Ian Welsh Muses On "The Terrible Impulse To Rally Around Bad Leaders In A Crisis"

"When do we get back to normal? I don't think we get back to normal," said my governor earlier this week. (After a long "standby" period, the action starts at 36:13 of the clip.) "I think," he went on to say, "we get to a new normal," adding later, "Let's make sure we're getting the positive lesson, not the negative one." What he had to say, I thought, was pretty darned smart. Even Ian, as we'll see, allows, "He sounds good on TV." There's more to think about, though.

-by Ken

Quick show of hands:

Raise yours if you have not been depressed to see SwampThing's approval ratings soar -- all the way to the majestic 50-percent mark, and maybe (shudder) beyond! --- even as he's been bungling, or maybe cunningly exploiting?, every aspect of the pandemic crisis. And I mean bungling, or exploiting?, not just as badly as the mind could imagine, but maybe worse than at least this mind could have imagined. And here I was thinking that one of my mind's chiefest capabilities is imagining down to the deepest depths of the abyss. Live and learn, I guess.

HI, EVERYONE! I HOPE YOU'RE OK!

And you're all coping, as best any of us can, with the stuff that's going on around us. All we can do is, you know, the best we can do -- about the things in our lives we can each do something about -- that and, I guess, keep trying to expand the catalog of things we can do something about. And I guess that's going to have to be good enough. Isn't it at least better than letting ourselves be paralyzed by hopelessness? Maybe sometime I'll try to write a little more about how I'm coping, but for now I'm mindful that one thing that keeps me going is the kind of human contact we're still permitted -- most abundantly, contact of the online kind.

One thing such contact can do is help me feel that I haven't lost all my marbles. For me, then, it qualified as providential that Ian Welsh on Tuesday delivered a spectacular blogpost called "The Terrible Impulse To Rally Around Bad Leaders In A Crisis." So it's not just me thinking vaguely that this sort of thing does seem to happen a lot, especially in times of, you know, crisis.

I have to confess that in this crisis I've slowly come to accept, kind of respect, perhaps even admire -- what the heck, let me say it, feel almost grateful for Governor Cuomo's now-perpetual televisual presence. Indeed, rewatching some of the appearance preserved in the YouTube clip above, which I'd happened to watch live, I thought again that it sounded darned smart, much of it extraordinary.

My goodness, could what Governor Cuomo had to say be more different in its informed contact with reality from what we hear regularly from other gov't sources, not least the, er, highest-up gov't source? Again, even Ian W credits that "he sounds good on TV." But this isn't enough for Ian to cut him any slack. Of course slack-cutting isn't what we look to Ian for, and the rest of what he has to say about the governor is utterly legit, and way too important to be forgotten.

At least, if we look at the governor's rising approval ratings, it's possible to respond with something other than utter despair. There's no imaginable mitigation for the two "sad clown"s Ian goes on to write about -- aka the second most important leader in the Western world and the most powerful life form in the known world.

So, Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, had his approval ratings soar 30% during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is talk of him becoming US President (presumably this means making him Biden’s VP candidate, then having Biden step aside.)

He sounds good on TV.

Cuomo is attempting to cut funding for Medicaid because he refused to tax the rich, as the crisis continues. A panel Cuomo appointed has recommended 400 billion in cuts to hospitals. He repeatedly said New York City has too many hospital beds. He has let prisoners in New York jails stay in them even as he was warned they would be breeding grounds for the disease. He left going to isolation at least 2 weeks too long.

In other words he’s a neoliberal who wants to cut key resources even during a crisis, and incompetent to boot. Back after 9/11 we saw the same thing happen with Bush Jr. Bush not only ignored warnings about Al-Qaeda’s intention to strike in the US, the actual government response on 9/11 was terrible—the US could not get armed jets into the air, only unarmed ones. It would have been a hilarious display of incompetence if it weren’t for the consequences. Canada had armedjets up before the US: I joked that if we invaded the US we could have destroyed the entire US air force on the ground. (Then given you universal health care.)

Bush was an incompetent, stupid, and mentally challenged (listen to his speeches. He was impaired.) He used the blank check given to him by the rally-round effect to take the country to war with Iraq, a disaster which has spawned disaster after disaster. The money and resources used in Iraq should have been spent on other things: almost on anything else: and the deaths and maiming and rape and torture are his legacy, and the legacy of Americans who ran to an incompetent leader.

Something similar is happening in Britain. Boris Johnson, the PM, has had ratings of his party soar. Boris is the fellow who originally wanted to not do any social distancing at all, based on a herd immunity theory which amounted to “let the maximum number of people die and the hospital capacity be overwhelmed.” Personally Boris bragged about shaking hands with infected Covid-19 patients, then going on and shaking hands with everybody else he met. Personally a typhoid Mary. The Conservative party has spent 10 years defunding the NHS, to the point where it has one of the lowest numbers of hospital beds per capita in the developed world.

Yet Johnson and the Conservative party’s ratings have gone up.

Trump’s ratings, while they have not soared, have gone up, and Trump’s Covid reponse has been beyond incompetent, into delusional Emperor has no clothes territory.

This tendency to rally around even incompetent leaders makes one despair for humanity. The correct response in all cases is contempt and an attempt, if possible, at removal of the corrupt and venal people in charge. Certainly no one should be approving of the terrible jobs they have done.

All three have or will use their increased power to do horrible things. The Coronavirus bailout bill passed by Congress and approved by Trump is a huge bailout of the rich, with crumbs for the poor and middle class. So little, in fact, that there may be widespread hunger soon. Cuomo is pushing forward with his cuts, and I’m sure Johnson will live down to expectations.

Incompetence and ideological blindness to the good of the people are, then, encouraged by the behaviour of the masses. This, it seems, is what they want.

We break that, or over the crises and catastrophes to come (and the 21st century will be a century of tragedy) we will lose billions we needn’t have.

DWT UPDATE: Don't Worry, The Polls On Trump Are Back To Normal

Change Research just came out with new polling showing Trump's job approval ratings sinking back down to where they were before the pandemic.

Has Anyone Noticed The Country Is Falling Apart-- And That We Better Make Some Changes Fast?

This is good Robert Reich clip. "To the conservative mind," he explained, "the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet, that's exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich. Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism. They need stronger safety nets, and they deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this 'socialism,' fine."

This week, the AP sent out a preview of a book, We Are Indivisible-- A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, coming out this fall by Indivisible founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. AP reporter Elana Schor writes that it zeros in on issues such as the overhaul of Senate rules, gerrymandering, the electoral college and automatic voter registration "which they see as necessary to achieve the sort of big policy shifts that Democratic presidential candidates are campaigning on... 'We’re not just interested in getting rid of Trump,' Levin said. 'We’re interested in getting rid of Trumpism.'"

The Indivisible duo aims to speak to both the dozen-plus Democratic candidates vying to take on Trump next year and the tens of millions of voters who will choose the party’s nominee. As Democratic White House hopefuls line up behind ambitious policy ideas, Levin and Greenberg want to prod the candidates to explain how they would steer their ideas through a Congress often crippled by partisan stalemates.

“I don’t think we can hear from somebody about their plan for climate change or gun violence until we can hear about their plan for making that happen,” Greenberg, 32, told the Associated Press in a joint interview with Levin, 33. “If you’re refusing to take on things about our democracy that make that policy proposal impossible to pass in our system, then that’s not a real proposal.”

The real rot is certainly being exacerbated by Trump and Trumpism but, that rot didn't start with Trump and it won't end with excising Trumpism. America is in deep trouble. Ian Welsh termed it a failing state. When stuff that should work," he wrote, just keeps getting worse and worse, you know your state is failing." He offers his readers this chart from Texas:

But he isn't talking about the state of Texas. He's talking about the United States of America. Ergo, these 2 charts:

People who are happy and have hope for the future rarely become drug addicts.

Adam Smith wrote that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

That amount is not infinite.

The U.S. is not keeping up its infrastructure. It is not building important new infrastructure, as anyone who has seen high speed trains overseas (or good airline terminals) knows.

The U.S. is losing wars. It is losing in Afghanistan. When it left Iraq it had to pay local militias not to attack as it left. It arguably won in Libya, if you call contributing to a refugee crisis destabilizing its main strategic partner, the EU, winning, which anyone sane wouldn’t.

The US has turned, in large part, against the World Trade Organization, which it created. Even before turning against it, the WTO failed in its latest round of trade negotiation.

The prices of basic medicines in the U.S. are soaring. (The price of insulin has tripled) and there is an actual decline in life expectancy, the first since the Spanish Flu.

The U.S. is alienating its most important allies, like the EU. Increasingly it uses financial sanctions to punish nations, leading to talk of creating a financial network without the US at its center.

Core manufacturing (for example of computer chips) has moved offshore, and the US is no longer the key manufacturer of electronic goods, nor is one of its allies (Japan controlling this wouldn’t matter much, China doing so, does.) The most advanced 5G technology was created by China. The most important technological city in the world is in China.

China now manufactures more than the US, and in purchasing power parity terms, has a larger economy.

Core nations like Italy (a member of the G7) are beginning to look to Beijing. Italy has signed up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is, among other things, a rival to the WTO and the American lead trade order. Non core nations are increasingly turning to China for loans and development, which China is willing to lend them the money for, often at better rates than the IMF and WTO with less demands for internal controls.

The U.S. military is showing signs of being unable to create effective advanced military equipment: as with the F-35, which basically can’t fly. It is showing signs of intense incompetence, as when it let multiple planes be destroyed on the ground by a hurricane rather than, uh, fly them out or get them under effective cover.

The U.S. is led by Donald Trump, a reality TV star, who was made to look like an effective billionaire mogul by clever editing. While Trump is not without his competencies (he did spend his life shitting into a gold toilet and screwing models), he’s clearly a few screws lose and a flaming narcissist.

Meanwhile the opposition party, faced with an extremely unpopular president, mutters about coming together and how they would never impeach a weak President.

The U.S. is a gold flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the U.S. as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.

And so, today, large parts of America are shitholes, which the residents hate so much they are consuming record amounts of drugs and committing suicide, because who the fuck wants to live in a nation with no hope, shitty bosses and no hope.

Oh, of course, there are people doing well. There were people doing well in 400AD as the Roman Empire collapses. There are always some people doing well.

But the number of people doing well keeps getting less and less, and the decline keeps getting worse and worse.

But the top is doing fine, so they see no reason to do anything.

Heck, Trump just gave them another tax cut. Everyone they know is doing great.

And so the decline goes on, because until the elites are made to feel the pain of the majority, they will not change.

And so far, no one is willing or able to make the elites pay.

What's a Morally Appropriate Response to Climate Deniers?

A small part of a much larger infographic showing our bright bright technical future. None of this will happen.

by Gaius Publius

What's a morally appropriate response to climate deniers?

What's a morally appropriate response to those who enable mass murder?

This short piece is the start of a much longer consideration of the state of the U.S. at this crossroads moment. It's an odd state. I remember the Y2K explosion of fear and concern, that there may be a global collapse due to computers not having been told that the year portion of a date contains four digits, not just two. Many computers stored the year as two digits, for example, as "68" for 1968. That works until 1999. What would happen when all those computers, if they weren't fixed, rolled the date to January 1, 2000? Would they all be fixed?

Y2K fear was in all the newscasts of the day, and appropriately so. No one knew what would happen, and if the very worst did occur, it could indeed have been a disaster. It wasn't, but we sure heard about it.

When it comes to global warming, however, at the rate we're fixing the problem — which is achingly slow, the slowest rate anyone can manage and still be pretending to care — there will be a global disaster. And yet there's been nary a peep from the media or any public official in position to act effectively.

Newscasters talk about driverless cars in 2030; about cheap, widespread DNA-inspired nanotech in 2033; about designer molecules from "superatoms" in 2036; an unhackable quantum internet; a feast of wonders at the next stage of culture and development. (See graphic at this link for all of these technologies.) And none of that will happen unless the disaster we're headed for is avoided. Any movie set in 2030, that doesn't have global chaos as its backdrop, is set on a planet none of are living on, unless we effectively address global warming now.

If a meteor were approaching the earth, the will of the world would be bent toward salvation. Global warming is that meteor. No one with any power is acting appropriately.

Those with power, of course, are paid not to act. For example:

Entire towns are burning to nothing in California. People are being incinerated alive in their cars attempting to flee. But a majority of Democrats still won’t reject fossil fuel money, and no one has put forward a climate plan that is remotely commensurate with the IPCC findings

— Claire Sandberg (@clairesandberg) November 11, 2018

And those without power — the mass of the public — are encouraged by a well-paid media campaign not to act. Many in that mass, our aggressive climate deniers, are in fact deliberately in the way. Many of those aggressive climate deniers are our sisters, fathers, neighbors, friends, co-workers. What's a morally appropriate response to climate deniers, even among our friends?

Consider this from Eric Anderson, first published at Ian Welsh's excellent site (lightly edited; emphasis added):

Shun the Climate Change Deniers

I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.

I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.

There are those that threaten it every day.

Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:

They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.

They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.

They are lying because they are climate change deniers.

Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. [...]

I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.

They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.

Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”

To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.

They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.

Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose. [...]

I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.

We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

"Shun them" means to cut off all social interaction. Remove them completely and totally from your life. Sit shiva for them and declare them dead to you. Shunning is a non-violent act, but a public declaration, and frankly it's the mildest of responses. (For contrast, consider a Jack Reacher response to those who enable what kills.)

Anderson admits the extremity of this act: "I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life."

And yet: If a neighbor cheers a murder as you watch, how should he then be treated? If an aunt cheers an active genocide as you watch, how should she then be treated? What if the genocide included you and your children?

It's the same here. If a person is seduced by Fox News for reasons of hate — the Fox News product is entirely hate, and its viewers watch it just for that — and thus helps choke the life from the species you share, how should that person be treated?

Like a man who verbally backs the wife in a dispute, when you back the husband? Or like an accessory to murder?

Something to think about...

GP
 

Ian Welsh suggests, "Maybe It Is Time To Stop Underestimating Trump?" -- and Steve Bannon too

Andy B. strikes again -- and note especially
the "Carol Foyer" fake-quote at the end

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- A once-prominent political career came to a shocking end on Friday as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was arrested for keying the limo of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

The incident, which rocked political circles in Trenton and Washington, happened in full view of the midtown-Manhattan crowds outside of Trump Tower, where the vandalized limo had been parked.

“Suddenly, this guy broke through security, whipped out his keys, and made a gigantic gash along the side of the limo,” said Harland Dorrinson, a tourist from Missouri who witnessed the incident. “Police started wrestling him to the ground, and I was, like, ‘Holy crap, that’s Chris Christie.’ ”

Fellow-Republicans reacted to Christie’s arrest with sadness and sympathy. “This whole transition period has been tough on a lot of folks,” former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said.

Across New Jersey, residents like Carol Foyler, of Teaneck, said that they were shocked by their governor’s spectacular fall. “I never would have guessed that this would be the thing he’d go to jail for,” she said.

"Trump’s opposition will continue getting their asses handed to them if they keep assuming that he’s a boob, or that he can’t take good advice. He’s a very savvy operator, and the people he trusts most, Bannon and Kushner, are extraordinarily competent men who have proved their loyalty."

-- Ian Welsh, in "Maybe It Is Time To Stop
Underestimating Trump?" (Wednesday)

"Bannon, for all he is decried as a racist, is the person you want to win most of the Trump White House fights, at least if you care about ordinary people, because he’s the guy who wants ordinary Americans to do well, and he knows he needs Hispanics and Blacks to get jobs too. . . . Bannon is right that if the Trump White House can deliver for enough people, they get to rule DC and America for 50 years. . . .

"This is going to be a very interesting White House and administration, just because Trump does not have decided views on a lot of issues. Who wins the internal fights will determine the entire course of Trump’s presidency, and may well determine America’s (and the world’s) future for decades.

"Place your bets and don’t underestimate these people."

-- Ian, in "Don't Underestimate Steve Bannon" (Thursday)

by Ken

Okay, enough fun with Andy B. Now down to business, in the form of Ian Welsh's posts from the last two days, referenced above. The thing to do, really, would be just to encourage you to read the whole posts at the links, in chronological order -- Trump first, then Bannon. I'm going to blunder ahead anyway, but really Ian deserves to make his case(s) his own way (and while you're on his site, don't forget pondering kicking in some $$$ to help enable him to continue giving us his distinctive perspective on, you know, stuff.)

In recommending these posts, I realize that the first danger is readers assuming that Ian is endorsing whatever it is that President The Donald decides to do, failing to make the fairly obvious distinction between saying that the guy is extremely competent and usually gets what he goes after and saying that he's an agent of goodness. So let's go first to the "qualifier":

Trump just convinced Carrier to keep some manufacturing jobs in the US (by bribing them with tax cuts, it seems).  That sort of high profile personal intervention will be remembered, and has already said to his followers “I’m delivering for you”.

Trump is clearly a very flawed individual, with really questionable morals and ethics, but he isn’t incompetent by any useful definition of the word.  He may well wind up betraying his followers, certainly many of his cabinet picks are of deeply dubious individuals who favor policies which will hurt the working and middle classes.

But that doesn’t make him incompetent, that makes him -- a politician and a sleazy, but very good, salesman.

So what is it that this is qualifying?

I keep seeing people talking about how stupid Trump is.

It is certainly true that Trump is not book-smart.  He probably wouldn’t score well on an IQ test.

But by now, it should be clear, except to functional idiots, that Trump is very good at getting what he wants.

This is a man who shits into a gold toilet.  Who has slept with a succession of models.  Yeah, he’s a sleazy predator, but he gets what he wants.

He won the primary and the election. He won the election spending half as much money as Clinton did. Yes, she won the popular vote total: that’s irrelevant.  He won where he needed to win to get the Presidency.

He played the media like a maestro, getting a ton of coverage, of the subjects he wanted covered when he wanted them covered.

After making clear his feelings about Trump's principles and beliefs (whatever they are), Ian gets to the point I've already quoted above, which seems worth repeating:

Trump’s opposition will continue getting their asses handed to them if they keep assuming that he’s a boob, or that he can’t take good advice. He’s a very savvy operator, and the people he trusts most, Bannon and Kushner, are extraordinarily competent men who have proved their loyalty.

"What Trump doesn’t have," Ian writes, "is very firm policy opinions,"

and wonkish centrists and lefties think that makes him stupid, and that that type of stupid is the same thing as incompetent.

Trump stands a decent chance of juicing the economy even as he chops away at is remaining underpinnings through his tax cuts. If he does so, he will be re-elected.

I’d be careful betting against him.

AS TO THOSE "EXTRAORDINARILY COMPETENT
MEN WHO HAVE PROVED THEIR LOYALTY" --


Ian cautions: "Don't underestimate these people."

In yesterday's post Ian took a closer look at Steve Bannon, and what he sees there isn't, or isn't just, what most of us have been focusing on.

First I told you not to underestimate Trump (well, I’ve told you repeatedly), now I’m going to tell you not to underestimate Bannon, his chief strategist, rewarded for supporting him thru everything from Breitbart.  Here’s Bannon:

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over. If we deliver we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Pretty much. Now, it was not necessary to gut the American working class to create a middle class in Asia, there were win/win ways to alleviate poverty outside the developed world without fucking working class Europeans and Americans and so on over. But those ways were not possible under neoliberalism.

"That point is important," Ian says, "but irrelevant to what Bannon is saying."

The way the world economy was run completely fucked a lot of people in America, the EU, Canada, Australia and elsewhere and Bannon is right that if the Trump White House can deliver for enough people, they get to rule DC and America for 50 years, like the Dems did from 1932 to 1980 (yeah, there were Republicans, they governed as Democrats.)

If Ian is right about Bannon's agenda, and if he can persuade the boss to let him do it, there's a lot he can do which will be felt in a good way by voters, especially if he can take advantage of "easy money from the Fed."

Trump will get to replace most Fed governors, fairly soon, so he can certainly have a compliant Federal Reserve. Bear in mind that [following the 2008 economic meltdown] the Fed gave away trillions of dollars, and was giving away tens of billions a month for years.  That money is an available slush fund for anyone smart enough to use it to do more than bail out bankers.

Bannon, I suspect, is smart enough. 80 billion a month can buy a lot of jobs if you use it effectively, which Obama’s Fed never did.

Ian argues that there are other tools President Trump can use which may produce results noticeable in "flyover country," so dangerously undertracked by most of us during the election. "Contrary to what mainstream economists (over 90% of whom, I remind you, did not notice the housing bubble) say," he writes,

Trump can use tariffs to bring a lot of jobs back.  The manufacturer of iPhones (FoxConn) has already said, sure, they’re willing to build them in the US.  They aren’t going to kiss a market like that goodbye.

But there's a crucial "but" here:

But Trump’s tax cutting instincts work against this.  Cutting taxes for corporations isn’t as effective as tariffs, because corporations already pay very low taxes, and multinationals pay damn near none, since they play various jurisdictions off against each other.

So Bannon's economic agenda may run up against his boss's impulses. "If you’re a partisan Democrat first," Ian concludes, "and don’t give a fuck about the working class and middle class, especially in flyover country,"

then Bannon needs to lose his fights, because if he wins them, Trump gets elected again (though, as I note, I don’t think Bannon gets his 50 years, unless he’s far more clever even than he’s so far indicated (not impossible).

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There Oughta Be a Law Dept.: Is there a way around the horrors of drug price extortion?

THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW (2/7/1946)

[Click to enlarge.]

by Ken

Okay, the cartoon feature There Oughta Be a Law (1948-84) was generally pretty lame. Still, isn't this what invariably comes to mind when horror stories like the latest drug price-extortion scandal break out? Of course, that's probably because the phrase predated the comic, unlike the comic it slavishly imitated, Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time (1929-2008), whose name -- as Don Markstein points out on Toonopedia -- became a common catch phrase in its own right.

And, sure enough, they will do it every time, just in pretty much the way that Mylan "has hiked prices for EpiPen as frequently as three times a year over the past nine years." to the dismay of allergy sufferers who count on EpiPens to bring them back from the life-threatening peril of anaphylactic shock -- not because of significant cost increases or such understandable economic reasons, but for the most compelling reason known to free-market enthusiasts: because they can.

Naturally, as is noted in the above-linked AP report, the company is trying to massage the wretched PR outbreak with some palliative measures. However, "there is no change in the price of the treatment, however, which is what has drawn ire both in Congress and from families that have had to shell out increasingly large sums for the potentially life-saving treatment." After all, aren't corporations bound by law, and possibly by God, to do everything they can to maximize profits?

It's not likely, though, that your average CEO relishes the prospect of having the company name featured alongside images of, say, kids dying from a peanut allergy. The trick, it seems, is to exercise just enough self-control over the price increases, and to do them sufficiently out of the limelight, to attract minimal attention. In other words, as is so often the case, the unforgivable offense here is getting caught. One wonders how much of the U.S. economy now consists of damage control.

The public-interest problem here is what kind of law there ought to, or even might, be to distinguish between allowable and unallowable drug profits. And Ian Welsh thinks he has a "Simple Fix for Intellectual Property Laws": mandatory licensing.

"Let's say," Ian writes,

that someone has genuinely created something new–and we’ll skip the fact that most drug research actually uses massive government subsidies. Let’s say we want them to make money for doing so, in order to encourage people to keep innovating.

How would mandantory licensing work?

If a company has beneficial control over the patent or copyright:

For X years (I’d suggest seven), anyone who wants to use their patent or copyright must pay them 100 percent of the manufacturing cost of making the product.*

[There are two footnotes. First: "When one looks at EpiPen, today, it is not a case of patents, it is a case that FDA trials would cost 1.5 billion.  Competitors should simply be able to copy the EpiPen design and forgo trials beyond confirmation that they have." Then: "This number would have to be different in industries like software and pharma where unit manufacturing costs are often close to zero. The principle is simple: you make back your investment and get a good profit, but your invention/idea is available for all to use at a reasonable price as soon as possible, so society benefits fully and you don’t price gouge."]

After that, anyone who wants to make their product must pay 10 percent.

You can fiddle with the numbers and years, and yes, patents are usually only small parts of final products and there are details around that which need to be fixed, but the principle of mandatory licensing is what matters.

If "beneficial control" is had by an individual rather than a company ("meaning most of the profits are actually going to them, not to a corporation"), Ian says he'd "extend the period by two or three times, to encourage individual innovators and to try and keep all IP from winding up in the hands of corporations." He notes that "an individual often needs more time to fully exploit a new invention or copyright item."

Ian argues that mandatory licensing would help achieve the purpose of patents and copyrights: "mak[ing] people more likely both to invent something and to share the details," by making sure that they're paid and that they're "incentivized" to share ("100 percent monopoly profits for X years is a lot of money, but it avoids the 'jack it up by thousands of percents' problem"). What's more, the plan --

makes markets actually work how they’re supposed to. In economic theory, competitive markets are supposed to drive costs and profits down because if anyone has high profits, someone else will enter the market. Strict monopoly intellectual rights make it impossible for markets to work the way they are supposed to.

Now "simple" as the proposal may be, it leaves us a lot to talk about, and really not much of it has yet been talked about in the comments left on Ian's post, which tend to dwell on things he's said along the way rather than the proposal itself. He's at least given us something to talk about.

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Is Jeremy Corbyn the only British pol who "gets" the significance of the apparent war crimes of Tony Blair & Co.?

One of these war criminals-in-chief is the Brits' problem; the other's ours.

"[A]s I’m sure you’ve noticed, the people who fear actual left-wingers or people of principle the most aren’t Tories, they are Blairites."

-- Ian Welsh, in "Blair et al. Committed War Crimes"

by Ken

Of course we shouldn't be talking just about British pols. A more urgent question for those of us on this side of the pond is how many American pols "get it"? The Chilcot Report, I gather, deals only with possible British war crimes in the grand Iraq adventure. (See Nick Hopkins's Guardian report, "Chilcot exposes how Blair kept ministers and generals in the dark.") However, is there any question that the ringleaders, the master-"minds," the orchestrators of both the war crimes and the lies formulated to both promote and conceal them, are our fellow Americans?

In some quick online chatter that Howie and Noah I did, Noah underscored the point:

If I had the big badge, I would hold a big package deal Nuremberg-style trial of ALL of the political and media scum who voted and propagandized to go to Iraq. I would do it on a reality TV channel and I would have a sliding scale of various punishments for the perps that would match their degree of blame (which the trial process would determine). My TV show would start with the minor punishments such as removal of finger and toe nails to removal of limbs and blinding such as our soldiers and the civilians had to suffer. Then, for the last week of my reality mini-series, I would have Blair, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Kindasleaza, and Blair's seconds face real life Gladiators at Wimbledon. Dump their miserable remains at sea in the same place bin Laden was dumped; mass murderers all. That just seems fair and just to me.

I regret that criminals such as Blair, and Bush et al, who created the all too predictble fiasco in Iraq, and thus enabled and gave the world the cancer that is ISIS, which now has the dream of killing whole cites at a time, if not, yet, the means, have but one life to present for punishment up to and including exection for their crimes against all humanity. If we are to be a civilized world, trials are demanded and justice for the dead, justice for the terror and havoc being visited on the living, and justice for the future victims is a moral imperative. Oh, and let's not forget the oil companies.

Before venting, Noah had seconded my deferral to Ian Welsh's post yesterday, "Blair et al. Committed War Crimes." "So, the Chilcot report is out," he began, "and it’s not pretty." Then he cued Anushka Asthana, Rowena Mason, and Jessica Elgot's Guardian report ("Corbyn apologises after Labour's role in Iraq war 'laid bare' by Chilcot report"):

Jeremy Corbyn has apologised on behalf of the Labour party for its role in the 2003 Iraq war, and warned that the people who took the decisions “laid bare in the Chilcot report” must now face up to the consequences.
…

The Labour leader’s apology went further than he had earlier in parliament, when he responded to the Chilcot report after David Cameron. At that point, Corbyn called the war an “act of military aggression”, arguing that it was thought of as illegal “by the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion”. (emphasis added)

Corbyn said in his House of Commons speech that he had apologized to families of military servicemen and women who lost loved ones, Iraqi citizens and war veterans "for the decisions taken by our then government that led this country into a disastrous war," explaining --

It’s a disaster that occurred when my party was in government; 140 of my then colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party opposed it at the time, as did many many party members and trade unionists.

The Guardian team writes:

Corbyn said that many more Britons had said they regretted their votes, which they had cast in loyalty to the Labour government because of the intelligence that today’s report has “confirmed to be false”.

The Labour leader did not name Tony Blair, but said parliament had been misled by a “small number of leading figures in the government" who he said were “none too scrupulous” about how they made their case for war.

“Politicians and political parties can only grow stronger by acknowledging when they get it wrong and by facing up to their mistakes,” he said. “So I now apologise sincerely on behalf of my party for the disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003.

“That apology is owed first of all to the people of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, and the country is still living with the devastating consequences of the war and the forces it unleashed.” He said it was those people who had paid the greatest price.

Ian plucks out this bit from the Guardian report on Corbyn's apology:

As Corbyn issued his excoriating statement to the House of Commons, he was heckled by his own backbencher Ian Austin, who shouted: “Sit down and shut up, you’re a disgrace.”

Which he introduces thusly: "I very much hope this next man, who has far less worth than the toilet paper I clean myself with, is not a Labour candidate in the next election," explaining: "When you’re screaming at someone for apologizing for a war crime that is identical to that which many Nazi leaders were hung for, you’re officially a waste of human skin." He goes on:

Corbyn hasn’t actually called for “war crimes trial for Blair,” but he’s made the case. The European Criminal Court, being also basically worthless, had already said that they would not try Tony Blair, but might charge ordinary soldiers.

I have never had any respect for the ECC, whose mandate appears to involve prosecuting the politically powerless, especially Africans, and avoiding anyone with any influence. Justice as unevenly applied as the ECC applies it is not a step in the right direction, it is actually injustice. Saying that they would not charge Blair even before the Chilcot report was out simply confirmed the primacy of political over legal considerations for them.

Yet again, Corbyn has proved he is one of very few honorable people in a den of scum. May he become Prime Minister and, once Prime Minister, may he ensure Tony Blair and those who aided and abetted him in selling the Iraq war with lies, have the fair trial they so richly deserve.

Oh, and as usual, doing so is not just the right thing to do ethically, it would be the right thing to do politically, keeping Corbyn’s primary enemies completely occupied. Because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the people who fear actual left-wingers or people of principle the most aren’t Tories, they are Blairites.

Now, as to our team of war criminals, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the whole miserable crew . . . well, we don't even have a report to chew over, do we?


GLENN GREENWALD MUSES ON THE CHILCOT
REPORT AND THE CAUSES OF TERRORISM

Howie notes: "New Labour, like the New Dems, is confused about which side it's on -- other than whatever works to advance individual careers (their own)-- and has been relentlessly attacking Jeremy Corbyn since his loud and unswerving opposition to Blar's war. He also commends our attention to Glenn Greenwald's Intercept post today, "Chilcot Report and 7/7 London Bombing Anniversary Converge to Highlight Terrorism’s Causes," which begins (lots o' links onsite):

ELEVEN YEARS AGO today, three suicide bombers attacked the London subway and a bus and killed 51 people. Almost immediately, it was obvious that retaliation for Britain’s invasion and destruction of Iraq was a major motive for the attackers.

Two of them said exactly that in videotapes they left behind: The attacks “will continue and pick up strengths till you pull your soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. … Until we feel security, you will be targets.” Then, less than a year later, a secret report from British military and intelligence chiefs concluded that “the war in Iraq contributed to the radicalization of the July 7 London bombers and is likely to continue to provoke extremism among British Muslims.” The secret report, leaked to The Observer, added: “Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalization of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the U.K. as legitimate.”

The release on Tuesday of the massive Chilcot report — which the New York Times called a “devastating critique of Tony Blair” — not only offers more proof of this causal link, but also reveals that Blair was expressly warned before the invasion that his actions would provoke al Qaeda attacks on the U.K. As my colleague Jon Schwarz reported yesterday, the report’s executive summary quotes Blair confirming he was “aware” of a warning by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

None of this is the slightest bit surprising. . . .

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Ian Welsh: "We are ruled by people who are what they have been conditioned to be" -- and look at the results

Insiders know stuff they don't want us outsiders ever to.

"These policies are insane, if one assumes a minimum of public spiritedness. They have not worked. They will not work.

"But they do work in the social sense: They create successful lives for the people who devise and implement them. They are rewarded with money and social approval, they receive feedback which screams, 'Continue!' "

-- Ian Welsh, in his post yesterday,
"The Political Consequences of Mental Models"

by Ken

In the above quote pulled out of Ian Welsh's post yesterday, I realize I've left out which policies "these policies" refers to. Really, it almost doesn't matter. It should be clear that the reference is to policies promulgated by people in a position to set policy, and the model Ian proposes works for pretty much any policies such people are likely to promote.

Still, for the record, here are some of the instances Ian had just cited:

• "the repeated use of force in situations where force has failed to work over and over again."

• "the inability to tolerate democratic governments of opposing ideologies despite the fact that destroying them, after a period of autocracy, generally leads to worse outcomes than simply working with them. (See Iran for a textbook case.)"

• "the belief that the US needs to run the world in tedious detail, that regular coups, invasions, garrisons, and so on are necessary -- along with the endless, sovereignty-reducing treaties described in 'free trade deals.' "

These are policy choices dictated by conditioning, beliefs that people believe because they've been conditioned to, usually according to mental models developed in their minds through processes that have little -- if anything -- to do with actual thought. Ian had begun by pondering the question of whether Western leaders have deliberately destabilized the Middle East. Which landed him in an age-old conundrum:

Q. "Stupid or evil?"
A. "Both."

DICK CHENEY: MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

By way of illustration in this post, called "The Political Consequences of Mental Models," Ian offered this case:

I know someone who worked with Cheney and believes that Cheney honestly thought that removing Saddam would make the world a better place. Also (and the person I know is a smart, capable person) that Cheney was very smart.

But smart in IQ terms (which Cheney probably was) isn’t the same as having a sane mental map of the world. Being brilliant means being able to be brilliantly wrong and holding to it no matter what. Genius can rationalize anything.

Which prompted some thoughts on the human "thought" process (and here I would stress that "thought" is being used in its broadest possible sense, referring to not necessarily much more than "activity in the brain").

Human thought is mostly an unconscious and uncontrolled process. What comes up is what went in, filtered through conditioning. We are so conditioned and the inputs are so out of our control during most of our lives (and certainly during our childhood) that our actual, operational margin of free will is far smaller than most believe.

We interpret what we know through the mental (and emotional) models we already have. Thoughts are weighted with emotion, recognized and unrecognized, connotations far more than denotations.

Machiavelli made the observation that people don’t change, they instead react to situations with the same character and tone of action even when a different action would work better.
This doesn’t mean one cannot undergo ideological changes, it means character changes only very slowly, and that we have virtually no conscious ability to change our thinking, actions, or characters on the fly.

This is true for both the brilliant and the stupid, though the tenor of challenges for both is different.

"The science of conditioning," Ian wrote, "was strong from the late 19th century through to the 60s," but "has faded out of the intellectual limelight." However, "viewed through the lens of conditioning, much that makes no sense makes perfect sense."

Ian offered a classic example: the "insider" perspective vs. the "outsider" one:

Over fifteen years ago Stirling Newberry told me, “Insiders understand possibility, outsiders understand consequences”.

Insiders are rewarded for acting in accordance with elite consensus, and very little else.

Outsiders, not being part of that personal risk/reward cycle are able to say, “Yeah, that’s not going to work”.

They are both right and wrong.

"Conditioning," Ian wrote, "extends well beyond observable behavior and into thought, and the structure of knowledge."

Intellectual structures are felt, and each node and connection has emotional freight. This is true even in the purer sciences, and it is frighteningly true in anything related to how we interact with other humans and what our self-image is.

It is in this sense that the disinterested, the outsider, those who receive few rewards for acquiescence, are virtually always superior in understanding to those within the system. Outsiders may not understand what it “feels” like, but the outsider understands what the consequences are.

THE MYSTIQUE OF "INSIDE KNOWLEDGE"

Those of us who lived through the Vietnam war became accustomed to being told that opposition to it was based on inadequate knowledge, that the people who were making our policy, who were prosecuting the war, had all kinds of knowledge about the situation that we didn't, and they therefore had to be deferred to. Naturally they couldn't share this inside knowledge with us, because it was, you know, inside knowledge. It was secret, and therefore knowable only to insiders wise enough and security-cleared enough to possess such knowledge.

Eventually, of course, and still totally unbeknownst to us benighted outsiders, as inside an insider as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who had been as responsible as anyone for enmeshing us in the conflict, began to have doubts about the quality of that inside knowledge, which led to the Pentagon Papers, which still had to remain secret -- until they weren't, thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, with assists from the highest decision-making levels of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and others as well, not least the U.S. Supreme Court.

For his efforts Ellsberg was charged with assorted acts of espionage, theft, and conspiracy, which Wikipedia reminds us "carr[ied] a total maximum sentence of 115 years."



Not many people nowadays think of Ellsberg as a traitor, which is why the insiders who rose in righteous wrath against Edward Snowden had to go to such pains to distinguish Snowden's leaks from Ellsberg's. Unfortunately for them, Snowden's revelations turned out to be a gift that kept on revealing, and the more that was revealed, the more foolish the people who were denouncing him as a traitor came to look. This was all "inside knowledge" being revealed, and to the people who had previously had exclusive access to it, it was awfully important that it remain secret.

And it's very likely that some of them, at least, believed as sincerely as Ian's acquaintance insists Dick Cheney did that they were doing a wise and patriotic thing, helping make the world a better place, by both acting on and suppressing all that information. It's very likely too that many of them were confirmed in their beliefs by just the sort of conditioned "mental models" Ian was writing about yesterday.

Again, as Ian put it, "the disinterested, the outsider, those who receive few rewards for acquiescence, are virtually always superior in understanding to those within the system. Outsiders may not understand what it 'feels' like, but the outsider understands what the consequences are." And he concluded:

This is true far beyond politics, but it is in politics where the unexamined life, the unexamined belief structure, and the unexamined conditioning, are amplified by long levers to brutalize the world.

The last thing I. F. Stone wanted to be was an insider.

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Is the world economy headed into the dumper? One thing's sure, says Ian Welsh: Western elites are losing control of the global economic narrative

"[T]here is more pain to come, but there always was. The decision was made in 2008 and 2009 to not allow an actual recovery and to protect the rich at all costs. There was a cost; it has been paid for the last six years, and this is yet and simply another one of those costs. China, as an exporting power, cannot carry the world economy when the people to whom it exports insist on various levels of austerity (be clear, the US is in austerity too, just not as bad an austerity as Europe)."

-- Ian Welsh, in his post this evening, "As the Dow Jones Drops"

by Ken

I think Drew Harwell's late-afternoon washingtonpost.com report, "Global sell-off turns to chaos in rocky day for financial markets," is representative of at least the American coverage of the day's financial events. It begins (links onsite):

A worldwide selling frenzy on Monday bruised U.S. stocks and sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging nearly 600 points, as investors worried over China’s slowing economy extended a global-market meltdown.

The Dow fell more than 1,000 points within six minutes, its largest single-day slump in history, before staggering back to close down 588 points, or 3.6 percent, its lowest point in 18 months. It marked the second straight day of a 500-point-or-more loss for the Dow, a blue-chip index of 30 large companies.

The Standard and Poor’s 500, a broader look at the market, and the Nasdaq Composite, a tech-heavy index, posted similarly dismal starts before swinging wildly then sinking again to losses of close to 4 percent.

The global whiplash underscored investors’ shaken confidence in China’s slowing economy and central bank. The world’s second-largest economy is now reeling over what China’s state media is calling “Black Monday,” during which its markets just recorded their biggest one-day nosedive in eight years.

WHEN LAST WE LOOKED AT CHINA'S PLUNGING EQUITY MARKETS --

in early July, Tufts professor Daniel Drezner, in the washingtonpost.com post "The politics of China's stock market collapse," was quoting he Financial Times's Tom Mitchell saying that "if anything, a three-week, 30 per cent correction after a 12-month, 150 per cent surge seemed like a welcome adjustment." Experienced watchers of the Chinese economy were pointing out that, given the size of the bubble that had inflated the Chinese markets, and in combination with news of the Chinese economy's slowdown, there was still a heckuva lot of bubble deflating to be done. So I don't think there should be any great surprise that the Chinese markets have done more plunging.

However, there was (and still is) much interest in the Chinese government's handling of the situation, notably the hardly precedented effort to appear to allow its currency to sort-of-float while simultaneously being seen making various quite conspicuous, even frantic efforts to maintain control (that's the control-freak PRC we're accustomed to) -- frantic and notoriously unsuccessful. In the less than two months since, the government's efforts to get control of the situation have mostly served to show how little actual control it has.

Nevertheless, as Ian Welsh points out in the post I've referenced at the top of this post, China retains the distinction of having an economy that's actually producing actual stuff,.

China is the key maker of goods. There are a few other countries that also make goods as the most important (not largest, most important) part of their economy. Everyone else is a commodity producer, a financier, or trying to sell intangibles (intellectual property, whether inventions or fiction or branding).

This means that China has to buy resources from somewhere to be able to make stuff and has to have markets where they can sell the stuff they make. So the Chinese economy, already in slowdown, has been further vulnerable to world increases in resource prices and to fall-off in consumer demand in its once-humming export markets.

During this period we had repeated currency devaluations in an attempt to increase the competitiveness of exports. These devaluations had marginal effect at best, didn’t work at least.

China’s growth had been slowing (thus the reduction in their demand for commodities), they encouraged a stock market bubble as consumers were proving reluctant to continue piling into real-estate. They printed vast amounts of money, at least twenty times as much as Europe, Japan, and the US combined, but exports were no longer leading growth. Regular Chinese and private firms have massive amounts of debt.

To put it simply, China had reached the point where export-led mercantilism was no longer working. They needed to shift to domestic consumer demand.  They chose to try and inflate bubbles instead.

Virtually every country in the world was either rolling off a cliff, or struggling to keep their head above water. Most of the South of Europe had never really recovered (Ireland is a partial exception). Latin America was diving, Turkey’s real-estate driven, neo-liberal growth was stalling, India’s “miracle” was always more of a paper tiger than most made out, being concentrated to a minority even as the average number of calories consumed in the country dived.

To Ian it's significant that the economic "contagion" started in China, "spread to emerging economies, money fled to the US and a few other safe havens, China’s economy continued to stall, its stock market fell despite radical attempts to keep it inflated, and that has now come home to New York." He points out that he has been saying for years that the next 1929-style crash "would start in China." Whether this is actually the new 1929 "we won't know for a while," Ian says -- "just as they did not know in 1929 that it was 1929."

"Welcome to the new world," says Ian.

The US and Europe put a LOT of effort into moving as much industrial production as possible to China. China just promised that a very few people would get very rich doing it, and those people made sure it happened. (Look up the profit margins on iPhones.)

I will note that there are still bubbles. Real-estate bubbles (Canada, Britain, a few important US cities, Australia, etc.) and a vast amount of highly leveraged derivatives have been pumped back out since the 2008 crash, since no one actually bothered to regulate or forbid them. And banks and financial companies are now larger and fewer, making the economy and financial markets both more subject to contagion.

The elites learned from 2008 that the important thing to do in a financial crisis is to just print enough money and relax enough accounting rules–extend and pretend. That will be the play again this time if this contagion turns truly serious. I would guess that it will work, sort of: More zombies will be created, they will need higher profits, the real economy will be even more stagnant. And people like Corbyn, Trump, Sanders, and so on will reap the rewards electorally.

Printing money is a viable strategy only as long as the elites control the regulatory apparatus (including prosecutors, finance departments/treasuries, and central banks), legislators, and executives. The reason people are screaming so loudly about Corbyn is not because he can’t win in England, it’s because if he did, and he’s serious about his policies, he will inevitably have to confront them. And an English PM with a majority he controls is pretty much a dictator.

"A LOT IS AT STAKE HERE," SAYS IAN

And he explains this stake in a way I don't think you'll be seeing in your regular infotainment nooze outlets:

Our elites are losing control over the electoral apparatus and the common narrative. In both cases, the signs aren’t terrible yet, but they are there; the rise of the old right and the old left is visible.

"So," Ian says, "there is more pain to come,"

but there always was. The decision was made in 2008 and 2009 to not allow an actual recovery and to protect the rich at all costs. There was a cost, it has been paid for the last six years, and this is yet and simply another one of those costs. China, as an exporting power, cannot carry the world economy when the people to whom it exports insist on various levels of austerity (be clear, the US is in austerity too, just not as bad an austerity as Europe).

Ian can't help but take note of "the way the Chinese are fumbling this crisis," which convinces him, he says, "that they are now past the point where enough competent people who remember poverty and fear remain in power."

Ian concludes: "We continue to live in interesting times."

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Catching up with Ian Welsh -- on character and ideology, understanding the world, and applying the Golden Rule

by Ken

I trust everyone is keeping up with our friend Ian Welsh now that he's posting on his contribution-fueled superschedule. Of course he's been chiming in on the expectable subjects, like the pulverizing of Greece by the German-led avenging angels of the Eurozone (in which connection, by the way, I heartily recommend Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, "The Greek Warrior"; if you're pressed for time, the subtitle, "How a radical finance minister took on Europe -- and failed," tells the story in a nutshell). And lately he's proposed a couple of blockbuster reading plans which could keep most of us out of (other) trouble for, probably, years:

• "The Role of Character and Ideology in Prosperity" (July 28)

I want to take readers through some of my previous writing on ideology and character, and how they help form the societies we live in.  Taking the time to read these articles (a short book’s worth), should vastly improve your understanding of the world and the articles to come. It should be worth your time even if you read the articles when they were published, as, at the time, they lacked both context and commentary, and were not collated to be read together so that the connections were obvious.

• "So You Want to Understand the World? A Reading List" (August 7)

On occasion I get requests for reading lists. Here’s one, not exhaustive. . . . Please feel free to include other books you think worth reading in comments.

But there's a pair of posts I've had it in mind for a while now to go back to, and while I'm not going to say much about them, I think some of you, at least, will be interested in the posts themselves and intrigued by the reactions to both.

First there was this simple post from May 27:

How to Be Liked or Even Loved by Blue Collar and Service Workers

by Ian Welsh

Be friendly, interested, and acknowledge their existence.

You will be amazed how soon they think you’re a wonderful person.

What I find amazing is how little it takes: make eye contact, smile, ask a question or two. They’re in a near complete drought for people who treat them with even a smidgen of kindness, respect, and interest.

If you need a self-interested angle: Once you’ve established this relationship (shallow as it is), you will be astounded at what they will be willing to do for you, often without you even asking.

File this post in “absolutely obvious things most people don’t do.”

Simple, no? And just this side -- or maybe a little on the other side -- of inspiring. But controversial? Who'd-a thunk it? You or I might see here a fairly straightforward apπlicatio˜of the Golden Rule. One charge I wouldn't have seen coming was: "Patronizing."

Hmm. This engendered a fair amount of discussion, in which Ian certainly received a fair amount of support, but the tone of the dissent left me puzzled -- it was as if people were lying in wait to . . . I don't know what, make sure that balloon doesn't stay aloft?

And in any case, it turns out that rather overwhelmingly readers seem to have misunderstood the post from the ground up, which led to a follow-up post on June 12, which began:

Being Effective and Liked in the Workplace

by Ian Welsh

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to be liked by service employees and blue collar workers. [Here there's a link to the post I've reproduced above.] I wasn’t writing about “in the workplace” or “as a manager,” but most commenters read it as both.

Today, let’s actually talk about being effective (and yes, liked) in the workplace. I’ve been out of a corporate environment for years now, but my last corporate gig was at a large insurance company. It wasn’t managerial, though I led the occasional team and was responsible for one large departmental reorganization. Instead, I was a senior line employee: responsible for getting stuff done that required the help of many other people, but without the authority to just make them do things. By my count, at one point, up to 16 other specialties, spread across almost a dozen different departments, could be required.

I had no authority, but I needed other people to get my job done.

Until I went off the rails in my last year or so, I was very good at this job. And I’ve held line authority positions elsewhere, including being a dispatcher and a managing editor.

So, here are Ian’s guidelines for getting folks to do what you want, at work, and having them like it. To be clear, these never worked on everyone, but they have always worked on enough people. . . .

What followed was enormously interesting (hint: it began with "First, find something to admire," and continued with "Next, treat them right"), and I find it hard to imagine anyone not wanting to find out what Ian was proposing.

And again, the response was fascinating. Many readers added interesting personal stories, lending both support and disagreement, both absolutely legitimate, though there was a strain of discord that this idea doesn't work with bosses, even though Ian had noted pretty conspicuously in the post:

Unfortunately, I can’t give any advice on managing up beyond the immediate boss level. As a rule, I’ve always been terrible at dealing with upper-upper-management. Perhaps because they’re used to people saying what they want to hear, and I don’t do that. . . .

Oh well. But again, there was that frequent tone of, I don't know, "How dare you, sir?" As Ian found himself noting in some of the ensuing comments, the quarrel often seemed to be not so much with him as with the Golden Rule.

Which is interesting too. Was this not Jesus's single most important teaching? The one that pretty much underlies all the others? But I think it accurately represents the fuck-that-goddamn-Jesus tone of most of organized Christianity the most organized Christians barely even pay lip service to it.

These posts of Ian's which out of nowhere carve out bits of real-life turf for exploration and illumination are some of my favorites. That you never know what you're going to find on his blog is one of my favorite things about it. The address could hardly be easier to remember; it's ianwelsh.net. And contributions to make it possible for Ian to continue blogging at his current rate are always encouraged.

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The hard question about the merchants of austerity: Are they dopes or liars?

Edward Harrison

by Ken

I encountered Edward Harrison's cute little graph in Ian Welsh's June 25 post, "Greece and the Emperor's New Clothes," in which Ian noted that a commenter, markfromireland, had pointed out that "Oliver Blanchard, the chief IMF economist, had made the following assumptions about Greece in July of last year":

1. The Greek economy would grow by three percent both this year and every other year until 2020.
2. Inflation would average between one percent and two percent a year both this year and every other year until 2020.
3. The Greek government would run a primary budget surplus of four percent a year.

"As MFI points out," Ian wrote, "at best, these assumptions are delusional. Greece is in forced austerity; they aren’t going to make these targets." And Ian noted a point made by Edward Harrison, as reflected in the graph: that "the IMF revised down its estimate for Greece’s 2014 gross domestic product by some 22 percent in the space of 18 months."

On this basis Ian proceeded to the "old" question: "Evil, or stupid?"

We'll rejoing him in a moment, but first let's go back to our last post, in which Gaius Publius brought us up to date on the Greek financial mess, which you can't do in any kind of honesty without recognizing that the "bailout" deal on which Greece has been formally in default since July 1 was doomed from the moment it was signed, if not sooner.

In his post, GP quoted Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and current president of Eurogroup, the collective of Eurozone finance ministers:

I take note of the outcome of the Greek referendum. This result is very regrettable for the future of Greece.

For recovery of the Greek economy, difficult measures and reforms are inevitable. We will now wait for the initiatives of the Greek authorities.

"Difficult measures and reforms," eh? For sure. But not the ones imposed on the Greeks, which have had their inevitable effect. As Ian wrote in that June 25 post:

Austerity is a reduction in demand. Reduction in demand leads to economic activity being lower than it would be otherwise. Governments who spend less money buy less stuff, this is indisputable. Then, everybody has less money and almost certainly buys less stuff as a result, thus reducing the size of the economy.

Meanwhile, money has been given to rich people and corporations who, mostly, have not spent it and when they have spent it, they’ve spent it on luxury goods.

The merchants of austerity love sounding like prophets of fiscal responsibility, demanding that economies decimated by a supposed history of devil-may-care fiscal irresponsibility take their medicine, and never mind that said medicine has the all but invariable result of choking the economy in question.

The point is that this isn't news. It's a point that has been repeated here countless times, often quoting Paul Krugman, who has been trying to inject this note of basic sanity into a predominantly insane international play-acting show. It shouldn't, for example, have been necessary for British Prime Minister David Cameron to prove the econonic deadening effect of "austerity" when he came to power in 2010, but he did so anyway, and still, as far as the merchants of austerity are concerned, the point is a mystery

Which brings us back to Ian's post. How is it possible for theeconomists of the economic elites still not to know that their notion of austerity doesn't rescue failed economies, it seals the failure in place?

Austerity, Ian notes, "is sold as a way to make economies better."

You cannot, as a government or quasi-governmental agency (like a central bank or the IMF), admit that austerity will make the economy worse and many of the people in an economy to which it is applied worse off.

The question, then, is the old one. “Evil, or stupid?” Is Blanchard, for example, such an ideologue that he believes the assumptions which allow him to forecast a better economy under austerity? Are the other economists who have made similar forecasts similarly stupid? I mean, assuming moderate stupidity (normal), they might have believed it in 2008 or even 2010, but we’ve seen the effects of austerity since the financial crisis, and that’s going on seven years.

WHAT YOU DO TO KEEP YOUR CUSHY JOB

"These people are either very stupid," Ian continues,

or are doing what they feel they must to keep their jobs and their membership in a very lucrative club. If they were to say, “No, these policies don’t work,” would they keep their jobs?

We know that austerity doesn’t work, Ian writes,

if by “work” you mean “improve the economy more than not being in austerity would,” we do. It’s only ever worked in theory by making very dubious assumptions, and it has never worked in practice.

So, at this point, if you believe austerity works, you’re either an extraordinarily blind ideologue, or you’re crooked, on the payroll, and know what you’re doing.

Of course there could be another question here: Is there some other way of defining "works" as it relates to austerity? Indeed there is:

Austerity is the policy that the IMF, most central authorities, and all neo-liberal parties (which means almost all parties in power in the EU) believe in. It is a policy which works: It puts public assets up for sale which would not be otherwise, so that rich, private investors can buy them up. Combined with “unconventional monetary policy” (the two are Siamese twins), it makes sure that the rich get richer, corporations are flush with cash they do not use to hire workers, and that everyone who isn’t rich, or part of the close retainer class, loses.

You really, really don’t want to fall out of that close retainer class. They are paid very well ([IMF Managing Director Christine] Lagarde receives a six hundred thousand per annum salary, entirely tax free), they are treated well, and their future job prospects are secure, as are those of their families. [Emphasis added.]

Once you realign your definition of "working," it's clear that austerity is. As Ian says, "it has performed exactly as expected."

Its advocates are its beneficiaries. The people who enforce it are benefiting as well and there is a sufficient constituency, both at the elite level and the common level, to keep it going (remember, Cameron was re-elected in the UK, and Labour got many votes when its essential promise was “slightly kinder austerity”). A few countries (Germany, for example) are winning under this policy regime.

So austerity will continue. It is a successful policy which does what it is supposed to do and which has a constituency sufficient for its continuation. It must be sold by lies, to be sure, and many of those who sell those lies probably believe them, because they personally benefit from pushing austerity and people prefer to believe that they are honest and working for good.

Others, I am certain, know it is being sold with lies.

Ah, so there are both dopes and liars!

Who falls into which camp? Who knows? The end effect is the same.

In conclusion, Ian notes: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."

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