) there is no justice in America. We titled our book, "How the Law Was
Lost." It is a description of how the protective features in law that made law a shield of the innocent was transformed over time
into a weapon in the hands of the government, a weapon used against the people. The loss of law as a shield occurred prior to 9/11,
which "our representative government" used to construct a police state.
The marketing department of our publisher did not appreciate our title and instead came up with "The Tyranny of Good Intentions."
We asked what this title meant. The marketing department answered that we showed that the war on crime, which gave us the abuses
of RICO, the war on child abusers, which gave us show trials of total innocents that bested Joseph Stalin's show trials of the heroes
of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the war on drugs, which gave "Freedom and Democracy America" broken families and by far the highest
incarceration rate in the world all resulted from good intentions to combat crime, to combat drugs, and to combat child abuse. The
publisher's title apparently succeeded, because 15 years later the book is still in print. It has sold enough copies over these years
that, had the sales occurred upon publication would have made the book a "best seller." The book, had it been a best seller, would
have gained more attention, and perhaps law schools and bar associations could have used it to hold the police state at bay.
Whitehead documents how hard a not guilty verdict is to come by for an innocent defendant. Even if the falsely accused defendant
and his attorney survive the prosecutor's pressure to negotiate a plea bargain and arrive at a trial, they are confronted with jurors
who are unable to doubt prosecutors, police, or witnesses paid to lie against the innocent defendant. Jurors even convicted
the few survivors of the Clinton regime's assault on the Branch Davidians of Waco, the few who were not gassed, shot, or burned to
death by US federal forces. This religious sect was demonized by Washington and the presstitute media as child abusers who were manufacturing
automatic weapons while they raped children. The charges proved to be false, like Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction,"
and so forth, but only after all of the innocents were dead or in prison.
The question is: why do Americans not only sit silently while the lives of innocents are destroyed, but also actually support
the destruction of the lives of innocents? Why do Americans believe "official sources" despite the proven fact that "official sources"
lie repeatedly and never tell the truth?
The only conclusion that one can come to is that the American people have failed. We have failed Justice. We have failed Mercy.
We have failed the US Constitution. We have failed Truth. We have failed Democracy and representative government. We have failed
ourselves and humanity. We have failed the confidence that our Founding Fathers put in us. We have failed God. If we ever had the
character that we are told we had, we have obviously lost it. Little, if anything, remains of the "American character."
Was the American character present in the torture prisons of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and hidden CIA torture dungeons where
US military and CIA personnel provided photographic evidence of their delight in torturing and abusing prisoners? Official reports
have concluded that along with torture went rape, sodomy, and murder. All of this was presided over by American psychologists with
Ph.D. degrees.
We see the same inhumanity in the American police who respond to women children, the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped,
with gratuitous violence. For no reason whatsoever, police murder, taser, beat, and abuse US citizens. Every day there are more reports,
and despite the reports the violence goes on and on and on. Clearly, the police enjoy inflicting pain and death on citizens whom
the police are supposed to serve and protect. There have always been bullies in the police force, but the wanton police violence
of our time indicates a complete collapse of the American character.
The failure of the American character has had tremendous and disastrous consequences for ourselves and for the world. At home
Americans have a police state in which all Constitutional protections have vanished. Abroad, Iraq and Libya, two formerly prosperous
countries, have been destroyed. Libya no longer exists as a country. One million dead Iraqis, four million displaced abroad, hundreds
of thousands of orphans and birth defects from the American ordnance, and continuing ongoing violence from factions fighting over
the remains. These facts are incontestable. Yet the United States Government claims to have brought "freedom and democracy" to Iraq.
"Mission accomplished," declared one of the mass murderers of the 21st century, George W. Bush.
The question is: how can the US government make such an obviously false outrageous claim without being shouted down by the
rest of the world and by its own population? Is the answer that good character has disappeared from the world?
Or is the rest of the world too afraid to protest? Washington can force supposedly sovereign countries to acquiesce to its
will or be cut off from the international payments mechanism that Washington controls, and/or be sanctioned, and/or be bombed, droned,
or invaded, and/or be assassinated or overthrown in a coup. On the entire planet Earth there are only two countries capable of standing
up to Washington, Russia and China, and neither wants to stand up if they can avoid it.
For whatever the reasons, not only Americans but most of the world as well accommodate Washington's evil and are thereby complicit
in the evil. Those humans with a moral conscience are gradually being positioned by Washington and London as "domestic extremists"
who might have to be rounded up and placed in detention centers. Examine the recent statements by General Wesley Clark and British
Prime Minister Cameron and remember Janet Napolitano's statement that the Department of Homeland Security has shifted its focus from
terrorists to domestic extremists, an undefined and open-ended term.
Americans with good character are being maneuvered into a position of helplessness. As John Whitehead makes clear, the
American people cannot even prevent "their police," paid by their tax payments, from murdering 3 Americans each day, and this is
only the officially reported murders. The actual account is likely higher.
What Whitehead describes and what I have noticed for many years is that the American people have lost, in addition to their own
sense of truth and falsity, any sense of mercy and justice for other peoples. Americans accept no sense of responsibility for the
millions of peoples that Washington has exterminated over the past two decades dating back to the second term of Clinton. Every one
of the millions of deaths is based on a Washington lie.
When Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was asked if the Clinton's regime's sanctions, which had claimed the
lives of 500,000 Iraqi children, were justified, she obviously expected no outrage from the American people when she replied in the
affirmative.
Americans need to face the facts. The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a
criminal enterprise.
benb
The American people have been scientifically mis-educated, propagandized, and beaten down. A disproportionate number of the
under 30's are societal DOAs thanks to ... weaponized TV. But I am being too optimistic...
PrayingMantis
... Americans are "intentionally ignorant" of other countries' rights and sovereignty while other countries had been well-informed
of America's malicious intents of destroying other countries' rights and sovereignty ...
BarnacleBill
No, I don't think Americans are intentionally ignorant, any more than other nationalities. What they are tribal. Tribal
peoples don't care whether their policies are right or wrong; they are instinctively loyal to them and to those who formulate
them.
Also, I have to say that I believe the US empire is a long, long, way from collapse. It is still expanding, for goodness sake.
Empires collapse only when the shrinking process is well under way. (The recent Soviet Empire was exceptional, in this regard.)
It will take several more generations before the darkness lifts, I'm afraid.
macholatte
The only conclusion that one can come to is that the American people have failed.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element
in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the
true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely
by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers
of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost
every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking,
we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the
masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
-- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
OldPhart
"Americans need to face the facts. The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government
into a criminal enterprise."
I think that happened August 13, 1971, but didn't get fully organized (as in Mafia) until 2000.
PT
The majority have their nose to the grind stone and as such can not see past the grind stone. They rely on "official sources"
to put the rest of the world in order for them, but have no time to audit the "official sources". Would public education suffer
if mothers and fathers were monitoring what the children were learning? But who has got time for that when both parents are working?
How many non-work organizations were your parents and grand-parents involved in (both the wage-earner and the housekeeper)? How
many organizations are you involved in?
Do you constantly hassle your local politicians or do you just say, "I'll vote 'em out in four years time"? (Yes, I know, you
just don't vote. Fair enough, this question is for the voters.)
Yes, some of us are guilty of not fighting back. We had "Shut up and do as you're told" and "Well, if you're not happy with
what you've got then work harder" beaten into us. Some of us are a little awake because, despite all our efforts, the grind stone
was removed from us and then we got to see the larger picture of what lies behind the grind stone. Others are still busy, nose
to the wheel, and all they see is the wheel.
And that is before we even consider HypnoToad on the Idiot Box. Some "need" the idiot box to help them wind down. Some can
no longer enjoy the silence. (Remember Brave New World? It's true. Many people can no longer stand to be around silence, with
nothing but their own thoughts.) I tell everyone that TV is crap. Radio is crap. Newspapers are crap. Turn that shit off for six
months to a year, then go back to it and see what you really think of it. But they can't handle the thought of being away from
"the background noise".
Ever spoken to grandparents who remember wars and depressions? And even amongst the rations and the hardships they still find
positive memories? Time to talk to them again. Or not. I guess we'll get first-hand experience soon enough.
Allow me for a moment to share a brief anecdote about the new "American Character".
Last Sunday I was at the local supermarket. I was at the bakery counter, when suddenly a nicely dressed, Sunday best, non-Caucasian
woman barrels into my cart riding a fat scooter. She rudely demands from the counter person a single cinnamon bun and then wheels
off towards the front. Curious, I follow her up the aisle as she scarfs down the pastry in three bites. She then proceeds to stuff
the empty bag between some soda bottles and scooters through the checkout without paying for her item. In the parking lot she
then disembarks from her scooter, easily lifts it into the trunk of her Cadillac and walks to the drivers side, gets in and speeds
off with her kids, who were in the back seat.
Amazed at what I had just witnessed, I went back into the store, retrieved the empty bag, included it in my few items at checkout
and then went to the manager to share this story with him. He laughed and said there was nothing he could do.
The new "American Character" is that of a sense of entitlement and apathy.
I weep for the future.
Headbanger
Having character is not politically correct. Plus there's no need to develop character anymore because there's no jobs requiring
any!
Consumption is the ONLY value of the inDUHvidual today.
And the less character they have, the more shit they'll consume to feel fulfilled cause they can't get that from themselves.
clymer Sat, 07/25/2015 - 07:34
Macholatte, i don't think PCR is writing from a point of view that is haughty and contemptful of the American people, per se,
but rather from a perspective that is hopeless and thoroughly depressed after contemplating what the American people of many generations
ago has taken for themselves as natural rights from a tyrranical government, only to see the nation slowly morph into something
even worse than what was rejected by the founders.
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within...
He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body
politic so that it can no longer resist."
ThroxxOfVron
"The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise. "
"I think that happened August 13, 1971 "
The entirety of the Western Hemisphere, not just 'The United States', was seized by invaders from Europe.
It is not an 'American' disease: it is a European disease and always was.
The indiginous populations of the Western Hemisphere were suystemaically and with forethought expropriated, ensalved, and slaughtered.
The indiginous persons that dwelled within the geographical domain that presently comprise the USA were still being margialized,
forcibly relocated, and murdered, long after the so-called 'American Civil War' had been decided.
...& As much as it is fashionable and/or politically expedient to vilify and blame the 'white' Europeans both for this history
and extenuate that history to inform the present state of affairs, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, and the Spanish ( most
eggregiously IMHO) were brutal and savage.
Look at the demographics of the Western Hemisphere.
If you have a shred of honesty you just can't hang the blame on 'whites', put it on a bumper sticker or a #shittyhashtagmeme
and go back to fucking off.
The disgusting fraud of Manifest Destiny was a fig leaf to hide the enormity of these crimes; but, they are most obviously
European crimes.
...& has Europe changed since the West was settled? Did Europeans even stop their warring amonsgst themselves?
Neither in Europe itself, nor in the settled West.
The Pacific Ocean wasn't named for calm waters.
It was named thusly because it is the natural geographic boundary where the mayhem and brutality and genocide ceased, if only
because the greedy and ruthless Europeans had run out of land in the Western Hemisphere with people upon it to plunder and murder...
El Vaquero
The US will collapse within the next decade if some serious new technology is not developed and the infrastructure to use it
is put in. There is too much debt and not enough material resources to continue growing the ponzi scheme that is our monetary
system at an exponential rate without something breaking. The question is, will it be at the end of this boom-bust cycle, or the
next? And if you look at what is being done on the financial front, which is the backbone of our neo-empire, that is shrinking.
The USD is slowly falling out of favor. There will come a point where that rapidly accelerates. We've been in a state of collapse
for 15 years.
Abitdodgie
ignorance is choice these days and Americans love it.
AetosAeros
Not only a choice, but the ONLY choice they are prepared to accept. Cognitive Dissonance at it's finest. And to make matters
worse, in only the best American fashion, we've asked if if it can be Supersized to go along with the Freedom Lies we feed ourselves.
I've seen the enemy, and....
But only if I'm willing to look in the mirror. Today's American doesn't look for what's right there in front of him/her, we
look for all the new 'Social Norms' that we aren't living up to. This article is completely on target, and I hope Roberts hasn't
decided to do any remodeling, cause too many idle nails guns make for a great Evening News sidebar mention.
Damnit all to hell.
Fun Facts
Fun Facts's picture
protocol #1 - Take control of the media and use it in propaganda for our plans
protocol #2 - Start fights between different races, classes and religions
... ... ...
protocol #13 - Use our media to create entertaining distractions
protocol #14 - Corrupt minds with filth and perversion
protocol #15 - Encourage people to spy on one another
Rubicon727
We educators began seeing this shift towards "me-ism" around 1995-6. Students from low to middle income families became either
apathetic towards "education" or followed their parent's sense of "entitlement." Simultaneously, the tech age captured both population's
attention. Respecting "an education" dwindled.
Fast forward to the present: following the 2007-8 crash, we noted clear divisions between low income vs middle/upper class
students based on their school behavior. Low to slightly middle income students brought to school family tensions and the turmoil
of parents losing their jobs. A rise in non-functioning students increase for teachers while the few well performing students
decline significantly.
Significant societal, financial shifts in America can always be observed in the student population.
reader2010
Mission Accomplished.
"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments,
when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business
a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility."
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
Lea
"The American people have been scientifically mis-educated".
You've got the answer there. The education system is the root cause of the problem. I'm from Europe, but if I've understood
correctly, the US education policy is to teach as little as possible to children, and expect them to fill in the gaps in the Universities,
past a certain age.
Only, it can't work. Children WILL learn, as childhood is the time when most informations are stored. If the schools don't
provide the knowledge, they will get it from the television, movies or games, with the consequences we can see: ignorance, obsession
with TV and movies stars, inability to differentiate life from movies, and over-simplistic reasoning (if any).
In Europe, we knew full well children learn fast and a lot, and that was why the schools focused on teaching them as much general
knowldge as possible before 18 years old, which is when - it is scientifically proved - the human brain learns best.
Recently, the EU leading countries have understood that having educated masses doesn't pay if you want to lead them like sheep,
so they are perfidiously trying to lower the standards... to the dismay of parents.
My advice, if I may presume to give any, would be to you USA people: teach your children what they won't learn at school, history,
geography, literature (US, European and even Asian, why not), a foreign language if you can, arts, music, etc; and keep them away
from the TV, movies and games.
And please adapt what you teach them to their age.
Refuse-Resist
Bang on! One anecdotal example: insisting that all 3rd graders use calculators "to learn" their multiplication tables. If I
didn't do flashcards at home with my kids they wouldn't know them. As somebody who majored in engineering and took many many advanced math courses, I always felt that knowing your 'times tables'
was essential to being successful in math.
What better way to dumb down otherwise intelligent children by creating a situation where the kid can't divide 32 by 4 without
a calculator. Trigonometry? Calculus? Linear Algebra? Fuggedaboudit.
doctor10
The CB's and MIC have Americans right where they want them. the consequences of 3-4 generations of force feeding Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
ThroxxOfVron
Some of US were never fucking asleep. Some of us were born with our eyes and minds open. We were, and are: hated, and reviled, and marginalized, and disowned for it. The intellectual repression was, and is, fucking insane and brutal. Words such as ethics and logic exist for what purpose? What are these expressions of? A bygone time? Abstractions?
Those that have tried to preserve their self awareness, empathy, and rationality have been ruthlessly systematically demeaned
and condemed for confronting our families, our culture and institutions. We all have a right to be angry and disgusted and distrustful of the people and institutions around us. I am very fucking angry, and disgusted, and distrustful of the people and institutions around me.
But I still have hope. Nothing lasts forever.. This self-righteous nation called The United States, this twisted fraud of a culture called America, is most dangerously overdue
for receipt of chastisment and retribution. It would be best if the citizenry of the United States taught themselves a lesson in stead of inviting Other nations and cultures
to educate them.
A serious self education may be tedious and imperfect; but, it would be far far cheaper than forcing someone to come all the
way over those oceans to educate Americans at the price they will be demanding for those lessons...
I do not require representation. I will speak my own mind and act of my own accord.
Every time other so-called Americans take a shit on me for thinking and speaking and acting differently it is a badge of honor
and a confirmation of my spiritual and intellectual liberty. They don't know it but they are all gonna run out of shit before
I run out of being free.
ThroxxOfVron
"The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise. "
"I think that happened August 13, 1971 "
The entirety of the Western Hemisphere, not just 'The United States', was seized by invaders from Europe. It is not an 'American' disease: it is a European disease and always was.
The indiginous populations of the Western Hemisphere were suystemaically and with forethought expropriated, ensalved, and slaughtered.
The indiginous persons that dwelled within the geographical domain that presently comprise the USA were still being margialized,
forcibly relocated, and murdered, long after the so-called 'American Civil War' had been decided.
...& As much as it is fashionable and/or politically expedient to vilify and blame the 'white' Europeans both for this history
and extenuate that history to inform the present state of affairs, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, and the Spanish ( most
eggregiously IMHO) were brutal and savage.
Look at the demographics of the Western Hemisphere. If you have a shred of honesty you just can't hang the blame on 'whites', put it on a bumper sticker or a #shittyhashtagmeme
and go back to fucking off. The disgusting fraud of Manifest Destiny was a fig leaf to hide the enormity of these crimes; but, they are most obviously
European crimes....& has Europe changed since the West was settled? Did Europeans even stop their warring amongst themselves?
See for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe
That would be: Hell NO. Neither in Europe itself, nor in the settled West. The Pacific Ocean wasn't named for calm waters. It was named thusly because it is the natural geographic boundary where the mayhem and brutality and genocide ceased, if only
because the greedy and ruthless Europeans had run out of land in the Western Hemisphere with people upon it to plunder and murder...
Mini-Me
"The loss of character means the loss of liberty and the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise."
I agree with the first part. As for the latter, "government," by definition, is a criminal enterprise. It doesn't start out
pure as the driven snow and then change into something nefarious over time. Its very essence requires the initiation of violence
or its threat. Government without the gun in the ribs is a contradiction.
The fact that those in power got more votes than the losing criminals does not magically morph these people into paragons of
virtue. They are almost without exception thoroughly deranged human beings. Lying is second nature to them. Looting is part of
the job description. Killing is an end to their means: the acquisition and aggrandizement of power over others, no matter how
much death and destruction results.
These people are sick bastards. To expect something virtuous from them after an endless string of wanton slaughter, theft and
abuse, is simply wishful thinking.
Jack Burton
I agree with Paul Craig Roberts. He asks "Why" and "How." Well, Paul, here is my answer. Decades of Public Education and over
50 years of mass media monopoly. In an age where FOX is the top rated News station and CNN is considered liberal? Where kids in
Public school are offered Chocolate milk and frozen pizza for school breakfast before going to class rooms with 30-40 kids. When
Texas political appointees chose school text book content for the nation? A nation where service has ended, replaced with volunteer
soldiers signing up for pay and benefits, instead of just serving as service, like we did in the 70's?
Paul Craig Roberts points out the police war against the people. That comes right from the very top, orders filter down to
street cops. Street Cops are recruited from groups of young men our fathers generation would have labeled mental! But now they
are hired across the board, shaved heads, tatoos, and a code of silence and Cops Above Justice.
Schools
Media
Crazed Cops
And a corporate owned government.
The people have allowed the elites to rule in their place, never bothering to question the two fake candidates we are allowed
to vote for.
Jtrillian
There is a difference between IGNORANCE and STUPIDITY. As Ron White said, "YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID". In todays information age, ignorance is a choice.
Part of the problem that no one is talking about or addressing is the population explosion. And it's not linear. Those who
are the least educated, fully dependent others for their survival (welfare), the most complacent, and often with violent criminal
records are breeding the fastest.
Evolution is not guaranteed. It can be argued that the apathy we experience today is a sign of the human race de-evolving.
It takes a certain amount of cognitive ability to observe and question what is going on.
Further, the society we have created where "60 is the new 40" creates very little time to pay attention to what is going on
in the world. Many people rely on mainstream media which is not really news any more. When six corporations control more than
90% of the news, it's the message of the corporate elite that we are fed. This becomes painfully obvious when you start turning
to other sources for information like social media and independent news. Mainstream media today is full of opinion bias - injecting
opinion as though it were fact. They also appeal to the lowest commmon denominator by focusing on emotionally charged topics and
words rather than boring facts. Finally, the mainstream media is extremely guilty of propaganda by omission, ignoring important
events altogether or only presenting one side of the story as is being done with regard to ISIS, Syria, and Ukraine today. People
who watch the mainstream media have no idea that the US played a significant role in arming ISIS and aided in their rise to power.
They have no idea that it was likely ISIS that used chemical weapons in Syria. They have no idea that the US has propped up real
life neo nazis in high government positions in Ukraine. And they have ignored the continuing Fukushima disaster that is STILL
dumping millions of gallons of radioactive water into the ocean every single day.
To sum up, democracies only work when people pay attention and participate. People are either too stupid, too overworked, are
are looking to the wrong sources for information.
Until we break up mainstream media, remove incentives for those who cannot even care for themselves to stop breeding, and make
fundamental changes to our society that affords people the time to focus on what is happening in the world, it will only get worse.
Much worse.
serotonindumptruck
A dying empire is like a wounded, cornered animal.
It will lash out uncontrollably and without remorse in a futile effort to save itself from certain death.
Enough Already
The problem is that we have no "Constitution." That is a fable. The constitution of the separation of powers has been undermined
from almost day one. Witness the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
In the centuries since then, there has been no "separation of powers." Marbury v Madison (1803) gave the Supreme Court the
right to "decide" what the "law" was. Although, only in the 20th century did the "Supreme" court really start "legislating" from
the bench.
We're just peons to the Overall Federal Power; the three "separate" parts of the federal government have been in collusion
from the first. But like all empires, this one is in the final stage of collapse; it has just gotten too big.
gswifty
Yes sir. Globalization has failed us. The infinite growth paradigm has failed us, as we knew it would. Castro's Cuba, based
in a localized agrarian economy, is looking pretty good about now. Localization is the only way back to sustainability.
napples
Books? Who said books? You mean reading books? Let me throw a couple out there: I read 'The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America' last year, it was published 50+ years ago by a very recommended
writer and accomplished historian. Boorstin's observations are truer today and even more concerning thanks to our modern, ubiquitous
"connectivity". http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/159979.The_Image
Another by Boorstin, The Discoverers was my fav, like Bryson's 'Short History' on steroids:
I'm currently trying to fathom all of the historical implications of the claims Menzies is making in his book '1434', where
apparently everything I learned about history is a lie. While he's making a lot of claims(hoping some sticks?) I'm not truly convinced.
It is a very good, believable thought experiment. It almost makes perfect sense given the anglo/euro history of deceit & dishonesty,
but I digress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies
Adorno famously pointed out in 1940 that the "Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse." It takes 75 years for someone
such as PCR to reiterate. He doesn't blame the masses because he simply points out the fact that Americans are completely
ignorant and blindly believe anything MSM spoon-fed to them.
George Orwell once remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In
the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of what
Adorno called Culture Industry and MSM, no matter what. Today we are indeed in another Dark Age
PoasterToaster
"Americans" are not one person. Individuals are not fungible. Reasoning from the "average American" leads to false conclusions.
reader2010
Jacques Derrida says, "The individualism of technological civilization relies precisely on a misunderstanding of the unique
self. It is the individualism of a role and not of a person. In other words it might be called the individualism of a masque or
persona, a character [personnage] and not a person." There are many Americans but they all play the same role in the Pursuit of
Happiness, aka wage slaves, career slaves, debt slaves, information junkies, and passive consumers.
Moccasin
Paul Craig Roberts believe that the people are capable of creating a better and more just society. Instead the people have
voted against their own best interest and overwhelmingly believe the propaganda.
When do the people or the society take responsibility for its greater good or own the crimes of those they put into power?
Blaming the aristocracy or the oligarchs seems like a scapegoat when the people have never stood up to the corruption in a
cohesive or concerted way. imho, After a few generations of abuse and corruption the people need to take responsibility for their
future. I expect that most will just buy into the charade and live the lie, on that basis as a society we are doomed to live in
a corporatocracy fascist state.
Aldous Huxley called it a scientific dictatorship, Edward Bernays referred to us as a herd.
Moccasin
In the USA being white, monied and having the capacity to afford a good education is privileged. To his credit he speaks to
the greater population, the 'average citizen' and not the plutocratic class.
MSorciere
What we have is the result of conditioning and commoditizing a population. The country is filled with consumers, not citizens.
Teach the acquisition of money and goods as the main goal and individualism as the only acceptable social unit. We end up with
a nation of insatiable sociopaths, ruled by power-hungry psychopaths.
Divisive politics, jackbooted authority from the DC scumpond down to the cop on the beat, the constant preaching of the cult
of the individual as a sustitute for true liberty... all of these have served to destroy a sense of community and decentness between
Americans.
The ONLY thing that could threaten the ruling class is a banding together of the people - in large numbers. 'They' have purposefully
and effectively quashed that.
TrulyStupid
Shifting responsibility to the usual suspects is simply a manifestation of the American moral collapse. Man up and do some
self evaluation.
T-NUTZ
"what I have noticed for many years is that the American people have lost, in addition to their own sense of truth and falsity,
any sense of mercy and justice for other peoples"
Unfortunately, Paul, the American people have lost any sense of mercy and justice for their own people.
Painful as it may be, we need to rationally look at US history/society. The nascent US was formed by stealing land from the
native population and using human capital (read African Slaves) to generate wealth (it took a civil war with circa 500K casualties
to stop this- one could argue the US "civil war" never ended). More recently, the US has been almost continuously at war since
1940, we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Currently, the US/NATO war theater extends from the Levant, to Caspian Basin, Persian
Gulf, China Sea, Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa (Saudi/US war on Yemen), the Maghreb and E Europe and Russian Border.
"... the transformation of government into a criminal enterprise ..."
Governments were created by the history of warfare, which was always organized crime
developing on larger and larger scales. In the context, the greater problem is that people like Paul Craig Roberts are
reactionary revolutionaries, who provide relatively good analysis, followed by bogus "solutions" based upon impossible ideals.
The "American People" are the victims of the best scientific brainwashing that money could buy. As Cognitive Dissonance
has previously stated on Zero Hedge: "The absolute best controlled opposition is one that doesn't know they
are controlled."
It is practically impossible to exaggerate the degree to which that is so, on such profound levels, because of the ways that
most people want to continue to believe that false fundamental dichotomies and impossible ideals are
valid, and should be applied to their problems, despite that those mistaken ideas cause the opposite to happen in the real world,
because those who promote those kinds of false fundamental dichotomies and their related impossible ideals, ARE "controlled
opposition."
Rather, the place to begin would be by recognizing that all human beings and civilizations must necessarily operate as entropic
pumps of energy flows, which necessarily are systems of organized lies operating robberies. Everyone has some power to rob, and
power to kill to back that up. Governments assembled and channeled those powers. There was never a time when governments were
not organized crime. There could never be any time when governments were not organized crime. The only things that exist are the
dynamic equilibria between different systems of organized lies operating robberies. Those dynamic equilibria have become extremely
unbalanced due the degree that the best organized gangs of criminals were able to control their opposition.
Paul Craig Roberts, as well as pretty well all of the rest of the content published on Zero Hedge, are presentations
of various kinds of controlled opposition groups, most of which do not recognize that they are being controlled by the language
that they use, and the philosophy of science that they take for granted. THAT is the greatest failure of the American People,
as well as most of the rest of the people everywhere else. They believe in false fundamental dichotomies, and the related impossible
ideals, and therefore, their bogus "solutions" always necessarily backfire badly, and cause the opposite to happen in the real
world.
After all, the overwhelming vast majority of the American People operate as the controlled opposition to the best organized
gangs of criminals that most control the government of the USA. Therefore, the FAILURES of the American People are far more profound
and problematic than what is superficially presented by guys like Paul Craig Roberts, and also, of course, his suggested bogus
"solutions" are similarly superficial.
The ONLY things which can actually exist are the dynamic equilibrium between different systems of organized lies operating
robberies. The degree to which the American People, as well as most of the rest of the people in the world, FAIL to understand
that is the degree to which they enable the best organized gangs of criminals to control them, due to the vast majority of people
being members of various controlled opposition groups. Controlled opposition always presents relatively superficial analysis of
the political problems, which are superficially correct. However, they then follow that up with similarly superficial "solutions."
Therefore, magical words are bandied about, that express their dualities, through false fundamental dichotomies, and the related
impossible ideals.
Governments must exist because organized crime must exist. Better governments could be achieved through
better organized crime. However, mostly what get presented in the public places are the utter bullshit of the biggest
bullies, who dominate the society because they were the best organized gangs of criminals, who were also able to dominate their
apparent opposition. Therefore, instead of more realistic, better balancing of the dynamic equilibria between different systems
of organized lies operating robberies, we get runaway developments of the best organized gangs of criminals being able to control
governments, whose only apparent opposition is controlled to stay within the same bullshit frame of reference regarding everything
that was actually happening.
The mainline of the FAILURES of the American People have been the ways that the international bankers were able to recapture
control over the American public "money" supply. After that, everything else was leveraged up, through the funding of the political
processes, schools, and mass media, etc., being more and more dominated by that fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting
system. Of course, that FAILURE has now become more than 99% ... Therefore, no political possible ways appear to exist to pull
out of that flaming spiral nose dive, since we have already gone beyond the event horizon into that social black hole.
Most of the content on Zero Hedge which is based upon recognizing that set of problems still acts as controlled opposition
in that regard too. Therefore, the bogus "solutions" here continue to deliberately ignore that money is necessarily measurement
backed by murder. Instead of accepting that, the controlled opposition groups like to promote various kinds of "monetary reforms."
However, meanwhile, we are actually already headed towards the established debt slavery systems having generated debt insanities,
which are going to provoke death insanities.
In that context, the only realistic resolutions to the real problems would necessarily have to be monetary revolutions,
that may emerge out of the future situations, after the runaway debt insanities have provoked death insanities. Indeed, the only
genuine solutions to the problems are to develop different death control systems, to back up different debt control systems, which
must necessarily be done within the context that governments are the biggest forms of organized crime, controlled by the best
organized gangs of criminals.
The various controlled opposition groups do not want to face those social facts. Rather, they continue to want to believe in
the dualities expressed as false fundamental dichotomies and the related impossible ideals, which is their greatest overall FAILURE.
In my view, the article above by Roberts contained a lot of nostalgic nonsense. There was never a time when there
were any governments which were not based on the applications of the principles and methods of organized crime, and there
could never be any time in the future when that could be stopped from being the case.
The greatest FAILURE of the American People, as well as most of the rest of the world's people, has been to become so brainwashed
to believe in the biggest bullies' bullshit world view, that there is no significant opposition that is not controlled by thinking
inside of the box of that bullshit. The government did NOT transform into a criminal enterprise. The government was necessarily
ALWAYS a criminal enterprise. That criminal enterprise has become more and more severely UNBALANCED due to the FAILURE
of the people to understand that they were actually members of an organized crime gang, called their country. Instead, they were
more and more scientifically brainwashed to believe in bullshit about everything, including their country.
The ONLY connection between human laws and the laws of nature is the ability to back up lies with violence. The development
of the government of the USA has been the developed of integrated systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence. Those
systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS have been able to become more extremely unbalanced because there is almost nothing which is publicly
significant surrounding that core of organized crime but various controlled opposition groups.
Of course, it seems politically impossible for my recommendations to actually happen within the foreseeable future, as the
current systems of debt slavery drive through debt insanities to become death insanities, but nevertheless, the only theoretically
valid ideas to raise to respond to the real problems would have to based upon a series of intellectual scientific revolutions.
However, since we have apparently run out of time to go through those sorts of paradigm shifts sufficiently, we are stuck in the
deepening ruts of political problems which guys like Roberts correctly present to be the case
... HOWEVER, ROBERTS, LIKE ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE, CONTINUE TO PRESUME UPON DUALITIES, AND THEREFORE,
HAVE THEIR MECHANISMS REGARDING "SOLUTIONS" ABSURDLY BACKWARDS.
Rather, we should start with the concept of SUBTRACTION, which then leads to robbery. We should start with the recognition
that governments are necessarily, by definition, the biggest forms of organized crime. Governments did NOT transform
into being that. Governments were always that. The political problems we have now are due to the best organized gangs
of criminals, which currently are primarily the biggest gangsters, which can rightly be referred to as the banksters, having dominated
all aspects of the funding of politics, enough to capture control over all sociopolitical institutions, so that the American People
would more and more be subjected to the best scientific brainwashing that money could buy, which was built on top of thousands
of years of previous history of Neolithic Civilizations being based on backing up lies with violence.
The runaway systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS, or the integrated systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, that more
and more dominate the lives of the American People are due to the applications of the methods of organized crime, and could not
be effectively counter-balanced in any other ways. However, the standing social situation is that there is no publicly significant
opposition that is not controlled to stay within the same frame of reference of the biggest bullies, which is now primarily the
frame of reference of the banksters. Indeed, to the degree to which people's lives are controlled by the monetary system, they
are debt slaves. Moreover, the degree to which they do not understand, and do not want to understand, that money is necessarily
measurement backed by murder, then they think like controlled opposition groups, who have their mechanisms absurdly backwards,
when they turn from their superficial analysis of what the political problems, to then promote their superficial solutions of
those problems.
I AGREE that "Americans need to face the facts." However, those facts are that citizens are members
of an organized crime gang, called their country. "Their" country is currently controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals.
However, there are no genuine resolutions for those problems other than to develop better organized crime. Since the controlled
opposition groups that are publicly significant do not admit any of the deeper levels of the scientific facts regarding human
beings and civilizations operating as entropic pumps of energy flows, but rather, continue to perceive all of that in the most
absurdly backward ways possible, the current dynamic equilibria between the different systems of organized lies operating robberies
continue to become more and more extremely UNBALANCED.
In the case of the article above, Roberts does NOT "face the facts" that governments were
always forms of organized crime, and must necessarily be so, because human beings must live as entropic pumps of energy
flows. Rather, Roberts tends to illustrate how the controlled opposition takes for granted certain magical words and phrases,
such as "Liberty" or "Constitution," that have no adequate operational definitions to connect them to the material
world.
We are living inside of an oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, which has applied the progress in science primarily to become
better at backing up lies with violence, while refusing to allow scientific methods to admit and address how and why that has
been what has actually happened. Therefore, almost all of the language that we use to communicate, as well as almost
all of the philosophy of science that we take for granted, was based on the biggest bullies' bullshit, which is now primarily
manifested as the banksters' bullshit, as that bullshit developed in America to become ENFORCED FRAUDS.
ALL of the various churches, corporations, and countries are necessarily various systems of organized lies operating robberies.
Those which are the biggest now were historically the ones that were the best at doing that. The INTENSE PARADOXES are due to
human systems necessarily being organized lies operating robberies, wherein the greatest social successfulness has been achieved
by those who were the best professional liars and immaculate hypocrites. That flows throughout ALL of the established systems,
which are a core of organized crime, surrounded by controlled opposition groups.
The degree to which the American People, as well as the rest of the world's people, have been more and more scientifically
brainwashed to believe in bullshit about governments in particular, and human beings and civilizations in general, is the degree
to which the established systems based upon ENFORCED FRAUDS are headed towards some series of psychotic breakdowns. For all practical
purposes, it is politically impossible to get enough people to stop acting like incompetent political idiots, and instead start
acting more like competent citizens, because they do not understand, and moreover have been conditioned to not want to understand
that governments are necessarily organized crime.
Roberts ironically illustrated the deeper nature of the political problems that he also shares, when he perceives that governments
have somehow transformed into being criminal enterprise, when governments were always necessarily criminal enterprises.
Similarly, with those who recognize that, but then promote the impossible solutions based upon somehow stopping that
from being the case, which is as absurdly backwards as stopping human beings from operating as entropic pumps of energy
flows, which then also presumes that it would be possible to stop human civilizations from being entropic pumps of energy
flows.
Rather, the deeper sorts of intellectual scientific revolutions that we should go through require becoming much more
critical of the language that we use to communicate with, and more critical about the philosophy of science that we presumed was
correct. Actually, we were collectively brainwashed to believe in the biggest bullies' bullshit, which is as absurdly backwards
as it could possibly be. However, due to the collective FAILURES of people to understand that, as reflected by the ways that the
core of organized crime is surrounded by nothing which is publicly significant than layers of controlled opposition, there are
no reasonable ways to doubt that the established debt slavery systems will continue to drive even worse debt insanities, which
will provoke much worse death insanities. Therefore, to be more realistic about the foreseeable future, the development of new
death control systems will emerge out of the context of crazy collapses into chaos, wherein the runaway death insanities provide
the possible opportunities for new death controls to emerge out of that situation.
Of course, the about 99% FAILURE of the American People to want to understand anything that I have outlined above
indicates that the foreseeable future for subsequent generations shall not too likely be catalyzed transformations
towards enough people better understanding their political problems, in order to better resolve those problems. Rather, what I
mostly expect is for the psychotic breakdowns of the previous systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS to give opportunities to some possible
groups of controlled opposition to take advantage of that, to perhaps emerge as the new version of professional liars and immaculate
hypocrites, who will be able to operate some new version of organized lies, operating robberies, who may mostly still get away
with being some modified versions of still oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, due to social success still being based upon the
best available professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, who were able to survive through those transformations, so that the
new systems arise from some of the seeds of the old systems.
At the present time, it is extremely difficult to imagine how the human species could possibly reconcile progress in
physical science by surpassing that with progress in political science. Rather, what mostly exists now is the core of
organized crime, which gets away with spouting the bullshit about itself, such as how the banksters dominate the mass media, and
the lives of everyone else who depend upon the established monetary system (which is dominated by the current ways that governments
ENFORCE FRAUDS by privately controlled banks), while that core of organized crime has no publicly significant opposition that
is not controlled by the ways that they think, which ways stay within the basic bullshit world view, as promoted by the biggest
bullies for thousands of years, and as more and more scientifically promoted to brainwash the vast majority of people to believe
in that kind of bullshit so completely that it mostly does not occur to them that they are doing that, and certainly almost never
occurs to them that they are doing that in the most profoundly absurd and backward ways possible.
That is how and why it is possible for an author like Roberts to correctly point out the ways in which the government of the
USA is transforming into being more blatantly based on organized crime ... HOWEVER, Roberts is not willing and able to go through
deeper levels of intellectual scientific revolutions, in order to recognize how and why governments were always necessarily manifestations
of organized crime. Therefore, as is typically the case, Roberts does not recognize how ironically he recommends that Americans
should "face the facts," while he himself does not fully do so.
The whole history of Neolithic Civilizations was social pyramid systems based on being able to back up lies with violence,
becoming more sophisticated systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, which currently manifest as the globalized
electronic frauds of the banksters, were are backed up by the governments (that those banksters effectively control) having atomic
bombs. Those are the astronomically amplified magnitudes of the currently existing combined money/murder systems. Therefore, it
appears to be politically impossible at the present time to develop better governments, due to the degree that almost everyone
is either a member of the core groups of organized crime, or members of the surrounding layers of groups of controlled opposition,
both of which want to stay within the same overall bullshit frame of reference, because, so far, their lives have been socially
successful by being professional liars and immaculate hypocrites.
Ironically, I doubt that someone like Roberts, or pretty well everyone else whose material is published on Zero Hedge
is able and willing to recognize the degree to which they are actually controlled opposition. Indeed, even more ironically, as
I have repeated before, even Cognitive Dissonance, when he previously stated on Zero Hedge:"The
absolute best controlled opposition is one that doesn't know they are controlled." DOES NOT "GET IT" regarding the
degree to which he too is controlled opposition, even while superficially attempting to recognize and struggle with that situation.
(Indeed, of course, that includes me too, since I am still communicating using the English language, which was the natural language
that most developed to express the biggest bullies' bullshit world view.)
Overall, I REPEAT, the deeper problems are due to progress in physical science, NOT being surpassed by progress in
political science. Instead, while there EXIST globalized electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs, practically nothing
regarding the ways of thinking that made that science and those technologies possible has found any significant expression through
political science, because political science would have to go through even more profound paradigm shifts within itself in order
to do that.
The INTENSE PARADOXES continue to be the manifestation of the oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, that deliberately refuses
to become any more genuinely scientific about itself. Therefore, the banksters have been able to pay for the best scientific brainwashing
that money could buy, for generation after generation, in order to more and more brainwash most of the American People to believe
in the banksters' bullshit world view. While there exist electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs, practically nothing regarding
the physical science paradigm shifts that made that possible have even the slightest degree of public appreciation within the
realms of politics today, which are almost totally dominated by the biggest bullies' bullshit world view, despite that being as
absurdly backwards as possible, while the controlled opposition groups, mostly in the form of old-fashioned religions and ideologies,
continue to stay within that same bullshit world view, and adamantly refuse to change their perceptual paradigms regarding political
problems.
However, I REPEAT, the issues we face are NOT that governments have transformed to become criminal enterprises,
but that governments were always necessarily criminal enterprises, which had the power to legalized their own lies, and
then back those lies up with legalized violence. Thereby, the best organized criminals, the international bankers, as
the biggest gangsters, or the banksters, were able to apply the methods of organized crime through the political processes. Meanwhile,
the only "opposition" that was allowed to be publicly significant was controlled, to basically stay within the same bullshit world
view, which is what Roberts has done in his series of articles, as well as what is almost always presented in the content published
on Zero Hedge.
The NEXT LEVEL of "the need to face the facts" is to recognize that the political economy is based
upon ENFORCED FRAUDS, or systems of debt slavery backed by wars based on deceits. However, the NEXT LEVEL "the need
to face the facts" is the that the only possible changes are to change the dynamic equilibria between the different
systems of organized lies operating robberies, i.e., change those ENFORCED FRAUDS, in ways which CAN NOT STOP
THOSE FROM STILL BEING ENFORCED FRAUDS, because of the degree to which money is necessarily measurement backed by murder.
For the American People, as well as the rest of the world's people, to stop being such dismal FAILURES would require them to
become more competent citizens. However, at the present time they appear to be totally unable to do that, because they are unwilling
to go through the profound paradigm shifts that it would take them to become more competent citizens inside of world where there
exist globalized electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs. The vast majority of the American People would not like
to go through the severe cognitive dissonance that would be required, to not only recognize that "their" government was a criminal
enterprise, but that it also must be, and that they too must necessarily be members of that organized crime gang. However, without
that degree of perceptual paradigm shifts of the political problems, then enough of the American People could not become more
competent citizens.
Somehow, most people continue to count on themselves never having to think about how and why progress was achieved in physical
science, by going through series of profound paradigm shifts in the ways that we perceived the world. Most people continue to
presume that it is not necessary for their perception of politics to go through profound paradigm shifts, that surpass those which
have already been achieved in physical science. We continue to live in an oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, that employs science
and technology to become better at being dishonest and violent, but does not apply science and technology to "face
the facts" about that scientific dictatorship as a whole.
At the present time, technologies which have become trillions of times more capable and powerful are primarily used as special effects within the context of repeating the same old-fashioned, stupid social stories, such as promoted by the biggest
bullies, and their surrounding controlled opposition groups. Ironically, especially when it comes to politics, that tends to manifest
the most atavistic throwbacks to old-fashioned religions and ideologies being relied upon to propose bogus "solutions," despite
that those kinds of social stories adamantly refuse to change their paradigms in light of the profound paradigms shifts which
have been achieved in physical science.
The article above was another illustration of the ways that the typical reactionary revolutionaries, Black Sheeple, or controlled
opposition groups, respond to recognizing the more and more blatant degrees to which there has been an accelerating "transformation of government into a criminal enterprise." THE PROBLEM IS THAT THEY CONTINUE TO STAY WITHIN
THE SAME OLD-FASHIONED BULLSHIT-BASED FRAME OF REFERENCE, INSTEAD, AROUND AND AROUND WE GO, STUCK IN
THE SAME DEEPENING RUTS, since they do NOT more fully "face the facts" regarding how and why the only
realistic solutions to the real problems would require developing better organized crime. INSTEAD, they
continue to promote the same dualities based upon false fundamental dichotomies, and the associate bogus "solutions" based upon
impossible ideals ...
Given that overall situation, that there there almost nothing which is publicly significant than the core of organized crime,
surrounded by controlled opposition groups, I see no reasonable hopes for the foreseeable material future of a civilization controlled
by ENFORCED FRAUDS, since there is no publicly possible ways to develop better dynamic equilibria between the different systems
of organized lies operating robberies, since the biggest forms of doing that were most able to get away with pretending that they
are not doing that, which was facilitated by their controlled opposition promoting the opinions that nobody should do that, while
actually everyone must be doing that.
Roberts' article above, to me, was another typical example of superficially correct analysis, which implies some bogus "solutions"
because those are based upon the same superficiality. It is NOT good enough to recognize "transformation of government
into a criminal enterprise," unless one goes through deeper levels of analysis regarding how and why that is what
actually exists, and then, one should continue to be consistent with that deeper analysis when one turns to proposing genuine
solutions to those problems, namely, I REPEAT THAT the only realistic resolutions to the real political
problems requires the transformation of government into a better organized criminal enterprise, which
ideally should be based upon enough citizens who are competent enough to understand that they are members of an organized crime
gang, which should assert themselves to make sure that their country becomes better organized crime.
Nice illustration of ideologically based ostrakism as practiced in Academia: "Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could
be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People
- powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don't criticize
other insiders."
Notable quotes:
"... A more probable school of thought is that this game was created as a con and a cover for the status quo capitalist establishment to indulge themselves in their hard money and liquidity fetishes, consequences be damned. ..."
"... The arguments over internal and external consistency of models is just a convenient misdirection from what policy makers are willing to risk and whose interests they are willing to risk policy decisions for ..."
"... Mathematical masturbations are just a smoke screen used to conceal a simple fact that those "economists" are simply banking oligarchy stooges. Hired for the specific purpose to provide a theoretical foundation for revanschism of financial oligarchy after New Deal run into problems. Revanschism that occurred in a form of installing neoliberal ideology in the USA in exactly the same role which Marxism was installed in the USSR. With "iron hand in velvet gloves" type of repressive apparatus to enforce it on each and every university student and thus to ensure the continues, recurrent brainwashing much like with Marxism on the USSR universities. ..."
"... To ensure continuation of power of "nomenklatura" in the first case and banking oligarchy in the second. Connections with reality be damned. Money does not smell. ..."
"... Economic departments fifth column of neoliberal stooges is paid very good money for their service of promoting and sustaining this edifice of neoliberal propaganda. Just look at Greg Mankiw and Rubin's boys. ..."
"... "Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People - powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don't criticize other insiders." ..."
At the risk of oversimplifying might it not be as simple as stronger leanings towards IS-LM and kind are indicative of a bias
towards full employment and stronger leanings towards DSGE, microfoundations, and kind are indicative of a bias towards low inflation?
IN general I consider over-simplification a fault, if and only if, it is a rigidly adhered to final position. This is to say
that over-simplification is always a good starting point and never a good ending point. If in the end your problem was simple
to begin with, then the simplified answer would not be OVER-simplified anyway. It is just as bad to over-complicate a simple problem
as it is to over-simplify a complex problem. It is easier to build complexity on top of a simple foundation than it is to extract
simplicity from a complex foundation.
A lot of the Chicago School initiative into microfoundations and DSGE may have been motivated by a desire to bind Keynes in
a NAIRU straight-jacket. Even though economic policy making is largely done just one step at a time then that is still one step
too much if it might violate rentier interests.
Darryl FKA Ron -> Barry...
There are two possible (but unlikely) schools of (generously attributed to as) thought for which internal consistency might
take precedence over external consistency. One such school wants to consider what would be best in a perfect world full of perfect
people and then just assume that is best for the real world just to let the chips fall where they may according to the faults
and imperfections of the real world. The second such school is the one whose eyes just glaze over mesmerized by how over their
heads they are and remain affraid to ask any question lest they appear stupid.
A more probable school of thought is that this game was created as a con and a cover for the status quo capitalist establishment
to indulge themselves in their hard money and liquidity fetishes, consequences be damned.
Richard H. Serlin
Consistency sounds so good, Oh, of course we want consistency, who wouldn't?! But consistent in what way? What exactly do you
mean? Consistent with reality, or consistent with people all being superhumans? Which concept is usually more useful, or more
useful for the task at hand?
Essentially, they want models that are consistent with only certain things, and often because this
makes their preferred ideology look far better. They want models, typically, that are consistent with everyone in the world having
perfect expertise in every subject there is, from finance to medicine to engineering, perfect public information, and perfect
self-discipline, and usually on top, frictionless and perfectly complete markets, often perfectly competitive too.
But a big thing to note is that perfectly consistent people means a level of perfection in expertise, public information, self-discipline,
and "rationality", that's extremely at odds with how people actually are. And as a result, this can make the model extremely misleading
if it's interpreted very literally (as so often it is, especially by freshwater economists), or taken as The Truth, as Paul Krugman
puts it.
You get things like the equity premium "puzzle", which involves why people don't invest more in stocks when the risk-adjusted
return appears to usually be so abnormally good, and this "puzzle" can only be answered with "consistency", that people are all
perfectly expert in finance, with perfect information, so they must have some mysterious hidden good reason. It can't be at all
that it's because 65% of people answered incorrectly when asked how many reindeer would remain if Santa had to lay off 25% of
his eight reindeer ( http://richardhserlin.blogspot.com/2013/12/surveys-showing-massive-ignorance-and.html ).
Yes, these perfect optimizer consistency models can give useful insights, and help to see what is best, what we can do better,
and they can, in some cases, be good as approximations. But to say they should be used only, and interpreted literally, is, well,
inconsistent with optimal, rational behavior -- of the economist using them.
Richard H. Serlin -> Richard H. Serlin...
Of course, unless the economist using them is doing so to mislead people into supporting his libertarian/plutocratic ideology.
dilbert dogbert
As an old broken down mech engineer, I wonder why all the pissing and moaning about micro foundations vs aggregation. In strength
of materials equations that aggregate properties work quite well within the boundaries of the questions to be answered. We all
know that at the level of crystals, materials have much complexity. Even within crystals there is deeper complexities down to
the molecular levels. However, the addition of quantum mechanics adds no usable information about what materials to build a bridge
with.
But, when working at the scale of the most advanced computer chips quantum mechanics is required. WTF! I guess in economics
there is no quantum mechanics theories or even reliable aggregation theories.
Poor economists, doomed to argue, forever, over how many micro foundations can dance on the head of a pin.
RGC -> dilbert dogbert...
Endless discussions about how quantum effects aggregate to produce a material suitable for bridge building crowd out discussions
about where and when to build bridges. And if plutocrats fund the endless discussions, we get the prominent economists we have
today.
Darryl FKA Ron -> dilbert dogbert...
"...I guess in economics there is no quantum mechanics theories or even reliable aggregation theories..."
[I guess it depends upon what your acceptable confidence interval on reliability is. Most important difference that controls
all the domain differences between physical science and economics is that underlying physical sciences there is a deterministic
methodology for which probable error is merely a function of the inaccuracy in input metrics WHEREAS economics models are incomplete
probabilistic estimating models with no ability to provide a complete system model in a full range of circumstances.
YOu can design and build a bridge to your load and span requirements with alternative models for various designs with confidence
and highly effective accuracy repeatedly. No ecomomic theory, model, or combination of models and theories was ever intended to
be used as the blueprint for building an economy from the foundation up.
With all the formal trappings of economics the only effective usage is to decide what should be done in a given set of predetermined
circumstance to reach some modest desired effect. Even that modest goal is exposed to all kinds of risks inherent in assumptions,
incomplete information, externalities, and so on that can produce errors of uncertain potential bounds.
Nonetheless, well done economics can greatly reduce the risks encountered in the random walk of economics policy making. So
much so is this true, that the bigger questions in macro-economics policy making is what one is willing to risk and for whom.
The arguments over internal and external consistency of models is just a convenient misdirection from what policy makers
are willing to risk and whose interests they are willing to risk policy decisions for.]
Darryl FKA Ron -> Peter K....
unless you have a model which maps the real world fairly closely like quantum mechanics.
[You set a bar too high. Macro models at best will tell you what to do to move the economy in the direction that you seek to
go. They do not even ocme close to the notion of a theory of everything that you have in physics, even the theory of every little
thing that is provided by quantum mechanics. Physics is an empty metaphor for economics. Step one is to forgo physics envy in
pursuit of understanding suitable applications and domain constraints for economics models.
THe point is to reach a decision and to understand cause and effect directions. All precision is in the past and present. The
future is both imprecise and all that there is that is available to change.
For the most part an ounce of common sense and some simple narrative models are all that are essential for making those policy
decisions in and of themselves. HOWEVER, nation states are not ruled by economist philosopher kings and in the process of concensus
decision making by (little r)republican governments then human language is a very imprecise vehicle for communicating logic and
reason with respect to the management of complex systems. OTOH, mathematics has given us a universal language for communicating
logic and reason that is understood the same by everyone that really understands that language at all. Hence mathematical models
were born for the economists to write down their own thinking in clear precise terms and check their own work first and then share
it with others so equipped to understand the language of mathematics. Krugman has said as much many times and so has any and every
economist worth their salt.]
likbez -> Syaloch...
I agree with Pgl and PeterK. Certain commenters like Darryl seem convinced that the Chicago School (if not all of econ) is driven
by sinister, class-based motives to come up justifications for favoring the power elite over the masses. But based on what I've
read, it seems pretty obvious that the microfoundation guys just got caught up in their fancy math and their desire to produce
more elegant, internally consistent models and lost sight of the fact that their models didn't track reality.
That's completely wrong line of thinking, IMHO.
Mathematical masturbations are just a smoke screen used to conceal a simple fact that those "economists" are simply banking
oligarchy stooges. Hired for the specific purpose to provide a theoretical foundation for revanschism of financial oligarchy after
New Deal run into problems. Revanschism that occurred in a form of installing neoliberal ideology in the USA in exactly the same
role which Marxism was installed in the USSR.
With "iron hand in velvet gloves" type of repressive apparatus to enforce it on each and every university student and thus to
ensure the continues, recurrent brainwashing much like with Marxism on the USSR universities.
To ensure continuation of power of "nomenklatura" in the first case and banking oligarchy in the second. Connections with reality
be damned. Money does not smell.
Economic departments fifth column of neoliberal stooges is paid very good money for their service of promoting and sustaining
this edifice of neoliberal propaganda. Just look at Greg Mankiw and Rubin's boys.
But the key problem with neoliberalism is that the cure is worse then disease. And here mathematical masturbations are very
handy as a smoke screen to hide this simple fact.
likbez -> likbez...
Here is how Rubin's neoliberal boy Larry explained the situation to Elizabeth Warren:
"Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could
be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People
- powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don't criticize
other insiders."
"... During the two decades following the neoliberal economists' take-over of Western governments in the 1980s, many felt that the almost mystical terms of economics - such as derivatives, hedging, leverage, contangos, etc - were beyond the understanding of most ordinary people. ..."
"... They pursued them as a matter of faith in the market and its processes, despite the apparent warning signs of their imminent failure. ..."
"... as within many custom or belief systems, what economics enshrines is a social order. One where a dominant minority are able to take a small quantity of wealth from each member of the majority in order to maintain their higher status. ..."
"... idea of economics as an exploitative mechanism is echoed in the cover picture of the book, Bosch's The Conjurer ..."
"... Within its exposition of economics as a quasi-religious theory, Brian Davey's book helps us to understand why economic theory is driving us toward a global system failure - and why politics and economics are incapable of responding to the pressing ecological crisis which the pursuit of economic growth has spawned. ..."
Brian Davey's new book, Credo: Economic Beliefs in a World in Crisis, is an analysis of economic theory as if it were a system
of religious belief.
It's a timely book. The simplistic, perhaps 'supernatural' assumptions which underpin key parts of economic theory demand far
more attention. It's a debate we've failed to have as a society.
... ... ...
During the two decades following the neoliberal economists' take-over of Western governments in the 1980s, many felt that
the almost mystical terms of economics - such as derivatives, hedging, leverage, contangos, etc - were beyond the understanding of
most ordinary people.
And without understanding those terms, irrespective of our gut feeling that there was something wrong, how could we challenge
the political lobby those theories had put into power? In the end it took the
financial crash of 2007/8 to demonstrate
that those in charge of this system didn't understand the complexity and risk of those practices either.
They pursued them as a matter of faith in the market and its processes, despite the
apparent
warning signs of their imminent failure. Those outside 'orthodox' economics could already see where the economy
was heading in the longer-term.
Question is, did economists learn anything from that failure? Or,
through austerity, have they once again committed us to their dogmatic belief system, unchanged by that experience?
... ... ...
However, through simple hubris or optimism bias, the political
class has been convinced that 'fracking' is a solution to our economic woes
- even though there is a paucity of verifiable evidence to demonstrate those claims, and
it has already lost billions of investors money.
Economics is a reflection of power
Ultimately though, as within many custom or belief systems, what economics enshrines is a social order. One where a dominant
minority are able to take a small quantity of wealth from each member of the majority in order to maintain their higher status.
This idea of economics as an exploitative mechanism
is echoed in the cover picture of the book, Bosch's
The Conjurer - where a magician distracts
the public with a sleight of hand trick so that they can be more easily robbed by his associate.
Again, in a world where we're hitting the limits to human material growth, political models of well-being based upon wealth and
consumption are damaging to human society in the long-term. The evidence that we're heading for a longer-term failure is there, as
was the case with the warning signs before the 2007 crash. The problem is that those in positions of power
do not wish to see it.
... ... ...
Within its exposition of economics as a quasi-religious theory, Brian Davey's book helps us to understand why economic theory
is driving us toward a global system failure - and why politics and economics are incapable of responding to the pressing ecological
crisis which the pursuit of economic growth has spawned.
Contrary to the economic hubris of many world leaders, set alongside the reality of ecological limits humanity is not 'too big
to fail'.
"... An interview by Gordon T. Long of the Financial Repression Authority. Originally published at his website ..."
"... One of the most important distinctions that investors have to understand is the difference between secular and cyclical trends Let us begin with definitions from the Encarta® World English Dictionary: ..."
"... Secular – occurring only once in the course of an age or century; taking place over an extremely or indefinitely long period of time ..."
"... Cycle – a sequence of events that is repeated again and again, especially a causal sequence; a period of time between repetitions of an event or phenomenon that occurs regularly ..."
"... Secular stagnation is when the predators of finance have eaten too many sheeple. ..."
"... Real estate rents in this latest asset bubble, whether commercial or residential, appear to have been going up in many markets even if the increases are slowing. That rent inflation will likely turn into rent deflation, but that doesn't appear to have happened yet consistently. ..."
"... Barter has always existed and always will. Debt money expands and contracts the middle class, acting as a feedback signal, which never works over the long term, because the so encapsulated system can only implode, when natural resource liquidation cannot be accelerated. The whole point is to eliminate the initial requirement for capital, work. Debt fails because both sides of the same coin assume that labor can be replaced. The machines driven by dc technology are not replacing labor; neither the elites nor the middle class can fix the machines, which is why they keep accelerating debt, to replace one failed technology only to be followed by the next, netting extortion by whoever currently controls the debt machine, which the majority is always fighting over, expending more energy to avoid work, like the objective is to avoid sweating, unless you are dumb enough to run on asphalt with Nike gear. ..."
"... . . . The whole argument for privatization, for instance, is the opposite of what was taught in American business schools in the 19th century. The first professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, which was the first business school, was Simon Patten. He said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production. But its role isn't to make a profit . It's to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive. But privatization adds interest payments, dividends, managerial payments, stock buybacks, and merges and acquisitions . Obviously these financialized charges are factored into the price system and raise the cost of living and doing business . ..."
GORDON LONG: Thank you for joining us. I'm Gordon Long with the Financial Repression Authority. It's my pleasure to have with
me today Dr. Michael Hudson Professor Hudson's very well known in terms of the FIRE economy to-I think, to a lot of our listeners,
or at least he's recognized by many as fostering that concept. A well known author, he has published many, many books. Welcome, Professor
Hudson.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes.
LONG: Let's just jump into the subject. I mentioned the FIRE economy cause I know that I have always heard it coming from yourself-or,
indirectly, not directly, from yourself. Could you explain to our listeners what's meant by that terminology?
HUDSON: Well it's more than just people getting fired. FIRE is an acronym for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Basically that
sector is about assets, not production and consumption. And most people think of the economy as being producers making goods and
services and paying labor to produce them – and then, labour is going to buy these goods and services. But this production and consumption
economy is surrounded by the asset economy: the web of Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate of who owns assets, and who owes the debts,
and to whom.
LONG: How would you differentiate it (or would you) with what's often referred to as financialization, or the financialization
of our economy? Are they one and the same?
HUDSON: Pretty much. The Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector is dominated by finance. 70 to 80% of bank loans in North
America and Europe are mortgage loans against real estate. So instead of a landowner class owning property clean and clear, as they
did in the 19 th century, now you have a democratization of real estate. 2/3 or more of the population owns their own
home. But the only way to buy a home, or commercial real estate, is on credit. So the loan-to-value ratio goes up steadily. Banks
lend more and more money to the real estate sector. A home or piece of real estate, or a stock or bond, is worth whatever banks are
willing to lend against it
As banks loosen their credit terms, as they lower their interest rates, take lower down payments, and lower amortization rates
– by making interest-only loans – they are going to lend more and more against property. So real estate is bid up on credit. All
this rise in price is debt leverage. So a financialized economy is a debt-leveraged economy, whether it's real estate or insurance,
or buying an education, or just living. And debt leveraging means that a larger proportion of assets are represented by debt. So
debt equity ratios rise. But financialization also means that more and more of people's income and corporate and government tax revenue
is paid to creditors. There's a flow of revenue from the production-and-consumption economy to the financial sector.
LONG: I don't know if you know Richard Duncan. He was with the IMF, etc, and lives in Thailand. He argues right now that capitalism
is no longer functioning, and really what he refers to what we have now is "creditism." Because in capitalism we have savings that
are reinvested into productive assets that create productivity, which leads to a higher level of living. We're not doing that. We
have no savings and investments. Credit is high in the financial sector, but it's not being applied to productive assets. Is he valid
in that thinking?
HUDSON: Not as in your statement. It's confused.
LONG: Okay.
HUDSON: There's an enormous amount of savings. Gross savings. The savings we have that are mounting up are just about as large
as they've ever been – about, 18-19% of the US economy. They're counterpart is debt. Most savings are lent out to borrowers se debt.
Basically, you have savers at the top of the pyramid, the 1% lending out their savings to the 99%. The overall net savings may be
zero, and that's what your stupid person from the IMF meant. But gross savings are much higher. Now, the person, Mr. Duncan, obviously-I
don't know what to say when I hear this nonsense. Every economy is a credit economy.
Let's start in Ancient Mesopotamia. The group that I organized out of Harvard has done a 20-study of the origins of economic structuring
in the Bronze Age, even the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age economy – 3200 BC going back to about 1200 BC. Suppose you're a Babylonian
in the time of Hammurabi, about 1750 BC, and you're a cultivator. How do you buy things during the year? Well, if you go to the bar,
to an ale woman, what she'd do is write down the debt that you owe. It was to be paid on the threshing floor. The debts were basically
paid basically once a year when the income was there, on the threshing floor when the harvest was in. If the palace or the temples
would advance animals or inputs or other public services, this would be as a debt. It was all paid in grain, which was monetized
for paying debts to the palace, temples and other creditors.
The IMF has this Austrian theory that pretends that money began as barter and that capitalism basically operates on barter. This
always is a disinformation campaign. Nobody believed this in times past, and it is a very modern theory that basically is used to
say, "Oh, debt is bad." What they really mean is that public debt is bad. The government shouldn't create money, the government shouldn't
run budget deficits but should leave the economy to rely on the banks. So the banks should run and indebt the economy.
You're dealing with a public relations mythology that's used as a means of deception for most people. You can usually ignore just
about everything the IMF says. If you understand money you're not going to be hired by the IMF. The precondition for being hired
by the IMF is not to understand finance. If you do understand finance, you're fired and blacklisted. That's why they impose
austerity programs that they call "stabilization programs" that actually are destabilization programs almost wherever they're imposed.
LONG: Is this a lack of understanding and adherence to the wrong philosophy, or how did we get into this trap?
HUDSON: We have an actively erroneous view, not just a lack of understanding. This is not by accident. When you have an error
repeated year after year after year, decade after decade after decade, it's not really insanity doing the same thing thinking it'll
be different. It's sanity. It's doing the same thing thinking the result will be the same again and again and again. The result
will indeed be austerity programs, making budget deficits even worse, driving governments further into debt, further into reliance
on the IMF. So then the IMF turns them to the knuckle breakers of the World Bank and says, "Oh, now you have to pay your debts by
privatization". It's the success. The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that
they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and
transportation, like you're seeing in Greece's selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it's deliberate. It's not insane.
It's part of the program, not a bug.
LONG: Where does this lead us? What's the roadmap ahead of us here?
HUDSON: A thousand years ago, if you were a marauding gang and you wanted to take over a country's land and its natural resources
and public sector, you'd have to invade it with military troops. Now you use finance to take over countries. So it leads us into
a realm where everything that the classical economists saw and argued for – public investment, bringing costs in line with the actual
cost of production – that's all rejected in favor of a rentier class evolving into an oligarchy. Basically, financiers – the
1% – are going to pry away the public domain from the government. Pry away and privatize the public enterprises, land, natural resources,
so that bondholders and privatizers get all of the revenue for themselves. It's all sucked up to the top of the pyramid, impoverishing
the 99%.
LONG: Well I think most people, without understanding economics, would instinctively tell you they think that's what's happening
right now, in some way.
HUDSON: Right. As long as you can avoid studying economics you know what's happened. Once you take an economics course you step
into brainwashing. It's an Orwellian world.
LONG: I think you said it perfectly well there. Exactly. It gets you locked into the wrong way of thinking as opposed to just
basic common sense. Your book is Killing the Host . What was the essence of its message? Was it describing exactly what we're
talking about here?
HUDSON: Finance has taken over the industrial economy, so that instead of finance becoming what it was expected to be in the 19
th century, instead of the banks evolving from usurious organizations that leant to governments, mainly to wage war, finance
was going to be industrialized. They were going to mobilize savings and recycle it to finance the means of production, starting with
heavy industry. This was actually happening in Germany in the late 19 th century. You had the big banks working with government
and industry in a triangular process. But that's not what's happening now. After WW1 and especially after WW2, finance reverted to
its pre-industrial form. Instead of allying themselves with industry, as banks were expected to do, banks allied themselves with
real estate and monopolies, realizing that they can make more money off real estate.
The bank spokesman David Ricardo argued against the landed interest in 1817, against land rent. Now the banks are all in favor
of supporting land rent, knowing that today, when people buy and sell property, they need credit and pay interest for it. The banks
are going to get all the rent. So you have the banks merge with real estate against industry, against the economy as a whole. The
result is that they're part of the overhead process, not part of the production process.
LONG: There's a sense that there's a crisis lying ahead in the next year, two years, or three years. The mainstream economy's
so disconnected from Wall Street economy. What's your view on that?
HUDSON: It's not disconnected at all. The Wall Street economy has taken over the economy and is draining it. Under what economics
students are taught as Say's Law, the economy's workers are supposed to use their income to buy what they produce. That's why Henry
Ford paid them $5 a day, so that they could afford to buy the automobiles they were producing.
LONG: Exactly.
HUDSON: But Wall Street is interjecting itself into the economy, so that instead of the circular flow between producers and consumers,
you have more and more of the flow diverted to pay interest, insurance and rent. In other words, to pay the FIRE sector. It all ends
up with the financial sector, most of which is owned by the 1%. So, their way of formulating it is to distract attention from today's
debt quandary by saying it's just a cycle, or it's "secular stagnation." That removes the element of agency – active politicking
by the financial interests and Wall Street lobbyists to obtain all the growth of income and wealth for themselves. That's what happened
in America and Canada since the late 1970s.
LONG: What does an investor do today, or somebody who's looking for retirement, trying to save for the future, and they see some
of these things occurring. What should they be thinking about? Or how should they be protecting themselves?
HUDSON: What all the billionaires and the heavy investors do is simply try to preserve their wealth. They're not trying to make
money, they're not trying to speculate. If you're an investor, you're not going to outsmart Wall Street billionaires, because the
markets are basically fixed. It's the George Soros principle. If you have so much money, billions of dollars, you can break the Bank
of England. You don't follow the market, you don't anticipate it, you actually make the market and push it up, like the Plunge Protection
Team is doing with the stock market these days. You have to be able to control the prices. Insiders make money, but small investors
are not going to make money.
Since you're in Canada, I remember the beginning of the 1960s. I used to look at the Treasury Bulletin and Federal Reserve
Bulletin figures on foreign investment in the US stock market. We all used to laugh at Canada especially. The Canadians don't
buy stocks until they're up to the very top, and then they lose all the money by holding these stocks on the downturn. Finally, when
the market's all the way at the bottom, Canadians decide to begin selling because they finally can see a trend. So they miss the
upswing until they decide to buy at the top once again. It's hilarious to look at how Canada has performed in the US bond market,
and they did the same in the silver market. I remember when silver was going up to $50. The Canadians said, "Yes, we can see the
trend now!" and they began to buy it. They lost their shirts. So, basically, if you're a Canadian investor, move.
LONG: So the Canadian investors are a better contrarian indicator than the front page cover, you're saying.
HUDSON: I'd think so. Once they get in, you know the bubble's over.
LONG: Absolutely on that one. What are you currently writing? What is your current focus now?
HUDSON: Well, I just finished a book. You mentioned Killing the Host . My next book will be out in about three months:
J is for Junk Economics . It began as a dictionary of terms, so I can provide people with a vocabulary. As we got in the argument
at the beginning of your program today, our argument is about the vocabulary we're using and the words you're using. The vocabulary
taught to students today in economics – and used by the mass media and by government spokesmen – is basically a set of euphemisms.
If you look at the television reports on the market, they say that any loss in the stock market isn't a loss, it's "profit taking".
And when they talk about money. the stock market rises – "Oh that's good news." But it's awful news for the short sellers it wipes
out. Almost all the words we get are kind of euphemisms to conceal the actual dynamics that are happening. For instance, "secular
stagnation" means it's all a cycle. Even the idea of "business cycles": Nobody in the 19 th century used the word "business
cycle". They spoke about "crashes". They knew that things go up slowly and then they plunge very quickly. It was a crash. It's not
the sine curve that you have in Josef Schumpeter's book on Business Cycles . It's a ratchet effect: slow up, quick down. A
cycle is something that is automatic, and if it's a cycle and you have leading and lagging indicators as the National Bureau of Economic
Research has. Then you'd think "Oh, okay, everything that goes up will come down, and everything that goes down will come up, just
wait your turn." And that means governments should be passive.
Well, that is the opposite of everything that's said in classical economics and the Progressive Era, when they realized that economies
don't recover by themselves. You need a-the government to step in, you need something "exogenous," as economist say. You need something
from outside the system to revive it. The covert idea of this business cycle analysis is to leave out the role of government. If
you look at neoliberal and Austrian theory, there's no role for government spending, and no role of public investment. The whole
argument for privatization, for instance, is the opposite of what was taught in American business schools in the 19 th
century. The first professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, which was the first business school, was Simon Patten.
He said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production. But its role isn't to make a profit. It's to lower the cost
of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive.
But privatization adds interest payments, dividends, managerial payments, stock buybacks, and merges and acquisitions. Obviously
these financialized charges are factored into the price system and raise the cost of living and doing business.
LONG: Well, Michael, we're-I thank you for the time, and we're up against our hard line. I know we didn't have as much time as
we always like, so we have to break. Any overall comments you'd like to leave with our listeners who might be interested this school
of economics?
HUDSON: Regarding the downturn we're in, we're going into a debt deflation. The key of understanding the economy is to look at
debt. The economy has to spend more and more money on debt service. The reason the economy is not recovering isn't simply because
this is a normal cycle. And It's not because labour is paid too much. It's because people are diverting more and more of their income
to paying their debts, so they can't afford to buy goods. Markets are shrinking – and if markets are shrinking, then real estate
rents are shrinking, profits are shrinking. Instead of using their earnings to reinvest and hire more labour to increase production,
companies are using their earnings for stock buybacks and dividend payouts to raise the share price so that the managers can take
their revenue in the form of bonuses and stocks and live in the short run. They're leaving their companies as bankrupt shells, which
is pretty much what hedge funds do when they take over companies.
So the financialization of companies is the reverse of everything Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and everyone you think of as a
classical economist was saying. Banks wrap themselves in a cloak of classical economics by dropping history of economic thought from
the curriculum, which is pretty much what's happened. And Canada-I know since you're from Canada, my experience there was that the
banks have a huge lobbying power over government. In 1979, I wrote for the IRPP Institute there on Canada In the New Monetary
Order . At that time the provinces of Canada were borrowing money from Switzerland and Germany because they could borrow it at
much lower interest rates. I said that this was going to be a disaster, and one that was completely unnecessary. If Canadian provinces
borrow in Francs or any other foreign currency, this money goes into the central bank, which then creates Canadian dollars to spend.
Why not have the central bank simply create these dollars without having Swiss francs, without having German marks? It's unnecessary
to have an intermediary. But the more thuggish banks, like the Bank of Nova Scotia, said, "Oh, that way's the road to serfdom." It's
not. Following the banks and the Austrian School of the banks' philosophy, that's the road to serfdom. That's the road
to debt serfdom. It should not be taken now. It lets universities and the government be run by neoliberals. They're a travesty of
what real economics is all about.
LONG: Michael, thank you very much. I learned a lot, appreciate it; certainly appreciate how important it is for us to use the
right words on the right subject when we're talking about economics. Absolutely agree with you. Talk to you again?
Interesting, but after insulting Duncan, Hudson says the banks stopped partnering with industry and went into real estate,
which sounded like what Duncan said.
I mention this because for a non- expert like myself it is sometimes difficult to tell when an expert is disagreeing with someone
for good reasons or just going off half- cocked. I followed what Hudson said about the evils of the IMF, but didn't see where
Duncan had defended any of that, unless it was implicit in saying that capitalism used to function better.
"As we got in the argument at the beginning of your program today, our argument is about the vocabulary we're using and the
words you're using. The vocabulary taught to students today in economics – and used by the mass media and by government spokesmen
– is basically a set of euphemisms ."Almost all the words we get are kind of euphemisms to conceal the actual dynamics that are
happening."
May consider it's about recognizing and deciphering the "doublespeak", "newspeak", "fedspeak", "greenspeak" etc, whether willing
or unwitting using words for understanding and clarifying as opposed to misleading and confusing dialectic as opposed to sophistry.
What I objected to was the characterization of today's situation as "financialization." I explained that financialization is
the FIRST stage - when finance WORKS. We are now in the BREAKDOWN of financialization - toward the "barter" stage.
Treating "finance" as an end stage rather than as a beginning stage overlooks the dynamics of breakdown. It is debt deflation.
First profits fall, and as that occurs, rents on commercial property decline. This is already widespread here in New York, from
Manhattan (8th St. near NYU is half empty) to Queens (Austin St. in Forest Hills.).
I wrote an article you might be interested in reading. It outlines a tax policy which would help prevent what you are discussing
in your article. The abuse of credit to receive rents and long term capital gains.
Thank you for another eye-opening exposition. My political economy education was negative (counting a year of Monetarism and
Austrian Economics around 1980), so I appreciate your interviews as correctives.
From your interview answer to the question about what we, the 99+% should do,I gathered only that we should not try to beat
the market. Anything more than that?
From my understanding, post Plaza banking lost most of its traditional market to the shadow sector, as a result, expanded off
into C/RE and increasingly to Financialization of everything sundry.
Disheveled Marsupial interesting to note Mr. Hudson's statement about barter, risk factors – ?????
One of the most important distinctions that investors have to understand is the difference between secular and cyclical
trends Let us begin with definitions from the Encarta® World English Dictionary:
Secular – occurring only once in the course of an age or century; taking place over an extremely or indefinitely long period
of time
Cycle – a sequence of events that is repeated again and again, especially a causal sequence; a period of time between repetitions
of an event or phenomenon that occurs regularly
Secular stagnation is a condition of negligible or no economic growth in a market-based economy . When
per capita income stays at relatively high levels, the percentage of savings is likely to start exceeding the percentage of longer-term
investments in, for example, infrastructure and education, that are necessary to sustain future economic growth. The absence of
such investments (and consequently of the economic growth) leads to declining levels of per capita income (and consequently of
per capita savings). With the reduced percentage savings rate converging with the reduced investment rate, economic growth comes
to a standstill – ie, it stagnates. In a free economy, consumers anticipating secular stagnation, might transfer their savings
to more attractive-looking foreign countries. This would lead to a devaluation of their domestic currency, which would potentially
boost their exports, assuming that the country did have goods or services that could be exported.
Persistent low growth, especially in Europe, has been attributed by some to secular stagnation initiated by stronger European
economies, such as Germany, in the past few years.
Words. What they mean depends on who's talking.
Secular stagnation is when the predators of finance have eaten too many sheeple.
Markets are shrinking – and if markets are shrinking, then real estate rents are shrinking, profits are shrinking.
Real estate rents in this latest asset bubble, whether commercial or residential, appear to have been going up in many
markets even if the increases are slowing. That rent inflation will likely turn into rent deflation, but that doesn't appear to
have happened yet consistently.
Perhaps he meant to say that markets are going to shrink as the debt deflation becomes more evident?
Yes, I think we are into turnip country now. Figure 1 in
this
prior article looks clear enough – even if you don't like the analysis that went with it. Wealth inequality still climbs but
income inequality has plateaued since Clinton I. Whatever the reasons for that, the 1% should be concerned – where is the ROI?
Barter has always existed and always will. Debt money expands and contracts the middle class, acting as a feedback signal,
which never works over the long term, because the so encapsulated system can only implode, when natural resource liquidation cannot
be accelerated. The whole point is to eliminate the initial requirement for capital, work. Debt fails because both sides of the
same coin assume that labor can be replaced. The machines driven by dc technology are not replacing labor; neither the elites
nor the middle class can fix the machines, which is why they keep accelerating debt, to replace one failed technology only to
be followed by the next, netting extortion by whoever currently controls the debt machine, which the majority is always fighting
over, expending more energy to avoid work, like the objective is to avoid sweating, unless you are dumb enough to run on asphalt
with Nike gear.
Labor has no problem with multiwhatever presidents, geneticists, psychologists, or economists, trying to hunt down and replace
labor, in or out of turn, but none are going to be any more successful than the others. Trump is being employed to bypass the
middle class and cut a deal. There is no deal. Labor is always going to pay males to work and their wives to raise children. Obviously,
the majority will vote for a competing economy, and it is welcome to do so, but if debt works so well, why is the majority voting
to kidnap our kids with public healthcare and education policies.
I'm not sure I heard an answer to the question of what people, who might be trying to save for the future or plan for retirement,
can do? Is the point that there isn't anything? Because I'm definitely between rocks and hard places
Yeah, he basically said there is no good savings plan. Big-money interests have rigged the rules and are now manipulating the
market (this used to be the definition of what was NOT allowed). Thus, they use computer algorithms to squeeze small amounts out
of the market millions of times. This means that the "investments" are nothing of the sort. You don't "invest" in something for
milliseconds. He said that the 1% are mostly just trying to hold on to what they have. Very few trust the rigged markets.
Low rent & cheap energy are key to the arts & innovations. My model has to work for airports, starts at the fuel farm as the
CIA & MI6 Front Page Avjet did. Well before that was Air America. I wonder if now American Airlines itself is a Front.
All of America is a Front far as I can about tell. Hadn't heard that Manhattan rents were coming down. Come in from out of
town, how you going to know? Not supposed to I guess.
I got that textbook and I liked that guy John Commons. He says capitalism is great, but it always leads to Socialism because
of unbridled greed.
The frenzy to find another stable cash currency showing in Bit Coin and the discussion of Future Tax Credits while the Euro
is controlled by the rent takers demands change on both sides of the Atlantic.
We got shot dead protesting the war, and civil rights backlash is the gift that keeps giving to the Southerners looking up
every day in every courthouse town, County seat is all about spreading fear and desperation.
How to change it all without violence is going to be really tricky.
. . . So, basically, if you're a Canadian investor, move.
LONG: So the Canadian investors are a better contrarian indicator than the front page cover, you're saying.
HUDSON: I'd think so. Once they get in, you know the bubble's over.
When one reads the financial press in Canada, every dollar extracted by the lords of finance is a glorious taking by brilliant
people at the top of the financial food chain from the stupid little people at the bottom, but when it counts, there was silence,
in cooperation with Canada's one percent.
The story starts about five years ago, with smart meters. Everyone knows what they are, a method by which electrical power
use can be priced depending on the time of day, and day of the week.
To make this tasty, Ontario's local utilities at first kept the price the same for all the time, and then after all the meters
were installed, came the changes, phased in over time. Prices were increased substantially, but there was an out. If you changed
your living arrangements to live like a nocturnal rodent and washed your clothes in the middle of the night, had supper later
in the evening or waited for weekend power rates you could still get low power rates, from the three tier price structure.
The local utilities bought the power from the government of Ontario power generation utility, renamed to Hydro One, and this
is where Michael Hudson's talk becomes relevant.
The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to
privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like
you're seeing in Greece's selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it's deliberate. It's not insane. It's
part of the program, not a bug .
LONG: Where does this lead us? What's the roadmap ahead of us here?
HUDSON: A thousand years ago, if you were a marauding gang and you wanted to take over a country's land and its natural
resources and public sector, you'd have to invade it with military troops. Now you use finance to take over countries. So it leads
us into a realm where everything that the classical economists saw and argued for – public investment, bringing costs
in line with the actual cost of production – that's all rejected in favor of a rentier class evolving into an oligarchy. Basically,
financiers – the 1% – are going to pry away the public domain from the government. Pry away and privatize the public enterprises,
land, natural resources, so that bondholders and privatizers get all of the revenue for themselves. It's all sucked up to the
top of the pyramid, impoverishing the 99% .
Eighteen months ago, there was an election in Ontario, and the press was on radio silence during the whole time leading up
to the election about the plans to "privatize" Hydro One. I cannot recall one instance of any mention that the new Premier, Kathleen
Wynne was planning on selling Hydro One to "investors".
Where did this come from? Did the little people rise up and say to the politicians "you should privatize Hydro One" for whatever
reason? No. This push came from the 1% and Hydro One was sold so fast it made my head spin, and is now trading on the Toronto
Stock exchange.
At first I though the premier was an economic ignoramus, because Hydro One was generating income for the province and there
was no other power supplier, so one couldn't even fire them if they raised their prices too high.
One of the arguments put forward by the 1% to privatize Hydro One was a classic divide and conquer strategy. They argued that
too many people at Hydro One were making too much money, and by privatizing, the employees wages would be beat down, and the resultant
savings would be passed on to customers.
Back to Michael Hudson
. . . The whole argument for privatization, for instance, is the opposite of what was taught in American business schools
in the 19th century. The first professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, which was the first business school,
was Simon Patten. He said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production. But its role isn't to make a profit
. It's to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing
business to make the economy more competitive. But privatization adds interest payments, dividends, managerial payments,
stock buybacks, and merges and acquisitions . Obviously these financialized charges are factored into the price system
and raise the cost of living and doing business .
Power prices have increased yet again in Ontario since privatization, and Canada's 1% are "making a killing" on it. There has
been another change as well. Instead of a three tier price structure, there are now two, really expensive and super expensive.
There is no longer a price break to living like a nocturnal rodent. The 1% took that for themselves.
I am so tired of seeing that old lie about Old Henry and the $5 a day. I realize it was just a tossed off reference to something
most people believe for the purpose of describing a discarded policy, but the fact is very, very few of Old Henry's employees
ever got that pay. See, there were strings attached.
Old Henry hired a lot of spies, too. He sent them around to the neighborhoods where his workers lived (it was convenient having
them all in Detroit). If the neighbors saw your kid bringing a bucket of beer home from the corner tavern for the family, you
didn't get the $5.
If your lawn wasn't mowed to their satisfaction, you didn't get the $5. If you were thought not to bathe as often as they liked,
you didn't get the $5. If you didn't go to a church on Sundays, you didn't get the $5. If you were an immigrant and not taking
English classes at night school, you didn't get the $5. There were quite a lot of strings attached. The whole story was a public
relations stunt, and Old Henry never intended to live up to it; he hated his workers.
These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much
deeper level.
Notable quotes:
"... I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise. What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible. ..."
"... Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of as "literature." ..."
"... These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much deeper level. ..."
"... Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major corporation. ..."
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned
CounterPunch. They didn't send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it
from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed. This happened just as the "fake
news" hysteria was being unleashed by the corporate media, right around the time The Washington
Post ran
this neo-McCarthyite smear piece vicariously accusing CounterPunch, and a number of other
publications, of being "peddlers of Russian propaganda." As I'm sure you'll recall, that
astounding piece of "journalism" (which The Post was promptly forced to disavow with an absurd
disclaimer but has refused to retract) was based on the claims of an anonymous website
apparently staffed by a couple of teenagers and a formerly rabidly anti-Communist, now rabidly
anti-Putin think tank. Little did most people know at the time that these were just the opening
salvos in what has turned out to be an all-out crackdown on any and all forms of vocal
opposition to the global corporate ruling classes and their attempts to quash the ongoing
nationalist backlash against their neoliberal agenda.
Almost a year later, things are much clearer. If you haven't been following this story
closely, and you care at all about freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and that kind of
stuff, you may want to take an hour or two and catch up a bit on what's been happening. I
offered a few examples of some of the measures governments and corporations have been taking to
stifle expressions of dissent in my latest
piece in CounterPunch , and there are many more detailed articles online, like this one by Andre
Damon from July, and this follow-up he published last
week (which reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges has also
been unpersoned). Or, if you're the type of soul who only believes what corporations tell you,
and who automatically dismisses anything published by a Trotskyist website, here's
one from last December in The Guardian, and an
op-ed in The New York Times , both of which at least report what Google, Twitter, and
Facebook are up to. Or you could read this
piece by Robert Parry , who also has "legitimate" (i.e., corporate) credentials, and who
hasn't been unpersoned just yet, although I'm sure they'll get around to him eventually.
I am using the Orwellian verb "unperson" playfully, but I'm also trying to be precise.
What's happening isn't censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While
there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from
so-called "terrorist content," most governments aren't formally banning expressions of
anti-corporatist dissent. This isn't Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism,
where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning
CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like
Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to
readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and
articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.
Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself
from contributing to publications like CounterPunch, Truthdig, Alternet, Global Research, and
any other publications the corporatocracy deems "illegitimate." Google unpersoning a writer
like Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers. The message is, "this could happen
to you." This message is meant for other journalists, primarily, but it's also aimed at writers
like myself who are making a living (to whatever degree) writing and selling what we think of
as "literature."
Yes, as you've probably guessed by now, in addition to writing political satire, I am, as
rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone so aptly put it once, an "elitist wanker." I've spent the
majority of my adult life writing stage plays and working in the theater, and it doesn't get
any more elitist than that. My plays are published by "establishment" publishers, have won a
few awards, and have been produced internationally. I recently published my "debut novel"
(which is what you call it if you're an elitist wanker) and am currently trying to promote and
sell it. I mention this, not to blow my little horn, but to the set the stage to try to
illustrate how these post-Orwellian intimidation tactics (i.e., unpersoning people from the
Internet) work. These tactics do not just suppress information. They enforce conformity at much
deeper level.
The depressing fact of the matter is, in our brave new Internet-dominated world,
corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook (not to mention Amazon), are, for elitist
wankers like me, in the immortal words of Colonel Kurz, "either friends or they are truly
enemies to be feared." If you are in the elitist wanker business, regardless of whether you're
Jonathan Franzen, Garth Risk Hallberg, Margaret Atwood, or some "mid-list" or "emerging"
author, there is no getting around these corporations. So it's kind of foolish, professionally
speaking, to write a bunch of essays that will piss them off, and then publish these essays in
CounterPunch. Literary agents advise against this. Other elitist literary wankers, once they
discover what you've been doing, will avoid you like the bubonic plague. Although it's
perfectly fine to write books and movies about fictional evil corporations, writing about how
real corporations are using their power to mold societies into self-policing virtual prisons of
politically-correct, authoritarian consumers is well, it's something that is just not done in
professional elitist wanker circles.
Normally, all this goes without saying, as these days most elitist wankers are trained how
to write, and read, and think, in MFA conformity factories, where they screen out any unstable
weirdos with unhealthy interests in political matters. This is to avoid embarrassing episodes
like Harold
Pinter's Nobel Prize lecture (which, if you haven't read it, you probably should), and is
why so much of contemporary literature is so well-behaved and instantly forgettable. This
institutionalized screening system is also why the majority of journalists employed by
mainstream media outlets understand, without having to be told, what they are, and are not,
allowed to report. Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream . It isn't a
question of censorship the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional
coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a
particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been
destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who's been to graduate school, or worked at a major
corporation.
Or let me provide you with a personal example.
A couple weeks ago, I googled myself (which we elitist wankers are wont to do), and noticed
that two of my published books had disappeared from the "Knowledge Panel" that appears in the
upper right of the search results. I also noticed that the people "People Also Search For" in
the panel had changed. For years, consistently, the people you saw there had been a variety of
other elitist literary wankers and leftist types. Suddenly, they were all rather right-wing
types, people like Ilana Mercer and John Derbyshire, and other VDARE writers. So that was a
little disconcerting.
I set out to contact the Google Search specialists to inquire about this mysterious
development, and was directed to a series of unhelpful web pages directing me to other
unhelpful pages with little boxes where you can write and submit a complaint to Google, which
they will completely ignore. Being an elitist literary wanker, I also wrote to Google Books,
and exchanged a number of cordial emails with an entity (let's call her Ms. O'Brien) who
explained that, for "a variety of reasons," the "visibility" of my books (which had been
consistently visible for many years) was subject to change from day to day, and that,
regrettably, she couldn't assist me further, and that sending her additional cordial emails was
probably a pointless waste of time. Ms. O'Brien was also pleased to report that my books had
been restored to "visibility," which, of course, when I checked, they hadn't.
"Whatever," I told myself, "this is silly. It's probably just some IT thing, maybe Google
Books updating its records, or something." However, I was still perplexed by the "People Also
Search For" switcheroo, because it's kind of misleading to link my writing to that of a bunch
of serious right-wingers. Imagine, if you were a dystopian sci-fi fan, and you googled me to
check out my book and see what else I had written, and so on, and my Google "Knowledge Panel"
popped up and displayed all these far-right VDARE folks. Unless you're a far-right VDARE type
yourself, that might be a little bit of a turn-off.
At that point, I wondered if I was getting paranoid. Because Google Search runs on
algorithms, right? And my political satire and commentary is published, not only in
CounterPunch, but also in The Unz Review, where these far-right-wing types are also published.
Moreover, my pieces are often reposted by what appear to be "Russia-linked" websites, and
everyone knows that the Russians are all a bunch of white supremacists, right? On top of which,
it's not like I'm Stephen King here. I am hardly famous enough to warrant the attention of any
post-Orwellian corporate conspiracy to stigmatize anti-establishment dissent by manipulating
how authors are displayed on Google (i.e., subtly linking them to white supremacists,
anti-Semites, and others of that ilk).
So, okay, I reasoned, what probably happened was over the course of twenty-four hours, for
no logical reason whatsoever, all the folks who had been googling me (along with other leftist
and literary figures) suddenly stopped googling me, all at once, while, more or less at the
exact same time, hundreds of right-wingers started googling me (along with those white
supremacist types they had, theoretically, already been googling). That kind of makes sense
when you think about it, right? I mean, Google couldn't be doing this intentionally. It must
have been some sort of algorithm that detected this sudden, seismic shift in the demographic of
people googling me.
Or, I don't know, does that possibly sound like a desperate attempt to rationalize the
malicious behavior of an unaccountable, more or less god-like, global corporation that wields
the power of life and death over my book sales and profile on the Internet (a more or less
god-like global corporation that could do a lot of additional damage to my sales and reputation
with complete impunity once the piece you're reading is published)? Or am I simply getting
paranoid, and, in fact, I've developed a secret white supremacist fan base without my
knowledge? Only Google knows for sure.
Such are the conundrums elitist literary wankers have to face these days that is, those of
us wankers who haven't learned to keep our fucking mouths shut yet. Probably the safest course
of action, regardless of whether I'm being paranoid or Google does have me on some kind of
list, is to lay off the anti-corporatist essays, and definitely stop contributing to
CounterPunch, not to mention The Unz Review, and probably also give up the whole dystopian
satire novel thing, and ensure that my second novel conforms to the "normal" elitist wanker
rules (which every literary wanker knows, but which, technically, do not exist). Who knows, if
I play my cards right, maybe I can even sell the rights to Miramax, or okay, some other
corporation.
Once that happens, I assume that Google will want to restore me to normal personhood, and
return my books to visibility, and I will ride off into the Hollywood sunset with the Clintons,
Clooneys, and Pichais, and maybe even Barack Obama himself, if he isn't off jet skiing with
Richard Branson, or having dinner with Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, who just happen to live right
down the street, or hawking the TPP on television. By that time, CounterPunch and all those
other "illegitimate" publications will have been forced onto the dark web anyway, so I won't be
giving up all that much. I know, that sounds pretty cold and cynical, but my liberal friends
will understand I just hope all my new white supremacist fans will find it in their hearts to
forgive me.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing
(USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Thank you for mustering the courage and then taking the time to spell out these outrages in a
straightforward, unemotional way. I've appreciated the humor that centers your other essays,
but there's not a damned thing funny about this.
But why are things as they are? With billions aplenty, our rulers must be driven by their
libido dominandi. We're left to wonder only whether they get off more on ostracizing the
Hopkinses, on buying the politicians, or on herding the sheep from bathrooms to statues to
flags.
The paper is two years old. Looks how his prediction fared. Stagnation is still with us
althouth low oil prices lifted all the boats. But this period is coming to the end.
Notable quotes:
"... The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 challenged the foundations of orthodox economic theory and policy. At its outset, orthodox economists were stunned into silence as evidenced by their inability to answer the Queen of England's simple question (November 5th, 2008) to the faculty of the London School of Economics as to why no one foresaw the crisis. ..."
"... Six years later, orthodoxy has fought back and largely succeeded in blocking change of thought and policy. The result has been economic stagnation ..."
"... Perspective # 3 is the progressive position which is rooted in Keynesian economics and can be labeled the "destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis" ..."
"... It is identified with the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and the labor movement, but it has no standing within major economics departments owing to their suppression of alternatives to economic orthodoxy. ..."
"... However, financial excess is just an element of the crisis and the full explanation is far deeper than just financial market regulatory failure According to the Keynesian destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis, the deep cause is generalized economic policy failure rooted in the flawed neoliberal economic paradigm that was adopted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ..."
"... globalization reconfigured global production by transferring manufacturing from the U.S. and Europe to emerging market economies. This new global division of labor was then supported by having U.S. consumers serve as the global economy's buyer of first and last resort, which explains the U.S. trade deficit and the global imbalances problem. ..."
"... This new global division of labor inevitably created large trade deficits that also contributed to weakening the aggregate demand (AD)generation process by causing a hemorrhage of spending on imports (Palley, 2015) ..."
"... Finance does this through three channels. First, financial markets have captured control of corporations via enforcement of the shareholder value maximization paradigm of corporate governance. Consequently, corporations now serve financial market interests along with the interests of top management. Second, financial markets in combination with corporations lobby politically for the neoliberal policy mix. ..."
"... Third, financial innovation has facilitated and promoted financial market control of corporations via hostile take-overs, leveraged buyouts and reverse capital distributions. Financial innovation has therefore been key for enforcing Wall Street's construction of the shareholder value maximization paradigm. ..."
"... The second vital role of finance is the support of AD. The neoliberal model gradually undermined the income and demand generation process, creating a growing structural demand gap. The role of finance was to fill that gap. Thus, within the U.S., deregulation, financial innovation, speculation, and mortgage lending fraud enabled finance to fill the demand gap by lending to consumers and by spurring asset price inflation ..."
"... this AD generation role of finance was an unintended consequence and not part of a grand plan. Neoliberal economists and policymakers did not realize they were creating a demand gap, but their laissez-faire economic ideology triggered financial market developments that coincidentally filled the demand gap. ..."
"... the financial process they unleashed was inevitably unstable and was always destined to hit the wall. There are limits to borrowing and limits to asset price inflation and all Ponzi schemes eventually fall apart. ..."
"... the long duration of financial excess made the collapse far deeper when it eventually happened. It has also made escaping the after-effects of the financial crisis far more difficult as the economy is now burdened by debts and destroyed credit worthiness. That has deepened the proclivity to economic stagnation. ..."
"... The neoliberal labor market flexibility agenda explicitly attacks unions and works to shift income to wealthier households. ..."
"... That model inevitably produces stagnation because it produces a structural demand shortage via (i) its impact on income distribution, and (ii) via its design of globalization which generates massive trade deficits, wage competition and off-shoring of jobs and investment. In terms of the three-way contest between the government failure hypothesis, the market failure hypothesis and the destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis, the economic policy debate during the Great Recession was cast as exclusively between government failure and market failure. ..."
"... This attitude to fiscal policy reflects the dominance within the Democratic Party of "Rubinomics", the Wall Street view associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that government spending and budget deficits raise real interest rates and thereby lower growth. According to that view, the US needs long-term fiscal austerity to offset Social Security and Medicare Side-by-side with the attempt to reflate the economy, the Obama administration also pushed for major overhaul and tightening of financial sector regulation via the Dodd- Frank Act (2010). ..."
"... The Obama administration's softcore neoliberalism would have likely generated stagnation by itself, but the prospect has been further strengthened by Republicans. ..."
"... The Obama administration was to provide fiscal stimulus to jump start the economy; the Fed would use QE to blow air back into the asset price bubble; the Dodd-Frank Act (2010) would stabilize financial markets; and globalization would be deepened by further NAFTA-styled international agreements. This is a near-identical model to that which failed so disastrously. Consequently, stagnation is the logical prognosis. ..."
"... Consequently, the economy is destined to repeat the patterns of the 1990s and 2000s. However, the US economy has also experienced almost twenty more years of neoliberalism which has left its economic body in worse health than the 1990s. That means the likelihood of delivering another bubble-based boom is low and stagnation tendencies will likely reassert themselves after a shorter and weaker period of expansion ..."
This paper examines the major competing interpretations of the economic crisis in the US and
explains the rebound of neoliberal orthodoxy. It shows how US policymakers acted to stabilize
and save the economy, but failed to change the underlying neoliberal economic policy model.
That failure explains the emergence of stagnation, which is likely to endure
Current economic
conditions in the US smack of the mid-1990s. The 1990s expansion proved unsustainable and so
will the current modest expansion. However, this time it is unlikely to be followed by
financial crisis because of the balance sheet cleaning that took place during the last
crisis
Revised 1: This paper has been prepared for inclusion in Gallas, Herr, Hoffer and Scherrer
(eds.), Combatting Inequality: The Global North and South , Rouledge, forthcoming in
2015.
The crisis and the resilience of neoliberal economic orthodoxy
The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 challenged the foundations of orthodox economic
theory and policy. At its outset, orthodox economists were stunned into silence as evidenced by
their inability to answer the Queen of England's simple question (November 5th, 2008) to the
faculty of the London School of Economics as to why no one foresaw the crisis.
Six years later,
orthodoxy has fought back and largely succeeded in blocking change of thought and policy. The
result has been economic stagnation
This paper examines the major competing interpretations of
the economic crisis in the US and explains the rebound of neoliberal orthodoxy. It shows how US
policymakers acted to stabilize and save the economy, but failed to change the underlying
neoliberal economic policy model.
That failure explains the emergence of stagnation in the US
economy and stagnation is likely to endure.
Current economic conditions in the US smack of the
mid-1990s. The 1990s expansion proved unsustainable and so will the current modest expansion.
However, this time it is unlikely to be followed by financial crisis because of the balance
sheet cleaning that took place during the last crisis.
Competing explanations of the
crisis
The Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and includes the financial crisis of 2008,
is the deepest economic downturn in the US since the World War II. The depth of the downturn is
captured in Table 1 which shows the decline in GDP and the peak unemployment rate. The
recession has the longest duration and the decline in GDP is the largest. The peak unemployment
rate was slightly below the peak rate of the recession of 1981-82. However, this ignores the
fact that the labor force participation rate fell in the Great Recession (i.e. people left the
labor force and were not counted as unemployed) whereas it increased in the recession of
1981-82 (i.e. people entered the labor force and were counted as unemployed).
Table 1. Alternative measures of the depth of US recessions.
... ... ...
Table 2 provides data on the percent change in private sector employment from business cycle
peak to trough. The 7.6 percent loss of private sector jobs in the Great Recession dwarfs other
recessions, providing another measure of its depth and confirming it extreme nature. 2 Over the
course of the 1981-82 labor force participation rose from 63.8 percent to 64.2 percent, thereby
likely increasing the unemployment rate. In contrast, over the course of the Great Recession
the labor force participation rate fell from 66.0 percent to 65.7 percent, thereby likely
decreasing the unemployment. The decrease in the labor force participation rate was even
sharper for prime age (25 – 54 years old) workers, indicating that the decrease in the
overall participation rate was not due to demographic factors such as an aging population.
Instead, it was due to lack of job opportunities, which supports the claim that labor force
exit lowered the unemployment rate. Table 2. U.S. private employment cycles, peak to trough.
Source: Bureau of labor statistics and author's calculations.
... ... ...
Broadly speaking there exist three competing perspectives on the crisis (Palley, 2012).
Perspective # 1 is the hardcore neoliberal position which can be labeled the
"government failure hypothesis" . In the U.S. it is identified with the Republican
Party and with the economics departments of Stanford University, the University of Chicago,
and the University of Minnesota.
The hardcore neoliberal government failure argument is that
the crisis is rooted in the U.S. housing bubble and its bust. The claim is that the bubble
was due to excessively prolonged loose monetary policy and politically motivated government
intervention in the housing market aimed at increasing ownership. With regard to monetary
policy, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates too low for too long following the
recession of 2001.
With regard to the housing market, government intervention via the
Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, drove up house prices and
encouraged homeownership beyond peoples' means.
Perspective # 2 is the softcore neoliberal position, which can be labeled the "market
failure hypothesis" . It is identified with the Obama administration, the Walls Street
and Silicon Valley wing of the Democratic Party, and economics departments such as those at
MIT, Yale and Princeton. In Europe it is identified with "Third Way" politics.
The softcore
neoliberal market failure argument is that the crisis is due to inadequate financial sector
regulation. First, regulators allowed excessive risk-taking by banks. Second, regulators
allowed perverse incentive pay structures within banks that encouraged management to engage
in "loan pushing" rather than "sound lending." Third, regulators pushed both deregulation and
self-regulation too far. Together, these failures contributed to financial misallocation,
including misallocation of foreign saving provided through the trade deficit, that led to
financial crisis. The crisis in turn deepened an ordinary recession, transforming it into the
Great Recession which could have become the second Great Depression absent the extraordinary
policy interventions of 2008-09
Perspective # 3 is the progressive position which is rooted in Keynesian economics and
can be labeled the "destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis".
It is identified
with the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and the labor movement, but it has no
standing within major economics departments owing to their suppression of alternatives to
economic orthodoxy. The Keynesian "destruction of shared prosperity" argument is that
the crisis is rooted in the neoliberal economic paradigm that has guided economic policy for
the past thirty years. An important feature of the argument is that, though the U.S. is the
epicenter of the crisis, all countries are implicated as they all participated in the
adoption of a systemically flawed policy paradigm. That paradigm infected finance via
inadequate regulation, enabling financial excess that led to the financial crisis of 2008.
However, financial excess is just an element of the crisis and the full explanation is far
deeper than just financial market regulatory failure According to the Keynesian destruction
of shared prosperity hypothesis, the deep cause is generalized economic policy failure rooted
in the flawed neoliberal economic paradigm that was adopted in the late 1970s and early
1980s.
For the period 1945 - 1975 the U.S. economy was characterized by a "virtuous circle"
Keynesian growth model built on full employment and wage growth tied to productivity growth.
This model is illustrated in Figure 1 and its logic was as follows. Productivity growth drove
wage growth, which in turn fuelled demand growth and created full employment. That provided an
incentive for investment, which drove further productivity growth and supported higher wages.
This model held in the U.S. and, subject to local modifications, it also held throughout the
global economy - in Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.
Figure 1. The 1945 – 75 virtuous circle Keynesian growth model. Wage growth Demand
growth Full employment Productivity growth Investment
After 1980 the virtuous circle Keynesian
growth model was replaced by a neoliberal growth model. The reasons for the change are a
complex mix of economic, political and sociological reasons that are beyond the scope of the
current paper. The key changes wrought by the new model were:
Abandonment of the commitment
to full employment and the adoption of commitment to very low inflation;
Severing of the
link between wages and productivity growth.
Together, these changes created a new economic
dynamic. Before 1980, wages were the engine of U.S. demand growth. After 1980, debt and asset
price inflation became the engine The new economic model was rooted in neoliberal economic
thought. Its principal effects were to weaken the position of workers; strengthen the position
of corporations; and unleash financial markets to serve the interests of financial and business
elites.
As illustrated in figure 2, the new model can be described as a neoliberal policy box
that fences workers in and pressures them from all sides. On the left hand side, the corporate
model of globalization put workers in international competition via global production networks
that are supported by free trade agreements and capital mobility.
On the right hand side, the
"small" government agenda attacked the legitimacy of government and pushed persistently for
deregulation regardless of dangers. From below, the labor market flexibility agenda attacked
unions and labor market supports such as the minimum wage, unemployment benefits, employment
protections, and employee rights. From above, policymakers abandoned the commitment of full
employment, a development that was reflected in the rise of inflation targeting and the move
toward independent central banks influenced by financial interests.
Figure 2. The neoliberal
policy box. Globalization WORKERS Abandonment of full employment Small Government Labor Market
Flexibility
Corporate globalization is an especially key feature. Not only did it exert
downward inward pressures on economies via import competition and the threat of job
off-shoring, it also provided the architecture binding economies together. Thus, globalization
reconfigured global production by transferring manufacturing from the U.S. and Europe to
emerging market economies. This new global division of labor was then supported by having U.S.
consumers serve as the global economy's buyer of first and last resort, which explains the U.S.
trade deficit and the global imbalances problem.
This new global division of labor inevitably
created large trade deficits that also contributed to weakening the aggregate demand
(AD)generation process by causing a hemorrhage of spending on imports (Palley, 2015)
An
important feature of the Keynesian hypothesis is that the neoliberal policy box was implemented
on a global basis, in both the North and the South. As in the U.S., there was also a structural
break in policy regime in both Europe and Latin America. In Latin America , the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank played an important role as they used the economic distress
created by the 1980s debt crisis to push neoliberal policy
They did so by making financial
assistance conditional on adopting such policies. This global diffusion multiplied the impact
of the turn to neoliberal economic policy and it explains why the Washington Consensus enforced
by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank has been so significant. It also explains why
stagnation has taken on a global dimension.
III The role of finance in the neoliberal
model
Owing to the extraordinarily deep and damaging nature of the financial crisis of 2008,
financial market excess has been a dominant focus of explanations of the Great Recession.
Within the neoliberal government failure hypothesis the excess is attributed to ill-advised
government intervention and Federal Reserve interest rate policy. Within the neoliberal market
failure hypothesis it is attributed to ill-advised deregulation and failure to modernize
regulation.
According to the Keynesian destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis neither of
those interpretations grasps the true significance of finance. The government failure
hypothesis is empirically unsupportable (Palley, 2012a, chapter 6), while the market failure
hypothesis has some truth but also misses the true role of finance That role is illustrated in
Figure 3 which shows that finance performed two roles in the neoliberal model. The first was to
structurally support the neoliberal policy box. The second was to support the AD generation
process. These dual roles are central to the process of increasing financial domination of the
economy which has been termed financialization (Epstein, 2004, p.3; Krippner, 2004, 2005;
Palley, 2013). Figure 3. The role of finance in the neoliberal model. The role of finance:
"financialization" Supporting the neoliberal policy box Aggregate demand generation Corporate
behavior Economic policy Financial innovation The policy box shown in Figure 2 has four sides.
A true box has six sides and a four sided structure would be prone to structural weakness.
Metaphorically speaking, one role of finance is to provide support on two sides of the
neoliberal policy box, as illustrated in Figure 4.
Finance does this through three channels.
First, financial markets have captured control of corporations via enforcement of the
shareholder value maximization paradigm of corporate governance. Consequently, corporations now
serve financial market interests along with the interests of top management. Second, financial
markets in combination with corporations lobby politically for the neoliberal policy mix.
The
combination of changed corporate behavior and economic policy produces an economic matrix that
puts wages under continuous pressure and raises income inequality.
Third, financial innovation
has facilitated and promoted financial market control of corporations via hostile take-overs,
leveraged buyouts and reverse capital distributions. Financial innovation has therefore been
key for enforcing Wall Street's construction of the shareholder value maximization paradigm.
Figure 4. Lifting the lid on the neoliberal policy box. The neoliberal box Corporations
Financial markets
The second vital role of finance is the support of AD. The neoliberal model
gradually undermined the income and demand generation process, creating a growing structural
demand gap. The role of finance was to fill that gap. Thus, within the U.S., deregulation,
financial innovation, speculation, and mortgage lending fraud enabled finance to fill the
demand gap by lending to consumers and by spurring asset price inflation
Financialization
assisted with this process by changing credit market practices and introducing new credit
instruments that made credit more easily and widely available to corporations and households.
U.S. consumers in turn filled the global demand gap, along with help from U.S. and European
corporations who were shifting manufacturing facilities and investment to the emerging market
economies.
Three things should be emphasized.
First, this AD generation role of finance was an
unintended consequence and not part of a grand plan. Neoliberal economists and policymakers did
not realize they were creating a demand gap, but their laissez-faire economic ideology
triggered financial market developments that coincidentally filled the demand gap.
Second, the
financial process they unleashed was inevitably unstable and was always destined to hit the
wall. There are limits to borrowing and limits to asset price inflation and all Ponzi schemes
eventually fall apart. The problem is it is impossible to predict when they will fail. All that
can be known with confidence is that it will eventually fail.
Third, the process went on far
longer than anyone expected, which explains why critics of neoliberalism sounded like Cassandras (Palley, 1998, Chapter 12). However,
the long duration of financial excess made the
collapse far deeper when it eventually happened. It has also made escaping the after-effects of
the financial crisis far more difficult as the economy is now burdened by debts and destroyed
credit worthiness. That has deepened the proclivity to economic stagnation.
IV
Evidence
Evidence regarding the economic effects of the neoliberal model is plentiful and clear
Figure 5 shows productivity and average hourly compensation of non-supervisory workers (that is
non-managerial employees who are about 80 percent of the workforce). The link with productivity
growth was severed almost 40 years ago and hourly compensation has been essentially stagnant
since then.
Figure 5.
... ... ...
Table
3 shows data on the distribution of income growth by business cycle expansion across the
wealthiest top 10 percent and bottom 90 percent of households. Over the past sixty years there
has been a persistent decline in the share of income gains going to the bottom 90 percent of
households ranked by wealth. However, in the period 1948 – 1979 the decline was gradual.
After 1980 there is a massive structural break and the share of income gains going to the
bottom 90 percent collapses. Before 1980, on average the bottom 90 percent received 66 percent
of business cycle expansion income gains. After 1980, on average they receive just 8 percent.
Table 3. Distribution of income growth by business cycle expansion across the wealthiest top 10
percent and bottom 90 percent of households. Source: Tcherneva (2014), published in The New
York Times , September 26, 2014. '49- '53 '54- '57 '59- '60 '61- '69 '70- '73 '75- '79
'82- '90 '91- '00 '01- '07 '09- '12 Average Pre-1908 Average Post-1980 Top 10% 20% 28 32 33
43 45 80 73 98 116 34% 92% Bottom 90% 80% 72 68 67 57 55 20 27 2 -16 66% 8%
Figure 6
shows the share of total pre-tax income of the top one percent of households ranked by wealth.
From the mid-1930s, with the implementation of the New Deal social contract, that share fell
from a high of 23.94 percent in 1928 to a low of 8.95 percent in 1978. Thereafter it has
steadily risen, reaching 23.5 percent in 2007 which marked the beginning of the Great
Recession. It then fell during the Great Recession owing to a recession-induced fall in
profits, but has since recovered most of that decline as income distribution has worsened again
during the economic recovery. In effect, during the neoliberal era the US economy has retraced
its steps, reversing the improvements achieved by the New Deal and post-World War II
prosperity, so that the top one percent's share of pre-tax income has returned to pre-Great
Depression levels.
Figure 6. US pre-tax income share of top 1 percent. Source:
http://inequality.org/income-inequality/. Original source: Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez
(2003), updated at http://emlab.edu/users/saez.
As argued in Palley (2012a, p. 150-151) there
is close relationship between union membership density (i.e. percent of employed workers that
are unionized) and income distribution. This is clearly shown in Figure 7 which shows union
density and the share of pre-tax income going to the top ten percent of wealthiest households.
The neoliberal labor market flexibility agenda explicitly attacks unions and works to shift
income to wealthier households.
Share of income going to the top 10 percent 2013: 47.0% Union
membership density 11.2% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 1917 1923 1929 1935 1941 1947 1953 1959
1965 1971 1977 1983 1989 1995 2001 2007 2013 Source: Data on union density follows the
composite series found in Historical Statistics of the United States; updated to 2013 from
unionstats.com. Income inequality (share of income to top 10%) from Piketty and Saez,
"Income
Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998, Quarterly Journal of Economics , 118(1),
2003, 1-39. Updated Figure 7. Union membership and the share of income going to the top ten
percent of wealthiest households, 1917 – 2013. Source: Mishel, Gould and Bivens (2015).
Table 4 provides data on the evolution of the U.S. goods and services trade balance as a share
of GDP by business cycle peak. Comparison across peaks controls for the effect of the business
cycle. The data show through to the late 1970s U.S. trade was roughly in balance, but after
1980 it swung to massive deficit and the deficits increased each business cycle. These deficits
were the inevitable product of the neoliberal model of globalization (Palley, 2015) and they
undermined the AD generation process in accordance with the Keynesian hypothesis.
Table 4. The
U.S. goods & services trade deficit/surplus by business cycle peaks, 1960 – 2007.
Sources: Economic Report of the President, 2009 and author's calculations. Business cycle
peak year Trade balance ($ millions) GDP ($ billions) Trade balance/ GDP (%) 1960 3,508
526.4 0.7 1969 91 984.6 0.0 1973 1,900 1,382.7 0.1 1980 -25,500 2,789.5
-0.9 1981 -28,023 3,128.4 -0.9 1990 -111,037 5,803.1 -1.9 2001 -429,519
10,128.0 -4.2 2007 -819,373 13,807.5 -5.9
Finally, Figure 8 shows total domestic debt
relative to GDP and growth. This Figure is highly supportive of the Keynesian interpretation of
the role of finance. During the neoliberal era real GDP growth has actually slowed but debt
growth has exploded. The reason is the neoliberal model did nothing to increase growth, but it
needed faster debt growth to fill the demand gap created by the model's worsening of income
distribution and creation of large trade deficits. Debt growth supported debt-financed consumer
spending and it supported asset price inflation that enabled borrowing which filled the demand
gap caused by the neoliberal model. Figure 8. Total domestic debt and growth (1952-2007).
Source: Grantham, 2010.
V The debate about the causes of the crisis: why it matters
The importance of the debate about the causes of the crisis is that each perspective
recommends its own different policy response. For hardcore neoliberal government failure
proponents the recommended policy response is to double-down on the policies described by the
neoliberal policy box and further deregulate markets; to deepen central bank independence and
the commitment to low inflation via strict rules based monetary policy; and to further shrink
government and impose fiscal austerity to deal with increased government debt produced by the
crisis For softcore neoliberal market failure proponents the recommended policy response is to
tighten financial regulation but continue with all other aspects of the existing neoliberal
policy paradigm. That means continued support for corporate globalization, socalled labor
market flexibility, low inflation targeting, and fiscal austerity in the long term.
Additionally, there is need for temporary large-scale fiscal and monetary stimulus to combat
the deep recession caused by the financial crisis.
However, once the economy has recovered,
policy should continue with the neoliberal model For proponents of the destruction of shared
prosperity hypothesis the policy response is fundamentally different. The fundamental need is
to overthrow the neoliberal paradigm and replace it with a "structural Keynesian" paradigm.
That involves repacking the policy box as illustrated in Figure 9.
The critical step is to take
workers out of the box and put corporations and financial markets in so that they are made to
serve a broader public interest. The key elements are to replace corporate globalization with
managed globalization that blocks race to the bottom trade dynamics and stabilizes global
financial markets; restore a commitment to full employment; replace the neoliberal
anti-government agenda with a social democratic government agenda; and replace the neoliberal
labor market flexibility with a solidarity based labor market agenda.
The goals are restoration
of full employment and restoration of a solid link between wage and productivity growth.
Figure
9. The structural Keynesian box Corporations & Managed Financial Markets Globalization Full
Employment Social Democratic Government Solidarity Labor Markets
Lastly, since the neoliberal
model was adopted as part of a new global economic order, there is also need to recalibrate the
global economy. This is where the issue of "global rebalancing" enters and emerging market
economies need to shift away from export-led growth strategies to domestic demand-led
strategies. That poses huge challenges for many emerging market economies because they have
configured their growth strategies around export-led growth whereby they sell to U.S.
consumers.
VI From crisis to stagnation: the failure to change
Massive policy interventions, unequalled in the post-war era, stopped the Great Recession
from spiraling into a second Great Depression. The domestic economic interventions included the
2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out the financial sector via government
purchases of assets and equity from financial institutions; the 2009 American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that provided approximately $800 billion of fiscal stimulus, consisting
of approximately $550 billion of government spending and $250 billion of tax cuts; the Federal
Reserve lowering its interest target to near-zero (0 - 0.25 percent); and the Federal Reserve
engaging in quantitative easing (QE) transactions that involve it purchasing government and
private sector securities. At the international level, in 2008 the Federal Reserve established
a temporary $620 billion foreign exchange (FX) swap facility with foreign central banks.
That
facility provided the global economy with dollar balances, thereby preventing a dollar
liquidity shortage from triggering a wave of global default on short-term dollar loans that the
financial system was unwilling to roll-over because of panic.3
Additionally, there was
unprecedented globally coordinated fiscal stimulus arranged via the G-20 mechanism. 3
The FX
swaps with foreign central banks have been criticized as being a bail-out for foreign
economies. In fact, they saved the US financial system which would have been pulled down by
financial collapse outside
Despite their scale, these interventions did not stop the recession
from being the deepest since 1945, and nor did they stop the onset of stagnation. Table 5 shows
how GDP growth has failed to recover since the end of the Great Recession, averaging just 2.1
percent for the five year period from 2010 – 2014. Furthermore, that period includes the
rebound year of 2010 when the economy rebounded from its massive slump owing to the
extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus measures that were put in place
Table 5. U.S. GDP
growth. Source: Statistical Annex of the European Union, Autumn 2014 and author's calculations.
The growth rate for 2014 is that estimated in October 2014.
Table 6 shows employment creation in the five years after the end of recessions, which provides
another window on stagnation. The job creation numbers show that the neoliberal model was
already slowing in the 1990s with the first episode of "jobless the US.
Many foreign banks
operating in the US had acquired US assets financed with short-term dollar borrowings. When the
US money market froze in 2008 they could not roll-over these loans in accordance with normal
practice. That threatened massive default by these banks within the US financial system, which
would have pulled down the entire global financial system.
The Federal Reserve could not lend
directly to these foreign banks and their governing central banks lacked adequate dollar
liquidity to fill the financing gap. The solution was to lend dollars to foreign central banks,
which then made dollar loans to foreign banks in need of dollar roll-over short-term financing.
recovery".
It actually ground to stagnation in the 2001 – 2007 period, but this was
masked by the house price bubble and the false prosperity it created. Stagnation has persisted
after the Great Recession, but the economic distress caused by the recession has finally
triggered awareness of stagnation among elites economists. In a sense, the Great Recession
called out the obvious, just as did the little boy in the Hans Anderson story about the
emperor's new suit
Table 6. U.S. private sector employment creation in the five year period
after the end of recessions for six business cycles with extended expansions. Source: Bureau of
labor statistics and author's calculations. * = January 1980 the beginning of the next
recession Recession end date Employment at recession end date (millions) Employment five years
later (millions) Percent growth in employment Feb 1961 45.0 52.2 16.0% Mar 1975 61.9 74.6*
20.5% Nov 1982 72.8 86.1 18.3% March 1991 90.1 99.5 10.4% Nov 2001 109.8 115.0 4.7% June 2009
108.4 117.1 8.0% The persistence of stagnation after the Great Recession raises the question
"why"? The answer is policy has done nothing to change the structure of the underlying
neoliberal economic model.
That model inevitably produces stagnation because it produces a
structural demand shortage via (i) its impact on income distribution, and (ii) via its design
of globalization which generates massive trade deficits, wage competition and off-shoring of
jobs and investment. In terms of the three-way contest between the government failure
hypothesis, the market failure hypothesis and the destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis,
the economic policy debate during the Great Recession was cast as exclusively between
government failure and market failure.
With the Democrats controlling the Congress and
Presidency after the 2008 election, the market failure hypothesis won out and has framed policy
since then. According to the hypothesis, the financial crisis caused an exceptionally deep
recession that required exceptionally large monetary and fiscal stimulus to counter it and
restore normalcy. Additionally, the market failure hypothesis recommends restoring and
renovating financial regulation, but other than that the neoliberal paradigm is appropriate and
should be deepened In accordance with this thinking, the in-coming Obama administration
affirmed existing efforts to save the system and prevent a downward spiral by supporting the
Bush administration's TARP, the Federal Reserve's first round of QE (November/December 2008)
that provided market liquidity, and the Federal Reserve's FX swap agreement with foreign
central banks
Thereafter, the Obama administration worked to reflate the economy via passage of
the ARRA (2009) which provided significant fiscal stimulus. With the failure to deliver a
V-shaped recovery, candidate Obama became even more vocal about fiscal stimulus However,
reflecting its softcore neoliberal inclinations, the Obama administration then became much less
so when it took office. Thus, the winners of the internal debate about fiscal policy in the
first days of the Obama administration were those wanting more modest fiscal stimulus.4
Furthermore, its analytical frame was one of temporary stimulus with the 4 Since 2009 there has
been some evolution of policy positions characterized by a shift to stronger support for fiscal
stimulus. This has been especially marked in Larry Summers, who was the Obama administration's
goal of long-term fiscal consolidation, which is softcore neoliberal speak for fiscal austerity
Seen in the above light, after the passage of ARRA (2009), the fiscal policy divide between the
Obama administration and hardcore neoliberal Republicans was about the speed and conditions
under which fiscal austerity should be restored.
This attitude to fiscal policy reflects the
dominance within the Democratic Party of "Rubinomics", the Wall Street view associated with
former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that government spending and budget deficits raise real
interest rates and thereby lower growth. According to that view, the US needs long-term fiscal
austerity to offset Social Security and Medicare Side-by-side with the attempt to reflate the
economy, the Obama administration also pushed for major overhaul and tightening of financial
sector regulation via the Dodd- Frank Act (2010).
That accorded with the market failure
hypothesis's claim about the economic crisis and Great Recession being caused by financial
excess permitted by the combination of excessive deregulation, lax regulation and failure to
modernize regulation Finally, and again in accordance with the logic of the market failure
hypothesis, the Obama administration has pushed ahead with doubling-down and further
entrenching the neoliberal policy box. This is most visible in its approach to globalization.
In 2010, free trade agreements modelled after NAFTA were signed with South Korea, Colombia and
Panama. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP), two mega-agreements negotiated in secrecy and apparently bearing chief
economic adviser when it took office. This shift has become a way of rewriting history by
erasing the memory of initial positions. That is also true of the IMF which in 2010-2011 was a
robust supporter of fiscal consolidation in Europe. similar hallmarks to prior trade
agreements, are also being pushed by the Obama administration
The Obama administration's softcore neoliberalism would have likely generated stagnation by itself, but the prospect has
been further strengthened by Republicans.
Thus, in accordance with their point of view,
Republicans have persistently pushed the government failure hypothesis by directing the policy
conversation to excessive regulation and easy monetary policy as the causes of the crisis.
Consequently, they have consistently opposed strengthened financial regulation and demands for
fiscal stimulus.
At the same time, they have joined with softcore neoliberal Democrats
regarding doubling-down on neoliberal box policies, particularly as regards trade and
globalization Paradoxically, the failure to change the overall economic model becomes most
visible by analyzing the policies of the Federal Reserve, which have changed the most
dramatically via the introduction of QE. The initial round of QE (QE1) was followed by QE2 in
November 2010 and QE3 in September 2012, with the Fed shifting from providing short-term
emergency liquidity to buying private sector financial assets.
The goal was to bid up prices of
longer term bonds and other securities, thereby lowering interest rates on longer-term
financing and encouraging investors to buy equities and other riskier financial assets. The
Fed's reasoning was lower long-term rates would stimulate the economy, and higher financial
asset prices would trigger a positive wealth effect on consumption spending. This makes clear
the architecture of policy.
The Obama administration was to provide fiscal stimulus to jump
start the economy; the Fed would use QE to blow air back into the asset price bubble; the
Dodd-Frank Act (2010) would stabilize financial markets; and globalization would be deepened by
further NAFTA-styled international agreements. This is a near-identical model to that which
failed so disastrously. Consequently, stagnation is the logical prognosis.
VII
Déjà vu all over again: back to the 1990s but with a weaker economy
The exclusion of the destruction of shared prosperity hypothesis, combined with the joint
triumph of the market failure and government failure hypotheses, means the underlying economic
model that produced the Great Recession remains essentially unchanged. That failure to change
explains stagnation. It also explains why current conditions smack of "déjà vu
all over again" with the US economy in 2014-15 appearing to have returned to conditions
reminiscent of the mid-1990s.
Just as the 1990s failed to deliver durable prosperity, so too
current optimistic conditions will prove unsustainable absent deeper change The
déjà vu similarities are evident
in the large US trade deficit that has started
to again deteriorate rapidly;
a return of the over-valued dollar problem that promises to
further increase the trade deficit and divert jobs and investment away from the US economy;
a
return to reliance on asset price inflation and house price increases to grow consumer demand
and construction;
a return of declining budget deficits owing to continued policy disposition
toward fiscal austerity; a return of the contradiction that has the Federal Reserve tighten
monetary policy when economic strength triggers rising prices and wages that bump against the
ceiling of the Fed's self-imposed 2 percent inflation target; and renewal of the push for
neoliberal trade agreements
All of these features mean both policy context and policy design
look a lot like the mid-1990s. The Obama administration saved the system but did not change it
Consequently, the economy is destined to repeat the patterns of the 1990s and 2000s. However,
the US economy has also experienced almost twenty more years of neoliberalism which has left
its economic body in worse health than the 1990s. That means the likelihood of delivering
another bubble-based boom is low and stagnation tendencies will likely reassert themselves
after a shorter and weaker period of expansion
This structurally weakened state of the US
economy is evident in the further worsening of income inequality that has occurred during the
Great Recession and subsequent slow recovery.
... ... ...
Thomas I. Palley, Senior Economic Policy Advisor, AFL-CIO Washington, D.C. [email protected]
Among interesting ideas that Mirkowski presented in this lecture are "privatization of science" -- when well paid
intellectual prostitutes produce the reuslt which are expected by their handlers. the other is his thought
on the difference between neoclassical economics and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism believes in state
intervention and this intervention should take the form of enforcing market on all spheres of human
society.
Another interesting idea that neoliberalism in many cases doe not need the success of its ideas.
The failure can also be exploited for enforcing "more market" on the society.
In other words market fundamentalism has all features of civil religion and like in Middle Ages
it is enforced from above. heretics are not burned at the stake but simply ostracized.
Notable quotes:
"... how it is that science came to be subordinate to economics and the very future of nature to be contingent upon the market. ..."
"... As a leading exponent of the Institutional school, he has published formal treatments of financial markets that update Minsky's 'financial instability hypothesis' for the world of computerised derivative trading. ..."
Life and Debt: Living through the Financialisation of the Biosphere
How can it be that the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and the deepest financial crisis
since 1930s have done so little to undermine the supremacy of orthodox economics?
The lecture will preview material from Mirowski's new book: Never Lt a Serious Crisis Go to Waste:
How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013).
In this lecture, Professor Mirowski responds to the question of how it is that science came
to be subordinate to economics and the very future of nature to be contingent upon the market.
Charting the contradictions of the contemporary political landscape, he notes that science denialism,
markets for pollution permits and proposals for geo-engineering can all be understood as political
strategies designed to neutralize the impact of environmentalism, as they all originated in the network
of corporate-sponsored think-tanks that have made neoliberal accounts of society, politics and the
economy so prevalent that even the most profound crises are unable to shake their grip on the political
imagination.
For those of us who are still paying attention, the task of constructing an alternative politics
of science and markets is a vital one.
Philip Mirowski is Carl E. Koch Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most famous
book, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics (1989) established his reputation as a formidable
critic of the scientific status of neoclassical economics. His Machine Dreams: Economics becomes
a Cyborg Science (2002) presents a history of the Cold War consolidation of American economic orthodoxy
in the same intellectual milieu that produced systems theory, the digital computer, the atomic bomb,
the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the 'think tank'. The Road from Mont Pelerin: the
Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (with Dieter Plewhe, 2009), drawn from the archives of
the Mont Pelerin Society and the Chicago School, presents a scholarly history of neoliberalism: the
political movement initiated by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in the 1940s, which has since
become the world's dominant philosophy of government.
As a leading exponent of the Institutional school, he has published formal treatments of financial
markets that update Minsky's 'financial instability hypothesis' for the world of computerised derivative
trading.
This lecture is presented by the UTS Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre and the Australian
Working Group on Financialisation at the University of Sydney.
The idea the a scientist can be a gangster was probably first presented by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
in his famous Sherlock Holmes
detective stories. Neoliberalism just made this a reality. Mass production of "scientific gangsters"
is an immanent feature of neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
"... The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense ..."
"... Neil Fligstein wrote a good book awhile back called The Transformation of Corporate Control that shows how most large manufacturing companies were initially run by engineers, then sales people, then finance people (as corporations came to be seen as bundles of assets as opposed to businesses). I think this transformation paralleled the rise of neoclassical economics. So, not so much "chicken-and-egg" as "class war." In Germany, at least until recently, I believe CEO's of manufacturing firms were still disproportionately engineers. ..."
"... a group of hedge fund activists can suck the value that you've created right out, driving your company down and making you worse off and the company financially fragile ..."
"... That means transforming business education, including the replacement of agency theory with innovation theory ..."
"... since gigantism is the norm, rather than family run farms in a mostly agrarian economy such failures are catastrophic. The linkage between these elephants tends to create systemic risk. Previously, failure was small and isolated. ..."
"... Welcome to our wonderful new world of infinite mutual vulnerability! Risk On! Nuclear weapons, Equifax, Googleamazon, NSApanopticon, FIRE, hacking, crapification The Soviet Union vanished as an entity, many starved, but the mopes there at least still knew how to raise up edible crops and live on "less" and maybe do better collective response to that sharp peak on the entropy curve. Wonder how things might play out exceptionally, here in the Empire? ..."
"... It should be noted that Michael Jensen of HBS, one of the originators of the `maximize shareholder value' of corporate governance, is on some short lists for this year's not-exactly-the-Nobel Prize in Economics. ..."
The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense
In a new
INET paper
featured in the Financial Times , economist William Lazonick lays out a theory about how corporations
can work for everyone – not just a few executives and Wall Streeters. He challenges a set of controversial
ideas that became gospel in business schools and the mainstream media starting in the 1980s. He
sat down with INET's Lynn Parramore to discuss.
Lynn Parramore: Since the 1980s, business schools have touted "agency theory," a controversial
set of ideas meant to explain how corporations best operate. Proponents say that you run a business
with the goal of channeling money to shareholders instead of, say, creating great products or making
any efforts at socially responsible actions such as taking account of climate change. Many now take
this view as gospel, even though no less a business titan than Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, called
the notion that a company should be run to maximize shareholder value "the dumbest idea in the world."
Why did Welch say that?
William Lazonick: Welch made that statement in a 2009
interview
, just ahead of the
news that GE had lost its S&P Triple-A rating in the midst of the financial crisis. He explained
that, "shareholder value is a result, not a strategy" and that a company's "main constituencies are
your employees, your customers and your products." During his tenure as GE CEO from 1981 to 2001,
Welch had an obsession with increasing the company's stock price and hitting quarterly earnings-per-share
targets, but he also understood that revenues come when your company generates innovative products.
He knew that the employees' skills and efforts enable the company to develop those products and sell
them.
If a publicly-listed corporation succeeds in creating innovative goods or services, then shareholders
stand to gain from dividend payments if they hold shares or if they sell at a higher price. But where
does the company's value actually come from? It comes from employees who use their collective and
cumulative learning to satisfy customers with great products. It follows that these employees are
the ones who should be rewarded when the business is a success. We've become blinded to this simple,
obvious logic.
LP: What have these academic theorists missed about how companies really operate and perform?
How have their views impacted our economy and society?
WL: As I show in my new INET paper " Innovative Enterprise Solves the Agency Problem ," agency
theorists don't have a theory of innovative enterprise. That's strange, since they are talking about
how companies succeed.
They believe that to be efficient, business corporations should be run to "maximize shareholder
value." But as I have argued in
another recent INET paper , public shareholders at a company like GE are not investors
in the company's productive capabilities.
LP: Wait, as a stockholder I'm not an investor in the company's capabilities?
WL: When you buy shares of a stock, you are not creating value for the company -- you're just
a saver who buys shares outstanding on the stock market for the sake of a yield on your
financial portfolio. Public shareholders are value extractors , not value creators.
By touting public shareholders as a corporation's value creators, agency theorists lay the groundwork
for some very harmful activities. They legitimize "hedge fund activists," for example. These are
aggressive corporate predators who buy shares of a company on the stock market and then use the power
bestowed upon them by the ill-conceived U.S. proxy voting system, endorsed by the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC), to demand that the corporation inflate profits by cutting costs. That
often means mass layoffs and depressed incomes for anybody who remains. In an industry like
pharmaceuticals , the activists also press for extortionate product price increases. The higher
profits tend to boost stock prices for the activists and other shareholders if they sell their shares
on the market.
LP: So the hedge fund activists are extracting value from a corporation instead of creating it,
and yet they are the ones who get enriched.
WL: Right. Agency theory aids and abets this value extraction by advocating, in the name of "maximizing
shareholder value," massive distributions to shareholders in the form of dividends for holding shares
as well as stock buybacks that you hear about, which give manipulative boosts to stock prices. Activists
get rich when they sell the shares. The people who created the value -- the employees -- often get
poorer.
###p"downsize-and-distribute" -- something that corporations have been doing since the 1980s,
which has
resulted in extreme concentration of income among the richest households and the erosion of middle-class
employment opportunities.
LP: You've called stock buybacks -- what happens when a company buys back its own shares from
the marketplace, often to manipulate the stock price upwards -- the "legalized looting of the U.S.
business corporation." What's the problem with this practice?
WL: If you buy shares in Apple, for example, you can get a dividend for holding shares and, possibly,
a capital gain when you sell the shares. Since 2012, when Apple made its first dividend payment since
1996, the company has shelled out $57.4 billion as dividends, equivalent to over 22 percent of net
income. That's fine. But the company has also spent $157.9 billion on stock buybacks, equal to 62
percent of net income.
Yet the only time in its history that Apple ever raised funds on the public stock market was in
1980, when it
collected $97 million in its initial public offering. How can a corporation return capital to
parties that never supplied it with capital? It's a very misleading concept.
The vast majority of people who hold Apple's publicly-listed shares have simply bought outstanding
shares on the stock market. They have contributed nothing to Apple's value-creating capabilities.
That includes veteran corporate raider Carl Icahn, who raked in
$2 billion by holding $3.6 billion in Apple shares for about 32 months, while using his influence
to encourage Apple to do $80.3 billion in buybacks in 2014-2015, the largest repurchases ever. Over
this period, Apple, the most cash-rich company in history, increased its debt by $47.6 billion to
do buybacks so that it would not have to repatriate its offshore profits, sheltered from U.S. corporate
taxes.
There are many ways in which the company could have returned its profits to employees and taxpayers
-- the real value creators -- that are consistent with an innovative business model. Instead,
in doing massive buybacks, Apple's board (which includes former Vice President Al Gore) has endorsed
legalized looting. The SEC bears a lot of blame. It's supposed to protect investors and make sure
financial markets are free of manipulation. But back in 1982, the SEC bought into agency theory under
Reagan and came up with a rule that gives corporate executives a "safe harbor" against charges of
stock-price manipulation when they do billions of dollars of buybacks for the sole purpose of manipulating
their company's stock price.
LP: But don't shareholders deserve some of the profits as part owners of the corporation?
WL: Let's say you buy stock in General Motors. You are just buying a share that is outstanding
on the market. You are contributing nothing to the company. And you will only buy the shares because
the stock market is highly liquid, enabling you to easily sell some or all of the shares at any moment
that you so choose.
In contrast, people who work for General Motors supply skill and effort to generate the company's
innovative products. They are making productive contributions with expectations that, if
the innovative strategy is successful, they will share in the gains -- a bigger paycheck, employment
security, a promotion. In providing their labor services, these employees are the real value creators
whose economic futures are at risk.
LP: This is really different from what a lot of us have been taught to believe. An employee gets
a paycheck for showing up at work -- there's your reward. When we take a job, we probably don't expect
management to see us as risk-takers entitled to share in the profits unless we're pretty high up.
WL: If you work for a company, even if its innovative strategy is a big success, you run a big
risk because under the current regime of "maximizing shareholder value" a group of hedge fund activists
can suck the value that you've created right out, driving your company down and making you worse
off and the company financially fragile. And they are not the only predators you have to deal with.
Incentivized with huge amounts of stock-based pay, senior corporate executives will, and often do,
extract value from the company
for their own personal gain -- at your expense. As Professor Jang-Sup Shin and I argue in a forthcoming
book, senior executives often become value-extracting insiders. And they open the corporate coffers
to hedge fund activists, the value-extracting outsiders. Large institutional investors can use their
proxy votes to support corporate raids, acting as value-extracting enablers.
You put in your ideas, knowledge, time, and effort to make the company a huge success, and still
you may get laid off or find your paycheck shrinking. The losers are not only the mass of corporate
employees -- if you're a taxpayer, your money provides the business corporation with physical infrastructure,
like roads and bridges, and human knowledge, like scientific discoveries, that it needs to innovate
and profit. Senior corporate executives are constantly complaining that they need lower corporate
taxes in order to compete, when what they
really want is more cash to distribute to shareholders and boost stock prices. In that system,
they win but
the rest of us lose .
LP: Some academics say that hedge fund activism is great because it makes a company run better
and produce higher profits. Others say, "No, Wall Streeters shouldn't have more say than executives
who know better how to run the company." You say that both of these camps have got it wrong. How
so?
WL: A company has to be run by executive insiders, and in order to produce innovation these executives
have got to do three things:
First you need a resource-allocation strategy that, in the face of uncertainty, seeks to generate
high-quality, low-cost products. Second, you need to implement that strategy through training, retaining,
motivating, and rewarding employees, upon whom the development and utilization of the organization's
productive capabilities depend. Third, you have to mobilize and leverage the company's cash flow
to support the innovative strategy. But under the sway of the "maximizing shareholder value" idea,
many senior corporate executives have been unwilling, and often unable, to perform these value-creating
functions. Agency theorists have got it so backwards that they actually celebrate the virtues of
"
the value extracting CEO ." How strange is that?
Massive stock buybacks is where the incentives of corporate executives who extract value align
with the interests of hedge fund activists who also want to suck value from a corporation. When they
promote this kind of alliance, agency theorists have in effect served as academic agents of activist
aggression. Lacking a theory of the value-creating firm, or what I call a "theory of innovative enterprise,"
agency theorists cannot imagine what an executive who creates value actually does. They don't see
that it's crucial to align executives' interests with the value-creating investment requirements
of the organizations over which they exercise strategic control. This intellectual deficit is not
unique to agency theorists; it is inherent in their training in
neoclassical economics .
LP: So if shareholders and executives are too often just looting companies to enrich themselves
– "value extraction," as you put it – and not caring about long-term success, who is in a better
position to decide how to run them, where to allocate resources and so on?
WL: We need to redesign corporate-governance institutions to promote the interests of American
households as workers and taxpayers. Because of technological, market, or competitive uncertainties,
workers take the risk that the application of their skills and the expenditure of their efforts will
be in vain. In financing investments in infrastructure and knowledge, taxpayers make productive capabilities
available to business enterprises, but with no guaranteed return on those investments.
These stakeholders need to have representation on corporate boards of directors. Predators, including
self-serving corporate executives and greed-driven shareholder activists, should certainly not have
representation on corporate boards.
LP: Sounds like we've lost sight of what a business needs to do to be successful in the long run,
and it's costing everybody except a handful of senior executives, hedge fund managers, and Wall Street
bankers. How would your "innovation theory" help companies run better and make for a healthier economy
and society?
WL: Major corporations are key to the operation and performance of the economy. So we need a revolution
in corporate governance to get us back on track to stable and equitable economic growth. Besides
changing board representation, I would change the incentives for top executives so that they are
rewarded for allocating corporate resources to value creation. Senior executives should gain along
with the rest of the organization when the corporation is successful in generating competitive products
while sharing the gains with workers and taxpayers.
Innovation theory calls for changing the mindsets and skill sets of senior executives. That means
transforming business education, including the replacement of agency theory with innovation theory.
That also means changing the career paths through which corporate personnel can rise to positions
of strategic control, so that leaders who create value get rewarded and those who extract it are
disfavored. At the institutional level, it would be great to see the SEC, as the regulator of financial
markets, take a giant step in supporting value creation by banning stock buybacks whose purpose it
is to manipulate stock prices.
To get from here to there, we have to replace nonsense with common sense in our understanding
of how business enterprises operate and perform.
Owners come first!
That was the slogan of our former board chair. He didn't disclose to the employees that his compensation
was influenced mightily by how big the net income was. He did tell the employees that they were
well down the hierarchy, after Owners (capital O) and then vendors and then customers. His former
employees deserted in droves.
I'd say that maximizing long-term shareholder value is a great idea the problem is, as is so
often the case these days, short-term thinking.
Driving away a company's best employees makes that quarter's numbers look better, but destroys
long-term value. Same thing for so many other short-term, "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" strategies.
One step to fixing things – change the definition of long-term capital gains from the current
1 year to, say, 5 years. This "one simple trick" would fix everything from the carried interest
loophole to the abuses inherent in the current Wall Street gambling mentality.
We can talk about what is best in theory, but reality is just that, shareholders come first.
They control the board and the CEO and the CEO institutes the will of the shareholders down
into the business entities, determining the level of reinvestment in the business units and the
level of employee compensation. That will continue to be the case until the company goes bankrupt
at which point shareholders are entitled to nothing.
I agree with others that Jack Welch is saying what he is saying after the fact. Way too easy
to do.
>Welch had an obsession with increasing the company's stock price and hitting quarterly
earnings-per-share targets, but he also understood
Yeah so he talks a good game but when he had the reins – one of the most powerful men in the
world meekly (ok, that's a hilarious adjective when applied to Jack Welsh) followed the herd.
Or more accurately, found out where the herd was heading and got out in front of it. The true
sign of modern "leadership".
Or more accurately, found out where the herd was heading and got out in front of it.
The true sign of modern "leadership".
Reminds me of something i have read, supposedly a quite from some politician or other, going
to the tune of "i need to find out where the mob is going, so i can lead them there".
Welch's primary business strategy at GE was to exit every product market in which GE's market
share was not in the top two in the industry (selling them off or closing them down) and reallocate
resources to industries where GE was market dominant, often buying up the competition rather than
truly investing in innovation. A truly awful human being.
As I personally have always believed, Employees have more invested in their employers than
shareholders. Shareholders can sell quickly and have no loyalty. Employees do not enjoy such a
liquid "jobs market."
There also seems to be a turning point in companies, where they change the perception of the
customers form a group to be treasured, to a group who are to b exploited – change the relationship
so the customers become "marks."
I also believe there should be an almost automatic "break -up" provision for companies who
reach a certain market share.
Finally there should be one definition of income, and it should include Wages, Dividends, and
Capital Gains.
there should be an almost automatic "break -up" provision for companies who reach a certain
market share.
Yes, anti-trust enforcement would be nice. Hypothetical President Sanders might actually do
that. Real and hypothetical Presidents Bush, Obama, Romney, B. Clinton, H. Clinton, and Trump
have other priorities.
Sen Bernie Sanders sees right through the neoclassical fetters, blinders, and bullshit. He
recognizes how intellectually and economically stagnant and dangerous it is. He has the most powerful
conceptual, articulate grasp of economics that I've seen the past 40 years. He also, IIRC, had
MMTer Stephanie Kelton as an advisor, and had her advise the Senate Finance Committee. Also notable:
Sen Elizabeth Warren.
The other political operators that you mention are still in thrall to neoclassical assumptions.
They mistake 'takers' for 'makers' and are economically bamboozled. And it has worked out well
for all of them, on a personal basis, so it is not surprising that they don't see the problems.
Anyone actually trying to build an innovative business, OTOH, has to see through the bamboozlement
or else you're out of business pronto.
The class of humans that by inclination and opportunity become C-Suite and VC looters and "owners:"
did they precede the imprimatur of "economists" with their notions of price, value, and crossing
of curves, or did the "economists" do a Martin Luther, nail up a bunch of theses, and preach fire
and brimstone to turn the greedheads loose?
And was/is any other outcome for the species and the planet even possible?
Neil Fligstein wrote a good book awhile back called The Transformation of Corporate Control
that shows how most large manufacturing companies were initially run by engineers, then sales
people, then finance people (as corporations came to be seen as bundles of assets as opposed to
businesses). I think this transformation paralleled the rise of neoclassical economics. So, not
so much "chicken-and-egg" as "class war." In Germany, at least until recently, I believe CEO's
of manufacturing firms were still disproportionately engineers.
"most large manufacturing companies were initially run by engineers, then sales people,
then finance people"
The Lincoln Electric Company, which became famous for its "Incentive Management" program of
compensating employees, was a client of mine. Over three decades I saw it progress through precisely
those stages, and gradually lose every characteristic that had made the company unique.
This post was a genuine pleasure to read. Especially:
If you work for a company, even if its innovative strategy is a big success, you run a big
risk because under the current regime of "maximizing shareholder value" a group of hedge
fund activists can suck the value that you've created right out, driving your company down
and making you worse off and the company financially fragile .
And we've had a government by and for hedge fund managers for about the same amount of time
that we've had economic woes. One problem is that hedge funders like Romney, who actually don't
think about consumer product development, actually don't have to test and deploy products, bring
their bean-counter assumptions to business and make a hash of things. I mention Romney specifically,
because he presents himself to the world as a paragon of economic wisdom.
Romney has a prestigious business school background. Which makes me want to highlight this:
Innovation theory calls for changing the mindsets and skill sets of senior executives.
That means transforming business education, including the replacement of agency theory
with innovation theory .
Just a thought: "innovation theory," like MMT, is maybe just a tool set? "Innovation" includes
"autonomous combat devices," and CRSP-R, and nuclear weapons, and the F-35, and fracking, and
derivatives, and plastics, and charter schools, stuff and ideas that for some of us constitute
"value" are corporations as the category has grown to be, any more likely to "innovate" in the
areas of social improvements and possibilities, or stewardship of the planet, or close down the
toll stations and all the other rent collection scams and extortions they have "innovated" to
date? Or release their chokehold on "policy?"
Says the proponent: "Major corporations are key to the operation and performance of the economy.
So we need a revolution in corporate governance to get us back on track to stable and equitable
economic growth. Besides changing board representation, I would change the incentives for top
executives so they are rewarded for allocating corporate resources to value creation. Senior executives
should gain along with the rest of the organization when the corporation is successful in generating
competitive products while sharing the gains with workers and taxpayers." There seems to be so
much wrong and just more Biz-babble about this, one hardly knows where to start unpacking.
"Major corporations are key?" Really? Monsanto? GM? Bechtel? The Big Banks? And "back on track":
When has the political economy, writ small or large, ever been "on track to stability and equitable
growth," said "growth' itself seemingly one of the pathologies that's killing us? And who's going
to write the entries for the corporate senior executives' dance cards that will measure their
"success," in those feel-good categories?
But it's a good conversation piece, and maybe an opening into Something Better, however us
inherently mostly self-interested, self-pleasing omnivorous predators might define "better "
Badly run companies, naturally extinguish themselves. Unfortunately they take down their customers,
owners, vendors and employees in the process. But the government can step in and either save a
company that otherwise would die, or act as a crony corruption partner on behalf of a well connected
company. Same as it always was.
But since gigantism is the norm, rather than family run farms in a mostly agrarian economy
such failures are catastrophic. The linkage between these elephants tends to create systemic risk.
Previously, failure was small and isolated.
Welcome to our wonderful new world of infinite mutual vulnerability! Risk On! Nuclear weapons,
Equifax, Googleamazon, NSApanopticon, FIRE, hacking, crapification The Soviet Union vanished as
an entity, many starved, but the mopes there at least still knew how to raise up edible crops
and live on "less" and maybe do better collective response to that sharp peak on the entropy curve.
Wonder how things might play out exceptionally, here in the Empire?
It should be noted that Michael Jensen of HBS, one of the originators of the `maximize
shareholder value' of corporate governance, is
on some short lists
for this year's not-exactly-the-Nobel Prize in Economics.
"... Mirowski identifies three basic aspects of neoliberalism that the Left has failed to understand: the movement's intellectual history, the way it has transformed everyday life, and what constitutes opposition to it. Until we come to terms with them, Mirowski suggests, right-wing movements such as the Tea Party (a prominent player in the book) will continue to reign triumphant. ..."
"... Joining a long line of thinkers, most famously Karl Polanyi, Mirowski insists that a key error of the Left has been its failure to see that markets are always embedded in other social institutions. Neoliberals, by contrast, grasp this point with both hands -- and therefore seek to reshape all of the institutions of society, including and especially the state, to promote markets. Neoliberal ascendancy has meant not the retreat of the state so much as its remaking. ..."
"... he also recognizes that the neoliberals themselves have been canny about keeping the real nature of their project hidden through a variety of means. Neoliberal institutions tend to have what he calls a "Russian doll" structure, with the most central ones well hidden from public eyes. Mirowski coins an ironic expression, "the Neoliberal Thought Collective," for the innermost entities that formulate the movement's doctrine. The venerable Mont Pelerin Society is an NTC institution. Its ideas are frequently disseminated through venues which, formally at least, are unconnected to the center, such as academic economics departments. Thus, neoclassical economists spread the gospel of the free market while the grand project of remaking the state falls to others. ..."
"... At the same time as neoliberal commonsense trickles down from above, Mirowski argues that it also wells up from below, reinforced by our daily patterns of life. Social networking sites like Facebook encourage people to view themselves as perpetual cultural entrepreneurs, striving to offer a newer and better version of themselves to the world. Sites like LinkedIn prod their users to present themselves as a fungible basket of skills, adjustable to the needs of any employer, without any essential characteristics beyond a requisite subservience. Classical liberalism always assumes the coherent individual self as its basic unit. Neoliberalism, by contrast, sees people as little more than variable bundles of human capital, with no permanent interests or even attributes that cannot be remade through the market. For Mirowski, the proliferation of these forms of everyday neoliberalism constitute a "major reason the neoliberals have emerged from the crisis triumphant." ..."
"... Finally, Mirowski argues that the Left has too often been sucked in by neoliberalism's loyal opposition. Figures like Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman, while critical of austerity and supportive of the welfare state, accept the fundamental neoclassical economic precepts at the heart of neoliberal policy. Mirowski argues that we must ditch this tradition in its entirety. Even attempts to render its assumptions more realistic -- as in the case of behavioral economics, for example, which takes account of the ways real people diverge from the hyperrationality of homo economicus -- provide little succor for those seeking to overturn the neoliberals. ..."
"... Mirowski's insistence on the centrality of the state to the neoliberal project helps correct the unfortunate tendency of many leftists over the past decade to assent to neoliberal nostrums about the obsolescence of the state. Indeed, Mirowski goes further than many other critics who have challenged the supposed retreat of the state under neoliberalism. ..."
"... Loïc Wacquant, for instance, has described the "centaur state" of neoliberalism, in which a humanist liberalism reigns for the upper classes, while the lower classes face the punitive state apparatus in all its bestiality. ..."
"... Mirowski shows us that the world of the rich under neoliberalism in no way corresponds to the laissez-faire of classical liberalism. The state does not so much leave the rich alone as actively work to reshape the world in their interests, helping to create markets for the derivatives and securities that made (and then destroyed) so many of the fortunes of the recent past. The neoliberal state is an eminently interventionist one, and those mistaking it for the austere nightwatchman of libertarian utopianism have little hope of combating it. ..."
"... Mirowski's concern to disabuse his readers of the notion that the wing of neoliberal doctrine disseminated by neoclassical economists could ever be reformed produces some of the best sections of the book. His portrait of an economics profession in haggard disarray in the aftermath of the crisis is both comic and tragic, as the amusement value of the buffoonery on display diminishes quickly when one realizes the prestige still accorded to these figures. Reading his comprehensive examination of the discipline's response to the crisis, one is reminded of Freud's famous broken kettle. The professional economists' account of their role in the crisis went something like (a) there was no bubble and (b) bubbles are impossible to predict but (c) we knew it was a bubble all along. ..."
"... Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis (which holds that prices in a competitive financial market reflect all relevant economic information), Mirowski argues that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has rendered them doubly ineffective. ..."
"... First, their adoption of the battery of assumptions that accompany most neoclassical theorizing -- about representative agents, treating information like any other commodity, and so on -- make it nearly impossible to conclusively rebut arguments like the efficient markets hypothesis. ..."
To understand how a body of thought became an era of capitalism requires more than intellectual
history.
"What is going to come after neoliberalism?" It was the question on many radicals' lips, present
writer included, after the financial crisis hit in 2008. Though few were so sanguine about our prospects
as to repeat the suicidal optimism of previous radical movements ("After Hitler, Our Turn!"), the
feeling of the day was that the era of unfettered marketization was coming to a close. A new period
of what was loosely referred to as Keynesianism would be the inevitable result of a crisis caused
by markets run amok.
Five years later, little has changed. What comes after neoliberalism? More neoliberalism, apparently.
The prospects for a revived Left capable of confronting it appear grim.
Enter Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived
the Financial Meltdown . Mirowski maintains that the true nature of neoliberalism has gone
unrecognized by its would-be critics, allowing the doctrine to flourish even in conditions, such
as a massive financial crisis, that would seem to be inimical to its survival. Leftists keep busy
tilting at the windmill of deregulation as the giants of neoliberalism go on pillaging unmolested.
Mirowski identifies three basic aspects of neoliberalism that the Left has failed to understand:
the movement's intellectual history, the way it has transformed everyday life, and what constitutes
opposition to it. Until we come to terms with them, Mirowski suggests, right-wing movements such
as the Tea Party (a prominent player in the book) will continue to reign triumphant.
The book begins with the war of ideas -- a conflict in which, Mirowski argues, the Left has been
far too generous in taking neoliberals at their word, or at least their best-publicized word. We
have, in effect, been suckered by kindly old Milton Friedman telling us how much better off we'd
all be if the government simply left us "free to choose." But neoliberals have at times been forthright
about their appreciation for the uses of state power. Markets, after all, do not simply create themselves.
Joining a long line of thinkers, most famously Karl Polanyi, Mirowski insists that a key error
of the Left has been its failure to see that markets are always embedded in other social institutions.
Neoliberals, by contrast, grasp this point with both hands -- and therefore seek to reshape all of
the institutions of society, including and especially the state, to promote markets. Neoliberal ascendancy
has meant not the retreat of the state so much as its remaking.
If Mirowski is often acidic about the Left's failure to understand this point, he also recognizes
that the neoliberals themselves have been canny about keeping the real nature of their project hidden
through a variety of means. Neoliberal institutions tend to have what he calls a "Russian doll" structure,
with the most central ones well hidden from public eyes. Mirowski coins an ironic expression, "the
Neoliberal Thought Collective," for the innermost entities that formulate the movement's doctrine.
The venerable Mont Pelerin Society is an NTC institution. Its ideas are frequently disseminated through
venues which, formally at least, are unconnected to the center, such as academic economics departments.
Thus, neoclassical economists spread the gospel of the free market while the grand project of remaking
the state falls to others.
At the same time as neoliberal commonsense trickles down from above, Mirowski argues that
it also wells up from below, reinforced by our daily patterns of life. Social networking sites like
Facebook encourage people to view themselves as perpetual cultural entrepreneurs, striving to offer
a newer and better version of themselves to the world. Sites like LinkedIn prod their users to present
themselves as a fungible basket of skills, adjustable to the needs of any employer, without any essential
characteristics beyond a requisite subservience. Classical liberalism always assumes the coherent
individual self as its basic unit. Neoliberalism, by contrast, sees people as little more than variable
bundles of human capital, with no permanent interests or even attributes that cannot be remade through
the market. For Mirowski, the proliferation of these forms of everyday neoliberalism constitute a
"major reason the neoliberals have emerged from the crisis triumphant."
Finally, Mirowski argues that the Left has too often been sucked in by neoliberalism's loyal
opposition. Figures like Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman, while critical of austerity and supportive
of the welfare state, accept the fundamental neoclassical economic precepts at the heart of neoliberal
policy. Mirowski argues that we must ditch this tradition in its entirety. Even attempts to render
its assumptions more realistic -- as in the case of behavioral economics, for example, which takes
account of the ways real people diverge from the hyperrationality of homo economicus -- provide
little succor for those seeking to overturn the neoliberals.
For Mirowski, these three failures of the Left go a long way toward explaining how neoliberals
have largely escaped blame for a crisis they created. The Left persistently goes after phantoms like
deregulation or smaller government, which neoliberals easily parry by pointing out that the regulatory
apparatus has never been bigger. At the same time, we ignore the deep roots of neoliberal ideology
in everyday life, deceiving ourselves as to the scale of the task in front of us.
Whatever criticisms of Mirowski's analysis are in order, much of it is compelling, particularly
in regard to the intellectual history of the NTC. Mirowski's insistence on the centrality of
the state to the neoliberal project helps correct the unfortunate tendency of many leftists over
the past decade to assent to neoliberal nostrums about the obsolescence of the state. Indeed, Mirowski
goes further than many other critics who have challenged the supposed retreat of the state under
neoliberalism.
Loïc Wacquant, for instance, has described the "centaur state" of neoliberalism, in which
a humanist liberalism reigns for the upper classes, while the lower classes face the punitive state
apparatus in all its bestiality. But Mirowski shows us that the world of the rich under
neoliberalism in no way corresponds to the laissez-faire of classical liberalism. The state does
not so much leave the rich alone as actively work to reshape the world in their interests, helping
to create markets for the derivatives and securities that made (and then destroyed) so many of the
fortunes of the recent past. The neoliberal state is an eminently interventionist one, and those
mistaking it for the austere nightwatchman of libertarian utopianism have little hope of combating
it.
It's here that we begin to see the strategic genius of neoliberal infrastructure, with its teams
of college economics professors teaching the wondrous efficacy of supply and demand on the one hand,
and the think tanks and policy shops engaged in the relentless pursuit of state power on the other.
The Left too often sees inconsistency where in fact there is a division of labor.
Mirowski's concern to disabuse his readers of the notion that the wing of neoliberal doctrine
disseminated by neoclassical economists could ever be reformed produces some of the best sections
of the book. His portrait of an economics profession in haggard disarray in the aftermath of the
crisis is both comic and tragic, as the amusement value of the buffoonery on display diminishes quickly
when one realizes the prestige still accorded to these figures. Reading his comprehensive examination
of the discipline's response to the crisis, one is reminded of Freud's famous broken kettle. The
professional economists' account of their role in the crisis went something like (a) there was no
bubble and (b) bubbles are impossible to predict but (c) we knew it was a bubble all along.
Incoherence notwithstanding, however, little in the discipline has changed in the wake of the
crisis. Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition
-- those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously
neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though
Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis (which holds that
prices in a competitive financial market reflect all relevant economic information), Mirowski argues
that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has
rendered them doubly ineffective.
First, their adoption of the battery of assumptions that accompany most neoclassical theorizing
-- about representative agents, treating information like any other commodity, and so on -- make
it nearly impossible to conclusively rebut arguments like the efficient markets hypothesis.
Instead, they end up tinkering with it, introducing a nuance here or a qualification there. This
tinkering causes their arguments to be more or less ignored in neoclassical pedagogy, as economists
more favorably inclined toward hard neoliberal arguments can easily ignore such revisions and hold
that the basic thrust of the theory is still correct. Stiglitz's and Krugman's arguments, while receiving
circulation through the popular press, utterly fail to transform the discipline.
Mirowski also heaps scorn on the suggestion, sometimes made in leftist circles, that the problem
at the heart of neoclassical economics is its assumption of a hyperrational homo economicus
, relentlessly comparing equilibrium states and maximizing utility. Though such a revision may
be appealing to a certain radical romanticism, Mirowski shows that a good deal of work going on under
the label of behavioral economics has performed just this revision, and has come up with results
that don't differ substantively from those of the mainstream. The main problem with neoclassicism
isn't its theory of the human agent but rather its the theory of the market -- which is precisely
what behavioral economics isn't interested in contesting.
In all, Mirowski's indictment of the state of economic theory and its imbrication with the neoliberal
project is devastating. Unfortunately, he proves much less successful in explaining why
things have turned out as they have. The book ascribes tremendous power to the Neoliberal Thought
Collective, which somehow manages to do everything from controlling the economics profession to reshaping
the state to forging a new sense of the human self. The reader is left wondering how the NTC came
to acquire such power. This leads to the book's central flaw: a lack of any theory of the structure
of modern capitalism. Indeed, the NTC seems to operate in something of a vacuum, without ever confronting
other institutions or groups, such as the state or popular movements, with interests and agendas
of their own.
To be fair, Mirowski does offer an explanation for the failure of popular movements to challenge
neoliberalism, largely through his account of "everyday" neoliberalism. At its strongest, the book
identifies important strategic failures, such as Occupy's embrace of "a mimicry of media technologies
as opposed to concerted political mobilization." However, Mirowski extends the argument well beyond
a specific failure of the Occupy movement to propose a general thesis that developments like Facebook
and reality TV have transmitted neoliberal ideology to people who have never read Friedman and Hayek.
In claiming that this embodied or embedded ideology plays an important role in the failure of the
Left, he places far more explanatory weight on the concept of everyday neoliberalism than it is capable
of bearing.
At the simplest level, it's just not clear that everyday neoliberalism constitutes the kind of
block to political action that Mirowski thinks it does. No doubt, many people reading this article
right now simultaneously have another browser tab open to monster.com or LinkedIn, where they are
striving to present themselves as a fungible basket of skills to any employer that will have them.
In this economy, everyone has to hustle, and that means using all available means. That many of these
same readers have probably also done things like organize against foreclosures should give pause
to any blurring of the distinction between using various media technologies and embracing the ideology
Mirowski sees embodied in them.
Indeed, the ubiquity of participation in such technologies by people who support, oppose, or are
apathetic about neoliberalism points to a larger phenomenon on which Mirowski is silent: the labor
market. Put bluntly, it is difficult to imagine anyone engaging in the painfully strained self-advertisement
facilitated by LinkedIn in a labor market with, say, 2-percent unemployment. In such a market, in
which employers were competing for comparatively scarce workers, there would be very little need
for those workers to go through the self-abasing ritual of converting themselves into fungible baskets
of skills. In our current situation, by contrast, where secure and remunerative employment is comparatively
scarce, it is no surprise that people turn to whatever technologies are available to attempt to sell
themselves. As Joan Robinson put it, the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not
being exploited by it.
In evaluating the role of everyday neoliberalism, it is also helpful to move, for the moment,
beyond the perspective of the United States, where the NTC has clearly had great success, and adopt
that of countries where resistance is significantly more developed, such as Venezuela or South Africa.
Especially in the former, popular movements have been notably successful in combating neoliberal
efforts to take over the state and reshape the economy, and have instead pushed the country in the
opposite direction. Is it really plausible that a main reason for this difference is that everyday
neoliberalism is more intense in the United States? I doubt it. For one thing, the strength of Venezuela's
radical movements, in comparison with the US, clearly antedates the developments (social media,
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo , and so on) that Mirowski discusses.
Moreover, it is just as plausible that the entrepreneurial culture he describes is even more extensive
in the slums of the global South, where neoliberal devastation has forced many poor households to
rely on at least one family member engaging in semi-legal arbitrage in goods salvaged from garbage
or made at home. Surely such activities provide a firmer foundation for commercial subjectivity than
having a 401(k). That resistance has grown in such circumstances suggests that looking to malignant
subjectivities to explain popular passivity is an analytic dead-end.
If everyday neoliberalism doesn't explain the comparative weakness of the US left, what does?
This is, of course, the key question, and I can do no more than gesture at an answer here. But I
would suggest that the specific histories of the institutions of the American left, from the Communist
Party to Students for a Democratic Society to labor unions, and the histories of the situations they
confronted, provide us with a more solid foundation for understanding our current weakness than the
hegemony of neoliberal culture does. Moreover, with a theory of capitalism that emphasizes the way
the structure of the system makes it both necessary and very difficult for most people to organize
to advance their interests, it becomes very easy to explain the persistence of a low level of popular
mobilization against neoliberalism in the context of a weakened left.
If Mirowski's account doesn't give us a good basis for explaining why popular resistance has been
so lacking in the US, it nonetheless suggests why he is so concerned with explaining the supposed
dominance of neoliberal ideology among the general population. From the beginning, he raises the
specter of right-wing resurgence, whether in the form of Scott Walker surviving the recall campaign
in Wisconsin, the Tea Party mania of 2010, or the success of right-wing parties in Europe. However,
much of this seems overstated, especially from a contemporary perspective. The Tea Party has, for
all intents and purposes, disappeared from the front lines of American politics, and the Republican
Party, while capable of enacting all kinds of sadistic policies on the state level, has remained
in a state of disarray on the national level since the 2006 congressional elections.
More fundamentally, the argument that the voting public embraces neoliberalism doesn't square
well with recent research by political scientists like Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens emphasizing
the profound disconnect between the policy preferences of the poor and what transpires in Washington.
What appears to be happening is less the general populace's incorporation into neoliberalism than
their exclusion from any institutions that would allow them to change it. Importantly, this alternative
explanation does not rely on the Left conceit that rebellion lurks perpetually just below the placid
social surface, ready to explode into radical insurgency at any moment. It simply contends that the
political passivity of neoliberalism's victims reflects a real diminution of their political options.
Mirowski's failure to address these larger institutional and structural dynamics vitiates much
of the explanatory power of his book. On a purely descriptive level, the sections on the intellectual
history of neoliberalism and the non-crisis of neoclassical economics illuminate many of the hidden
corners of neoliberal ideology. However, if Mirowski is right to suggest that we need to understand
neoliberalism better to be successful in fighting it -- and he surely is -- then much more is needed
to explain neoliberal success and Left failure.
To understand how a body of thought became an era of capitalism requires more than intellectual
history. It demands an account of how capitalism actually works in the period in question, and how
the ideas of a small group of intellectuals came to be the policy preferences of the rich. Mirowski
has given us an excellent foundation for understanding the doctrine, but it will remain for others
to explain its actual development.
"... Two of my criticisms about Krugman/Friedman, etc is that is 'free markets' are supposed to substitute for policy in the government sphere. Except very telling except when we're talking about funding the security state. ..."
"... The other is that the real power of markets is that in a real free market (not a Potemkin one) decisions are made often at the point where needs, information, incentives, and economic power come together. But where the large scale decisions the governments have to make, markets fail. Policy though doesn't. But Neoliberals hate policy. ..."
"... Well, duh. "Policy" and "Capitalism" don't go together and never have. When you enact policy, you destroy the ability to make profit and you get the 1970's. ..."
"... Free market is a neoliberal myth, the cornerstone of neoliberalism as a secular religion. Somewhat similar to "Immaculate Conception" in Catholicism. ..."
"... In reality market almost by definition is controlled by government, who enforces the rules and punish for the transgressions. ..."
"... Also note interesting Orwellian "corruption of the language" trick neoliberals use: neoliberals talk about "free market, not "fair market". ..."
"... After 2008 few are buying this fairy tale about how markets can operate and can solve society problems independently of political power, and state's instruments of violence (the police and the military). This myths is essentially dead. ..."
"... Friedmanism is this sense a flavor of economic Lysenkoism. Note that Lysenko like Friedman was not a complete charlatan. Some of his ideas were pretty sound and withstood the test of time. But that does not make his less evil. ..."
Krugman's refusal to endorse fiscal stimulus unless the economy is at zero lower bound. That is
not only anti-Keynesian, it plays directly into the hands of the debt fear mongers. (Krugman is
also worried about the debt.)
[ Only correct to a degree, economic weakness is recognized. ]
Two of my criticisms about Krugman/Friedman, etc is that is 'free markets' are supposed to substitute
for policy in the government sphere. Except very telling except when we're talking about funding
the security state.
The other is that the real power of markets is that in a real free market (not a Potemkin one)
decisions are made often at the point where needs, information, incentives, and economic power
come together. But where the large scale decisions the governments have to make, markets fail. Policy
though doesn't. But Neoliberals hate policy.
Well, duh. "Policy" and "Capitalism" don't go together and never have. When you enact policy,
you destroy the ability to make profit and you get the 1970's.
likbez -> Gibbon1... , -1
Free market is a neoliberal myth, the cornerstone of neoliberalism as a secular religion.
Somewhat similar to "Immaculate Conception" in Catholicism.
In reality market almost by definition is controlled by government, who enforces the rules
and punish for the transgressions.
Also note interesting Orwellian "corruption of the language" trick neoliberals use: neoliberals
talk about "free market, not "fair market".
After 2008 few are buying this fairy tale about how markets can operate and can solve society
problems independently of political power, and state's instruments of violence (the police and
the military). This myths is essentially dead.
But like Adventists did not disappear when the Second Coming of Christ did not occurred in
predicted timeframe, neoliberals did not did not disappeared after 2008 either. And neither did
neoliberalism, it just entered into zombie, more bloodthirsty stage.
The fact that even the term
"neoliberalism" is prohibited in the US MSM also helped. It is king of stealth ideology, unlike
say, Marxists, neoliberals do not like to identify themselves as such. The behave more like members
of some secret society, free market masons.
Friedmanism is this sense a flavor of economic Lysenkoism. Note that Lysenko like Friedman
was not a complete charlatan. Some of his ideas were pretty sound and withstood the test of time.
But that does not make his less evil.
And for those who try to embellish this person, I would remind his role in 1973 Chilean coup
d'état ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
) and bringing Pinochet to power. His "Chicago boys" played a vital role in the events. This
man did has blood on his hands.
Of course, bringing a reign of terror to Chile was not why the CIA had sponsored him. The reason
he was there was to reverse the gains of the Allende social democracy and return control of the
country's economic and political assets to the oligarchy. Pinochet was convinced, through supporters
among the academics in the elite Chilean universities, to try a new series of economic policies,
called "neoliberal" by their founders, the economists of the University of Chicago, led by an
economist by the name of Milton Friedman, who three years later would go on to win a Nobel Prize
in Economics for what he was about to unleash upon Chile.
Friedman and his colleagues were referred to by the Chileans as "the Chicago Boys." The term
originally meant the economists from the University of Chicago, but as time went on, as their
policies began to disliquidate the middle class and poor, it took on a perjorative meaning. That
was because as the reforms were implemented, and began to take hold, the results were not what
Friedman and company had been predicting. But what were the reforms?
The reforms were what has come to be called "neoliberalism." To understand what "neoliberal"
economics is, one must first understand what "liberal" economics are, and so we'll digress briefly
from our look at Chile for a quick
"... The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek . Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism . It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone. ..."
"... But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close the gap. ..."
"... He begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands. ..."
"... The general thrust is about the gradual hollowing out of the middle class (or more affluent working class, depending on the analytical terms being used), about insecurity, stress, casualisation, rising wage inequality. ..."
"... So Hayek, I feel, is like many theoreticians, in that he seems to want a pure world that will function according to a simple and universal law. The world never was, and never will be that simple, and current economics simply continues to have a blindspot for externalities that overwhelm the logic of an unfettered so-called free market. ..."
"... J.K. Galbraith viewed the rightwing mind as predominantly concerned with figuring out a way to justify the shift of wealth from the immense majority to an elite at the top. I for one regret acutely that he did not (as far as I know) write a volume on his belief in progressive taxation. ..."
"... The system that Clinton developed was an inheritance from George H.W. Bush, Reagan (to a large degree), Carter, with another large assist from Nixon and the Powell Memo. ..."
"... What's changed is the distribution of the gains in GDP growth -- that is in no small part a direct consequence of changes in policy since the 1970s. It isn't some "market place magic". We have made major changes to tax laws since that time. We have weakened collective bargaining, which obviously has a negative impact on wages. We have shifted the economy towards financial services, which has the tendency of increasing inequality. ..."
"... Wages aren't stagnating because people are working less. Wages have stagnated because of dumb policy choices that have tended to incentives looting by those at the top of the income distribution from workers in the lower parts of the economy. ..."
"... "Neoliberalism" is entirely compatible with "growth of the state". Reagan greatly enlarged the state. He privatized several functions and it actually had the effect of increasing spending. ..."
"... When it comes to social safety net programs, e.g. in health care and education -- those programs almost always tend to be more expensive and more complicated when privatized. If the goal was to actually save taxpayer money, in the U.S. at least, it would have made a lot more sense to have a universal Medicare system, rather than a massive patch-work like the ACA and our hybrid market. ..."
"... As for the rest, it's the usual practice of gathering every positive metric available and somehow attributing it to neoliberalism, no matter how tenuous the threads, and as always with zero rigour. Supposedly capitalism alone doubled life expectancy, supports billions of extra lives, invented the railways, and provides the drugs and equipment that keep us alive. As though public education, vaccines, antibiotics, and massive availability of energy has nothing to do with those things. ..."
"... I think the damage was done when the liberal left co-opted neo-liberalism. What happened under Bill Clinton was the development of crony capitalism where for example the US banks were told to lower their credit standards to lend to people who couldn't really afford to service the loans. ..."
The events that led to Donald Trump's election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became
leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of
conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and
slammed it on the table . "This is what we believe," she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.
The book was The Constitution
of Liberty by Frederick Hayek . Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an
outright racket.
The philosophy
was called neoliberalism . It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a
natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design.
Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive.
Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.
This, at any rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the
network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of
defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set
out to close the gap.
He begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions
as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour
of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.
Democracy, by contrast, "is not an ultimate or absolute value". In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising
choice over the direction that politics and society might take.
He justifies this position by creating a heroic narrative of extreme wealth. He conflates the economic elite, spending their money
in new ways, with philosophical and scientific pioneers. Just as the political philosopher should be free to think the unthinkable,
so the very rich should be free to do the undoable, without constraint by public interest or public opinion.
The ultra rich are "scouts", "experimenting with new styles of living", who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow.
The progress of society depends on the liberty of these "independents" to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish.
All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction
made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.
Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: "the idle rich", who don't have to work for their money, can devote
themselves to influencing "fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs". Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing
but "aimless display", they are in fact acting as society's vanguard.
Hayek softened his opposition to monopolies and hardened his opposition to trade unions. He lambasted progressive taxation and
attempts by the state to raise the general welfare of citizens. He insisted that there is "an overwhelming case against a free health
service for all" and dismissed the conservation of natural resources. It should come as no surprise to those who follow such matters
that he was awarded
the Nobel prize for economics .
By the time Thatcher slammed his book on the table, a lively network of thinktanks, lobbyists and academics promoting Hayek's
doctrines had been established on both sides of the Atlantic,
abundantly financed by some of the world's richest people and
businesses , including DuPont, General Electric, the Coors brewing company, Charles Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Lawrence Fertig,
the William Volker Fund and the Earhart Foundation. Using psychology and linguistics to brilliant effect, the thinkers these people
sponsored found the words and arguments required to turn Hayek's anthem to the elite into a plausible political programme.
Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax
cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition
in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the
right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did not possess a narrative of their own. Rather than develop a new political story, they thought
it was sufficient to
triangulate
. In other words, they extracted a few elements of what their parties had once believed, mixed them with elements of what their
opponents believed, and developed from this unlikely combination a "third way".
It was inevitable that the blazing, insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism would exert a stronger gravitational pull than
the dying star of social democracy. Hayek's triumph could be witnessed everywhere from Blair's expansion of the private finance initiative
to Clinton's
repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act , which had regulated the financial sector. For all his grace and touch, Barack Obama, who didn't
possess a narrative either (except "hope"), was slowly reeled in by those who owned the means of persuasion.
As I warned
in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing
social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people's lives; debate
is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments
are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation. The man who sank Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency was not Donald Trump. It
was her husband.
The paradoxical result is that the backlash against neoliberalism's crushing of political choice has elevated just the kind of
man that Hayek worshipped. Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation
of Hayek's "independent"; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike
a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting
to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies,
beginning with the agreement to limit global warming .
Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives. The key task now is to tell
a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century. It must be as appealing to some who have voted for Trump and Ukip as
it is to the supporters of Clinton, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn.
A few of us have been working on this, and can discern what may be the beginning of a story. It's too early to say much yet, but
at its core is the recognition that – as modern psychology and neuroscience make abundantly clear – human beings, by comparison with
any other animals, are both
remarkably social and
remarkably
unselfish . The atomisation and self-interested behaviour neoliberalism promotes run counter to much of what comprises human
nature.
Hayek told us who we are, and he was wrong. Our first step is to reclaim our humanity.
justamug -> Skytree 16 Nov 2016 18:17
Thanks for the chuckle. On a more serious note - defining neoliberalism is not that easy since it is not a laid out philosophy
like liberalism, or socialism, or communism or facism. Since 2008 the use of the word neoliberalism has increased in frequency
and has come to mean different things to different people.
A common theme appears to be the negative effects of the market on the human condition.
Having read David Harvey's book, and Phillip Mirowski's book (both had a go at defining neoliberalism and tracing its history)
it is clear that neoliberalism is not really coherent set of ideas.
ianfraser3 16 Nov 2016 17:54
EF Schumacher quoted "seek first the kingdom of God" in his epilogue of "Small Is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people
mattered". This was written in the early 1970s before the neoliberal project bit in the USA and the UK. The book is laced with
warnings about the effects of the imposition of neoliberalism on society, people and the planet. The predictions have largely
come true. New politics and economics needed, by leaders who place at the heart of their approach the premise, and fact, that
humans are "by comparison with any other animals, are both remarkably social and remarkably unselfish". It is about reclaiming
our humanity from a project that treats people as just another commodity.
Filipio -> YouDidntBuildThat 16 Nov 2016 17:42
Whoa there, slow down.
Your last post was questioning the reality of neoliberalism as a general policy direction that had become hegemonic across
many governments (and most in the west) over recent decades. Now you seem to be agreeing that the notion does have salience, but
that neoliberalism delivered positive rather than negative consequences.
Well, its an ill wind that blows nobody any good, huh?
Doubtless there were some positive outcomes for particular groups. But recall that the context for this thread is not whether,
on balance, more people benefited from neoliberal policies than were harmed -- an argument that would be most powerful only in
very utilitarian style frameworks of thought (most good for the many, or most harm for only the few). The thread is about the
significance of the impacts of neoliberalism in the rise of Trump. And in specific relation to privatisation (just one dimension
of neoliberalism) one key impact was downsizing (or 'rightsizing'; restructuring). There is a plethora of material, including
sociological and psychological, on the harm caused by shrinking and restructured work-forces as a consequence of privatisation.
Books have been written, even in the business management sector, about how poorly such 'change' was handled and the multiple deleterious
outcomes experienced by employees.
And we're still only talking about one dimension of neoliberalism! Havn't even touched on deregulation yet (notably, labour
market and financial sector).
The general thrust is about the gradual hollowing out of the middle class (or more affluent working class, depending on
the analytical terms being used), about insecurity, stress, casualisation, rising wage inequality.
You want evidence? I'm not doing your research for you. The internet can be a great resource, or merely an echo chamber. The
problem with so many of the alt-right (and this applies on the extreme left as well) is that they only look to confirm their views,
not read widely. Open your eyes, and use your search engine of choice. There is plenty out there. Be open to having your preconceptions
challenged.
RichardErskine -> LECKJ3000 16 Nov 2016 15:38
LECKJ3000 - I am not an economist, but surely the theoretical idealised mechanisms of the market are never realised in practice.
US subsidizing their farmers, in EU too, etc. And for problems that are not only externalities but transnational ones, the idea
that some Hayek mechanism will protect thr ozone layer or limit carbon emissions, without some regulation or tax.
Lord Stern called global warming the greatest market failure in history, but no market, however sophisticated, can deal with
it without some price put on the effluent of product (the excessive CO2 we put into the atmosphere).
As with Montreal and subsequent agreements, there is a way to maintain a level playing field; to promote different substances
for use as refrigerants; and to address the hole in ozone layer; without abandoning the market altogether. Simple is good, because
it avoids over-engineering the interventions (and the unintended consequences you mention).
The same could/ should be true of global warming, but we have left it so late we cannot wait for the (inevitable) fall of fossil
fuels and supremacy of renewables. We need a price on carbon, which is a graduated and fast rising tax essentially on its production
and/or consumption, which has already started to happen ( http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/SDN/background-note_carbon-tax.pdf
), albeit not deep / fast / extensive enough, or international in character, but that will come, if not before the impacts really
bite then soon after.
So Hayek, I feel, is like many theoreticians, in that he seems to want a pure world that will function according to a simple
and universal law. The world never was, and never will be that simple, and current economics simply continues to have a blindspot
for externalities that overwhelm the logic of an unfettered so-called free market.
LionelKent -> greven 16 Nov 2016 14:59
And persistent. J.K. Galbraith viewed the rightwing mind as predominantly concerned with figuring out a way to justify the
shift of wealth from the immense majority to an elite at the top. I for one regret acutely that he did not (as far as I know)
write a volume on his belief in progressive taxation.
RandomLibertarian -> JVRTRL 16 Nov 2016 09:19
Not bad points.
When it comes to social safety net programs, e.g. in health care and education -- those programs almost always tend to be more
expensive and more complicated when privatized. If the goal was to actually save taxpayer money, in the U.S. at least, it would
have made a lot more sense to have a universal Medicare system, rather than a massive patch-work like the ACA and our hybrid market.
Do not forget that the USG, in WW2, took the deliberate step of allowing employers to provide health insurance as a tax-free
benefit - which it still is, being free even from SS and Medicare taxes. In the post-war boom years this resulted in the development
of a system with private rooms, almost on-demand access to specialists, and competitive pay for all involved (while the NHS, by
contrast, increasingly drew on immigrant populations for nurses and below). Next, the large sums of money in the system and a
generous court system empowered a vast malpractice industry. So to call our system in any way a consequence of a free market is
a misnomer.
Entirely state controlled health care systems tend to be even more cost-effective.
Read Megan McArdle's work in this area. The US has had similar cost growth since the 1970s to the rest of the world. The problem
was that it started from a higher base.
Part of the issue is that privatization tends to create feedback mechanism that increase the size of spending in programs.
Even Eisenhower's noted "military industrial complex" is an illustration of what happens when privatization really takes hold.
When government becomes involved in business, business gets involved in government!
Todd Smekens 16 Nov 2016 08:40
Albert Einstein said, "capitalism is evil" in his famous dictum called, "Why Socialism" in 1949. He also called communism,
"evil", so don't jump to conclusions, comrades. ;)
His reasoning was it distorts a human beings longing for the social aspect. I believe George references this in his statement
about people being "unselfish". This is noted by both science and philosophy.
Einstein noted that historically, the conqueror would establish the new order, and since 1949, Western Imperialism has continued
on with the predatory phase of acquiring and implementing democracy/capitalism. This needs to end. As we've learned rapidly, capitalism
isn't sustainable. We are literally overheating the earth which sustains us. Very unwise.
Einstein wrote, "Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to
protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate
abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures,
to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting,
strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual
can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society."
Personally, I'm glad George and others are working on a new economic and social construct for us "human beings". It's time
we leave the predatory phase of "us versus them", and construct a new society which works for the good of our now, global society.
zavaell -> LECKJ3000 16 Nov 2016 06:28
The problem is that both you and Monbiot fail to mention that your "the spontaneous order of the market" does not recognize
externalities and climate change is outside Hayek's thinking - he never wrote about sustainability or the limits on resources,
let alone the consequences of burning fossil fuels. There is no beauty in what he wrote - it was a cold, mechanical model that
assumed certain human behaviour but not others. Look at today's money-makers - they are nearly all climate change deniers and
we have to have government to reign them in.
aLERNO 16 Nov 2016 04:52
Good, short and concise article. But the FIRST NEOLIBERAL MILESTONE WAS THE 1973 COUP D'ETAT IN CHILE, which not surprisingly
also deposed the first democratically-elected socialist government.
accipiter15 16 Nov 2016 02:34
A great article and explanation of the influence of Hayek on Thatcher. Unfortunately this country is still suffering the consequences
of her tenure and Osborne was also a proponent of her policies and look where we are as a consequence. The referendum gave the
people the opportunity to vent their anger and if we had PR I suspect we would have a greater turn-out and nearly always have
some sort of coalition where nothing gets done that is too hurtful to the population. As for Trump, again his election is an expression
of anger and desperation. However, the American voting system is as unfair as our own - again this has probably been the cause
of the low turn-out. Why should people vote when they do not get fair representation - it is a waste of time and not democratic.
I doubt that Trump is Keynsian I suspect he doesn't have an economic theory at all. I just hope that the current economic thinking
prevailing currently in this country, which is still overshadowed by Thatcher and the free market, with no controls over the city
casino soon collapses and we can start from a fairer and more inclusive base!
JVRTRL -> Keypointist 16 Nov 2016 02:15
The system that Clinton developed was an inheritance from George H.W. Bush, Reagan (to a large degree), Carter, with another
large assist from Nixon and the Powell Memo.
Bill Clinton didn't do it by himself. The GOP did it with him hand-in-hand, with the only resistance coming from a minority
within the Democratic party.
Trump's victory was due to many factors. A large part of it was Hillary Clinton's campaign and the candidate. Part of it was
the effectiveness of the GOP massive resistance strategy during the Obama years, wherein they pursued a course of obstruction
in an effort to slow the rate of the economic recovery (e.g. as evidence of the bad faith, they are resurrecting a $1 trillion
infrastructure bill that Obama originally proposed in 2012, and now that they have full control, all the talk about "deficits"
goes out the window).
Obama and the Democratic party also bear responsibility for not recognizing the full scope of the financial collapse in 2008-2009,
passing a stimulus package that was about $1 trillion short of spending needed to accelerate the recovery by the 2010 mid-terms,
combined with a weak financial regulation law (which the GOP is going to destroy), an overly complicated health care law -- classic
technocratic, neoliberal incremental policy -- and the failure of the Obama administration to hold Wall Street accountable for
criminal misconduct relating to the financial crisis. Obama's decision to push unpopular trade agreements didn't help either.
As part of the post-mortem, the decision to continuing pushing the TPP may have cost Clinton in the rust belt states that went
for Trump. The agreement was unpopular, and her shift on the policy didn't come across as credible. People noticed as well that
Obama was trying to pass the measure through the lame-duck session of Congress post-election. With Trump's election, the TPP is
done too.
JVRTRL daltonknox67 16 Nov 2016 02:00
There is no iron law that says a country has to run large trade deficits. The existence of large trade deficits is usually
a result of policy choices.
Growth also hasn't gone into the tank. What's changed is the distribution of the gains in GDP growth -- that is in no small
part a direct consequence of changes in policy since the 1970s. It isn't some "market place magic". We have made major changes
to tax laws since that time. We have weakened collective bargaining, which obviously has a negative impact on wages. We have shifted
the economy towards financial services, which has the tendency of increasing inequality.
The idea too that people will be "poorer" than in the 1920s and 1930s is just plain ignorant. It has no basis in any of the
data. Wages in the bottom quartile have actually decreased slightly since the 1970s in real terms, but those wages in the 1970s
were still exponentially higher than wages in the 1920s in real terms.
Wages aren't stagnating because people are working less. Wages have stagnated because of dumb policy choices that have tended
to incentives looting by those at the top of the income distribution from workers in the lower parts of the economy. The 2008
bailouts were a clear illustration of this reality. People in industries rigged rules to benefit themselves. They misallocated
resources. Then they went to representatives and taxpayers and asked for a large no-strings attached handout that was effectively
worth trillions of dollars (e.g. hundreds of billions through TARP, trillions more through other programs). As these players become
wealthier, they have an easier time buying politicians to rig rules further to their advantage.
JVRTRL -> RandomLibertarian 16 Nov 2016 01:44
"The tyranny of the 51 per cent is the oldest and most solid argument against a pure democracy."
"Tyranny of the majority" is always a little bizarre, given that the dynamics of majority rule are unlike the governmental
structures of an actual tyranny. Even in the context of the U.S. we had minority rule due to voting restrictions for well over
a century that was effectively a tyranny for anyone who was denied the ability to participation in the elections process. Pure
majorities can go out of control, especially in a country with massive wealth disparities and with weak civic institutions.
On the other hand, this is part of the reason to construct a system of checks and balances. It's also part of the argument
for representative democracy.
"Neoliberalism" is entirely compatible with "growth of the state". Reagan greatly enlarged the state. He privatized several
functions and it actually had the effect of increasing spending.
When it comes to social safety net programs, e.g. in health care and education -- those programs almost always tend to be more
expensive and more complicated when privatized. If the goal was to actually save taxpayer money, in the U.S. at least, it would
have made a lot more sense to have a universal Medicare system, rather than a massive patch-work like the ACA and our hybrid market.
Entirely state controlled health care systems tend to be even more cost-effective. Part of the issue is that privatization
tends to create feedback mechanism that increase the size of spending in programs. Even Eisenhower's noted "military industrial
complex" is an illustration of what happens when privatization really takes hold.
daltonknox67 15 Nov 2016 21:46
After WWII most of the industrialised world had been bombed or fought over with destruction of infrastructure and manufacturing.
The US alone was undamaged. It enjoyed a manufacturing boom that lasted until the 70's when competition from Germany and Japan,
and later Taiwan, Korea and China finally brought it to an end.
As a result Americans born after 1950 will be poorer than the generation born in the 20's and 30's.
This is not a conspiracy or government malfunction. It is a quirk of history. Get over it and try working.
Arma Geddon 15 Nov 2016 21:11
Another nasty neoliberal policy of Reagan and Thatcher, was to close all the mental hospitals, and to sweeten the pill to sell
to the voters, they called it Care in the Community, except by the time those hospitals closed and the people who had to relay
on those institutions, they found out and are still finding out that there is very little care in the community left any more,
thanks to Thatcher's disintegration of the ethos community spirit.
In their neoliberal mantra of thinking, you are on your own now, tough, move on, because you are hopeless and non productive,
hence you are a burden to taxpayers.
Its been that way of thinking for over thirty years, and now the latest group targeted, are the sick and disabled, victims
of the neoliberal made banking crash and its neoliberal inspired austerity, imposed of those least able to fight back or defend
themselves i.e. vulnerable people again!
AlfredHerring GimmeHendrix 15 Nov 2016 20:23
It was in reference to Maggie slapping a copy of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty on the table and saying this is what we believe.
As soon as you introduce the concept of belief you're talking about religion hence completeness while Hayek was writing about
economics which demands consistency. i.e. St. Maggie was just as bad as any Stalinist: economics and religion must be kept separate
or you get a bunch of dead peasants for no reason other than your own vanity.
Ok, religion based on a sky god who made us all is problematic but at least there's always the possibility of supplication
and miracles. Base a religion on economic theory and you're just making sausage of your neighbors kids.
TanTan -> crystaltips2 15 Nov 2016 20:10
If you claim that the only benefit of private enterprise is its taxability, as you did, then why not cut out the middle man
and argue for full state-directed capitalism?
Because it is plainly obvious that private enterprise is not directed toward the public good (and by definition). As we have
both agreed, it needs to have the right regulations and framework to give it some direction in that regard. What "the radical
left" are pointing out is that the idea of private enterprise is now completely out of control, to the point where voters are
disenfranchised because private enterprise has more say over what the government does than the people. Which is clearly a problem.
As for the rest, it's the usual practice of gathering every positive metric available and somehow attributing it to neoliberalism,
no matter how tenuous the threads, and as always with zero rigour. Supposedly capitalism alone doubled life expectancy, supports
billions of extra lives, invented the railways, and provides the drugs and equipment that keep us alive. As though public education,
vaccines, antibiotics, and massive availability of energy has nothing to do with those things.
As for this computer being the invention of capitalism, who knows, but I suppose if one were to believe that everything was
invented and created by capitalism and monetary motives then one might believe that. Energy allotments referred to the limit of
our usage of readily available fossil fuels which you remain blissfully unaware of.
Children have already been educated to agree with you, in no small part due to a fear of the communist regimes at the time,
but at the expense of critical thinking. Questioning the system even when it has plainly been undermined to its core is quickly
labelled "radical" regardless of the normalcy of the query. I don't know what you could possibly think left-wing motives could
be, but your own motives are plain to see when you immediately lump people who care about the planet in with communist idealogues.
If rampant capitalism was going to solve our problems I'm all for it, but it will take a miracle to reverse the damage it has
already done, and only a fool would trust it any further.
YouDidntBuildThat -> Filipio 15 Nov 2016 20:06
Filipo
You argue that a great many government functions have been privatized. I agree. Yet strangely you present zero evidence of
any downsides of that happening. Most of the academic research shows a net benefit, not just on budgets but on employee and customer
satisfaction. See for example.
And despite these privitazation cost savings and alleged neoliberal "austerity" government keeps taking a larger share of our
money, like a malignant cancer. No worries....We're from the government, and we're here to help.
Keypointist 15 Nov 2016 20:04
I think the damage was done when the liberal left co-opted neo-liberalism. What happened under Bill Clinton was the development
of crony capitalism where for example the US banks were told to lower their credit standards to lend to people who couldn't really
afford to service the loans.
It was this that created too big to fail and the financial crisis of 2008. Conservative neo-liberals believe passionately in
competition and hate monopolies. The liberal left removed was was productive about neo-liberalism and replaced it with a kind
of soft state capitalism where big business was protected by the state and the tax payer was called on to bail out these businesses.
THIS more than anything else led to Trump's victory.
"... The word ["neoliberalism"] has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. ..."
"... Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over "neoliberalism": they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism ..."
"... The paper gently called out a "neoliberal agenda" for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality. ..."
"... In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left's traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality. ..."
"... Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market ..."
"... Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But "neoliberalism" indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals. ..."
"... In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity. ..."
"... No sooner had neoliberalism been certified as real, and no sooner had it made clear the universal hypocrisy of the market, than the populists and authoritarians came to power ..."
"... Against the forces of global integration, national identity is being reasserted, and in the crudest possible terms. What could the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America have to do with neoliberal rationality? ..."
"... It isn't only that the free market produces a tiny cadre of winners and an enormous army of losers – and the losers, looking for revenge, have turned to Brexit and Trump. There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; ..."
"... That Hayek is considered the grandfather of neoliberalism – a style of thought that reduces everything to economics – is a little ironic given that he was such a mediocre economist. ..."
"... This last is what makes neoliberalism "neo". It is a crucial modification of the older belief in a free market and a minimal state, known as "classical liberalism". In classical liberalism, merchants simply asked the state to "leave us alone" – to laissez-nous faire. Neoliberalism recognised that the state must be active in the organisation of a market economy. The conditions allowing for a free market must be won politically, and the state must be re-engineered to support the free market on an ongoing basis. ..."
"... Hayek had only his idea to console him; an idea so grand it would one day dissolve the ground beneath the feet of Keynes and every other intellectual. Left to its own devices, the price system functions as a kind of mind. And not just any mind, but an omniscient one: the market computes what individuals cannot grasp. Reaching out to him as an intellectual comrade-in-arms, the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to Hayek, saying: "No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of a society At best a mind can understand its own version of the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to a man." ..."
"... The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts. ..."
"... According to the logic of Hayek's Big Idea, these expressions of human subjectivity are meaningless without ratification by the market ..."
"... ociety reconceived as a giant market leads to a public life lost to bickering over mere opinions; until the public turns, finally, in frustration to a strongman as a last resort for solving its otherwise intractable problems. ..."
"... What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview, nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics ..."
The word ["neoliberalism"] has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of
our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human.
Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over
"neoliberalism": they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not
known for its incaution, published
a paper questioning
the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is
nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called
out a "neoliberal agenda" for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open
national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity
or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since
1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality.
Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing
our current politics – or more precisely,
the range of thought allowed by our politics . In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis,
it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to
an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour
in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left's traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour
of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had
enabled a sickening rise in inequality.
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world – podcast
Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon,
a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right. (No wonder centrists
say it's a meaningless insult: they're the ones most meaningfully insulted by it.) But "neoliberalism"
is more than a gratifyingly righteous jibe. It is also, in its way, a pair of eyeglasses.
Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most
admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market
(and
not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss
calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course the goal
was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes
and deregulate. But "neoliberalism" indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list.
It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.
Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market
is a human invention. You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors
of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent
to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets
(competition, perfect information, rational behaviour) has been applied to all of society, until
it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed
in all modes of self-expression.
In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises
with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that,
quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate
organising principle for human activity.
No sooner had neoliberalism been certified as real, and no sooner had it made clear the universal
hypocrisy of the market, than the populists and authoritarians came to power. In the US, Hillary
Clinton, the neoliberal arch-villain, lost – and to a man who knew just enough
to pretend he hated free trade . So are the eyeglasses now useless? Can they do anything to help
us understand what is broken about British and American politics? Against the forces of global
integration, national identity is being reasserted, and in the crudest possible terms. What could
the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America have to do with neoliberal rationality?
What possible connection is there between the president – a freewheeling boob – and the bloodless
paragon of efficiency known as the free market?
It isn't only that the free market produces a tiny cadre of winners and an enormous army of
losers – and the losers, looking for revenge, have turned to Brexit and Trump. There was, from the
beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian
present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian
of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.
Moving the stale debate about neoliberalism forward begins, I think, with taking seriously the
measure of its cumulative effect on all of us, regardless of affiliation. And this requires returning
to its origins, which have nothing to do with Bill or Hillary Clinton. There once was a group of
people who did call themselves neoliberals, and did so proudly, and their ambition was a total revolution
in thought. The most prominent among them, Friedrich Hayek, did not think he was staking out a position
on the political spectrum, or making excuses for the fatuous rich, or tinkering along the edges of
microeconomics.
He thought he was solving the problem of modernity: the problem of objective knowledge. For Hayek,
the market didn't just facilitate trade in goods and services; it revealed truth. How did his ambition
collapse into its opposite – the mind-bending possibility that, thanks to our thoughtless veneration
of the free market, truth might be driven from public life altogether?
When the idea occurred to Friedrich Hayek in 1936, he knew, with the conviction of a "sudden illumination",
that he had struck upon something new. "How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing
in different minds," he wrote, "bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately,
would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?"
This was not a technical point about interest rates or deflationary slumps. This was not a reactionary
polemic against collectivism or the welfare state. This was a way of birthing a new world. To his
mounting excitement, Hayek understood that the market could be thought of as a kind of mind.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" had already given us the modern conception of the market: as an
autonomous sphere of human activity and therefore, potentially, a valid object of scientific knowledge.
But Smith was, until the end of his life, an 18th-century moralist. He thought the market could be
justified only in light of individual virtue, and he was anxious that a society governed by nothing
but transactional self-interest was no society at all. Neoliberalism is Adam Smith without the anxiety.
That Hayek is considered the grandfather of neoliberalism – a style of thought that reduces
everything to economics – is a little ironic given that he was such a mediocre economist. He
was just a young, obscure Viennese technocrat when he was recruited to the London School of
Economics to compete
with, or possibly even dim, the rising star of John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge.
The plan backfired, and Hayek lost out to Keynes in a rout. Keynes's General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money, published in 1936, was greeted as a masterpiece. It dominated the public discussion,
especially among young English economists in training, for whom the brilliant, dashing, socially
connected Keynes was a beau idéal . By the end of the second world war, many prominent free-marketers
had come around to Keynes's way of thinking, conceding that government might play a role in managing
a modern economy. The initial excitement over Hayek had dissipated. His peculiar notion that doing
nothing could cure an economic depression had been discredited in theory and practice. He later admitted
that he wished his work criticising Keynes would simply be forgotten.
... Hayek built into neoliberalism the assumption that the market provides all necessary protection
against the one real political danger: totalitarianism. To prevent this, the state need only keep
the market free.
This last is what makes neoliberalism "neo". It is a crucial modification of the older belief
in a free market and a minimal state, known as "classical liberalism". In classical liberalism, merchants
simply asked the state to "leave us alone" – to laissez-nous faire. Neoliberalism recognised that
the state must be active in the organisation of a market economy. The conditions allowing for a free
market must be won politically, and the state must be re-engineered to support the free market on
an ongoing basis.
That isn't all: every aspect of democratic politics, from the choices of voters to the decisions
of politicians, must be submitted to a purely economic analysis. The lawmaker is obliged to leave
well enough alone – to not distort the natural actions of the marketplace – and so, ideally, the
state provides a fixed, neutral, universal legal framework within which market forces operate spontaneously.
The conscious direction of government is never preferable to the "automatic mechanism of adjustment"
– ie the price system, which is not only efficient but maximises liberty, or the opportunity for
men and women to make free choices about their own lives.
As Keynes jetted between London and Washington, creating the postwar order, Hayek sat pouting
in Cambridge. He had been sent there during the wartime evacuations; and he complained that he was
surrounded by "foreigners" and "no lack of orientals of all kinds" and "Europeans of practically
all nationalities, but very few of real intelligence".
Stuck in England, without influence or respect, Hayek had only his idea to console him; an
idea so grand it would one day dissolve the ground beneath the feet of Keynes and every other intellectual.
Left to its own devices, the price system functions as a kind of mind. And not just any mind, but
an omniscient one: the market computes what individuals cannot grasp. Reaching out to him as an intellectual
comrade-in-arms, the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to Hayek, saying: "No human mind has
ever understood the whole scheme of a society At best a mind can understand its own version of
the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to
a man."
It is a grand epistemological claim – that the market is a way of knowing, one that radically
exceeds the capacity of any individual mind. Such a market is less a human contrivance, to be manipulated
like any other, than a force to be studied and placated. Economics ceases to be a technique – as
Keynes believed it to be – for achieving desirable social ends, such as growth or stable money.
The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes
the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in
both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a
special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the
market converts them into prices, or objective facts.
... ... ...
The more Hayek's idea expands, the more reactionary it gets, the more it hides behind its pretence
of scientific neutrality – and the more it allows economics to link up with the major intellectual
trend of the west since the 17th century. The rise of modern science generated a problem: if the
world is universally obedient to natural laws, what does it mean to be human? Is a human being simply
an object in the world, like any other? There appears to be no way to assimilate the subjective,
interior human experience into nature as science conceives it – as something objective whose rules
we discover by observation.
... ... ...
More than anyone, even Hayek himself, it was the great postwar Chicago economist Milton Friedman
who helped convert governments and politicians to the power of Hayek's Big Idea. But first he broke
with two centuries of precedent and declared that economics is "in principle independent of any particular
ethical position or normative judgments" and is "an 'objective' science, in precisely the same sense
as any of the physical sciences". Values of the old, mental, normative kind were defective, they
were "differences about which men can ultimately only fight". There is the market, in other words,
and there is relativism.
Markets may be human facsimiles of natural systems, and like the universe itself, they may be
authorless and valueless. But the application of Hayek's Big Idea to every aspect of our lives negates
what is most distinctive about us. That is, it assigns what is most human about human beings – our
minds and our volition – to algorithms and markets, leaving us to mimic, zombie-like, the shrunken
idealisations of economic models. Supersizing Hayek's idea and radically upgrading the price system
into a kind of social omniscience means radically downgrading the importance of our individual capacity
to reason – our ability to provide and evaluate justifications for our actions and beliefs.
As a result, the public sphere – the space where we offer up reasons, and contest the reasons
of others – ceases to be a space for deliberation, and becomes a market in clicks, likes and retweets.
The internet is personal preference magnified by algorithm; a pseudo-public space that echoes the
voice already inside our head. Rather than a space of debate in which we make our way, as a society,
toward consensus, now there is a mutual-affirmation apparatus banally referred to as a "marketplace
of ideas". What looks like something public and lucid is only an extension of our own pre-existing
opinions, prejudices and beliefs, while the authority of institutions and experts has been displaced
by the aggregative logic of big data. When we access the world through a search engine, its results
are ranked, as the founder of Google puts it, "recursively" – by an infinity of individual users
functioning as a market, continuously and in real time.
... ... ...
According to the logic of Hayek's Big Idea, these expressions of human subjectivity are meaningless
without ratification by the market – as Friedman said, they are nothing but relativism, each
as good as any other. When the only objective truth is determined by the market, all other values
have the status of mere opinions; everything else is relativist hot air. But Friedman's "relativism"
is a charge that can be thrown at any claim based on human reason. It is a nonsense insult, as all
humanistic pursuits are "relative" in a way the sciences are not. They are relative to the (private)
condition of having a mind, and the (public) need to reason and understand even when we can't expect
scientific proof. When our debates are no longer resolved by deliberation over reasons, then the
whimsies of power will determine the outcome.
This is where the triumph of neoliberalism meets the political nightmare we are living through
now. "You had one job," the old joke goes, and Hayek's grand project, as originally conceived in
30s and 40s, was explicitly designed to prevent a backslide into political chaos and fascism. But
the Big Idea was always this abomination waiting to happen. It was, from the beginning, pregnant
with the thing it was said to protect against. Society reconceived as a giant market leads to
a public life lost to bickering over mere opinions; until the public turns, finally, in frustration
to a strongman as a last resort for solving its otherwise intractable problems.
... ... ...
What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview,
nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics. What can't be quantified must not be real,
says the economist, and how do you measure the benefits of the core faiths of the enlightenment –
namely, critical reasoning, personal autonomy and democratic self-government? When we abandoned,
for its embarrassing residue of subjectivity, reason as a form of truth, and made science the sole
arbiter of both the real and the true, we created a void that pseudo-science was happy to fill.
"... I argue here that it's the abuse of mathematics by Neoclassical economists -- who practice what I have dubbed "Mythematics" rather than Mathematics--and that some phenomena are uncovered by mathematical logic that can't be discovered by verbal logic alone. ..."
"... A lady in the audience named Barb Jacobson suggested that using the name Neo-Classical gives it a certain degree of cache and wants you guys to start calling it for what it is: "Scorched Earth Economics." What a great name to use and doesn't it ring true? ..."
This is the brief talk I gave at a conference celebrating 25 years of the
Critical Realist seminar series at Cambridge University. Critical realists argue against the
use of mathematics in economics; I argue here that it's the abuse of mathematics by Neoclassical
economists -- who practice what I have dubbed "Mythematics" rather than Mathematics--and that some
phenomena are uncovered by mathematical logic that can't be discovered by verbal logic alone.
I give the example of my own model of Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis, which revealed
the possibility of a "Great Moderation" preceding a "Great Recession" before either event had happened.
David Milburn, September 12, 2015 at 9:38 am
Steve,
Last week Prof Bill Mitchell was in London where he gave a talk on re-framing the language
used in the media that carried on the myth of the mainstream groupthink. A lady in the audience
named Barb Jacobson suggested that using the name Neo-Classical gives it a certain degree of
cache and wants you guys to start calling it for what it is: "Scorched Earth Economics." What
a great name to use and doesn't it ring true? Barb Jacobson is spot on!
Sue Madden, September 13, 2015 at 8:28 am
Hi Steve,
I was really amused to see an interview a while back in the New Scientist, with the "research
chief" (!!) at the B of E. If you haven't seen it, you really must:
Opinion Interview with Andy Haldane: "Sackcloth and Ashes on Thread needle Street" New Scientist
25 March 2015
Corbyn was elected leader!!!! Now the sparks will fly. At least a public debate worthy of
the name might at last be heard in our sad country.
Thanks for your work in trying to enlighten us!!
Sue.
"... Comparative advantage is an absurdity. Protectionism is the only way to wealth, yet economists brainwashed generations of 17 and 18 year olds to believe that up was down and free trade would help the US. ..."
"... This is a new "flat earth" cult. And pretty well paid one: academic economists recently became something like lackeys of financial oligarchy and get some crump from the financial oligarchy table in return to promoting neo-classical economics, as a valuable for neoliberals pseudo-science. ..."
"... People who "do not fit" are filtered at early stages, much like in political parties. Nepotism is another factor. Having relatives in high positions (like is the case with Summers), being member of the dominant ethnic clan, or being a friend of an influential economist (like academic Mafiosi Andrei Shleifer) greatly helps... ..."
"... The most interesting part about this pseudoscience is how well it fits together (reminding me Marxism, to which it was a reaction). ..."
Will the American Economic Association ever apologize to the American people
for helping to destroy the country with their absurd, simple-minded free
trade preaching?
Comparative advantage is an absurdity. Protectionism is the only
way to wealth, yet economists brainwashed generations of 17 and 18 year
olds to believe that up was down and free trade would help the US.
AEA should toast itself in the ruins of Ohio, North Carolina or Iowa
- pick any one of the thousands of ruined cities to gloat over.
libezkova -> Will US Economists apologize for destroying the US? Free trade
ruined America,
April 11, 2017 at 04:48 PM
You are simply naïve.
This is a new "flat earth" cult. And pretty well paid one: academic
economists recently became something like lackeys of financial oligarchy
and get some crump from the financial oligarchy table in return to promoting
neo-classical economics, as a valuable for neoliberals pseudo-science.
Tremendous value of neoclassical economics for neoliberals is that they
can use mathiness (trying to imitate physics) to obscure the promotions
of neoliberal thinking. In fact, neoclassical economics is the major tool
of indoctrination into "free market" nonsense of university students.
People who "do not fit" are filtered at early stages, much like in
political parties. Nepotism is another factor. Having relatives in high
positions (like is the case with Summers), being member of the dominant
ethnic clan, or being a friend of an influential economist (like academic
Mafiosi Andrei Shleifer) greatly helps...
People who do not fit but have tremendous talent are often suppressed.
Like was the case with Hyman Minsky (and he was lucky that his career was
at late stages during the full triumph of neoliberalism -- he managed to
get a tenured professor position in 1965 when he was 46)
The most interesting part about this pseudoscience is how well it
fits together (reminding me Marxism, to which it was a reaction).
Set of neoclassical myths such as "efficient market hypothesis", "rational
expectations", "generalized stochastic equilibrium", "invisible hand", comprise
a pretty coherent "secular religion". It may even have some minor value
as a mathematical theory of some fictitious economic space (almost like
in a computer game like Civilization) that never existed and will never
exist.
But it is sold differently and tends to produce predictions and prescriptions
(highly politicized in their nature) in line with neoliberal thinking. That's
why it is maintained and promoted.
So expecting them to apologize is nonsense.
You can benefit from re-reading recent discussion of Karl Polanyi famous
book "The Great Transformation" in this blog
Another interesting question is how neoliberalism and neo-classical economics
survived the financial meltdown. Here Professor Phillip Mirowski has some
interesting insights:
This guy is funny (and actually rather clueless, Summers is much better
) defender of "Flat Earth" theory:
== quote ==
A related criticism of macroeconomics is that it ignores financial factors.
Macroeconomists supposedly failed to anticipate the crisis because they
were enamored by models where financial markets and institutions were absent,
as all financing was assumed to be efficient (De Grawe, 2009, Skidelsky,
2009). The field would be in denial if it continued to ignore these macro-financial
links.
One area where macroeconomists have perhaps more of an influence is in
monetary policy. Central banks hire more PhD economists than any other policy
institution, and in the United States, the current and past chair of the
Federal Reserve are distinguished academic macroeconomists, as have been
several members of the FOMC over the years. In any given week, there are
at least one conference and dozens of seminars hosted at central banks all
over the world where the latest academic research is discussed. The speeches
of central bank governors refer to academic papers in macroeconomics more
than those by any other policymaker.
... ... ...
A separate criticism of macroeconomic policy advice accuses it of being
politically biased. Since the early days of the field, with Keynes and the
Great Depression, macroeconomics was associated with aggressive and controversial
policies and with researchers that wore other hats as public intellectuals.
Even more recently, during the rational expectations microfoundations revolution
of the 1970s, early papers had radical policy recommendations, like the
result that all systematic aggregate-demand policy is ineffective, and some
leading researchers had strong political views. Romer (2016) criticizes
modern macroeconomics for raising questions about what should be obvious
truths, like the effect of monetary policy on output. He lays blame on the
influence that Edward Prescott, Robert Lucas and Thomas Sargent had on field.
Krugman (2009) in turn, claims the problem of macroeconomics is ideology,
and in particular points to the fierce battles between different types of
macroeconomists in the 1970s and 1980s, described by Hall (1976) in terms
of saltwater versus freshwater camps.
...Macroeconomists, instead, are asked to routinely produce forecasts
to guide fiscal and monetary policy, and are perhaps too eager to comply.
"Is something really wrong with macroeconomics? - Ricardo Reis"
I appreciate that the author thinks the solution is to have young people
look at economics with fresh eyes to bring up new approaches this is a quote
when describing how they pick fresh young economists to go on a tour and
present their findings:
"the choices are arguably not biased in the direction of a particular
field, although they are most likely all in the mainstream tradition"
unfortunately the mainstream tradition is full of biase and restrictions
about what is allow to be considered and what is not so if all you allow
are people who are expanding on the "mainstream tradition" I think you are
severely restricting yourself further a lot of good ideas from the past
have been discarded, not allowed, ridiculed, not really analyzed or expanded
upon.... presented or taught or represented by people who have never studied
the ideas directly got them third hand or 5th hand , from people who misrepresent
the ideas in the first place
want fresh new ideas? go back to the beginning of economics, understand
over and over what the founds say , go read Adam Smith directly, read the
generally theory by Keynes directly don't just assume the verion samuelson
gave us of Keynes represents what he actually said, or Hansen or hicks,
or what ever nonsense they are passing along today as "what Keynes said"
reevaluation the who field over and over
And yea, study over and over the current teachings so you really understand
it intuitively don't allow magical thinking to let you "pretend" you got
it don't accept that its impossible to really understand it and "that's
just what the equations show" understand the limitations, figure out when
our fearless leaders and "great minds" and elder statesman of economics
are "overplaying their hand" and concluding more than they can this is hard
work and it takes dedication and don't assume that econometrics is the only
real economics and that theory is "unprovable" or "always subjective" because
without theory there is no econometrics, there is just a bunch of meaningless
numbers
so yea we can use fresh young minds taking a new look at things but we
will nowhere if all we allow is that "they are most likely all in the mainstream
tradition"
CSICOP. The Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Contents pages and selected articles from The Skeptical
Inquirer and Skeptical Briefs.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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