Alan: There is no hate quite like "Christian" "love."
"Christian" hatred is born of the triumphalist/absolutist belief that "the self-righteous" -- and only "the self-righteous" -- are "right," and all others are sacrilegious infidels who implicitly (if not explicitly) mock God Almighty.
"Extra ecclesiam nulla salus." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_Ecclesiam_nulla_salus
"The sooner, the better!"
Compendium Of Best "Pax-Barbaria" Posts About White, "Christian" Trump-Cult Cruelty
Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts Concerning The Damnation Of White, Conservative Christians (Assuming There Is A Hell, Which I Don't Believe)
Christian Conservatives Prefer The Damnation Of Others To Their Own Salvation
Don’t take it from me. Take it straight from the horse’s mouth.
“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it…you’re not going to spend it on a second dinner out.”
That’s Jeff Bezos saying he quite literally has no way he can think of to spend his fortune, so colossal has it grown. Could you spend $100 billion? Now, if you’re wondering, “well, why in blazes doesn’t he give Americans decent education, media, drinking water and healthcare?” you’re right to ask — it’s part of the point of this essay. The lesson though, is that, in a way, he’s right: there is nothing — literally nothing — as far as an existing product, service, or investment left for him to buy. Not another yacht, mansion, servant, or stock. So all he can think of is…sending his fellow billionaires on space vacations. Laughable, perhaps. And yet, funny, pitiable, too, that a man so rich should have such little insight.
All that should come as no surprise to you. I’ve been suggesting for years that the economy is profoundly broken — so much so that the rich have nothing left to buy, while the poor struggle for the basics of life — healthcare, education, finance, shelter, food. You didn’t have to wait for Bezos to say it. How did I know? Because that is what perma-zero interest rates mean — there is so much money sloshing around at the top, it’s as if money in the economy is crying out “invest me! use me! do something with me! I’m just sitting here, idle!” If money was in short supply, interest rates would be higher than zero.
But I digress. Consider a contrasting datapoint.
A full third of Americans can’t afford healthcare, food, and shelter. Pause. Take it in. That’s north of a hundred million people. Astounding — maybe even shocking — isn’t it? But when you put that together with Bezos’s comment, an almost absurdly grim reality still emerges. The poor cannot afford the basics of decent lives, while the rich cannot find ways to spend their fortunes.
What’s happening here? What went wrong? Intuitively, you probably feel a sense of moral repugnance, and ethical alarm — “this isn’t right. This can’t be right.” You are correct.
What is happening here is a repeat of the 1930s. An eerie, almost precise one. With one key difference. And if nations let the cycle play out, it is likely to end in precisely the same place it did then.
In the 1930s, it was countries that grew apart and unequal. Germany owed too much money to Britain and France — much more than it could ever repay. The reparations broke its economy, shattered the lives of its people, drove them into penury. Hungry, resentful, embittered, enraged, what happened next? They turned to the most strident and bombastic strongman they could find. They sought in his arms what had been taken from them, at root — dignity, a sense of belonging, pride, meaning. But instead of seeking those in healthy, positive, beneficial ways, they sought them in destructive, negative, and violent ones — turning on their neighbors, scapegoating Jews, immigrants, gays, minorities. And thus the seeds of atrocity and war were laid by the hand of austerity, indebtedness, and stagnation.
Does any of that sound familiar? It is exactly what happened in America today.
Afterwards, the great John Maynard Keynes, picking apart the causes of the great war that followed, called all the above “imbalances.” You can more easily think of it as inequality — the “imbalance” part simply referred to debts owed by one nation to another, and when those debts go too high, when they cannot be repaid, they collapse debtor nations into authoritarianism and fascism.
What is different today is only the details. Keynesian imbalances — inequalities — have returned with a vengeance. This time, though, not between countries, but within countries. Countries have not grown imbalanced with respect to one another — but with respect to themselves. A class of ultra-wealthy richer than Croesus has sprung up — so rich that they themselves are baffled as to what do with all their money. But at the same time — and here is the key — the middle class has imploded, the poor cannot afford the basics of life, and quality of life is falling, whether measured at the level of life expectancy, trust, happiness, or opportunity and possibility.
So. The 1930s are having their revenge. Imbalances are a disease infecting the world yet again. What was Keynes’ answer, the last time around? It was a very ingenuous one. He reasoned that if imbalances — poverty amidst riches, essentially — was the fuse that detonated the guns of war, then to prevent war, the key was to never let imbalances develop again. And so Keynes designed a whole new financial system for the globe. The point was to make sure things “balanced” — that some nations did not grow too rich, while others stayed poor. Hence, the World Bank and IMF — whose jobs were to manage this system, channeling the riches of prosperous nations into investment in poorer ones.
The system worked for a time. And then it broke, piece by piece. Nations refused to play their roles. America, notably, broke apart the system of exchange rates at its heart, in order to prop up its own dying industries, in the 1970s. But those are details. The point is that the old system of managing global imbalances was broken by nation after nation — America, Britain, Germany, Japan, China.
And now here we are, in a new age of vicious inequality, of spiralling imbalances. It isn’t quite the same as last time. Now, shadowy tax consultants funnel billions into hidden offshore accounts. Oligarchs who own the energy grids of entire countries pump money, via shell corporations, into Paris real estate. And the world’s (second) richest man, baffled, cries, “but I don’t know how to spend it! Shall I send tycoons into space?”
Let them eat cake. Send them into space. History is made — and unmade — by moments like these.
What happened last time imbalances this large reared their ugly head? Within a decade, the world saw the rise of fascists and authoritarians. Those fascists, not understanding, not caring, how genuine prosperity happens, started wars with their neighbours — seeking land and domination and power, instead of breakthroughs and virtue and knowledge. Soon enough, the world was embroiled in a war. But not just any war. One of atrocity, of unimaginable violence, of utter desperation and fury.
You see, the thing I want you to understand — because American media has failed utterly at the job of educating people — is that there is something like history’s most lethally effective, inescapable, terrible cause and effect at work in this cycle, at work today, just as it was yesterday. Stagnation causes decline causes people to turn to fascists causes atrocity causes war causes ruin. And so the key, as Keynes understood — one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history, understanding the cause of war — is preventing stagnation in the first place.
Now. How far along that cycle would you say we are today? I would say that we are somewhere near the middle of it.
(Yes, it’s true that Biden has won. But Biden increasingly seems to be returning to the old, pre-Trump status quo. But guess what? The old status quo is what paved the way for Trumpism in the first place. I would not yet say that America is out of treacherous waters, and I’d say that Trumpism has every chance of returning in 2024.)
"The Rich Plunder The Poor, Then Pile The Blame On The Dispossessed"
https://newsfrombarbaria.
So the fascists and authoritarians rose. Stagnation set in. Elites turned a blind eye. They seduced whole peoples. The next step — and it is a small one — is war. But once that step is taken, this process is irreversible. Until then — well, there is a slender shaft of hope.
That shaft of hope is undoing the stagnation that poisons people hearts, and sends them careening towards strongmen. That means that America must find ways to not just produce a handful of Jeff Bezoses — that was never the measure of a healthy society, although its foolish economists thought that it was. The measure of a healthy society is how many people live with dignity. And that means finding ways to turn fortunes that a man can never spend into the good lives that people are desperate to live.
From dignity comes peace. First in the human heart, and then radiating out across human lives. And in that way, dignity is the key to not repeating the mistakes of the past. 1937 is having its revenge. Let us be wise enough to take away its sickle, and replace it with fresh seeds to plant.
Umair
February 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment