Class and Underclass

If all the racists in this country had a genuine change of heart, and stopped being racists, would systemic racism still exist? You might say: Of course not, because systemic racism is caused by individual racism!

But I beg to differ. I contend that individual racism is not the cause of systemic racism, although it certainly supports it. Systemic racism is part of the system, obviously, and it’s there because it benefits wealthy and powerful people. Even if ordinary citizens have a come-to-Jesus moment and cleanse their hearts of racism, our rulers will almost certainly cling to the benefits of systemic racism. We might have to re-name it, of course, and it might change its tactics, but it would still be there.

To say otherwise is to imagine that the system is value-neutral, and it only works harm because bad people control it. And yet capitalism has never been value-neutral. The incentives and the socialization that make capitalism work always tend to devalue human life.

But what are these benefits, you might ask? At the risk of getting ahead of myself, racism “stabilizes” the class structure, that is, racism makes it less likely that the different classes will coalesce against billionaire capitalism.

But before going into detail about the class structure, let’s start with some basic observations:

  1. Unorganized individual racism cannot explain everything, and it definitely cannot account for the complexities of systemic racism.
  2. Extra-judicial killings by the police are central to this discussion. About a thousand people are killed each year by police, and of course some of these homicides are justified—this is America, after all, where any sociopath can purchase a firearm, or twenty.

But hundreds of these killings are highly questionable. About 50 police are killed by citizens every year, a suspicious 20:1 ratio. In a close-quarters fight, the aggressor has a distinct advantage. Of course American police wear bullet-proof vests and train endlessly with their weapons, but 20:1 still implies that some police are shooting first and cooking up their stories later. If they were only defending themselves, that ratio would be lower.

The killing of unarmed suspects is especially troubling, but armed suspects are also killed without justification.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

3. White racism is not a constant. It varies from time to time, place to place, and individual to individual. Its persistence in American life should not be confused with permanence.

4. White nationalism is not a mass movement. If there were two or three million whites longing to join the Klan, the White Aryan Resistance or the Boogaloo Boys they would have done so after Charlottesville—and they didn’t. The mass support for right-wing violence does not exist. On the other hand, there is mass support for an end to police violence, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands in the streets today.

Although there’s not much support for white nationalism as a movement, white racism is still common. This apparent contradiction is key to understanding what is going on.

Given these observations, let’s ask some basic questions, which are in boldface below:

Why does racism still exist?  What’s the motive? White people seldom get any benefit that they notice from racism; neither voting nor land-owning is reserved for whites anymore. If racist policies no longer have the force of law, and if average whites see little material benefit to being racist, then why do racist practices persist?

American life by any measure is less publicly racist than it was in my youth, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although de facto school segregation still exists, many middle-class high schools are integrated to some extent. Inter-marriage is legal and in some communities inter-racial couples live more-or-less normal lives.

Even Hells Angels have accepted black and Asian members:

https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Augusta-County-Sheriffs-Office-investigates-gunshot-wound-at-local-hotel-492834491.html

Job discrimination on the basis of race is illegal and most large employers manage to avoid being sued for it—and that’s not to understate the difficulty of proving discrimination.

And the discourse between white people is strikingly less racist than it used to be. In the Jim Crow South, many whites had no other mode of conversation than obsessive racist drivel. But nowadays it is rare for whites to make racial remarks to each other.

So why are blacks still the target of extra-judicial killings and other violence? Why are they harassed by both white police and civilians for legal behavior of all kinds?

Why is the crisis in race relations the worst we have seen since Dr. King’s assassination?

Let’s note first that “Why is there an underclass?” is closely related to the question of why racism still exists. Race and the class structure are tightly inter-woven.

History is full of harmful practices and institutions which nevertheless persist for ages. Slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism are examples. And ordinarily this persistence is because some people believe they benefit from these practices. There are benefits—real or perceived—to alcohol consumption, for example, and so Demon Rum is still with us. Slavery mostly belongs to the past, but it was an immense effort to destroy it, and likewise with child labor, cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

So, a refinement of the question “Why does racism still exist?” is this: what are the benefits of racism, and who reaps them?

And we can ask the same question about poverty. Jesus taught that the poor would always be with us—and he’s been right so far—-but nevertheless the elimination of poverty remains an honorable dream. The most recent effort in America was the War on Poverty, which was meant to drastically reduce the size of the underclass or to eliminate it entirely.

And the War on Poverty was partly successful—the rate of poverty among those over 65 was 28.5% in 1966 and is 10.1% today. But the late ‘60s and ‘70s were a time of rising crime and economic problems—inflation and extremely high interest rates. In that context, the expansion of welfare pushed all the racist buttons, and dovetailed perfectly with Nixon’s Southern Strategy. “Welfare Queens,” who had babies just to increase their benefits, became an enduring political myth.

The Southern Strategy was a turning point in our history because it gave Republicans a political incentive to attack the underclass. They started by opposing policies that would help the underclass, and they ended by systematically harming it at every turn. The political incentive became by degrees political necessity.

Their efforts moved beyond policy to attacks on the underclass itself—particularly blacks. Rhetorically, there was the attempt to normalize hate speech online, on campus and in political campaigns (e.g. the Willie Horton ads); racist pseudo-science was revived, e.g. The Bell Curve. Policy-wise, there were broad-ranging measures designed to reduce the standard of living and the stability of the underclass: mass incarceration, refusing to raise the minimum wage for long periods, weakening unions, making healthcare harder to get, and reducing enforcement of fair housing laws. And policing was intensified—with “stop and frisk” as an example—and militarized. There was also an organized campaign against affirmative action, especially in university admissions.

And of course public education was undermined.

And I would even say that exporting jobs to China and other countries served this purpose as well, because without a robust manufacturing sector most members of the underclass (and working class) had little chance to improve their condition.

As social policy, the Southern Strategy was a disaster, but as a political strategy it worked well. But it had a weakness: driving the poor down didn’t directly benefit anyone.

So alongside the Southern Strategy, Reagan also made huge tax cuts a centerpiece of the Republican agenda. But as with attacking the War on Poverty, the tax-cuts became steadily more destructive over time. Reagan’s tax cuts were much more broad-based than the tax cuts we’ve seen since. Of course the billionaires and the wealthy saw most of the benefit, but the effect on middle-class tax returns was also significant. For example, making IRA contributions deductible did help the middle class, although that benefit disappeared later in the Reagan administration.

Compare that to the 2017 tax cut, which was so narrowly focused that the net result may have actually harmed the wealthy, by capping the mortgage interest rate deduction. In any case the millionaires didn’t get much, and the other classes got nothing. In 1981 the wealthy were ecstatic, and the middle-class was content.

To separate the underclass from the working and middle classes, their problems had to be made more severe and uniquely different, to avoid anyone identifying with them. But many of the measures taken hurt the working class and even the middle class as well—exporting jobs, undermining public education and weakening unions were blunt-instrument policies that could have resulted in a broad coalition against the billionaire class.

And this is not hypothetical: the middle and lower classes did in fact unite during the Progressive Era and during the New Deal, and the results were inconvenient for the plutocrats of the day.

But there were other policies that could be used against the underclass without affecting the working class too much—-particularly policing. The militarization of the police and mass incarceration during a period of falling crime rates is often presented as an example of mindless racism and paranoia—and there is some of that—but if that was the only reason then the money spent on riot gear and prisons would have been diverted to tax cuts for the rich long ago.

The ridiculous APCs, the SWAT teams sent to arrest low-level drug dealers, the automatic weapons and all of that—are a non-verbal argument that the underclass is extremely dangerous, that they are different from the rest of us. Every time a black man is stopped and frisked in public the same message is sent.

While this campaign against the poor was in full swing, billionaire capitalism was riding high. From 1980 to 2008, the concentration of wealth and power proceeded with only minor delays due to the EIC and Clinton’s tax increases.

But with the Great Recession, capitalism began to lose credibility with members of the educated middle-class, especially the young. Before 2008, the middle class was under pressure due to health care costs, student loans and stagnant salaries, but their home equity and 401k balances largely made up for it. The Great Recession changed all that. Before, there was a broad consensus among the middle class that capitalism worked, but afterwards it was seen—even by conservatives—as a racket, at least in its current incarnation. But there weren’t alternatives that most people considered credible.

Another important sea-change was the rise of the African-American and Hispanic middle-class. It was a problem for billionaire capitalism that middle-class blacks and Hispanics were unconvinced that the underclass was a dangerous enemy, rather than human beings in bad circumstances. The fond false hope that the black and Hispanic middle class would go Republican was repeatedly disappointed.

Worse, the white middle-class began to accept and be influenced by their black and brown neighbors. This situation was clearly intolerable to billionaire capitalism, and the solution was to use the policing methods developed for the underclass on the black and brown middle-class.  This was intended to humiliate, of course, but also to drive a wedge between the white middle-class and their black and brown neighbors.

The result was a sustained pushback on policing practices that continues as I write, exemplified by Black Lives Matter.

Given this background, we can answer the question, “Why does racism still exist?” It exists because the billionaires need a class structure in which all the other classes are frozen in place, unable to envision a better future or unite to achieve it. And racism is an important part of that class structure.

And to illustrate that, consider this: American society was once famed for its ability to solve problems. In the 19th century, we suffered from poor transportation infrastructure, low agricultural productivity, slavery, lack of education (especially on the frontier), an unsafe food supply, loss of wilderness, the need to integrate millions of immigrants, a corrupt and ineffective civil service, and widespread drunkenness and violence.

And yet, from 1821, when the Erie Canal opened, to 1916, when the National Park Service was established, some of these problems were solved, and there was significant progress on the rest.

By contrast, Americans today face significant problems with the quality of public education and the cost of higher education, health care availability, air and water pollution, unhealthy food, drug addiction to both legal and illegal drugs, mass incarceration, growing poverty, declining birth rates and life expectancy, policing, obesity, climate change, integrity of elections, school and workplace shootings, homelessness, and a complete failure to deal with a dangerous pandemic. Some of these problems have come to light recently, but many of them have been around for decades.

On some of these, we made initial progress only to see it rolled back or undermined: civil rights, pollution, healthcare, and climate change. However, on most of these issues, no progress has been made.

We are stymied on almost every major problem we face, and that isn’t because we are much worse citizens than our predecessors in the 19th century. It is instead because we have a class system that prevents broad consensus on major issues—and a political system that mirrors the class system.

The contrast with the 19th century (and the 20th century until 1980), could not be sharper.

We are no longer a dynamic society because billionaire capitalism has re-wired our class structure to allow only one kind of change: the concentration of wealth and power.

And racism supports this class structure.

What is the American class structure? In the preceding section, I didn’t discuss many specifics about the American class structure, and of course it’s a complex topic. However, it is possible to outline the basics.

I’ll define 5 classes: the billionaires and near-billionaires; the wealthy; the middle-class; the working class; the under-class.

The middle-class today is characterized by higher education, often including graduate school in fields that pay a good salary; the working class is usually not college-educated, or not educated in fields that pay well. (This is not to say that the middle-class doesn’t include people who didn’t graduate from college—it does—but that the broad defining difference between the middle-class and the working class is higher education.)

For purposes of this discussion, however, the underclass is most important. Members of the underclass struggle to access basics, like food and medical care. Many of them live in “food deserts,” where the stores lack fresh vegetables, fruit or meat. Often doctors and clinics refuse to accept Medicaid, and dental care is generally unavailable. Public education is often sub-standard. In some poor neighborhoods, police do not answer calls unless there’s a body in the street.

Chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension often go untreated, and life expectancy is much lower than for the population at large. The difference in life-expectancy for American men in the top 10% by income versus the bottom 10% is about 11 years. This is comparable to the difference between Norway and Bangladesh.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866586/  (estimated from Figure 2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

I should mention housing. The housing available for the poor is either sub-standard, in dangerous neighborhoods, too far from employment, or too expensive—-or all four at once.

And the above deprivations are broadly the same for both the urban and rural poor.

Also, members of the underclass can be killed with impunity by police—that is, by the state.

Furthermore, a member of the underclass who is falsely accused of a crime is often unable to make an effective defense and commonly pleads guilty to a lesser charge, of which they are also innocent.

And even the guilty are frequently sentenced more harshly than is reasonable.

How does the condition of the underclass fit into the system of billionaire capitalism? First, people who aren’t in the underclass will do almost anything to avoid falling into it. They refuse to live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools as the underclass—-and this is not just a black vs. white phenomenon. The “seg academies” of the South also exclude the poorest whites, who cannot pay the tuition.

Second, the underclass can be scapegoated for all the social maladies of billionaire capitalism. Crime, drug addiction, unemployment and suicide can all be attributed to the cultural peculiarities of the underclass, and not to the policies of exporting jobs, denying people healthcare, concentrating wealth and power at the top, and so on. In other words, we blame the symptoms for the disease.

Race plays a big role in this scapegoating. Although there are plenty of whites, Hispanics and Native Americans in the underclass, they tend to be more rural and therefore ignored by the media. The underclass in most cities is largely African-American and Hispanic, and the only part of the underclass that has found a cultural voice (through the arts and activism) is the urban black underclass.

So there’s a perception that the underclass is black, or mostly black, although it’s definitely multi-ethnic. The rural white underclass mostly escapes notice except when they suffer catastrophic losses, for example due to the opioids marketed by billionaire capitalism.

Third, having an underclass resets the expectations and ambitions of the other classes. The working class, instead of pressing for higher wages or universal healthcare, focuses its energy on keeping its children off drugs or finding a neighborhood with no drive-by shootings—-in other words, on not falling into the underclass.

The middle class is similar; they want schools that have few students from the underclass, and they want police protection for their neighborhoods. Under other circumstances they might be pressing for better schools and safer neighborhoods for all. The middle class is in less danger of falling into poverty, but they want to avoid the effects of poverty on others—their fellow citizens and human beings. This is sometimes characterized as “privilege” but that understates the damage wrought by the deprivation and exclusion of the underclass. Who would want their child to suffer even indirectly from such tragedy?

The underclass itself, of course, is forced to somehow survive with the legal and the economic systems dead set against it, without healthy food or dental care, (mostly) without good education and medical care, and with the other classes shunning it in horror and scapegoating it for every social problem in America.

Is the underclass angry or alienated or despairing? Of course. Surviving poverty is a severe challenge, and it takes its toll; poverty is not just about material deprivation, it’s also about psychological damage.

On specific issues, it’s easy to see how class divides and paralyzes us. Gun control is a fraught issue. The working class and part of the middle class are armed out of fear of the underclass, and in much of the country, this means the black underclass.

On the other hand, many middle class and working-class white people—including gun owners—would agree that we’d be better off as a society with fewer guns.

And the underclass would probably agree. Certainly middle- and working-class blacks are strongly in favor of fewer guns on the streets—but they don’t want to be completely disarmed, either. No one wants to be disarmed in the midst of enemies, and for much of America the underclass is the enemy.

So, although a significant majority wants fewer guns on the streets, it doesn’t happen because of our class structure—particularly the isolation and desperation of the underclass.

And likewise with school desegregation. This is often sold as a self-evident Good, but there is in fact a specific reason why desegregation is desirable. Namely, if a school is mostly attended by underclass children, there’s a tendency to simply warehouse the kids. The parents, if they complain, have little political leverage. This isn’t universal, of course, due to dedicated teachers and principals and parents, but warehousing happens often enough for the “school to prison pipeline” to have entered the English language.

But what can be done? For nearly three generations—since about 1950—the answer has been integration. But integration only works sometimes; it can definitely work if the students are all middle-class, but otherwise the picture is mixed. And we cannot ignore the harm done when integration doesn’t work. I’ll take Chris Rock as an example. His parents finally gave up on the mostly white working-class schools he attended, and pulled him out. He later got a GED, but in an even slightly better educational environment, Chris Rock would have gone to college. And there are thousands of children of all races who experience the same. For a bright kid like Rock, even warehousing might have been better than being beaten up all the time.

To put middle-class kids in the same classrooms with underclass kids usually doesn’t work either—although there are no doubt exceptions. The social classes have diverged too much, their needs are too different. The middle-class has come to see its future in education, which is now the focus of all their class anxieties. The parents will not accept any slowing of the pace or simplification of the content, both of which might be necessary. And of course the middle-class kids are usually better prepared and better supported than the underclass kids.

One thing you definitely don’t want is for underclass kids to become discouraged and tune education out. And yet, sitting in a classroom with motivated middle-class kids can definitely discourage you; you may know the answer, but someone else often answers more quickly. And if you don’t know the answer, then you probably won’t get a chance to ask a question about it later.

It seems to me that underclass kids need good solid education where the pace moves right along, but there’s enough time for the teachers to fill in context and improve basic skills where needed. And where the kids can build confidence based on their hard work and their achievements.

And what I described in the last paragraph was the norm for all children before about the ‘70s—thorough, moderately-paced education that ensured that even the children of illiterates could read, write, and do sums. Yes, some kids were bored to death and other kids could have benefited from better music and art programs. But the system was designed for the average child, and everyone got something out of it. I am not pretending the old system was perfect by any means—but there was no large group of children that was left completely behind, either; warehousing was unheard of. The system was not designed to worsen social differences.

You might say that the segregated schools of the South were the exception. But although they were starved for funding, they functioned along the same lines as the white schools. The teachers taught and the students mostly showed up. Many a future teacher, pastor, doctor and lawyer attended those schools and went on to college. Whatever the intent of Southern state legislatures, those schools did nurture the future black middle class.

Having answered the questions in boldface, let’s circle back and look at the issue of extra-judicial killings again. This long-standing practice is a denial of the humanity of the underclass, and it is not unique to America. The helots of ancient Sparta could also be killed with impunity, and likewise the Untouchables of India.

In fact, the serfs or slaves of most ancien regimes could be killed with impunity, especially if they were rebellious in any way. Today’s American underclass is seen as being in a constant state of rebellion which justifies the unending violence and harassment against them—and policies like mass incarceration, using heavily militarized SWAT teams for ordinary arrests, mandatory minimum sentencing, and so on.

As with the serfs and slaves of the past, killings of the American underclass signify that the poor are our mortal enemies, or that they are not human at all. When Rayshard Brooks was killed, the policeman who shot him kicked him, and the other officer stood on Brooks’ chest; Brooks was not yet dead. Undisciplined soldiers in combat might do the same—but this was not combat, this was an ordinary police task: dealing with a drunk. Drunks commonly fight or run from the police and go to jail for doing so; but if they’re executed on the spot that is not justice.

What is the result of these extra-judicial killings?  Where the underclass has a sense of community, the result is profound demoralization; they cannot get justice, and it’s a short logical step to the conclusion that there is no justice. This is not just a matter of police misconduct; if the prosecutors and judges wanted to hold the police accountable, then these killings would have stopped long ago. The entire system is complicit in a campaign of extra-judicial executions.

The underclass has lost confidence in the police and courts, and by contrast the drug dealers somehow don’t seem as bad—not quite like Robin Hood, but still.

There’s a deep despair that settles over these communities when the police get away with yet another unjustified killing or assault. And for the other classes—underneath the denial—there’s a sickening sense that our society is neither civilized nor Christian, and that we are making the limitless suffering of the poor even worse.

 This fear, shame and despair are exactly the feelings that Al Qaeda was attempting to instill in Americans with the 9/11 attacks; what the legal system does to the underclass is what terrorists also do.

These killings, and the complicity of the entire criminal justice system, drive a wedge between the underclass and the rest of the community, which usually—not always—is policed better.

Our society is in essence waging war against the underclass, and one casualty is the legitimacy of the legal system. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was the principle that everyone is subject to the same law; but America has created a horrible exception for its underclass, particularly African-Americans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/?itid=lk_inline_manual_32&itid=lk_inline_manual_40

At every turn, billionaire capitalism divides classes and races. And the underclass is the foundation of this strategy of division. If the underclass didn’t exist, it would be extremely difficult to separate the working-class from the middle-class, since they share an interest in good education, health care and higher wages.

Billionaire capitalism needs an underclass, and if the underclass is mostly black, so much the better—-then they can use the individual racism of whites to maintain class divisions. The large number of working-class and middle-class African-Americans does become a problem in maintaining the class structure, but by subjecting them to the same policing that the underclass experiences, they somewhat neutralize them and—this is a brilliant flourish—they make the problems with the class structure appear entirely racial.

In many parts of the country there are few blacks, but this is only a minor inconvenience for billionaire capitalism. To maintain the underclass, police violence is actually intensified: the highest rate of police shootings occurs in Alaska, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Alaska and New Mexico have small African-American populations, and only 7.4% of the Oklahoma population is black.

So, where the underclass is mostly white, what does it accomplish to shoot first and ask questions later? Poor, socially isolated white men are often seen as potentially violent (think serial killers, or school shooters) and they do have their problems. When the policing against them is intensified, shootings are bound to occur. And the shootings themselves intensify the separation between the white underclass and the other classes. The shootings are a kind of performance that emphasizes the danger the underclass poses to the rest of society. And of course it terrorizes and demoralizes the white underclass itself. This is the same method used with the black underclass.

Much—not all—-racism in this country stems from fear. Fear of losing status and of falling into the underclass, fear of crime or bad schools, fear of the other.  This is why racist whites in general have scant enthusiasm for white nationalism; they don’t want to violently dominate non-whites, they just want to avoid them. The bulk of racist whites are older people with little surplus energy or money; they may arm themselves out of fear, but they aren’t signed up for an aggressive struggle against anyone. Their day-to-day struggle to survive is about all they can manage. Of course they support harsh measures by the police against non-whites—again, out of fear.

This fear is carefully nurtured by the existing class system, of course. The underclass must be always be an object of fear, whatever the color of its members.

George Floyd and Billionaire Capitalism

If the rich and powerful hadn’t wanted Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, then it wouldn’t have been there.

If the rich and powerful didn’t want extra-judicial killings by the police, then those killings would be rare or non-existent.

If the rich and powerful welcomed peaceful protests of police violence, then Colin Kaepernick would still be playing football.

American society, although dehumanizing, is in general well-organized, particularly when it comes to billionaires getting what they want. If the billionaires wanted police violence to stop, it would stop.

Their inaction in this matter is not due to indifference or petty racism; it’s an active policy. Billionaire Capitalism requires a certain social order, or it cannot survive. It must emphasize existing hierarchies everywhere, so that people come to accept a hierarchical society as normal. If egalitarianism makes a cultural comeback, the billionaires are in trouble.

There is no existing hierarchy in America more fraught with injustice than that of white and black. If the American people can be forced or deceived into accepting that hierarchy, then they will probably accept anything.

And of course the police have a symbolic role as protectors of property and the system. When the system slowly kills a man in broad daylight on the streets of Minneapolis, the message is clear: if we will do this for no reason to someone picked at random, imagine what we would do to a serious opponent?

In that sense Floyd’s death was an act of terrorism.

 

 

“What in me is dark, Illumine…”

For a moment, let’s calmly look around us. What values do we see reflected in the response to the pandemic? My intention here is not “virtue signaling” or moral judgement. This is a question about where civilization is headed, and what it means to us.

It is quite clear that many states in the US are re-opening too soon:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/study-estimates-24-states-still-have-uncontrolled-coronavirus-spread/2020/05/22/d3032470-9c43-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html

And this is not a matter of state or local choice, as we see when a major jurisdiction refuses to re-open. Clearly the might of the Department of Justice will be used to compel re-opening:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/politics/doj-la-warn-stay-at-home/index.html

There is absolutely no doubt that re-opening this soon will result in needless deaths, and whether it’s 150 deaths or 150,000 doesn’t matter—either to Trump or to us as socialists and citizens. For Trump the exact number is meaningless, because human life is meaningless to him, and to us the needless death of a single individual is enough to reject the entire course of action.

I have written that the basis of socialism is the intuition that human life is sacred. The current capitalist system does not regard human life as sacred, and in fact it sees little practical value in saving American lives—hence the lack of testing and contact tracing.

The immediate plan of billionaire capitalism is to retain its grip on power. This means Trump must be re-elected and the Republicans must hold the Senate. For Trump to be re-elected, the economy must recover somewhat before Election Day. Therefore the stay-at-home orders must be lifted—however many lives it costs—even though the economy was destroyed by the coronavirus, not by the resulting lockdowns.

Republicans have cited the example of Sweden as their model of an economy untroubled by stay-at-home orders. Here’s what’s wrong with that idea:

Coronavirus Deaths and Change in GDP, Northern Europe

Country Deaths from Covid-19

(5-23-20)

 Deaths per 100,000 people

(5-23-20)

 Projected change in GDP 2020

(IMF)
Sweden 3,992 38.6 -6.8%
Norway 235 4.4 -6.3%
Finland 306 5.5 -6%
Denmark 561 9.6 -6.5%
Germany 8,261 9.9 -6.5%

Sweden’s policies have been a public health disaster without any economic benefit. The contrast with Germany, a much more densely populated country, is particularly notable. It appears that at least 3,000 Swedes have died needlessly in this pandemic—so far.

There are other estimates of Sweden’s economic performance in 2020—in one Riksbank scenario, the Swedish economy will shrink by 9.1% in 2020. I used the IMF estimates to make the comparisons between countries consistent.

For deaths per country:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

For IMF estimates of 2020 GDP:

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2020/01/weodata/index.aspx

For Riksbank estimates:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-to-contract-as-severely-as-the-rest-of-europe.html

For population numbers:

https://www.wikipedia.org/

So, if Sweden is killing off its citizens at 9 times the rate of its closest neighbor, Norway, and 4 times the rate of Germany and Denmark, for no economic benefit whatsoever, then why do we want to emulate Sweden?

This makes no sense whatsoever unless we recognize Billionaire Capitalism as a political movement of nearly unlimited ruthlessness. Will Americans go back to work? Will they “shop until they drop” — or at least until they have trouble breathing? Will they go on vacations, book a cruise? If they do, that might create enough of an economic bounce to put Trump over the top in November—with lots of help from the Russian trolls and Fox News, of course. Americans might well refuse to go along, but Trump and his advisers figure, what do we have to lose?

 All we have to lose are thousands and thousands of lives. And a brutal second wave that could kill another two hundred thousand or so and wreck the economy for 2021, but that might be after the election, so no worries.

The horror of this situation cannot be emphasized by mere prose. The most powerful political force in our civilization—Billionaire Capitalism—is sacrificing lives on a massive scale to retain power.

When you realize that the system does not care whether you live or die, and it doesn’t care whether anyone you love lives or dies, you become profoundly alienated. You are no longer a citizen—you’re a horse caught in a burning barn. In this crisis, Billionaire Capitalism is no longer able to hide its complete disregard for human life. It’s the burning barn.

When the people absorb this lesson, then the political and social situation will become highly unstable. In truth, it was always unstable, or at least unsustainable, but now we have nothing left. I prefer change that comes through debate and elections, and I also prefer barns not to catch fire with horses inside. But the forces of change have their own laws, and our suffering will continue.

If this system isn’t changed, our suffering over the next decades will be incalculable; but changing this system will also bring suffering. “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,” as Marlowe wrote in Doctor Faustus.

Identity politics is irrelevant here. If your life has been written off by the political system, any incidental dehumanization you suffer—whether it’s mansplaining or microaggressions—is hardly worth mentioning. You are possibly going to die to preserve the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy—is it any wonder you will be mocked by them, as well?

Our part as civilized men and women is to provide a positive vision, an alternative. Our historical position is similar to that of the sages of the Enlightenment, struggling against the darkness.

Let’s take Diderot, who was denied paper and ink during his imprisonment, as our example:

Diderot had been permitted to retain one book that he had in his possession at the time of his arrest, Paradise Lost, which he read during his incarceration. He wrote notes and annotations on the book, using a toothpick as a pen, and ink that he made by scraping slate from the walls and mixing it with wine.[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot

By the time Diderot was released, the poem was embroidered on every page with his notes. No one has read Paradise Lost the way Diderot read it.

With just a drop of Diderot’s prison ink, we may yet change the world.

Human life is sacred—-let’s start with that.

Rocking by July!

There is always a narrative that drives the stock market, and sometimes more than one. These narratives come and go, and often the correlation with reality proves weak. In 2015 the markets were disturbed by falling oil prices and the associated fear that Persian Gulf countries would default on their debts, leading to a worldwide financial crisis; the trauma of 2008 had not been forgotten.

In the event, the result of falling oil prices was simply cheaper oil. But the stock market was exciting for a few months, despite the fact that there was little risk to the banks.

Today the market is relatively calm in the face of low oil prices, and is completely untroubled by a possible banking crisis. And this despite the fact that oil companies and banks face a much more challenging environment than in 2015. (I am writing on May 15, 2020.)

In a recent interview with Fox News, Jared Kushner presented an optimistic narrative; he indicated the economy would be normal by June and “rocking by July,” by which he means that prosperity is just around the corner

“Rocking by July” is one of two competing narratives in today’s stock market, and the other we’ll call the “Screwed until there’s a Vaccine” narrative. These two have roughly equal levels of support.

Jared’s vision is an economy returning to normal soon, certainly before the November election. July 4 is a mere seven weeks away, and our unemployment rate is what? According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s 14.7%; but 36 million Americans have filed for unemployment compensation, and there were 158 million employed in 2019—which seems like a 22.8% unemployment rate, without even counting the 3% rate we had before the pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the-united-states/

Whatever the exact unemployment rate, it’s huge and growing. The economy cannot possibly return to normal until the unemployment rate at least stabilizes. However, the “Rocking by July” narrative has its adherents; people continue to buy stocks, and the market has recovered about 60% of its losses since late March.

Why is that happening? There are a couple of obvious reasons. First, stocks are cheap. If you shake me awake in the middle of the night and tell me that Southwest Airlines is trading at 24 then I will croak “Buy! Buy! Buy!” before falling back asleep. I won’t ask why it’s trading so low. In the clear light of day, with all the information at my fingertips, I might have doubts—but cheap is cheap. I have to think it through carefully to not buy Southwest at that price.

Second, bonds, CDs and real estate are all problematic right now. Bonds are yielding very little—and the possibility of mass defaults cannot be ignored, although people are ignoring it as I write. (Granted, the Federal Reserve is on this problem.) CDs are low-risk, but yield little, and who can tell what’s going to happen with real estate? For now, the market is not being kind to REITs.

So there aren’t many other good investment opportunities. There’s gold, but that’s already gone up a lot. There are other commodities, but there’s some deflation in the economy already, and there’s frankly nothing I would buy right now. Other investors seem to feel similarly.

So stocks are kinda the only game in town.

Investors are to some extent forced by circumstances to believe in—or hope for—“Rocking by July.” Jared Kushner is now our spiritual and intellectual leader. If you’re staring ruin in the face, and an utterly clueless man tells you there’s still hope, then despite yourself you might think, even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

But these are vain hopes. Jared Kushner’s winning optimism notwithstanding, the “Screwed until there’s a Vaccine” narrative is supported by this undeniable and brutal truth: the economy will not begin to recover significantly until the corona-virus has largely disappeared. And even then the recovery will probably be slow.

Major sectors of the economy have been badly damaged: airlines, retail sales, food processing, restaurants and entertainment, manufacturing, tourism, farming (supply chains), energy, education and daycare centers, and probably the medical sector, particularly hospitals. Banking and insurance cannot be far behind. State and local governments are also on shaky ground. Big pharma and software may be okay, and financial markets will probably stay liquid.

Some of these sectors may never recover, and others may undergo drastic re-structuring—and that means capital investments and possible permanent job losses.

Also, an unemployment rate of 15%-26% means that much less productivity, and consumer demand will decline more than that. There are already signs of deflation:

schwab-quote-1-pdf

schwab quote 2pdf

The above quotes are from schwab.com, 5-14-2020 and 5-15-2020, Trade->Trade Source->Markets

Merely lifting the stay-at-home orders will mean little to the economy. Those orders are meant for the 10% to 20% of the population who won’t read or understand the advice of public health officials. The other 80% to 90% will continue to behave as if there is a deadly disease on the loose which the federal government isn’t doing much to stop. Yes, it’s possible that the Trump administration will try to force some of that 80% to 90% back to work, but by and large the workers will go back when they think it’s safe. Trump’s executive order to meat-packing workers to return to their jobs seems to have been widely ignored.

And even if they could be forced to work, they can’t be forced to shop—or take vacations.

But for many American workers, forcing them to return to their jobs is moot, because they have no jobs. Let’s look at the unemployment claims:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html

If you extrapolate the unemployment claim curve assuming it keeps the same shape (it might well not), then it appears that new jobless claims will return to 2019 levels in July or August. At that point, unemployment should level off; how fast it decreases depends mostly on how soon we get a vaccine, although more government stimulus wouldn’t hurt.

And if you remember a bit of integral calculus, you can guessestimate total unemployment claims at 45 to 50 million, or about 30% of the people working in January. Again, that’s assuming the curve doesn’t change shape….and one thing that could change the curve is if states and local governments start laying off employees, as they did during the Great Recession.

And if the unemployment rate won’t decrease much until we start administering the vaccine—and that’s my view—then we could have an unemployment rate of 15%-26% until late in 2021. A truly massive government stimulus could change this picture, but unless the Democrats win the election that seems unlikely.

And then there’s the question of the efficacy of the vaccine, and whether the population will accept it. Will the corona-virus mutate into a family of viruses, each requiring its own sub-vaccine, like the flu?

And beyond the usual anti-vaxxers, what about the people the Republicans have convinced that covid-19 is no worse than the flu? If they don’t get the flu shot today, why should they get the corona-virus shot tomorrow?

In the flu season of 2017-2018, 37.1% of adults got the flu shot. Yes, I would expect that more would get the covid-19 vaccine, but will we get enough to eliminate or nearly eliminate the virus? We might need 80% to 90% compliance; will we get that after all the attacks on the credibility of science and experts?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1718estimates.htm

Even a good vaccine may not be enough to save the economy.

P.S. Just because Jared Kushner is almost certainly wrong about the economy doesn’t mean that now is a bad time to invest in the stock market. The economy and the stock market do not often march in step. I did in fact buy Southwest Airlines—fingers crossed.

 

 

 

What Our Mind Cannot Grasp

The best way to read this blog entry is to go back and read A Gift and An Easter Miracle and the Basis of Socialism, and then read this one. However, it should be possible to read this essay alone without too much confusion.

Let’s state some postulates:

First, that we are entirely free to re-work socialism to meet our needs and the crises of this century, and in fact this is our duty and our joy. There is no standard definition of socialism; there is a history, which we should learn from, but which we are by no means obligated to follow.

Second, that capitalism has a split personality. It is often deadly. It destroys human lives and the natural world; it is a threat to the survival of both.

And yet, the wealth it creates pays for education, healthcare, music and museums—in short, for civilization. Can we learn to use capitalism safely?

Third, that a realistic and humane socialism could save our planet, and millions or even billions of human lives. This is about making the future something other than a series of catastrophes: pandemics, droughts, wildfires, crop failures, massive storms, coastlines flooded, wars, dictatorships, the loss of human rights and democracy.

So yes, this game is worth the candle. It is worth your time reading and my time writing.

 

The basis of socialism is the intuition that human life is sacred. And because human life arose from nature and depends upon it, the natural world is also sacred.

“Sacred” is what our spirit can encompass, but which our mind can never fully grasp. Its value is not expressed in units of something else.

I do not define socialism as opposition to the existing distribution of property; this is a break with historical socialism. Not that inequality should be ignored in governing, but rather to put the focus on the potential beauty and grace of our lives.

When we say human life is sacred, we cannot sentimentalize the conditions of life. Death is an inevitable part of life. The belief that life is sacred cannot imply a denial or evasion of death.

Human life often involves severe conflict, including war. While working and hoping for peace, we must be realistic about war. And our understanding of war cannot be facile; for example, dialogue cannot solve every problem.

Jung wrote that growth requires sacrifice. Sometimes people sacrifice their lives for the well-being of others, but this is an act of devotion, not a negation of the sacredness of life.

More importantly, human beings sometimes live as if life were not sacred. They may do this because they value something else more than life itself.  For example, they may value money, power, tobacco, drugs or alcohol more than life. Since these are all part of life, there’s an inherent imbalance, a kind of contradiction; do people die of cancer wishing that they could smoke for another few years, even just for a day? They might indeed. People who live as if life were not sacred have lost something important. Perhaps this was what Christ meant about the salt of the earth.

Addiction is a standing challenge to the sacredness of human life. And there are repetitive patterns of behavior and thought that resemble addiction, such as nationalism—there’s a sort of intoxication, and a loss of realism and empathy. There’s no actual substance abused, but the effect is similar.

Capitalist socialization is also a repetitive pattern of thought (and resulting behavior) that resembles an addiction. There may not be a high involved, but people are absolutely unable to imagine another way of thinking and behaving. And the loss of empathy is pronounced.

A full understanding of the sacredness of human life, and of nature, implies acceptance of the conditions of life, including suffering, addiction and death. This acceptance is not passive or grudging, nor is it tainted with cynicism or pessimism.

The conditions of life also include all the joy and fascination that the “pursuit of happiness” can capture. People cannot thrive without joy and fascination, and the goal of Survival Socialism is to enable them to thrive.

But what conditions foster joy and fascination?  For socialism, that question is the key to governing. Ultimately, the people must work out the conditions that allow them to thrive for themselves. But one area is obviously education. Northrop Frye, the literary critic, observed that all utopian writing is ultimately about education—-and that sounds just about right.

Under Survival Socialism, education will mean real education, not just career training—not that job skills aren’t also important. First, the humanities, and particularly the history of the West, are critical subjects. Western history leads directly to an understanding of the modern world, with its dynamism, its alienation, and its tragedy.  Second, scientific education needs to be re-vamped to give all high school and university graduates an understanding of basic concepts, of statistics, astronomy and ecology. We must all know enough science to understand the world around us. And students must know that science and math are not just for a minority of specialists but are the common property of all humanity.

I went to a university where “Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free,” was carved in stone above the entrance. And the inverse: without the truth, without knowledge and science, we are easily confused and enslaved—and if we forget that, Putin is always at hand to remind us.

 

 

 

Why is Billionaire Capitalism Bad at Pandemics?

I once saw a couple of the Gracie brothers, experts at Brazilian Jujitsu, discuss the efficacy of martial arts in self-defense. They believed that training that emphasizes safety—for example where all punches are pulled—was not effective in real street situations.

“You fight the way you fight,” said one.

“You fight the way you train,” said the other, expanding on the theme.

In other words, muscle memory counts for a lot. If you have pulled a punch hundreds of times in practice, you will not throw it with full force later even if your life depends on it.

This brings to mind military training, where trainees repeat the same movements over and over again, so that even when they are gripped with mortal fear, they can still obey orders and fire their weapons.

Let’s turn now to Trump and the Republican Party. They have been thinking the same thoughts now for decades: cut taxes, deny healthcare, concentrate wealth, undermine science and education, and promote cynicism and nihilism.

The common good is of course never part of their thinking, because they seek only the good of the very wealthy. Sacrificing the well-being of the vast majority is automatic for them, as evidenced by our declining life expectancy and birth rate.

So, managing a pandemic, which requires a dispassionate focus on the good of all, is practically impossible for Republicans. It’s like playing four-dimensional chess while shaving left-handed—they have no neural pathways for this task. The entire situation is literally unthinkable for them.

So they keep trying to convert managing a pandemic to something they are more familiar with, like concentrating wealth or undermining the Constitution—or sacrificing the lives of ordinary people.

Here’s the concentration of wealth:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavirus-law-congress-tax-change/

And here’s the undermining of the Constitution:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/trump-total-authority-claim.html

And finally, the sacrificing of American lives:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/politics/trey-hollingsworth-coronavirus/?iid=ob_lockedrail_topeditorial

It took me only a couple of minutes to find these examples, and I could have cited fifty other cases just like them; in the current emergency Republicans are unable to conceal their true beliefs. What they are saying and doing may seem senseless, but it all follows logically from the goals and methods of Billionaire Capitalism.

Republicans are simply being true to their ideology. Billionaire Capitalism wasn’t designed to protect ordinary people from pandemics or anything else. It’s designed to increase the wealth and power of billionaires, ad infinitum.

Over the next century, our survival as a species probably depends on our ability to counter novel pandemics and other global catastrophes, such as climate change. Billionaire Capitalism could therefore literally be the death of us.

If the preceding paragraph seems too extreme, consider this: every species goes extinct eventually, and a massive change in habitat is a common cause.

If we change our own habitat too much, we may well go extinct.

 

 

An Easter Miracle and the Basis of Socialism

I am writing on March 27, 2020.  Readers in the future will know how this story ends; I do not.

I have never despaired of humanity or America, but I cannot deny that our light is fading, at least for the moment. In the past few days there have been calls to reduce social distancing and lift the emergency shelter-in-place orders, in order to get the economy moving again. These calls started with President Trump, who has said he wants churches full of worshipers on Easter Sunday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-signals-growing-weariness-with-social-distancing-and-other-steps-advocated-by-health-officials/2020/03/23/0920ea0a-6cfc-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html

The science—and even simple math—indicates that this would be a very bad idea. Currently corona virus has a mortality rate of about 2% in the US, but if a hundred million Americans got the virus, our healthcare system (which includes only about a million hospital beds) would collapse, and it would also probably be impossible to deliver food and medicine to all those recovering at home. And since many essential workers would fall ill, there might be blackouts and food shortages.

So in that case the mortality rate would be far higher than 2%. Italy still has food and enough hospital beds, and the mortality rate there is 11%.

If the US had a hundred million cases and a mortality rate of 11%, that would mean eleven million deaths. We don’t have the capacity to process that many dead bodies by ordinary means. A political system that cannot even bury the dead may well be replaced or drastically reformed.

And yes, 11% is chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but since Italy is already seeing this mortality rate without running out of food and without a complete collapse of its medical system, 11% mortality with 100,000,000 cases in the US is certainly possible; Italy currently has less than 100,000 cases.

It’s unclear from the statistics how many of the critical/serious cases survive in Italy, but of course all those who die were classified as critical/serious at some point. So the total number of critical and serious cases in this scenario is at least eleven million. That’s eleven million critical cases in a country with 924,000 hospital beds, and no more 64,000 ICU beds. We also have only about 169,000 ventilators.

https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/13/coronavirus-numbers-we-really-should-be-worried-about/

Yes, we have some military resources available, and we can improvise; Tesla has already delivered 3,000 ventilators.

However, bear in mind that pandemic or no, people are still going to have heart attacks and babies at the same rate as before. Cancer, shootings and overdoses will still be happening. The vast majority of those hospital and ICU beds are already occupied:

Currently, US hospitals routinely operate at or near full capacity and have limited ability to rapidly increase services. There are currently shortages of healthcare workers of all kinds. Emergency departments are overcrowded and often have to divert patients to other hospitals.

http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02272020.html

And there will be plenty of corona virus victims who will need to be hospitalized for supportive care who would not be classified as serious or critical, and who won’t require an ICU bed or a ventilator. Clearly that group will be sent home with a bottle of Tylenol—-if there’s any still available—and some unknown percentage of them will turn critical and die, with or without a return trip to the hospital.

And worse: the resources detailed above, as thin as they are, will be under-utilized if health care workers themselves get sick in large numbers—which is quite likely if masks, gowns and gloves remain in short supply.

No matter how you slice it, our medical system would be crushed into powder by a pandemic of this magnitude—and most of the pandemic would play out in an environment where few people in this country could get medical care for anything for months. How do we suppose that dialysis patients and stroke victims will fare? Will diabetics still be able to get insulin and other supplies? What about baby well checks and prenatal exams? People who need organ transplants?

Lots of people will die in this pandemic who never catch the corona virus.

How likely is this scenario? Mathematically, highly likely if we do as Trump commands. Currently the US has about 100,000 confirmed cases, and due to our lack of testing, we have no idea what the actual number is. One blogger estimates the real number at 5-20 times the official number:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/

Since 12.5 is halfway between 5 and 20, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that we currently have 1.25 million cases in the US. Many of course are asymptomatic, but still infectious. (Note that this number is already higher than the number of hospital beds available.)

How long would it take us to get from 1.25 million cases to 100 million, if we ended most social distancing restrictions tomorrow, which is March 28? In other words, how long would it take for our cases to increase 80x?

A month ago, on Feb. 27, Italy had 655 cases; by March 21 it had 53,578, an increase of 82x. That’s in 22 days, or for us, April 18.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

But that’s not a fair comparison, because Italy instituted a nationwide lockdown on March 9, following several successive regional quarantines and other isolating measures that started on Feb. 23. So for the entire 22-day period I’ve selected, significant parts of Italy were under quarantine or lockdown. Without those efforts, the 80x increase would have taken place sooner, maybe in two weeks instead of three?

Two weeks from now is Good Friday.

You can change these numbers and assumptions all you like, but the answer is still the same: ending the shelter-in-place and social distancing restrictions at this time would result in a dreadful catastrophe. I have used the example of 100,000,000 corona virus cases with at least 11,000,000 of those critical and serious, but if we have 20,000,000 cases and 2,200,000 critical and serious then the effect on the medical system is largely the same. Even 200,000 critical and serious patients could overwhelm us.

Of course it won’t happen like that—but that is the implication of Trump’s Easter Miracle. Fortunately, his power is limited and most of the states would surely resist his mad scheme. But he could still get a lot of people killed in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, where the governors are kamikaze Republicans, and unchecked infections in a few states could prolong the pandemic nation-wide for a long time. Because when things get dire in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, people will flee and will bring the virus with them wherever they go. The states they flee to will have no choice but to prolong the lockdowns, and the economy and stock market will fall even further.

[Late note: Trump appears to be backing off his Easter Miracle plan, but there’s always a chance he’ll come back to some version of a premature lifting of the lockdowns.]

A particularly dismal part of this drama is how many right-wing commentators agree with Trump on this this issue:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/27/now-we-know-conservative-devotion-life-ends-birth/

As I’ve pointed out in A Greater Power, Mother’s Milk and Potosi, and Capitalism and Air Safety, capitalist socialization leads to a disregard for human life. We seldom see a starker version of this than in the comments of Dan Patrick, Dennis Praeger, R.R. Reno and Brit Hume above. There’s enough material there for several Halloweens—a proposal to deliberately infect first responders (from the Wall Street Journal!) or volunteers; the assertion that restarting the economy is worth 35,000 deaths; a lament at the modern unwillingness to sacrifice our lives to save the economy in the same way the WWII generation sacrificed their lives to win the war, etc.

Glenn Beck, of course, said he would rather die than let the country’s economy go down. I wanted to send flowers to his funeral, but his obituary isn’t online yet; I’ll check again tomorrow.

There’s a feeling akin to Schadenfreude at witnessing the idiotic depravity—displayed in public–of those with whom you disagree, but I only want that feeling for a second or two. Instead, let’s pivot from Beck and Brit Hume and think about the implications of the foregoing discussion, particularly in light of A Gift, my previous post.

Remember when I wrote this?

“Any political movement should be able to state its basis, and by that I mean its highest value and its goals in governing. It may also include a theory of political change, including revolution…”

And then I used the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence as an example?

I propose to the do the same for modern socialism—what I think of as Survival Socialism, because we are facing the loss of our civilization, our climate and mass death.

So what about us? What is the highest value of socialism? It is not, in my view, opposition to existing property arrangements, and this is an important departure from the past.

It is instead that human life is sacred. And since human life flows out of the natural world, nature is also sacred.

Capitalism, and particularly Billionaire Capitalism, do not hold human life sacred. If we didn’t realize that before, we can see it clearly in the supernatural light of Trump’s Easter Miracle.

 

 

A Gift

Any political movement should be able to state its basis, and by that I mean its highest value and its goals in governing. It may also include a theory of political change, including revolution:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Jefferson begins with an assertion of human equality, which is often discussed. But to me the most remarkable part of this famous sentence is a theory of political legitimacy and revolutionary change which is founded upon a gift from God. God has given humanity certain inalienable rights. You might object and say that that the “Creator” is merely a figure of speech, a flourish of eighteenth-century prose. But Jefferson’s phrasing is too close to the justification for absolute monarchy: the Divine Right of Kings. The absolute monarchies of pre-modern Europe rested on the assertion of a political right to rule conferred by God on kings.

An obvious question might be, what political rights did God confer on the rest of us? If the answer is “none,” then that’s seemingly inconsistent with Christian belief. After all, we all have souls, we are all created by God and saved by Christ, we all receive the same sacraments and we will all stand in judgment before God. We recite the same prayers at the graves of both kings and beggars; Christianity implies spiritual equality. Granted, God might not give exactly the same political rights to both kings and commoners, but still—the masses must certainly get something?

And Jefferson’s memorable answer is: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That is God’s gift to us.

And what Jefferson doesn’t say is also informative: there is no mention of any rights God might have given Kings—such as the right to rule—or the right of aristocrats to their lands and serfs and privileges. And perhaps most conspicuous by its absence is no mention of any charter or covenant for any particular church, or all churches.

And these rights are not given merely to some ethnic group or class, but to all men. Nor does he speak of clans or identities; there is no particularism in his vision.

Jefferson does not discuss why the Spirit gave us this gift.

It follows from the sacredness of these rights that governments exist only to secure them, and that if a government “becomes destructive of these ends” then it loses legitimacy and the people have a “Right…to alter or replace it.” This right must also be inalienable, by Jefferson’s logic. And clearly, if the government is headed by a king, the people have a right to remove him.

This is a concise statement of the basis and purpose of the American Revolution. The basis is a gift from God; the purpose is to realize the full potential of that gift.

[The foregoing discussion is not intended to drive people to watch the 700 Club or give money to Liberty University. In modern times, “God” has become an evangelical brand, and His Name is relentlessly monetized. I’m talking about the God that was never trademarked or patented, the one people used to worship because they felt the spirit move within them.]

 

 

Capitalism and Air Safety

Here is a clear and brief account of what went wrong with the Max8:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY

The comments on youtube understandably express outrage that Boeing failed so grievously to ensure the safety of its passengers. The FAA comes in for criticism as well. These responses are thoroughly human.

But let’s think: given the incentives, and capitalist socialization, what was to stop Boeing from making this decision? A deep concern for the well-being of others? But that had already been blunted and numbed by capitalist socialization.

The liberal answer to this problem would be regulation—and that approach has had success; we no longer allow dairies to put formaldehyde in milk, for instance. But as billionaire capitalism advances, acquiring more wealth and power, the regulatory agencies are more and more often put on the defensive, and in the end they no longer have the political influence to do their jobs.

This is not a matter of bad people corrupting an otherwise value-neutral system. This may sound shocking, but the people who made these decisions may well be good people outside the constraints of their jobs. If a Boeing executive saw a child drowning, they would likely attempt to save the child. It’s not a certainty, because capitalist socialization does tend to bleed over into the rest of one’s life, but human decency still has the power to emerge from the darkness, like a returning hero in an ancient legend.

But on the job, their natural goodness is overwhelmed by capitalist socialization and its associated incentives. We just couldn’t lose market share to Airbus! We just couldn’t! That may sound morally bankrupt, and it is—but it’s not the moral bankruptcy of individuals, but of the system itself.

 Of course, if the job is obviously dirty, the managers will tend to select designers with a history of doing bad work—without consciously thinking about it in those terms, of course. So some of the people involved may well have been incompetent or uncaring, but that didn’t happen by accident. For capitalism, incompetence has its uses; although most of the time capitalist enterprises want competent employees, there are moments when corners must be cut, and the best employee for that is someone with deep experience in carelessness.

 Imagine if a good software engineer were told to write code to tilt an airplane’s nose down based on sensor readings, without any input from the pilot. He or she would have attempted to change the design, to put it mildly; the pilot has a much better grasp of the situation that the software can get from a single set of sensors.

And that attempt at re-design would have resulted in someone else getting the job.

But the main point is not whether the individuals involved were competent or incompetent, good or evil. The point is that capitalism always has the potential to harm or kill employees, customers, people who live nearby, or even people thousands of miles away. And even once it is clear that people are dying, capitalism will not stop—as we see with tobacco companies, asbestos manufacturers, HFCS vendors, oil and coal companies, ad infinitum.

This is inherent to capitalism, and if we want to save our civilization and our planet we must stop that behavior. The institutions we devise to do so must be stronger than the old liberal methods of passing laws and setting up regulatory bodies.

Humanity and the System (when bats ate the global economy)

I set out to write about the state of humanity today, and as I began to outline that essay I realized that it was too broad a topic for a single post. However, an essay that fails to cover everything may still be of some use to readers.

I am writing this on Feb. 29, 2020; let us start with the coronavirus. It is almost certain to become a pandemic, although some relatively isolated places may be spared the full impact. Some countries are certainly under-counting; Egypt has only one reported case, which is like having only one mouse in your basement—-the others will turn up soon.

Italy is already reporting a critical shortage of hospital beds, and yet 8 or 9 days ago it had only 3 known cases; today it has over 1100. What will California be like in 8 or 9 days?

As with a traffic accident, it is hard to turn away from the details of this epidemic—horror has its fascination.

But we must turn away to consider the broader implications. When a person is quarantined, it is as if they are unemployed. Some people may be able to work from home, of course, but manufacturing workers must clock in. In China, nearly half the population is under some form of quarantine; some may be able to leave the house, but they have to stay in their immediate neighborhood.

Not surprisingly, February production in China is at a record low. In fact, it was lower than the worst month of the Great Recession.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/29/china-pmi-factory-activity-shrank-at-fastest-rate-on-record-in-february.html

And it’s reasonable to assume that China is prioritizing manufacturing, trying to keep that vital sector going as much as possible. The retail and service sectors must be mostly shut down, except for health care. Farming is probably untouched so far, but when it’s time to plant there may be shortages of fertilizer, equipment and spare parts, and possibly labor as well—seasonal workers may be unable to travel.

How soon will it be before productivity in China returns to 2019 levels? When will the epidemic end?

Although the coronavirus isn’t influenza, flu epidemics may shed some light on this question. When flu epidemics end, it’s because the virus has run through everyone that lacks resistance to that particular strain, including people with weak immune systems to any infection. In other words, most people have some prior resistance to (or vaccination against) that particular flu—or a similar one—and they either don’t get sick or they get a mild case.

In the case of COVID-19, nobody has a resistance to this particular virus, because it’s brand new. So this pandemic may be around for quite a while, probably until a vaccine is developed and administered to everyone. That could take, in round numbers, two to three years.

China’s economy right now is worse than the Great Recession in the US, and not as bad as the Great Depression, but only because demand hasn’t completely collapsed yet. Italy is already in recession and South Korea is not far behind. California could be in recession in weeks. Chinese officials say that their situation is stabilizing, and that may be true—-that is, the epidemiological situation may be stabilizing, as long as the quarantine is maintained. The economic situation is a different story.

Economic productivity will take a big hit globally. This is the “supply shock” that some analysts have mentioned, likening the drop in Chinese production to the oil shocks of the ‘70s. That’s a fairly good analogy—if China has the biggest manufacturing sector in the world, and if that sector loses 30% to 50% of its productive power in a short period of time, the rest of the world will be feeling the resulting shortages for some time to come, just as with the oil shocks. Unstated is that we may see real inflation again.

But there are a couple of missing pieces in that analogy—first, it appears that the entire world will be in China’s boat shortly, and second, what about demand?

Let’s say, with rubber gloves and heavy masks and lots of disinfectant and air filters, China can get most of its manufacturing workers back on the job. And let’s say they get back to 80% of 2019 production, maybe even 90%. But what’s happening to those workers when they go home after their shift? The COVID-19 is still out there, and there will very likely be inter-city travel restrictions. Will people be going out, spending money, having a good time? Buying cars and motorbikes, going on vacations? Splurging on jewelry? Of course not. People are going to be avoiding public spaces until a vaccine is developed, and that won’t be just China, either. And they will be hoarding cash, as well, spending money only on necessities. Their confidence in the economic system will be low.

The global economy will not recover until a vaccine is developed and widely available. Those two to three years could be worse than the worst of the Great Recession.

I will leave it to the reader to imagine the political, social and spiritual consequences. The merits of globalization will probably be discussed at length, particularly trade and travel with China. It will be a golden age for conspiracy theorists.

Now, could this all have been avoided? Both SARS and MERS are coronaviruses, so it was clear that coronaviruses had “learned” to make the jump to human hosts. What distinguishes COVID-19 is its long, asymptomatic incubation period, perfect for taking a leisurely trip through multiple airports with no more than a sniffly nose, infectious as all hell every step of the way.

I am certain that scientific teams were studying the coronavirus and modeling its mutations—not COVID-19 itself, but the ones we knew at the time. Someone must have asked the question, “what if SARS had had a longer incubation time?” and realized this would have meant a destructive pandemic.

And in fact the world did—in retrospect—have a close call with SARS, which has an even higher mortality rate than COVID-19. Travel to and from China was much less common in 2003 than it is today.

But this study had no effect at the policy level. China did not shut down the wildlife meat markets, and it didn’t even prohibit the sale of bats (the source of both SARS and COVID-19). Trump has been reflexively shutting down government teams which track possible pandemics and attempting to cut the CDC budget. The US government has never warned US citizens against visiting areas where bats are consumed.

If there was an effort to develop a vaccine against SARS then that experience might have been useful in developing a vaccine against COVID-19, but I never heard of any such effort.

Both the Chinese and US governments were asleep at the switch, and their dreams were untroubled by pandemics and economic collapse. The jump of coronaviruses to humans was a momentous evolutionary event, as we are finding out now, and our governments simply ignored it.

What were we doing instead, in the period between 2003 and 2019? Oh, we were definitely busy, busy bees: concentrating wealth into as few hands as possible, developing Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), which enabled the financial collapse of 2008, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, attempting to crush the serpent of socialized medicine, discoursing on Obama’s birth certificate at endless length, cutting taxes on billionaires again and again, threatening to lock Hillary Clinton up, learning to pray after mass shootings, and so on.

But we never gave coronaviruses a second’s thought. And that single instance of inattention should make us doubt the legitimacy of our entire system. If the system cannot protect us from foreseeable pandemics that will kill us and destroy our economy, then change is clearly required.

It would have been trivial to prohibit the consumption of bats in China. “For want of a nail…”