Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Neoliberalism's Textured History

This look into the history of Neoliberalism (as a review of the Book "GLOBALISTS: THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE BIRTH OF NEOLIBERALISM" by Quinn Slobodian) is well worth the read. Especially as it notes that we may well owe the fact that "...When capital has more freedom than people, serious democratic deficits are guaranteed..." (from the article J.V.) to the Geneva School of Neoliberalism:

"...Slobodian focuses instead purely on the central European strand of neoliberalism—what he calls the “Geneva school”— which gained relevance through a different institutional path. Turning to the law, this school pursued bilateral trade agreements and international accords granting the power to enforce contracts, to keep trade open, and to prevent the seizure of property by states—mechanisms that could protect property from democracy and extend the power of capital. They influenced the structure of the European Economic Community of 1957, the renegotiation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade during the 1970s, and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Slobodian’s argument relies less than MacLean’s on revealing a dark-money conspiracy and is more attuned to the shifting interests that created the trade regimes of a more neoliberal world.

The current rules all but ensure that governments act in the interests of capital, since, if businesses do not like a certain country’s policies (say, a proposal that corporations pay their fair share of taxes), they can disrupt the economy by abruptly withdrawing from that country. Preserving the rights of capital is the goal, even when that means sacrificing democratic demands. That is why our world is a more neoliberal one than it once was, and why it matters. However fractious and internally contradictory neoliberal thought may be, and however overused it can be as a term, it is describing something real..."

Does all of this really matter now? Well, of course it does in the sense of it helping to show how we got where we are now, but going forward?

What I believe to be true is that, just as Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan, made clear, great changes in the major means by which we interassociate, or communicate if you will, as well as store and retrieve experience, cannot help but have, and require, great changes in social structure. And now that instrumentality, on almost all levels, has changed so much, precisely because of competitive pressures to know how to do more, with less effort, we must face the fact that a process model based on what instrumentality was hundreds of years ago just does not apply any more. We do not need to stay with the economics of scarcity inherent 200 years ago. We have the technical means now to move away from commercialized specialization to whatever we can imagine; whatever we can imagine that both makes practical sense, as well as just feels right. We just have to accept that Capitalism, as an operating model, no longer makes any sense at all (because what we need now is a whole lot more meaning in what we do, and a whole lot more involvement in depth for all citizens, because this is what holistic thinking, within complex systems, demands).

Worlds Apart

See Also:

SINCLAIR SEEN CLEARLY

She Tried To Report On Climate Change. Sinclair Told Her To Be More 'Balanced'

8 diggs BuzzFeed Climate Change

For three years, Suri Crowe worked for a TV station owned by Sinclair. She clashed with management — including over stories about climate change and guns.

EXISTENCE ANY%

How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society

5 diggs New York Magazine Politics

We've left it up to the machines. And now they're turning us into paper clips.

Monday, April 23, 2018

You Really Have To Wonder Why Its So Hard For Some People

So hard for them to understand that doing things that span large swaths of public space tends to have collateral effects. You would think it would be easy, after all, because they do use the word "disruptive" rather proudly. But then there is this disconnect between what they do, what they expect to benefit from it, and what they do, and do not expect to be, held accountable for.

Perhaps it is just the simple observation that, as companies were given rights equivalent to a citizen, they were also quite clever enough to make sure that these rights were equivalent only in regards to the ability to control where the profits go. After that, decades of economic history have shown quite clearly that they don't have to be responsible for anything more. They don't because they've become big enough to make sure they don't have to care. Doing whatever it takes with their money to do it.

And the real problem here, certainly, isn't with these people. No. This is purely a case of "fool me once shame on you. Fool me more than once than shame the absolute hell out of me because that makes me a damn fool for letting it continue so long. Of course, to stop it from continuing would require that people actually start taking responsibility for themselves and demand to be governed by true, direct representation, so as to govern themselves. Something we could figure out how to do if we took the time to first admit that doing something is required in the first place.

If you're happy being a damn fool dealing with unneeded disruption then fine. Hopefully the rest of us will wake the hell up before it is too late.

SCOOT AWAY

Electric Scooters Are Causing Havoc. This Man Is Shrugging It Off

4 diggs The New York Times Culture

Travis VanderZanden, chief executive of electric scooter start-up Bird, is unperturbed by how San Francisco and other cities are in an uproar over the dockless vehicles.

Let Us Be Very Clear Here

You cannot have Socialism inside of Capitalism and expect it to work correctly. And that is even assuming that Capitalism hasn't become a toxic, corrupted, and mutated monster. Which it of course has become.

The world is simply too insanely competitive, short on resources, and far too close to an extinction event, to stay with Capitalism in any case, whether you want Socialism or not. Which also means that we will need the cooperation of a lot of conservative folks to make sure we can do all of the tremendous tasks that lie ahead, if life on the planet is to survive at all.

That is why a "Grand Compromise" between Right and Left is absolutely essential. And we are most certainly not going to get much of any compromising at all if we don't come up with some creative new thinking on how we go about taking care of what boils down to certain, prime priorities, that both sides have.

I have proposed one such alternative. I was hoping it might encourage others to think of even better alternatives, or at least offer suggestions as to how to make mine better. The point, however, being that we absolutely do need a new alternative; whatever we can ultimately negotiate one to be that can also provide for the three main areas of concern: First certainly being all of the practical things you might think of for a society (people getting not only the things they need, but also a good portion of what they want); but secondly, to also inequality of outcomes, make our communities much more self sufficient, and fault tolerant (because resources will become more scarce, and the geo physical environment more turbulent), fix the environment, and start the infrastructure building required to do another "Great Migration" (because you can't fix an environment that keeps generating too many people). And then, on top of all of that, still have something left over to make it all feel right in the greater sense of things.

As such you can certainly sum it all up as one very hard process to have to get through. But get through it we must or we will surely perish. The trend line for the ice at the poles, and what that will do to circulation systems, and already stressed ecosystems, make that clear. Basically big changes in the weather could happen, be they extremes of hot, or cold (just like the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"). And those changes probably won't be very suitable for much of what stands for life now. Not as far as we are concerned anyway.

In my view, what we face cannot be solved by a few new legislators, or re-hashed Liberalism that might have a dose or two of Progressive flavor to it. As William Greider made clear, Big Money is very good at playing a waiting game. A law now, even if you can't water it down much at the start, can be co opted, and/or corrupted, in a number of other ways, when you look at it from the perspective of legislative re election cycles, and the way Big Money can make things hard on an economy when the social reformers are in office. What we face hinges on control of even the commoditization of information itself, and how that control threatens forming negotiated, social realities (where we come to terms on what we all think are the most important priorities), in the first place.

You either face this reality or you play games with who is in sudo control of this titanic disaster of ship we call "The United States of America." And games about what who lives on what deck, and who has to be sweating it out in the deep places, getting darker all the time, trying to stay alive, stay afloat, and keep the terrible thing running. Knowing in our hearts, if not our heads, that it is on a course to make good effect of centuries of ever more bad choices, and the impact they can have on cold, hard, rude awakenings.

POLITICS, JOIN DSA

Why Candidates Are Embracing The Label Of 'Socialist' In 2018

11 diggs The New York Times Politics

They want single-payer health care, a higher minimum wage, and greater protections for unions. But others advocate more extreme changes, such as abolishing the prison system.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Older Workers Must Obviously Cost More

And their experience, and demonstrated dedication must mean a good deal less these days. I mean, if you can get, say, two, three, or maybe even four, hotshot young guys to work for the same total employment cost of one older worker, why not, right? It certainly makes your quarterly bottom line look less offensive, even if you are not developing the cutting edge stuff you used to. And if you are the current, temporary guy in charge right now, just how far out is your vision for the company going to be; for any practical purposes, in any case? Probably not that far.

How IBM quietly pushed out 20,000 older workers

No Singular Economic Entity Should Have This Much Power

And that is only a consideration to start with.

The real question to be asked here is why it is so hard for us to understand that the lure of cheap prices won't ever make up for all of the disruptive effects this sort of supermassive change in how we conduct commerce has already affected, and will continue to affect. Because you should make no mistake. This is about more than just saving you money as a purchaser. It is about having free reign in completely reengineering social order. And not at all for your benefit, but for the sole benefit of better profit. Which is precisely why they don't care what their version work becomes for any of their workers; even if it means trying to turn humans into machines, and then actually resorting to machines when the humans simply can't take any more of it.

And then there is the fact that, for all of this largess they get in doing most of what they want, when they want to, they also then expect to not be very responsible at all for paying back to the community for the privilege of having been given this development opportunity. No, they don't want to pay the kinds of support taxes that would make the communities they operate in thrive, they want to pit the communities against each other so as to gouge out of them every break from ever paying taxes that they can possibly get.

So society is left with communities torn apart from traditional employment having been "disrupted" out of business, all the while fewer and fewer people will be employed (with a living wage) in making this profit monster get even bigger still. But gosh oh golly. Won't it be just swell to see low prices as you sit, unemployed, homeless and hungry on the street! I guess you will be able to say that your begging dollar will go farther.