Nader Elhefnawy

Is an Artificial Intelligence Bubble About to Burst?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:50:00 +0000

Hype about artificial intelligence has been cyclical in the past. The pattern typically saw some cause for expectations that the big moment everyone has been waiting for--the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence of genuinely human-caliber, and all it betokens--is really, finally, at hand make excitement about the technology surge, and then when this proved not to be the case the excitement collapse, "AI spring" followed by "AI winter," though usually not for very long because, the grip of artificial intelligence on the imaginations of so many being what it is, some new development soon enough prompts a resurgence of excitement and the return of spring. Thus the ebullience of the "tech"-obsessed '90s and the forecasts of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and company produced a great wave of such excitement, which, as the predictions failed to come to pass in the '00s, waned. However, progress in neural network design, and promises about the uses to which it might be put, like the production of self-driving cars, prompted a new surge of interest in the mid-'10s. Of course, those expectations were disappointed in their turn, leading to declining interest by decade's end, but then the pandemic's disruptions reminded the cloistered idiots of the board rooms far removed from where the economic rubber meets the road just how much the structures of everyday life rely on lots and lots of boring, tiring, physical labor that hasn't been automated, while they were excited again by the chatbots that, at least one set of scientists said may have been the real thing, artificial general intelligence--in a crude and incomplete form, but nevertheless, the moment in its way having already arrived . . . as the idiots of the media seized on every cliché they could to fan the hype.

The result has been an historic investment in artificial intelligence evident in ways from the level of individual firms and even individual fortunes (Tesla's being valued more than all the really major automakers combined, the chip maker NVIDIA becoming the world's first $4 trillion company, Larry Ellison's buyout of OpenAI making the valuation of his fortune leap a hundred billion dollars in one day), but also at the level of the stock market as a whole, as shown by the "Buffett Indicator" (the ratio of the market capitalization of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. to the Gross Domestic Product of the country). Simply for comparison purposes, at the height of the dot-com boom of the '90s, when the capitalization of the U.S. stock market had been growing on average 20 percent a year for five years it stood at about 150 percent. Today the Buffet Indicator stands at 220 percent.

Of course, the Indicator's standing much above 100 percent usually means an overheated market full of overvalued firms. So did it prove to be the case when the dot-com boom was revealed as a dot-com bubble that burst just after the turn of the century, all as, if one assumes the principle holds good, barring the Technological Singularity being very, very near (read: a lot nearer than even the stubbornly never-admitting-he's-wrong Kurzweil said it was at last check) an even more painful correction is coming. In either case the consequences are incalculable. Should it be the case that in this era in which we have so often seen smoke without fire (for all the self-important talk about INNOVATION! today's neoliberal economy is far better at generating hype than progress) the Electronic Herd prove to have made their very large bet correctly (for once!) then we may be looking at the unleashing of enormous technological potentials. I say potentials because one cannot be sure of precisely what they will actually be, or what one should never overlook, what people will actually do with them--a matter which is most certainly political, however much a great many persons would like to ignore the fact. (Indeed, we get so much Frankenstein complex crapola in our science fiction because it is far, far safer to point to the danger of an imaginary machine developing a mind and will of its own than the actual danger posed by the minds and wills of the very real people who control the machines in the world in which we happen to live.) Moreover, it has to be admitted that recent experience does not instill in any intelligent person great confidence in the practicalities of how our political-economic model presently works realizing those potentials for the benefit of all, with the Internet a case in point. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley who falsely take credit for having invented all of the technology in their garages but actually deserve credit mainly for having taken what had already been invented and thoroughly enshittifying it seem almost certain to be the owners and controllers of the hardware and software of any imminent artificial intelligence revolution, while these have already expressed some very dark--frankly, dystopian--intentions regarding it indeed.

However, should this prove to be another case of the same old neoliberal crap writ even larger than before (not least with regard to ultra-loose monetary policy fueling speculative madness as the engine of the economy in their gotta-keep-the-roulette-wheels-spinning way until it can't anymore and the bubble bursts) and the investors (just as they did every previous time) prove to have bet incorrectly then it is hard to imagine our not looking at a massive destruction of values--perhaps on an epoch-making scale. Indeed, according to a recent study by the British-based research firm MacroStrategy Partnership, that 220 percent of U.S. GDP represented by the Buffet Indicator bespeaks a bubble seventeen times as big as that New Economy bubble of the '90s, and four times as big as the real estate bubble that burst in '07. One can thus very easily imagine there being close at hand something much, much worse than what the world faced in '07--which, contrary to the stupid mainstream media narrative about the matter that made it seem like a speedbump we all got over together (yay!) really was an epoch-making event, dealing the world economy a blow from which it never recovered as the euphemistically called "Great Recession" went on and on (it was not just Japan but the world that saw a lost decade turn into a lost generation, with outside China per capita Gross World Product today pretty much where it was in the 1970s), with the consequences of the catastrophe--and one should not forget, the manner in which what pass for world "leaders" addressed that catastrophe they did so much to make happen--including the stalling out and fraying of the once-seemingly "like the rising of the sun" progress of globalization, the ascent of the far right all over the world, and the resurgence of great power warfare that already has Europe "not at peace" with Russia as the bloodbath in Ukraine nears the end of its fourth year, and once again under German leadership Europe rearms for a contest with the colossus to its east. A far vaster crash hitting a U.S. economy looking much more vulnerable than it was in 2007 (from the Federal debt load to the Federal Reserve's asset portfolio to the standing of the U.S. dollar to the ability of America's working people to stand a shock things are in just about every way different from what they were two decades ago, just about all of them for the worse), at the center of a world economic and political order that likewise look even more decrepit than they did two decades ago, one would not be wrong to shudder at the thought. They would also not be wrong to retch in advance at the way that the professional economists will demonstrate their worthlessness by dutifully sniveling that no one could have seen it coming, and the financial community wheel out its favorite spokesperson to tell us "It was all black swans, see?" as middlebrows beguiled by the imagery in which he wraps up his banalities of cheap epistemological nihilism nod their empty heads--never mind the reality that a great number of people saw it coming and said so but were ignored completely by those who held all the power and disclaimed all the responsibility, supported by their lickspittles in the Mainstream Media's platforming only the "right" views as they snarl at anyone who points out such inconvenient truths as a Know-Nothing piece of scum fighting the "war on experts" with "fake news." However, rather than wallowing in doomism (and contempt for those responsible for it) one would do better to think very, very hard about how the world might do better this time because of the sheer direness of the consequences if it doesn't.

The Privilege of Turning off Your Telescreen

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:50:00 +0000

People love to talk about George Orwell. Far more people than have ever actually bothered to read Orwell, going by a certain poll of a few years ago--with the fact of the poll's reliance on self-reporting, and the rapid decay of what little propensity then existed to read books rather than just speak of them in the years since the poll strongly suggesting that that much fewer of those who talk about Orwell have had any real content with the writings they are talking about. Meanwhile it seems that few of those who actually have read him did so closely or completely--a testimony not only to the falling standard of literacy (so evident among our commentariat, whose "Good Schools" failed miserably in imparting to them a "Good Education") but the ideological blinders of three-quarters of a century. After all, even if at the time he wrote his most famous book George Orwell still espoused socialist ideas intellectually way deep down he had gone over to that mix of muddle, pessimism and psycho-babble that became the sine qua non of critical respectability in the twentieth century, which made it the easier for the fiercest of anti-socialists to appropriate him and his work for his cause as they interpreted him to the public.

Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.

Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. Assuming they can find the options, which isn't a certainty given that the updates frequently deliberately remove them, forcing the user to learn a new procedure that is typically more complicated and involves accessing a more obscure, risk-laden, user-unfriendly part of their system, if there even is an alternative procedure for regaining that particular bit of privacy protection at all.

It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."

The Dead Dream of Democratizing the Means of Communication

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:49:00 +0000

While the rhetoric of the Internet as a great democratizer was everywhere in the market populism-dominated 1990s, and remained widespread many years after (with Mark Zuckerberg's vulgar PR hacks turning the revolutions of 2011 into a moment for corporate self-promotion) all this is little heard today. After all, in this age of advanced enshittification of the Internet of which anyone at all online is all too aware NO ONE WOULD BUY IT--all as our lobotomized media's remembrance of things past is invariably very selective as, while it makes a point of keeping certain national wounds permanently open for the sake of raison d'etat (like keeping a critical mass of the public frothing with fury to sustain support for illiberal, authoritarian, militarist, racist policies), it drops what is not serviceable to such raison down the Memory Hole, with those promises of yesteryear certainly that. After all, a reminder of the Internet we were promised would just make people even more furious with the Internet we actually got, where we are endlessly surveilled by Authority, endlessly lied to and manipulated by its spokespersons, endlessly exploited for money by those Authority serves, and yet left on our own to cope with the ever-worsening danger from cyber-criminals and their ilk ("Personal responsibility!" they snarl at us as we wonder just why it's legal for private companies to go around collecting and trafficking in our most private personal information), the public bound but unprotected as the monopolists of Big Tech and the security state are the extreme opposite in a world where, just as in that book by Orwell that people love to cite but never read, it is becoming a mark of privilege to be able to turn off the telescreen.

Not only in hindsight but even at the time the contrast between the promise and the reality was fairly predictable. Even were one to overlook the essential naiveté of the view that technological change might somehow automatically bring "power to the people!" discredited so many, many times over the years, the truth is that the Internet was never very promising as a genuinely democratic medium, the interface more suggestive of broadcast than detailed interactivity, and the vastness and sprawl and mess of the web all but insuring gatekeeping that privileges the deep-pocketed and established in every way, all as no attempt at protecting the public was to be expected in a neoliberal-neoconservative milieu of corporate power run amok and a security state gone mad--and more than a few understood that at the time. The problem was not that they didn't speak up, but that their every utterance of the truth was drowned out by a thousand shouts of the lie--much as remains the case today, the cynicism about Big Tech pervasive and growing, but really meaningful discussion unlikely to be seen anywhere near the major platforms, whose staff as dutifully as ever earn their brass checks by making sure of that.

Still, people do talk about the disappointment. Many of them discuss how those who took the promise at all seriously and invested in it--the blogger or self-published book author attempting to speak directly to the world over the heads of the Big Media gatekeepers, for example--generally found themselves walking down a boulevard of broken dreams, as the elitist trash of the media-industrial complex and the middlebrow mediocrities who let it do their thinking for them bathed in the tears of the disappointed hopefuls. However, there is also the disappointment of the way that the Internet looked like a source of salvation in other ways of more than purely private significance. The combination of privatization, deregulation, creditism, financialization that saw control of the country's economy concentrated in ever fewer hands were making the already suffocatingly narrow and constrained bounds of what could be aired, or published only more so, and generally dumber in the process, as was all too evident across contemporary life from the servility of the brass check-collectors before the powerful in the news outlets, to the vapid trash on our bestseller lists, to an academic life increasingly characterized by arguments over the latter-day equivalents of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It seemed to some that the Internet might somehow afford some space in which to do better than that. Of course, that didn't happen either, couldn't have as things were, with the feared consequences, as what passes for our intellectual and cultural life has gone on getting more decrepit--enough so that some of the gatekeepers themselves seem to be openly worried by the situation, but without the slightest readiness to consider that they may have themselves had a part in that. Their kind never do, ever convinced that all the things amiss in the world are the fault of those they look upon as their inferiors, for in their warped world no one may ever attribute any of the responsibility to those who have all the power.

On Germany's Armor Orders

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 18:26:00 +0000

At this stage of things it is difficult to say very much about the Russo-Ukrainian War now dragging into its fourth year. The plain and simple truth of the matter is that an ongoing war, with its "fog," secrecy and deception, is a far harder thing to analyze than a past one in even the best of circumstances--and these are not the best of circumstances. Everything that has happened in this conflict has made it very clear that those experts with any sort of platform from which one can address the broad public have been profoundly lacking in insight. They did not understand either Russia or Ukraine, not just their armed forces, but also their economies and their societies and what they would and would not be able to bear up under the strains of a war like this one. (Remember how for almost three years now Russia has been on the verge of totally running out of ammunition, but it just never happened? How one side or the other has always been about to collapse, but here they still are, fighting?) But then where "Establishment expert" is concerned (and it is this which the media gives us) the accent is on the Establishment part, not the expert part, all as having understanding to impart to the public is not likely to be a requirement of their job. To go by the results that would seem to be giving the public the "mushroom treatment," which is the real "skill set" of these "experts," and a not uncommon mission for them, which they consistently fulfill with zeal.

Still, at this stage of the war it does seem possible to say some things about what has been observable on the battlefield, not least the way that it has become a much more hazardous environment for even the most modern battle tanks, and for massed ground forces of any type, largely thanks to the age of the small drone rendering the battlespace transparent and dense with loitering, guided, munitions. Indeed, that age of armored-mechanized warfare that was supposed to have been clearly underway with the panzers of the opening battles of the Second World War can seem to have come to a close as rather than World War II what we see is World War I in a war zone where fortifications and artillery and attrition prevail, and advance seems to rely on the kind of tactics the Germans' stormtroopers were demonstrating in that earlier conflict's last phase--if using modern motorcycles and All-Terrain Vehicles in the process.

Looking at all this one may imagine that what we have seen in Ukraine would give governments looking to reconstitute their military forces pause in regard to just how they would go about the task---whether old-line mechanized forces would really be the right thing for the situation. However, from what I can tell they have given the German government no such pause as it has, depending on which source one consults, ordered somewhere between 7,500 and 9,500 armored fighting vehicles, truly colossal numbers by the standards of the post-Cold War era, including a thousand of those Leopard 2 tanks that the Ukrainians have already proven to be very vulnerable (and unreliable) in the existing battlefield conditions. It also seems striking that as the German government placed these same orders it has made only comparatively paltry orders for artillery systems--all as drones do not seem to have been much on its mind (unlike the British, whose recent Strategic Defence Review, for all its lack of substance, did highlight the drone, with a soldier holding a little drone actually the image on the review's cover).

What could the German government's planners be thinking here?

One plausible explanation is that Germany's analysts and planners are less impressed by the events in Ukraine than others. Perhaps they think that the threat from the drone can be neutralized--with it seeming far from irrelevant that they have placed so much stress on purchasing Skyguard anti-drone systems (the makers are promising a new version which uses not cannon shells but laser beams), while also trusting to the adaptation of Active Protection Systems to keep armor viable in the face of the drone threat. And in turn with big armored forces still viable, that they can avoid the World War I-type trenches-and-big guns stalemate, which, frankly, military planners prefer not to think about, the hope of cheap, swift victory always springing eternal with them, even as it is always disappointed. (Yes, the thrust through the Ardennes seemed to deliver miraculous results during the Battle of France--but one should not forget that that time the enemy practically held the door open, while being so eager to surrender that they can seem to have planned this from the start. And that afterwards, with France defeated, Germany found it had not won the war, because there was no real plan for what to do about a Britain that continued to fight on afterward.)

The result is that one would not be unreasonable in thinking that there is a lot of self-deception on their part, encouraged by at least two factors. One is the way that those radical successors to the tank people talked about so much at the turn of the century (Future Combat Systems-style systems-of-systems and Starship Troopers-style armored infantry, both of which would be handy in the current drone-filled battlespace with its premium on dispersal and agility) have simply not come close to materializing a quarter of a century on. (What was futuristic then is still futuristic now.) The other is that reality of commercial life that the consumer is not king, but endlessly pressed to buy what business wants them to buy. Compared with the German government, for example, investing in cheap drones or figuring out how to equip a large infantry force for the battlefield (buy a bunch of motorcycles and ATVs?), ten thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles make for a lot of corporate welfare, which, one should never forget, is a big part of what defense spending has been about in the modern era.

What's That in Poor Years?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:02:00 +0000

We live in an exceedingly unequal society which has long shown the trend of its life to be toward more and not less inequality, all as those who hold power are more openly contemptuous of doing anything to redress inequality than they have been in a very long time. Naturally those whose task it is to justify their ways to the public spend a lot of time trivializing that inequality's significance in the public mind. One common argument they make to this end holds that the poor aren't badly off materially, really. Only their pride suffers because "society" has placed less value on their contributions than, for example, that of such "geniuses" and "entrepreneurs" as Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes and the titans of shareholder activism--for where would the world be without them to LEAD!

However, contrary to this exceedingly stupid story so beloved by the psycho-babble addicts the reality is that the poor do suffer from much more than feeling "less than" (bad enough as that is), and not only psychically but materially. For contrary to what idiots who talk about a "knowledge economy" would have us believe we still live in a thoroughly material world where a great deal of old-fashioned toil is what keeps the world going round, physically tiring, dangerous, dirty, body-destroying work little relieved by the technological stagnation that has been the real legacy of our "entrepreneurs," excelling as they do not at the technological INNOVATION! they keep talking up, just the technological hype that endlessly proves to be all smoke and no fire. All as, of course, that same order of things has meant that those sneered-at working people bear the brunt of an economic situation in which the markets where they are required to meet their everyday needs for housing, health care and everything else are organized not around their demands as the "consumer is king" propaganda has it, but those of the rentiers and speculators who are the true kings here--all as, when these decide that for the moment the toil of said working folks is not required, the latter are thrown upon a social safety net said kings are eroding to nothing in the name of defending the Makers from the Takers (working people, of course, being in the second category unlike Epstein, Holmes, et. al.).

Especially when faced with these particular circumstances it is easy to imagine that life's tolls will mount up faster for the have-nots than for the haves, that they will indeed age faster and die earlier--perhaps by a significant margin. And as it happens the scientific data testifying to the correctness of this expectation seems increasingly abundant, and much of it formidable. However, it also seems that a scientifically-based or scientist-endorsed "big picture" view is elusive, certainly if one equates such a picture with, for example, an estimate of how much more quickly the poor age, or how much "older" the latter are likely to be physically or mentally at a given point in their lives when compared with the better-off. Certainly the layperson who sifts the research can feel that the researchers are looking at lots and lots of trees without seriously trying to describe the forest--while the explanation that this is just a matter of scientists being rigorous in handling the data will not do. After all, said scientists are operating in a field where hucksterism and quackery run rampant, as one sees in the media's breathlessly reporting dubious results ("Studies show . . .") ever seized upon for the sake of selling half-baked diet and fitness plans. Rather the motivation would seem to be the politics of the matter, and specifically political squeamishness about scientists flatly telling "the poors" that "You're aging faster than the rich, you'll be old beyond your years at every stage of your life, and you'll die sooner."

Still, going by the studies I have seen I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the gap between those who may be judged relatively poor and the relatively well-off numerous enough to be statistically measurable for the benefit of a study--not the super-rich with their weirdo Wellness-to-keep-us-alive-until-immortality-comes-along schemes but people we would probably think of as "middle class"--plausibly have the former aging ten percent faster than the latter. Now think about what that means in concrete terms. At the age of 62 the poorer man is apt to be physically and mentally functioning more like his better-off peer will at 68. At 67 he is likely to be functioning more like the other man will at 74--all as, less able to retire than his wealthier peer, he endures the greater discomfort of continuing in that job, starting with hauling himself out of bed to, perhaps, endure a long commute aboard an overcrowded bus such as his better-off peer would never have deigned to ride even in the years when their health and strength was at its peak. When he is actually 74 . . . well, at this rate he probably won't make it to 74.

None of this is obscure, but it is unpublicized by those who receive their brass checks for having made us, for example, think about Sydney Sweeney's political affiliation instead. Even so, I suspect that working people understand the reality all too well.

Writing About Neoliberalism: Some Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:01:00 +0000

Some years ago certain members of the commentariat began attacking the meaningfulness of the word "neoliberal" as a descriptor of economic policy, insisting it was an empty epithet. Initially seeming to me a very strange claim given that its use had long been established by that point it quickly became apparent that this was really an attack against those who criticized the economic policies of figures like Hillary Clinton or Britain's Blairites and preferred to them those of a Bernie Sanders, or a Jeremy Corbyn--a piece of bad faith hippie-punching by centrist political hacks who would likely never have dared attempt such against opponents who had a mainstream platform from which to fight back. Like Jonathan Chait. And Washington Monthly (of course) politics editor Bill Scher. And Nick Cohen (given space for the last in the Guardian, a reminder of where that paper really stands on the issues).

Still, considering the rancor it did seem to me that if they were false charges made in bad faith by political hacks users of the term were not invulnerable to it because of how theorists of the concept had explicated it in the past. Certainly such figures as a David Harvey, one of the principal popularizers of the concept, had provided a good deal of insight, not least in his important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, reading which one understands that this was a particular program rooted in certain ideas and offering particular prescriptions (market fundamentalism, commending to the public deregulation and privatization, etc.) that, picked up and advanced as part of a right-wing political counter-offensive, changed economic life all over the world in significant ways, and in the process changed much else as well (not least in bringing about the postmodern "cultural condition" to which he had previously devoted a book). All the same, if getting much right there is much else that the conventional, short, explanation of the matter does not capture (many of those who explain neoliberalism miss or fail to properly stress the financialization that is fundamental to it, or to acknowledge, let alone reconcile, the libertarian and anti-statist theory and rhetoric with the reality of the massive state role in the model, e.g. less welfare for humans but more for corporations)--imperfections of which the centrists denying the concept's usefulness made the most. As this suggested broadly comprehensive explication of the concept and its various dimensions in a way that could really and truly be treated as a touchstone for those discussing the subject was scarce, in part because much of the work that would have enabled this seemed to have gone undone. Academics approaching the records of particular governments, or the functioning of economies, tended to write a lot about a very little, rather than vice-versa, in that way reflective of academic life encouraging and rewarding not those who deal with the basics on which everything else rests (like clear, strong and illuminating definitions), but those who do not worry overmuch about such matters as they set about specializing minutely, the more in as the appearance of rigor all too often counts for more than the reality. This is reflective, too, of how due to those same priorities, even after the specialists may have done very good work, few much concern themselves with "what it all means," as we can only hope to understand when someone bothers to try to produce a useful big picture from it--all as, I suspect, academics, perhaps not unnaturally for people who set store by ideas, tended to overrate the significance of these as against hard facts of power and material results in telling the story (looking too much at the musings of would-be philosophes, of whom they too often tend to be in awe, and too little at what the money men hoped to get).

To be entirely fair I do not know that the relevant scholars did a worse job with neoliberalism than they did anything else (these are, again, failures pervading the whole world of scholarship today), but these failures mattered the more precisely because the commentariat has been so hostile to their findings (such that, for example, those who criticized neoliberalism as neoliberalism had to defend their reasoning much more carefully than, for example, the Anti-Communist bashing that model). That encouraged me to try to work things out for myself--searching after a definition and description that would better account for just how contradiction-riddled (frankly, dishonest) the neoliberal Agenda was, and how the result did not go according to plan, but still represented a meaningful departure from what came before that could meaningfully be identified as neoliberalism. This extended to my examining the record of many "neoliberal" politicians in a comprehensive way (specifically Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) to see whether their records did indeed correspond to the neoliberal line. It also extended to developing a conception of how the neoliberal model works in some detail and how neoliberalism was distinguishable not just from what I called "Keynesian Fordism," but at the same time also from mere classical liberalism, or financialization for that matter; and empirically testing that model against the available statistical data using such metrics as investment, assets, trade, profits, central government-to-GDP ratios and much else to develop a picture of how policymakers and investors and the forces they unleashed restructured the U.S. economy in particular during the neoliberal era. It extended, too, to my using this understanding of neoliberalism to examine particular facets of the matter, like what neoliberalism has meant for the expectations and reality of technological innovation, and even the ways in which working people are living their lives (or finding themselves unable to do so).

To make a long story short I concluded that, yes, neoliberalism, complex as it may be, is indeed a sound, strong, useful concept for describing the economic thinking, policymaking, economic history of the last half century; that one can justly refer to the governments of the United States and Britain of this period as having been neoliberal governments, whose policies produced a distinct economic model, with great, varied, ubiquitous consequence extending into the cultural sphere. I don't know that I convinced anyone else of all this, but then I don't know that that was a realistic prospect. Again, those in the mainstream who put down the concept were doing so in bad faith, all as those who did find the concept useful didn't need convincing, as at any rate all this was probably a bit over the heads of the public, which online rarely looks at such things as working papers of any kind, let alone about such subjects as these. Still, even after many years of researching, thinking, revising as I researched and thought again I stand by the body of work I produced, and the position to which it led me, which is infinitely more than can be said for the brass check earners who fill up the opinion pages in the newspapers, magazines, wire services, news channels and web sites that command a totally unwarranted respect from people of conventional mind--all as it seems to me that a real understanding of neoliberalism is growing only more important as we try to make sense of where the world is headed now.

Not Just Thatcher, But Reagan

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Recently reading the details of the German government's euphemistically named "Growth Booster" (read: big giveaway to business and the rich in the name of supply-side theory that was never really anything else) I found myself thinking not so much of Margaret Thatcher as Ronald Reagan, and not just because Friedrich Merz of Blackrock's plan also prominently features an accelerated depreciation schedule. There was also the way in which the tax cuts were combined with not just plans for social spending cuts (of which we are now starting to hear significantly details), but plans to drastically raise defense spending, which is much more Reagan than Thatcher if one is looking for precedents. After all, foreign policy hard-liner that Thatcher was, her government was anything but open-handed with the British armed forces--her deficit hawkishness more than a pose to that extent, at least.

The fact that European governments like those of the ultra-Establishment Merz are embracing bigger defense budget alongside the usual "Robin Hood in reverse" of robbing the poor to give to the rich via the usual tax and spending cuts seems worthy of remark. If continental politicians have long hoped to be their country's Thatcher, their hoping to be its Reagan is something newer, with the case of that other pillar of the European project, France, telling. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, if not without his pretensions on the international stage, was more concerned with economic reforms on the home front. By contrast the current French President, Emmanuel Macron, seems to look to the more international affairs-minded Reagan--and to go by certain of his rhetoric, that subsequent Republican President, Bush II, as well--as a model here. In this as in so many other ways it would seem that European policymakers, who were never so different in outlook from their American counterparts as those who bought into silly fantasies (or desperate dreams) of a more enlightened European elite pursuing a more enlightened path seemed prepared to believe, have been growing more brazen about that as they press harder to get more American-style policies, not only where hardcore neoliberalism at home is concerned, but the more "muscular" foreign policy they have for so long wanted. So much so that the governments of the Dutch and Czechs are apparently quite happy to turn their armies into franchises if not reserves of the successor of the World War II Wehrmacht that has now come under the control of a government headed by a profoundly uncouth yet also treacherous Chancellor whose ascent to office on an historically slight vote testifying to his lack of any genuine popular mandate has not inhibited him about going for broke pursuing an Agenda that most certainly includes arming for confrontation with "the East." Meanwhile in France, where the heirs of the "Better Hitler Than Blum" crowd are as close to (re)taking power as they have ever been since the fall of the Vichy regime, the present occupant of the Élysée Palace strives not to be outdone in plundering the public for the sake of turning what, Marianne tells us, is described by the French army's own officers as "an army of majorettes" into a more credible fighting force, also means to outdo Merz in aggressiveness about sending that force eastward as he calls for a "coalition of the willing" to be led by himself, of course--possibly to an even greater disaster than the world got the last time a President used that language.

Of course, all this is not going over well with the European publics. The German public, whose vote for Merz's party was, again, very low (less than a quarter of the electorate voted for Merz and his party), seems easily dividable into that part of it which never trusted him to begin with (likely, a great majority of the 76 percent of the German electorate that did not vote for him), and that part of it which feels betrayed by him (some 73 percent of Germans already feeling that way as he assumed office, with his subsequent performance not improving that, only 1 in 5 Germans seeing him as trustworthy), as pretty much all of that public detests him (his approval rating standing at a dismal 29 percent last month).

Of course, all this does not get the press it ought to in the States, but if anything American coverage of France may be even more muddled due to how, in contrast with Merz, whose lavish expenditures on styling and makeup seem to have not added to his charm in their eyes (he is Mr. Vain!), the American press fawns over Emmanuel Macron--with in particular a significant part of the identity politics-mad American commentariat consumed with ecstasies over the "handsome" and "powerful" (middle-aged) man being married to a woman old enough to be his (senior citizen) mother (much more to their taste than the not-so-handsome Sarkozy's capping off his rise to the top by marrying '90s glory days of the supermodel supermodel Carla Bruni right in the Palace, cuz it's good to be the king!). Too much consumed with ecstasies over this "unconventional" began-with-a-Lifetime-Channel-movie-of-the-week marriage to spare much thought for his policies, and the opinion of his electorate about those policies--not least as reflected in his string of failed Prime Ministers, to which (the still less handsome?) Francois Bayrou has just been added by a no confidence vote prompted by the aggressiveness of his particular grab after the pocketbooks and social rights of France's working people. Still, the fact remains that anyone even minimally informed about the situation should need no introduction to his troubles that way. (After all, even the American press couldn't completely ignore the upheaval of 2023.) Especially as the hard realities of what it will take to not just fund, but man, the Not-So-New-Model-Armies of the European Establishment's militaristic dreams (make no mistake, they are inching back toward conscription) Europe's "leaders" will not be able to expect that pompous lectures about defense being "the greatest public benefit of all" will suffice to make the plebs rally to their standards.

Germany's Rearmament Program: August 2025 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:12:00 +0000

Back in 2022 remarking Germany's announced infusion of cash into its armed forces I acknowledged the magnitude of the expenditure, which at a stroke made Germany a candidate for the rank of the world's third highest-spending military power. However, I also argued that the sums being talked about (2 percent+ of GDP for defense bolstered by a hundred billion euro "one-off") would not result in a very much larger or more capable German military force given inflation, the country's industrial troubles, the fluctuating exchange ranges relevant to the imports clearly part of the program (like F-35 fighters), the long neglected problems of those forces (like their reportedly unlivable barracks) and of course the extremely high cost of military power, even before the way one gets into the excellence of governments and military-industrial complexes at making a lot of money go a very short away.

I do not seem to have been wrong about that, with this underlined by how three years later Germany, militarily scarcely different from what it was before the grandiose claims of "Zeitenwende," the country joined the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in committing to a far higher target. This saw them abandon the 2 percent of GDP for defense that was the old target in favor of a defense (and "defense- and security-related") outlay of 5 percent, with at least 3.5 percent going to "core" defense, by 2035. More aggressive still Germany's government has pledged to realize the 3.5 percent+ goal not by 2035 but by 2029, with the broad program facilitated by the earlier amendment of the constitution to exclude defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the "debt brake," and parliament's creation of a half trillion euro "infrastructure fund" also exempt from said brake, some months earlier.

It is also the case that this aggressive, drastic, fiscally enabled enlargement of German defense spending has been accompanied by what was absent in the wake of the Zeitenwende, specific targets for the enlargement of the forces, and massive orders of new equipment. The current plan seems to be to enlarge the German armed forces' standing component from 180,000 to 250,000+ personnel (a 40 percent increase) and the reserves from 60,000 to 200,000 (more than tripling reserves that had, like those everywhere else in Europe, been cut nearly to nothing in the wake of the Cold War reorientation to rapid-response and less conventional missions in faraway places), with the result a fully mobilized force not in the quarter-million but the half-million range. Meanwhile the German government is reportedly ordering as many as 1,000 new Leopard 2 tanks (as against the three hundred or so it now has) and 6,500-8,500 Boxer and Patria armored fighting vehicles, implying a fully mobilized mechanized force many times Germany's current force in size. A much more substantial project than anything discussed three years ago it seems fair to say that Germany has not undertaken anything to compare with this since the founding of the Bundeswehr. And of course this does not include the reality of the "Framework Nation Concept" which has turned the Dutch army's brigades into "plug-and-play" elements (insertable into German divisions), with Czechia and Romania partly ventured on this course, which would potentially mean still larger forces under German "leadership."

All in all this situation seems a reminder of how when the issue is the social needs of the public, or something else to which elites are indifferent or even hostile Authority wails about balanced budgets, admonishes the hungry and homeless to be respectful of vested interest, offers homilies about "politics as the art of the possible," and warns them that those (rightly) contemptuous of its do-nothingism and desirous of actually solving a problem are crazy people fleeing from freedom into totalitarianism who will make an Orwellian hell of the world should they get their way. But when it's something elites care about suddenly the politicians become "men of action." Not very intelligent, competent, men of action, but men of action all the same, with all this underlined by how that amendment instituting the debt brake came along back in 2009, right after the Great Recession when Berlin was intent on austerity in the face of '30s-like crisis and everything else be damned, as we saw with German bridges collapsing--but didn't seem so important when events presented them a new chance for weltpolitik and corporate welfare.

Still, in spite of themselves the program will take many years to realize, with reversal not impossible. The geopolitical situation, the economic situation (Germany is not in a great way here, all as military Keynesianism, which ain't what it used to be, may not help much), may well throw some surprises at them in these coming years. Besides, the words "On time and on budget" simply don't exist in the vocabulary of contractors, with the military-industrial complex-types second to none here. Meanwhile, though you would never know it from the media cheerleading ("Who are the heirs of Julius Streicher?"), it is very probable that this program is much less popular with the public than the chattering classes. This is all the more the case as, as the collapse of the vote for the traditional leading parties shows, Germany's political Establishment is just as despised and mistrusted by its electorate as its counterparts elsewhere, career corporate lawyer and former Blackrock Germany board member Chancellor Merz is already warning the public that his warfare state requires sacrifice of the already austerity-battered welfare state, while the German government realizing its ambitious military manpower goals on a purely voluntary basis seems like pure fantasy. Aside from the aversion to militarism on the part of the German public generally, and its disinterest in military confrontation with Russia particularly, the well of manpower on which it can draw is more limited than one may guess from the size of its population, for where fertility and age structure are concerned Germany is practically in the same boat as Japan, such that having the kind of mobilizable force they want means a very high proportion of military-age German youth putting the best years of their lives into "service." If the German government really is staying the course on this one, conscription is returning to the country, and before very long--with this obvious enough that I would imagine (not that the media will rush to report it) a great many German young people are already thinking about how to avoid the draft, as the more activism-minded among them consider the prospects for a new campaign. In fairness, Germany's government seems less and less inclined to let democratic niceties stand in the way of its goals, but this too may mean surprises in store.

Of Neoliberalism's Contradictions--and the Democratic Party's

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:11:00 +0000

First encountering the Roosevelt Institute report titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism" I was intrigued by its promise of a comprehensive treatment of the implications of neoliberalism at a cultural level--precisely because really rigorous work on neoliberalism is so scarce and so potentially valuable for those interested in the subject, with this going double for the realm of cultural studies (floopy postmodernism having had its deeply unhealthy effect on such work). And initially the report appeared quite interesting, with its discussion of neoliberalism's ultra-conformism and insecurity's encouragement of atomization, alienation, isolation, "self-commodification," and self-blame in those who have problems, and its categorization of responses by individuals to neoliberalism's stresses and failures in a quasi-Mertonian way (describing, alongside those who do seek the sense of community the system deprives them of in some fashion, not always with happy result, the rugged individualism of "strivers, self-help and wellness" culture, "dropouts," and "rebellion").

However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.

This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).

In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.

Revisiting German Rearmament in 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:24:00 +0000

When in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I addressed the discussion of German--and Japanese--"rearmament," I argued that some seemed to have an exaggerated sense of the significance of those countries' governments' announced increases in defense spending and other policy changes, for a number of reasons. One was the fact that the remilitarization of both countries began even before they regained sovereignty from their occupiers after the Second World War, and traveled most of the way to being not just relatively large military powers (as the Federal Republic of Germany had become no later than the mid-1960s), but "normal" ones disposing of their forces in the same manner as other nations, with Germany's allies' relaxation of their earlier treaty-imposed restrictions on the country's rearmament, and the German courts' reinterpretation of the constitution, long since giving Germany a pretty free hand to send its forces around the world on combat assignment (as seen in the fact of German soldiers fighting from Mali to Afghanistan). Another reason was that given the state of the German armed forces in 2022, the sums of money then being talked about, and how very, very good militaries and defense ministries can be at making a very, very large sum of money go absolutely no way at all, the boosts to German defense spending would plausibly not translate to great changes in the size or capabilities of German forces relative to what they had been before.

Three years on I see no reason to change that assessment--and indeed every reason to stand by it, because the publicly available information shows just how little change there has been in Germany's position these past three years, with this reaffirmed by how German policymakers in the grip of aspirations to weltpolitik are demanding way, way bigger changes. Instead of talking about working toward boosting defense spending to 2 percent of GDP with a "one-off" supplement helping the process along the way Olaf Scholz did in February 2022, now, amid much talk of "Whatever it takes!" the minimum figure they have in mind is 3 percent, while they discuss exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the Holy Debt Brake, and talk of a €500 billion "special fund" (five times the supplement of 2022) for "infrastructure" (perhaps a redress of genuine need bolstering higher defense spending through its enabling of industry and stimulus to the economy, but easily imagined as a vehicle for more direct funding of military objectives). They also make explicit calls for conscription to enable the mobilization of a vastly enlarged force. (Germany's military reserve, like that of pretty much every European country, dwindled to nothing after the Cold War, so that even fully mobilized it does not raise the size of German forces amount to much more than 200,000. But the document published by the now parliament-dominating CDU/CSU calls for Germany to, with reserves mobilized, have over 500,000 at Berlin's disposal.)

Meanwhile, German European Commission President Ursula von Leyden is calling for a broader European effort on such lines, her ReArm Europe plan not only calling for a 1.5 percent of GDP boost in European defense spending by the member states (which would see Germany going well above the 3 percent of GDP mark as a spender), but also proposing a new "instrument" for defense investment capable of loaning €150 billion and the use of the EU's own budget, the previously proposed Savings and Investment Bank, and the existing EU member-stated owned European Investment Bank (EIB) to support such efforts. (Indeed, the EIB has already sent a letter to those member state governments proposing policy changes "allow[ing] investments into non-lethal defence products, provid[ing] unlimited loans to the defence industry . . . and measures to motivate commercial banks to follow suit in lending cash to the defence industry.")

Considering the implications of that German policymakers could expect not only to benefit from the direct policy alterations that have EU institutions providing direct support for its defense investments, cooperation with other countries better able to contribute to joint efforts because of the greater sums on the table, and other synergies that might follow from such a situation. Showing every sign of (once more) fancying themselves the "taskmasters of Europe" (Herfried Münkler only said what they were thinking, and how they behaved toward nations like Greece) they evidently expect to lead the combination--to which degree may be indicated by how the German army has worked to "integrate" five brigades from Romania, Czechia and the Netherlands (in the last case, three brigades amounting to pretty much the whole Dutch army's fighting strength) into its army's divisions.

In contrast with the proposals of three years ago all this looks much, much more significant--if it is actually acted upon. Still, if with these proposals Europe's political elite certainly make clear their extreme enthusiasm for remilitarizing and rearming, I see no evidence whatsoever of comparable enthusiasm on the part of the European public for the project. Quite the contrary, that public has been increasingly hostile to their governments' dragging them into one increasingly costly "forever" war after another, just as they have been enraged by those governments' refusing to do much about their economic problems, the environment, and much, much else affecting their daily lives, and indeed going into reverse on anything that could be deemed a solution. (Indeed, the idea of repurposing unused funds for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions for rearmament seems entirely symbolic of how the elites think here--and discomfort with the idea a hint of how the public actually feels.)

Of course, as the policy record shows governments have pressed ahead with their preferences in complete contempt of voters' opinions, and often complete contempt of their constitutions as well. (Such is their version of the "democracy" and "rule of law" for which they claim to stand.) However, as governments raise taxes and cut services and inflict added inflation on publics already battered by decades of neoliberalism (all of that borrowing and government demand seems likely to have unpleasant consequences in a context of profound deindustrialization, structurally higher energy prices, lingering and painful inflationary shocks, and governments ferocious in their enmity toward social protections)--and gets rougher with labor and with dissent (and it's pretty damn rough now)--and sends draft cards to its young people as it demands their "sacrifice" of freedom, self and even life itself for the sake of objects they do not support and against which they indeed protested--those elites may find the going less smooth than they imagined in this way, as it may in so many others.

Reflections on the German Federal Election of 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:24:00 +0000

The early election in Germany this year seems to me to warrant comment as reflective of the broader trend of electoral politics across the Western world, namely the collapse of support for the traditional parties, with the far right the principal beneficiary. (This may most obviously be the case in how as has already been seen in Italy and France, where the party system has long been more fragmented and mutable, but also to a lesser degree in more concentrated and stable British politics, where the vote for the Conservatives collapsed in 2024, and Reform UK surged.)

In discussion of the matter I have seen the historical background was almost always less than sketchy, partly I think because there is less in the way of handy comprehensive tabulations of historical election results for the Federal Republic (anything like the House of Commons Library’s excellent research briefing UK Election Statistics unavailable). Still, it seems to me that a look at this is key to giving us more than a superficial picture of the situation, while it does not take too much work to cobble together at least a rough image of the past. According to the data the two parties that have dominated the Federal Republic's elections (the Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union combination, and the Social Democrats) together claimed 60 percent of the vote in that first election in 1949, a higher 74 percent in 1953 and 81 percent in 1957, at which point one can regard these dynamics as having established the norm for the next several decades. In the nine Federal elections held over the 1957-1987 period the two parties together claimed a consistent 81 to 91 percent (on average, 86 percent) of the vote--a formidable share indeed, leaving less than a fifth, often much less, to all the third-parties combined (like the Free Democrats, or from 1980 forward, the Greens).

However, the near-two party duopoly was eroding by the 1990s, with the two big parties claiming just 77 percent of the vote in the four elections of the 1990-2002 period, and the figure trending more sharply downward from 2005 on. Seeing the two big parties claim 69 percent of the vote in 2005 (their lowest since that first election in 1949), and 57 percent in 2009 (the lowest ever since the Republic's founding), after a limited resurgence in 2013 (to a still relatively low 67 percent), that downward trend continued to new lows in the three elections since, with the figure 53 percent in 2017, just under 50 percent (49.8 percent) in 2021, and finally, under 45 percent (44.9 percent) in 2025, scarcely half the norm for the 1957-1987 period. That last election saw the Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union, even as the "number one" party, with a near-record low share of the vote (28.5 percent, second only to their share in 2021, as against the 41-50 percent they managed in every election in 1953-1998, the 38 percent they at least averaged in 2002-2013, and the 33 percent they got in 2017), while the Social Democrats had their absolute worst performance since the Republic's start. Getting a mere 16 percent of the vote, this compares badly even with their second-worst vote of 20 percent in 2017, their 23 percent average in 2009-2021, and before that their share of 32-45 percent and average of 38 percent, in 1957-2005--as well as, of course, the 21 percent that has seen the far-right party the Alternative for Germany replace them in the number two spot.

As the numbers presented here imply the decline of the two leading parties was a decades-long matter. It would seem that the reunification of Germany played its part here by shifting the electoral landscape (whether due to legacies of the German Democratic Republic, the combination of shock capitalism and swaggering right-wing nationalism that left many former East Germans traumatized for decades, or some mix of both), paving the way for and in respects (the relative poverty and general feeling of "second class"-citizenship in eastern Germany) intensifying those factors that have so much shaken party systems elsewhere--reaction against the commitment of all the major parties to neoliberalism, which worsened significantly with the onset of the Great Recession and all that has come after it; and opposition to war. This points to the extent to one of the most significant features of that collapse, namely the way in which opposition to neoliberalism and war, consistently translates to votes for parties which deliver more neoliberalism and more war, not least by way of those far-right parties that members of the "Fourth Estate" euphemistically call "populist."

Of course, the mainstream of the commentariat cannot be expected to point to, let alone puzzle out, what such a situation says about voters' real range of "choice"--just as they do not consider how, even were one to accord der kulturkampf the weight in electoral politics that elites would like it to have with the voters, Alternative for Germany's being led by a politician who resides outside the country where she is an office-holder with her Sri Lankan (female) partner as leader of a German far-right party makes a mockery of the pretensions of those who take a conventional view of the culture war. By contrast those who know full well that identity politics has been hugely advantageous to the right in its diverting public attention away from class toward "culture," and creating divisions and resentments of which the right has taken full advantage; that such politics have often been reconcilable with many a right-wing imperative on the more material issues, not least in the economic arena ("market populism," "woke capitalism"), but also the geopolitical-military arena; and indeed, that the anti-universalistic, nationalist tendency of such politics has enabled identity politics to be pressed into the explicit service in highly pointed fashion, as seen in the phenomena of "femonationalism" and "homonationalism," in which respect for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ is openly presented as a justification for racist hostility or religious discrimination toward selected minorities, immigrants and foreign countries, a game that Ms. Weidel has, of course, personally played; are not confused at all. For these the possibility, and actuality, of such accommodation is a reminder of the right's real priorities--and the fact that useful as cultural traditionalism has often been to the champion of status quos and of reaction, in the end with elites, even more than with working people "It's the Economy, stupid," first, last and always (after all, what else makes them elites in today's world?), with the vehement denials of their courtiers only ever underlining the matter.

Did China Really Fly a Sixth-Generation Fighter Last Month?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 13:52:00 +0000

The portion of the news media attentive to defense affairs and aviation technology has since late December buzzed with talk about the public flight of what is apparently a prototype of a new Chinese combat aircraft. Identified as the Chengdu J-36 by Western observers, many rushed to speak of it as a sixth-generation fighter.

But is it really a sixth-generation fighter? Given the differing, and changing, understanding of the term, what would that even mean, anyway? Back circa 2010 when talk of sixth-generation fighters was really getting going in a public way there were particular expectations for those planes, identifying the sixth generation of jet fighter with optionally manned hypersonic fighter jets capable of changing shape in flight and armed with directed-energy weapons--expectations which have proven profoundly unrealistic given the far slower pace of the development of the relevant technologies, such that more recent discussion has had much more modest expectations with regard to the technological difference between them and their fifth-generation predecessors. Indeed, it seemed to me that by "sixth-generation" what the analysts meant were more usefully describable as "fifth-generation-plus," fifth-generation jets with some modifications enhancing their abilities beyond the baseline for that generation but falling short of a true shift to some subsequent generation. (For example, it seemed we might end up with fifth-generation jets that were not "optionally manned," but provided "AI" copilots that meaningfully relieved the pilot's workload.)

Considering what we know of the J-36 do we have something that can be considered even "fifth-generation-plus?" Let us go with what seems most clearly established about the plane, namely its shape--that it is, as Rick Joe explains over at The Diplomat, a "double delta tailless flying wing planform, with a rather voluminous and blended fuselage," a 20 meter wingspan, and a length that may be up to 26 meters, with its dimensions suggesting a weight that may exceed 50 tons.

None of those traits are obviously "next-generation," or even obviously fifth-generation-plus, and nor are the smaller, more argued-over features. The plane has a visible cockpit, perhaps designed to accommodate two crew seated side by side, so while one cannot rule out its being highly automated, one cannot claim that it is so on the basis of what we can see. The plane has "low observable" features, like the aforementioned flying wing shape, the internal storage of weapons (until recently, also associated with strike aircraft rather than fighters), and the design of the intakes and the exhaust system--but again these do not warrant characterization as "next-generational." The result is that claims for this plane as "sixth-generation" smack of hype. Indeed, it is not clear the plane is even a fighter at all. The flying wing design, the dimensions and weight, the use of three engines rather than two to power the whole because of that weight, even the possible tandem seating in the cockpit; the apparent optimization of the plane for "range, internal volume, and high-altitude as well as high-speed performance" as Joe has it, with subsonic agility a relatively low priority; and the fact that at this moment we have no evidence whatsoever of its actually being equipped for air-to-air combat; has me wondering whether the plane is a "fighter" rather than a strike aircraft, a mistake people have made before in regard to radical new aircraft designs. (Those who remember the F-117 Nighthawk will recall how people initially thought that "stealth fighter" was a fighter when in fact it was a strike aircraft, and a "fighter" only in the sense that the plane was designed for tactical rather than strategic use. Those who remember the F-111 Aardvark will remember, too, how that plane was originally intended to be a fighter, but partly because of its sheer size and weight ended up filling a strike role instead.)

Altogether we may simply be looking at an advanced but essentially current-generation strike aircraft--a view some have already taken, as Joe acknowledges in his article. However, he also suggests that if the plane looks strike aircraft-ish, it may be that in an age of increasingly beyond visual range and system-of-systems-based combat strike aircraft-ish designs optimized for persistence and capacity may make more sense than nimble dogfighters in the air superiority/dominance. He even goes so far as to speak of the term "fighter" as becoming anachronistic in this new age of air-to-air combat. I do not wholly rule out that possibility--but considering it remember that past generations of defense planners thought such a moment was at hand too, as we saw when in the 1950s we started getting fighter jet designs which eschewed maneuvering and gunnery in favor of long-range sensors and missiles, like the F-4 Phantom--and the decision quickly discovered to have been a mistake, the technology for all that proving to "just not be there yet," so that they incorporated guns into later models of the aircraft, pilots learned to dogfight again, and the next generation designs placed a high stress on maneuverability (as we saw with the fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, the fifth-generation F-22). If that is not the case, however, and Joe is right about what air combat will mean, then we still have grounds to not speak of this plane as a sixth-generation fighter--because rather than a new generation of the Meteors and P-80s and Me-262 we saw at the end of World War II what we are getting is the first generation of something else.

What Do They Mean When They Tell Us the Economy Was "Good?"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 13:50:00 +0000

Part of the narrative to which the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" crowd is sticking in regard to the U.S. national election of 2024 is that the economy was in fact "good" before and at the time of the election, and that as a result either economic discontents had no part in the election's outcome (never mind the polls indicating how many of those aggrieved over inflation voted Republican), or that the public had been deceived about the reality of the economy's performance.

I have already argued for the falsity of this position. But even having done so it seems worth saying something more of how those in the media commonly attempted to argue that position to the broader public, namely by citing a handful of statistics. To cite two of the most important they reported unemployment at 4 percent, and inflation falling toward the 2 percent level. Conventionally regarding these as excellent numbers even in ordinary times, never mind in the wake of the historic shocks of recent years (the COVID-19 pandemic immediately spiking unemployment, and spiking inflation as well in later but more prolonged fashion), they said "See? No problem. So what have you got to be so glum about?"

In doing so they overlooked all that those who calculated these numbers did not even presume to represent. In speaking of unemployment they speak of "U-3" unemployment normally--just one of six ways of measuring employment reported every month, while giving no thought to the still other ways of considering the extent of unemployment, like examination of the percentage of people who have dropped out of the labor force. (The reality is that as of November 2024 the Labor Force Participation Rate was just 62.5 percent, still not recovered to its pre-pandemic level of 63.3 percent at the start of 2020--and the 66 percent it was before the Great Recession that, I remind you, never truly ended.) It certainly does not account for, for example, the college graduates who have a job but are "underemployed" in the sense of taking a job not requiring their expensively bought credentials, and paying them less (a far more common problem than most seem realize, and not only for those who picked the supposedly "wrong" majors).

Just as is the case with the talk about unemployment, those who talk about inflation tend to go by one specific measure, the Consumer Price Index--which certainly has its uses, but at the same time fails to account for a very great deal. It does not include food and fuel, for example, and dealing with them indirectly fails to fully capture rises in the price of housing or health insurance, which have not incidentally consistently outpaced official inflation measures. There is a tendency, too, to overlook subtler aspects of these matters. Consider, for instance, how rises in food prices hit low-income persons who cannot switch to "cheaper" brands because they already buy what is cheapest--and the fact that inflation tends to raise the prices of the lowest-cost items more than the average (because the margins here are slighter than with many more expensive products, making producers quicker to pass on higher costs to the consumer).

When one considers all this it is easy to see how supposedly "good" numbers do not necessarily seem so, all as one should remember that the Talking Heads' consideration of the economy is very, very short-term, telling us how things stood this month, this quarter, at most this year. In reality people's perceptions of their well-being are not shaped simply by how well-off they are at the moment, especially when long-term trends are at work--as is the case with those prices for many necessities relative to incomes. Consider how, for example, between 1973 and 2023 the median house price rose about twice as fast as the Consumer Price Index overall (the CPI going up by a factor of 6.9, the median house price by a factor of 13.3 over the same period)--a far from insignificant difference after all that time, and from the standpoint of most people's incomes, which did not do much more than keep pace with the CPI over the long term, all as, again, all this had parallels in other areas, like health insurance and education and the price of a car (in a country which expects anyone who wants to have a job to be able to drive there!). When they have experienced that long deterioration of their purchasing power with its associated stresses, amplified by the recent spiking of prices in the wake of the pandemic, a single quarter or single year of stability in the relation of incomes to prices is just not going to make that much difference (not that they got it). Indeed, Alan Greenspan himself made the point in Congressional testimony in the '90s when discussing the lack of upward pressure on wages amid what the Talking Heads (as superficial and dishonest then as they are now) told the public were "boom times" for them--observing that the American worker, made insecure by painful past experience, went on being so, giving rise to talk of "Traumatized Worker Syndrome" (all as, with a further generation's hindsight, the trauma would seem to have been just beginning).

Considering all this the discrepancy between the lived experience of the public and what their media tells them about their lived experience is appalling--and if the public has often believed the media rather than reality that has often been because drawing conclusions about that reality from the data was sufficiently beyond them that they could be deceived. The prices they pay at the grocery store have been another matter, however--with the results we have seen in public sentiment about the economy, no matter how much the "experts" clutter up the editorial pages of papers of record telling them their experience of being worse off is "all in their mind."

The Supposed "Eclecticism" of the American Voter

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 13:50:00 +0000

In the wake of an election many in the commentariat took as a shock and a revelation (everything's a revelation when you don't know much) we have seen an outpouring of analysis purporting to tell us What It All Meant. The election is certainly worth analyzing--but the bulk of the analysis is, alas, not worthwhile, just the usual garbage generated by media-Establishment "experts."

Of course, it is possible to learn something even by picking through garbage. The vehement insistence of many that "It Isn't the Economy, Stupid," in its way reminds us that it really is the economy, while it also makes clear that the commentariat which had no interest in acknowledging the fact that it was the economy, stupid, before the election still has no interest in acknowledging that it was the economy, stupid, after the election, with the same going for the political elite whom they so happily serve as, to use a politer term than they deserve, courtiers.

One can likewise learn something picking through that more specific garbage the commentariat speak and write about the "eclecticism" of the American voter. Basically they are shocked, shocked I tells ya, that if one were to consider the electorate as a whole one would find that the electorate dislikes both economic neoliberalism and identity politics (which, to be clear, refers not to principled opposition to bigotry as such, but rather the "nationalistic" attitude exemplified by the grasping and vindictive "weaponizaton" of race and gender for self-advancement deployed by all sides in the culture wars).

They also present this "insight" as challenging our conventional thinking in terms of "right" and "left."

In reality the fact that the electorate as a whole has disliked both neoliberalism and identity politics is no revelation to anyone, even the commentariat. It is also the reality that it does not show the meaninglessness of right and left, however much those making the comment may be eager to persuade us (yet again) that the old political spectrum is meaningless. After all, certainly if we are speaking of the major parties in America, there has never been a left to speak of among them save in the sense of the existence of people who are to the "left" of the avowed right, which however convenient some find it confuses rather than illuminates give the meanings of those terms. Using as a basis for judgment the political spectrum as conventionally understood by educated observers (e.g. people who cracked open a book once in their lives and not the talking heads we see on the screen, or smiling smugly from the photos accompanying their columns in "papers of record") what we have had instead has been the right, and the center--with the center itself highly conservative. This is why the center so readily embraced neoliberalism, such policy a truly "bipartisan" affair. At the same time the identity politics, even those identity politics they pass off as progressive because they are the identity politics of traditionally marginalized groups, have ALWAYS BEEN NON-LEFTIST and indeed EXTREMELY ANTI-LEFTIST FROM THE START, and that not as a bug but as a feature. (Identity politics is just another example of the long use of nationalism to deflect or suppress concern for democracy and for social class, already old when the postmodernists came on the scene and did their bit for this game, and indeed were appreciated for their contributions to the Cold War by some the West's own foremost Cold Warriors as "Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals.")

The acknowledgment of the public's sentiments is one to which the intelligent observer of the political scene may do well to pay attention because it won't last long--for just as the commentators have done before when they observed this they will drop it down the Memory Hole again, the reality simply too unacceptable to an elite whose commitment to neoliberalism and kulturkampf is unshaken and unshakeable, even as the world, in the view of anyone at all capable of processing the reality as the globalization that Thomas Friedman treated as being as unchangeable and beneficent as the rising of the sun is being shredded in an age of trade war, and trade war looks like a potential prelude to shooting war that in the view of some may have already begun.

Remembering Thomas Frank's "American Psyche"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:11:00 +0000

Thomas Frank wrote "That we are a nation divided is an almost universal lament of this bitter election year," then went on to observe that "we," by which he meant the commentariat, "know for sure the answer isn't class" and "rule that uncomfortable subject out from the start," instead certain that the matter must be culture, culture, not class, with the "red state-blue state" divide the favorite suspect and constant point of reference.

Frank wrote all this two decades ago, but it is still the song sung by the centrist "Establishment" commentator today, a reminder of how after the events of the last twenty years (a historic financial crash, the metastasizing of the country's wars, pandemic, the resurgence of great power confrontation, the profound deepening of the ecological crisis, the ascent of the far right) their conventional wisdom has not changed one iota, to their absolute discredit. Indeed, one can argue that their extreme refusal to countenance any "uncomfortable" ideas that call into question their complacent idiocies played its part in making the past two decades of American and world history the train wreck they have been.

Still, if their ideas about this matter did not change--if we still hear ceaselessly of "division," and "culture, not class," and "red states and blue states"--there is at least one thing that I can say seems to me different from how things stood in 2004. This is that Thomas Frank wrote that comment in an article for the New York Times--a newspaper far less likely to give Frank or anyone like him a platform these days as it boosts ever more openly far right commentators, all as Mr. Frank seems to be regarded as ever less admissible by the gatekeepers of Big Media broadly pushing the same line, as you are reminded should you look at its content.* Doing that these days you are far, far more likely to read about a soccer coach who just so happens to have the same name as Frank--while it seems telling that Frank's most conspicuous appearance in the print media in years would seem to be an interview not with any outfit comparable to the Times (or even The Guardian or Harper's, for which he used to write), but with Jacobin back in February.

* In the wake of Trump's victory at the polls (which came after I wrote this post) the Times deigned to publish Frank once more. You may read the item here.

The Stories Elites Tell Themselves About the World

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:11:00 +0000

A New York Times story about the response of then-President of the United States Barack Obama himself in the wake of Donald Trump's victory at the polls in 2016 reported that Obama "had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and . . . promoted an empty cosmopolitanism that made many people feel left behind," and wondered aloud among his aides that "'Maybe we pushed too far . . . Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.'"

Whether it was an accurate account of President Obama's reaction or not it would seem telling that at least in the story he thought the vote was about "people . . . want[ing] to fall back into their tribe," and that this was what the Times reported--reflexively seeing the note of revolt in so many persons voting for Trump as a matter of cultural discontent rather than of economic discontent, with the issue "liberal" cosmopolitanism rather than the neoliberal economics promoted by "liberal" and "conservative" alike for four decades. Never popular and increasingly bankrupt, that neoliberalism, which eviscerated the industrial base, gutted public services and protective regulations, left Americans' incomes in freefall relative to the cost of living, and, as Arthur Schlesinger put it when writing of the monetary policy of Andrew Jackson's day that all too closely paralleled that of the neoliberal era, generally left them "the victims of baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by," was plausibly what really made much of the American public "feel left behind."

That Obama himself--Obama, who after promising the public he would stand against those "baffling and malevolent economic forces" on the campaign trail behaved as a staunch neoliberal in office, be the issue the financial crisis and its fallout, the reform of health care, energy-climate policy, or anything else--might in spite of his conduct of the immediately preceding eight years have in an unguarded moment actually shown himself to have been thinking this speaks to the depth of the preference of the elite Obama derived from and represents for regarding politics as a matter of cultural divisions than of class divisions, or "values" rather than "interests."

Thus does the American punditry prefer to speak of the "culture war" pitting religiosity against secularism, see the country as torn between states which are "Blue" or "Red," or even claim to "discover" that America is really nine or eleven or some other number of "nations" whose differences of culture are the key to understanding the country's political life--and amid it all see opposition to "globalization" less as a matter of reaction by those injured or made insecure by it against its economic inequities than a System that in the age of robotized factories producing Lexus luxury automobiles, some want to "hold on to their olive trees" (as Thomas Friedman wrote, and as Obama's statement suggested in its less imagistic way).

All this is underlined by how they do speak of "class" on those occasions when they dare to do so at all, preferring to treat this, too, as a cultural matter, stress "education" and consumption choices over property, income, wealth (such that for many, as Thomas Frank put it, "the word 'elite' refers . . . to someone who likes books"); bind up class with regionalism, as in discussion of "coastal" or "big-city" elites as against the presumed non-elite of the interior, rural areas and so forth, or with race as in rhetoric about the "White working class" (as if working people were not the great majority in every ethnic group); and speak of "classism" as if it were analogous to prejudices of ethnicity or gender ("racism," "sexism," etc.) rather than class being a matter of the fundamental structure of society itself, with all that means for understanding anything about society at all.

The result is about what you would expect, the Establishment "expert" centrists so fawn over apt to understand little or nothing about these matters, and after opening their unsightly yaps leave the minds of those who heed them even more muddled than they were before, such that it would have been better had they never said anything at all.

Europe's Failures: A Few Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:10:00 +0000

In the 2020s the prospects of the European Union (EU) seem a long way from what its advocates and sympathizers and even its opponents thought it was a generation ago (when, for example, the anti-EU crowd in Britain hated the entity, but thought anything like Brexit just a fantasy, however much they longed for it). The change arguably comes down to three ways in which the EU's foundations proved wholly inadequate for the ambitions held for it, namely

1. The building up of the institution on the basis of short-term elite interest, and even that rather unevenly, the elites of the more powerful countries advantaged against those from poorer countries. Thus the EU produced a trade, fiscal and currency regime which gave German exporters access to the vast European market, the benefit of the cheaper labor just over their border in Eastern Europe, and the help of (in relation to their products) an undervalued currency that made for that much more competitiveness in the global market, producing Germany the export giant, and indeed the way a "greater Germany" in the economic sense has come to be the core of the Union. Other members of the Union, however, have not done nearly so well, Germany's gain often their loss (Germany is a champion exporter in part because it outcompetes them, while Germany does that in part because the German government has sacrificed the social rights of the German worker on the altar of "competitiveness" in the Hartz reforms and other policy changes, and with them their share in any gains, as the rising inequality in the country testifies. Meanwhile, looking even beyond the distribution of immediate costs and benefits, what about when just keeping the arrangement some found so congenial going required more than what German industrialists have found congenial in the short term? The European Union was not prepared for that.

2. The practical limits to Europe's expansion in the resulting conditions. Especially in light of that stress on short-term elite interests, with some elites more elite than others, one could expect expansion to stop where really big, deep, long-term thinking was required to make it happen—with one result the failure to incorporate the great bulk of the old "East bloc" and especially the former Soviet Union, with only Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (6 million people altogether) in the EU, and Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and especially Russia (almost 200 million people) outside it. The result is that in spite of the fall of the Iron Curtain and three decades of existence what is called the "European Union" actually encompasses a mere two-fifths of the territory of the European continent, containing a mere three-fifths of that continent's people, with little prospect of its being extended any time soon.

3. The economic situation of Europe along with the rest of the world in an era of profound global downturn, with which European elites were ill-equipped to deal. It can seem symbolic that the European Economic Community's first round of expansion came in 1973, the year widely associated with the end of the post-war boom, and the epoch of weaker growth that followed; that the European Community became the European Union in 1993, amid a deep global recession; that, barring the entry of Croatia, the EU reached its limits with the inductions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the year in which a long-developing financial crisis came to a head and plunged the world into a recession from which it never truly recovered, such that it can seem as if Japan's "lost decades" became the norm for the industrialized world, with all that meant for Europe's own prospects.

One may question whether in anything like the world we live in the European Union could have developed in any other way. The relevant negotiations were between countries very different in development and interests, very unequal in size and power, and just as unequal internally with all that meant for the line they took. Reflecting this economic integration ranked at the top of the list of priorities of the elites of the participating countries, rather than democracy, equality or social concern, with many not at all sorry to see economic decisions about such fundamental matters as government spending or monetary policy made by bodies less accountable to their electorates, and imposing limits on what national governments could do--while as they went about it they proved no more "enlightened" in their understanding of their self-interest than their counterparts elsewhere (the delusions of their silly admirers just that). Subsequently, whether one attributes the fact to the weakness of those countries' economies under their pre-1989 regimes, or the chaotic and destructive character of the reform process their leaders undertook afterward, Eastern Europe was in a far weaker state than many of those who had hoped for really continent-wide union had thought it would be in the 1990s, with all that meant for their integration into Europe, and what they would add to it if they were integrated. (There was, too, the sheer size and potential power of the Russian Federation even when taken as a single state, and as those familiar at all with geopolitics know full well, the implications of a Russo-German combination in any form for those anxious about the balance of power in the world.) Meanwhile the period generally saw slow growth, and frequent crisis, which Europe's neoliberalism-minded elite met with, again, orthodoxy, most notoriously in the post-Great Recession sovereign debt crisis. (Indeed, if Europe has done less poorly in relative terms than the sneering of committed Europe-bashers about "Eurosclerosis" implies it has still quite sufficed to pose no end of troubles from the standpoint of profits, employment, taxes, budgets and debt--all as Europe has abided by the neoliberal trend rather than trying to "buck" it, arguably to its disadvantage, both where its economic performance and its political attractiveness have been concerned.)

All of this meant that the EU was institutionally underdeveloped--as in its having a currency union without also having a "transfer union," with all the inherent instability of such a combination. It meant that Europe had a far narrower base of power, quantitatively and qualitatively (compare the EU that exists now with one that had managed to integrate the European members of the former Soviet Union, with their 200 million people, their natural resource wealth, and in particular Russia's technological specialties and military capacities), while rather than its tensions being dissolved, or sublimated, within a Europe concerned with getting on rather than nationalistic feuds and power politics, the EU's eastern frontier was that much more a scene of potential conflict (with far and away the most dramatic instance the conflicts that now have Russia and Ukraine fighting the biggest conventional war on European soil since 1945). It meant that if German business did well, at least for a time, deindustrialized, on the whole West European states got poorer and the East European states which had been allowed into the club saw their aspirations to solidly First World productivity and living standards disappointed amid shock that tested the institution's viability, and proved as unflattering to its independence as it had been unflattering toward the independence of its members (the U.S. Federal Reserve bailing out the EU's banks with $10 trillion in loans amid the Great Recession). And especially with Europe identified with elite interests and policies which hurt working people, and ruled out those policies that might help them (for instance, a freer hand in the fiscal arena), that the European project failed to acquire a popular base--all as those looking to play what is often euphemistically called the "populist" card very easily pointed to Europe as the cause of their discontents, and won election after election by it in circumstances promising little but the continuation of the EU's stagnation and slow unraveling that has characterized its recent history. In fairness, ruptures like what we saw with Britain seem unlikely to recur any time soon. (Britain's long aloofness from the continent and physical insularity, and the way its size, financialization and apparent other options for association seemed to give it alternatives, are not shared by any other EU member, all as even then it has been a close-run, rancorous, widely regretted thing, unlikely to encourage imitation.) Still, it is highly plausible that the situation will still prevent further expansion and consolidation, while complicating any attempts at national or EU-wide solutions to the continent's larger and more pressing problems--all as my guess is that in spite of visions of a peace-and-prosperity-minded EU coming together for the sake of security in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the fact that the conflict has been hugely unpopular with many of the EU's various publics, and produced significant divergences in policy between its member governments, will only add to Europe's difficulties in forming a "more perfect union," not facilitate its surmounting them.

"It's Still the Economy, Stupid"--and Don't You Ever Forget It

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:10:00 +0000

"It's The Economy, Stupid" was a cliché of the 1992 presidential election.

By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)

That it was not the economy, stupid, was a comforting thought for those who hoped to see the Democratic Party do well. After all, they were incumbents in a situation in which the economy was not doing well, which meant that its being about the economy was to their disadvantage--the more in as the Democratic Party had dispelled a great many illusions about itself since 1992, perhaps usefully explained through reference to that longtime stalwart of the post-war Democratic Party, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. As he explained it, in America "Big Business" government is the default mode of government--an unsustainable default, in that Big Business government eventually makes a mess of things, eventually producing an overwhelming pressure for reform that acts as a necessary, periodic, corrective. So far as conventional wisdom went it was the Democratic Party's function to be the vehicle of such reform--a function the party bosses never had much enthusiasm for, and which they increasingly kicked to the curb from the 1970s on with the ascent of Charles Peters' "neo-liberals," and indeed the election of a member of that group, Bill Clinton, who made the Democratic Party a party of neoliberalism in the more widely used economic sense of that term, a course from which it has not deviated (not with Gore, not with Obama, not with Hillary Clinton, not with Biden, not with Harris), in spite of the public's consistent, increasing, undeniable hostility to that line and its results (the mess that got bigger and bigger because reform never came), which played its part in costing them election after election (the midterms of 1994 that ushered in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America-armed Republican Revolution, in 2000, in the midterms of 2010, in 2016).

Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.

Was the "Economy" Really Doing So Well Under Biden?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:09:00 +0000

Before and after the recent election Establishment commentators claimed that the U.S. economy was performing splendidly, insisting that inflation is falling, unemployment low, growth robust, and the stock market "booming." Yet anyone with a scintilla of understanding of these matters knows how all of this can have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual condition of the vast majority of the country, and how it has rightly become cynical about them. The official inflation numbers have long been suspect in the eyes of the public--with the same going for unemployment. (Consider how before the pandemic we had many years of "full employment" that were on close inspection anything but.) "Growth," which is automatically overstated whenever inflation is understated, has long been a matter of paper profits in an ever-more hollowed-out economy, with the same going for the stock market, the dubious benefits of all of which accrue to the super-rich and not working people, whose disadvantage is often registered in a rising Dow Jones Average. (A company announces layoffs, and its stock will rise high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that hiring is slow, and the Average shoots up.)

Certainly it ignores the way that the long-term decline in the ability of working people to afford the essentials of life, like housing, has continued painfully these past years. Back in the 1960s the median-priced home went for the equivalent of three to four years of the median male income. By the 2010s it was more like seven to eight years, and in 2022 it hit nine years. Only a complete idiot would characterize this as a situation bespeaking unexampled prosperity for the public, the more in as the trend has been similar with other essentials, from the price of a car (used as well as new), to the price of health insurance, to the price of college tuition. It does not sweeten the deal that those supposedly enjoying this era of "low unemployment" have experienced it as an era of high underemployment, not least for college graduates, with, contrary to the STEM fetishists and those sneering at the victims of the student debt racket who love painting its sufferers as fools who got "useless" humanities degrees (the number of these has in fact fallen sharply in recent years), the underemployed very frequently people with "practical," occupationally-oriented degrees. (Did you know that a year after graduation 1 in 4 engineering majors lacks employment in their field, and the picture just gets worse from there? Indeed, the practical business major is no better off than the humanities degree holders.)

It ignores, too, the fact that, as Michael Roberts has explained, "[t]he headline GDP [Gross Domestic Product growth] rate" that is the basis for the talk of robust growth, "is driven by healthcare services, which really measure the rising cost of health insurance," with a little help from those extra defense outlays for the wars being waged abroad (hardly the form of consumption Americans equate with higher living standards!)--all as inventories of unsold goods are piling up, with the last fact the easier to understand when one remembers that, as Ruchir Sharma admitted in the Financial Times the day before the election, the gap between the spending of the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent has become "the widest . . . on record," the richest consumers spending, the others having less and less leeway to do so given all the ways in which they are hard-pressed--and of course, not getting any relief from the rising stock prices, because they do not own stock.

Still, for all that the talking heads have persisted in telling the public "You've never had it so good"--and afterward, apparently not caring in the slightest that the public disbelieved what they have to say not because it was deluded, but because it was less deluded than the "experts" for whom centrists so snarlingly demand absolute deference . Of course, considering the experts as deluded one is left with the problem of determining in just which way they happened to be so deluded--whether they were deluded about what the public could be got to believe about the economy, or deluded about the state of the economy itself. The second possibility cannot be ruled out--or the dangers associated with that slighted.

The Election of 2024: A Predictable Debacle for the Democratic Party?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:09:00 +0000

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is over, and if you are reading this you almost certainly know exactly how it went.

Not only did Trump win, but he became only the second Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988 (the only other such case was Bush in 2004 when he was up against John Kerry, 'nuff said), and that by a margin of almost three million votes at last count. It is also the case that in spite of (the fixation of many analysts on the existence of an unprecedented "gender gap" in this election ) those same observers, including the folks at the Guardian (second to none in its stridency about this reading of earlier polling), are now looking at the actual result of the election and scratching their heads in their inability to support that conclusion with the available data, though not for lack of trying--the better, I suppose, to sideline the way in which the matter of "the economy" was decisive with voters who largely experienced the situation as miserable, all as the Democratic Party's "strategists" delivered a "greatest hits" edition of their record of post-World War II failures. Consider the following:

* An unpopular Democratic Party incumbent (an ex-Senator who was the last Democratic President's VP) whose domestic program withered while he escalated U.S. involvement in a major land war on the Eurasian mainland in a process that saw him keep going beyond his formerly declared limits with no clear end in sight, announces late in his first term that he will not run for a second. Leaving his party off-balance, the party bosses, displaying contempt for the preferences of the Democratic Party base--and giving a rising anti-war movement two middle fingers--sideline any input from the party base to put "their" candidate on the ballot, with, among other consequences, their leaving the Republican candidate room in which to pose as a "peace candidate" before a public sick and tired of war.

* A Democratic President elected in a period of backlash against what was seen by its detractors as disgracefully crude, corrupt and even impeachable Republican governance presides over a period of national crisis in his first term including inflationary shock. The rising prices, and his opposition to striking workers, which saw him resort to old anti-union legislation to suppress a major strike action, infuriate a great many working people, enough so as to make them shift their support to his Republican opponent.

* The VP of a Democratic administration which was widely seen as having betrayed working people runs as his party's nominee for President in the next election--with the baggage of their predecessor's unpopularity compounding the candidate's problems of simply being "uninspiring" to the electorate, both as a policymaker, and as an individual in his own right (with their having tried and failed to get the party nomination in a prior presidential primary arguably not a point in his favor).

* The Democratic Party, facing a rising tide of anti-elitist, anti-Establishment sentiment and popular opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that the incumbent Democratic President has not dispelled, insists on running a thoroughly Establishment neoliberal-neoconservative candidate against a Republican (the very same one!) appealing to populist resentments in ways that made many in his own party uncomfortable, and relying on identity politics and the failings of the opponent much more than a positive platform to "sell" the public on them.

Yes, as the above implies this election saw repetitions of the mistakes of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016, of Johnson and Humphrey and Carter and Gore and Hillary Clinton in just the one election, while not content with simply repeating their own mistakes they decided to repeat at least one great Republican mistake of the past as well. In 1992 the Democratic Party in a hard-times election went by the principle "It's the Economy, Stupid," as the Republicans tried to make it an election about the "culture war." However, that was exactly what the Democratic Party did this time, its supporters insisting "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" on the way to making clear who really was being stupid here.

No serious analysis of "what went wrong" for the Democratic Party can overlook the plenitude of factors discussed here--and no analysis which does overlook them should be taken seriously. Which tells you just how seriously you can take the drivel that is most of what has been written about the matter to date, and the worse sure to come as the party bosses and their supporters blame anything and everything but themselves for the outcome in a reminder that the "pragmatic," "practical," "conventional wisdom"-abiding person abides by the opposite of what Uncle Ben taught Peter Parker. If hypocritically saying that with power comes responsibility in practice they go by the principle that those who have all of the power have none of the responsibility--and vice-versa--and snarl at anyone who would suggest they ought to do otherwise.

Owen Jones on Centrism in 2024

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:07:00 +0000

Earlier this month Owen Jones had something to say of the "surprise" outcome of the U.S. election--specifically, that it was no surprise. Discontent, not least over such matters as the purchasing power of hard-pressed consumers, tends to work against incumbents--and Kamala Harris, whose substitution for President Joe Biden on the ballot a scarce four months before election day in a manner many criticized as not just belated and undemocratic but incompetent, saw her promise continuity to a public which, on various grounds, seems to see continuity as an existential threat to the things they care about. Of course, many others have said that, but Jones does sum up the situation in a last sentence that I think merits attention from anyone considering the election, and what it reminds one about regarding the limits of the kind of politics the Democratic candidate ran on, namely that "voters . . . wanted politicians to solve their problems."

Alas, in the eyes of the centrist that desire has always been suspect--and in an era in which those who espouse centrism regard themselves as less and less able to do just that than their predecessors, simply unreasonable. Unsurprisingly centrists have a harder and harder time winning elections these days--and equally unsurprising, centrists refuse to acknowledge any connection between one fact and the other.

Owen Jones on Centrism in 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:06:00 +0000

Some years ago Owen Jones took on the matter of centrism. As Mr. Jones remarked, centrists present themselves as "above ideology: pragmatic, focused on 'what works,' being grown up," in contrast with the extremists to the right of them, and (especially) the extremists to the left of them, while when one moves beyond the abstract principles to specific policy positions one finds that they offer "a blend of market liberalism, social liberalism and--more often than not--a hawkish military posture." Translating to an obliviousness about the reality that they are just another pack of ideologues pushing most of the substance of right-wing politics with an insistence quite at odds with their pretensions to an enlightened moderation.

All this seems to me about right as a characterization of British Labour party centrism. It also seems to me that Jones was right about how centrists have conducted themselves amid what must now be regarded as decades of not only economic stagnation but economic crisis and nationalistic backlash, "offer[ing] little evidence of reflection about their plight," sure that everyone but themselves is to blame for their rejection by a public as they refuse to admit the existence of problems, let alone suggest solutions.

Of course, in considering what this has meant for the Labour Party, where the centrists were out of power amid the ascendancy of "Corbynism" (and going out of their minds over the fact), Jones would seem to have underestimated centrism's capacity to recover politically--and this without modifying themselves in the slightest. Thus does the last sentence of his comment read that "until [the centrists] come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again." Not quite two-and-a-half years later Keir Starmer ousted Jeremy Corbyn from the party leadership, while if it is undeniable that Starmer passed himself off as a social democrat at the time of the contest, his quick and brazen retreat from his promises (confirmed in his repudiation of almost all of them by the time of the 2024 General Election, as an examination of the party's GE Manifesto shows, while he engaged in a ruthless purge of the left-leaning members of the party in Parliament), makes it almost impossible to deny that the center is back in control of not just the party but the country without having come to terms with said failures as it shamelessly flogs the same old policies.

Still, in fairness to Jones one should note that if the center returned not just the leadership of the party but to 10 Downing Street it did so in most unusual circumstances. The election of 2024, after all, came after fourteen straight years of Tory rule with little but a train of disasters to show for it (austerity, Brexit, the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 sterling crisis) that ignominiously ended one prime ministership after another in unprecedented succession (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss each leaving office in, to use one of Ms. Truss' favorite words, "disgrace"); and with the particularly unfortunate and multiply unsalable Rishi Sunak at the head as Nigel Farage's Reform UK split the right's vote in a manner unseen in British electoral history; which enabled Starmer to become Prime Minister even with his party getting the ballots of a mere fifth of the eligible voters (rather less than Jeremy Corbyn lost with in 2017, and even less than he lost with in 2019). Nevertheless, if Starmer's becoming Prime Minister is less explicable as a Labour victory than as a shocking Tory collapse that one can be forgiven for recalling to the minds of the historically literate of 2024 the shake-up of the electoral system seen in 1924, it still happened, a reminder of just how much business-as-usual manages to creak on in the absence of anything like genuine public support for political "leaders" and the policies they advance as a product of "consensus."

Is Britain Without London Really Poorer Than Any U.S. State?

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:06:00 +0000

About a decade ago the Spectator's Fraser Nelson made the observation that when London is cut out of the picture Britain is poorer than Mississippi when considered in terms of per capita Gross Domestic Product, with comparisons of this sort since becoming a commonplace.

Is it really true, however?

Recently checking the relevant statistics at the Office of National Statistics I found that in per capita terms London was in 2022 almost twice as "rich" as the rest of Britain, with a per capita GDP of £63,400 to £32,900.

As sterling equaled $1.24 on average in 2022, one may say that Britain outside London had a per capita GDP of $40,800 that year. Meanwhile (going by the GDP figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the mid-year population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau) the poorest U.S. state was Mississippi, which had a per capita GDP of $48,600 in that year--while second-poorest Alabama had a rather higher $56,200. In other words, Britain outside London was about a quarter poorer than Alabama, and a seventh poorer than Mississippi, when judged by that metric.

The result is that the numbers really do bear out the claim--unfortunately for Britain. Still, significant as the regional disparity may be within Britain, the disparity within London itself should not be overlooked. The city has a Gini coefficient of 0.58--which bespeaks far greater inequality in London than in the country as a whole (Britain's score ranged over 32-33 in 2017-2021), and indeed a wider disparity than has been observed in countries like Botswana and Colombia. It is thus not Londoners who are rich, but a comparative few of them--once again, the differences between classes trumping the differences between regions, though of course acknowledgment of the fact is less than congenial for commentators who prefer to concentrate their attention, and their audience's, on anything else.

Meanwhile, whether one thinks in terms of region or class the reality is inseparable from the way the British economy has transformed since Margaret Thatcher's time, with a near half century of neoliberal reform thoroughly deindustrializing and financializing Britain. London has been a beneficiary of financialization, and the city's emergence as a second or even first home for a disproportionate share of the planet Earth's oligarchs, their hangers-on, parasites, etc.--while other regions have had less to show in the way of anything to blunt the losses.

Of course, Keir Starmer's new government being what it predictably is, anyone would be very naive indeed to expect any significant change in direction any time soon--with whatever little room there may have been for those questioning this path to continue hoping for change pretty much shrinking every time Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves makes a public statement.

Rethinking How We Talk About the Political Spectrum

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:05:00 +0000

Recently I remarked the unsatisfactory way in which we discuss political ideology in America.

Having done so it seems to me fair to offer a possible alternative that has seemed to me useful.

In explaining it I think it best to start by saying that, contrary to what some seem to think, the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative," "radical" and "reactionary," "right" and "left," and their various synonyms and derivatives deriving from the Enlightenment and its subsequent controversies remain entirely relevant to the discussion of American politics today. However, there is a significant gap between the labeling and the actualities that causes a lot of confusion. What people conventionally call "conservatives" tend to actually be reactionaries, desirous of restoring a past state of society (somehow going back to before the New Deal, or the Progressive era, or the counterculture of the 1960s, for example); what we call "liberals" and might more usefully call "centrists," who are really conservatives; and what people conventionally call the "left," insofar as this is identified with identity politics, is a conservative or reactionary politics which differs from the others in being the conservative or reactionary nationalism of groups which have been marginalized. Thus do all of them broadly embrace the neoliberal-neoconservative economic and social vision, domestically and internationally, with this at most being adapted in an age of ascendant economic nationalism and geopolitical shifts (above all, related to the rise of China).

Considering the picture of conservatives who are really reactionaries, centrists who are conservatives, and a left that is not really farther to the left than the others, it has seemed to me fair to, following Richard Hofstadter's precedent, refer to conservatism today as "pseudo-conservatism," and extend this to the others by making "pseudo-liberalism" a synonym for today's centrism and so-called "liberalism," and label what many rush to call the left the "pseudo-left," respectively--with the pseudo-liberal, in line with their centrism, giving a good deal of ground to the pseudo-conservative in such areas as the economy and foreign policy, and making concessions to the pseudo-left's demands in the cultural sphere.

Of course, other tendencies exist. There are old-fashioned liberals--reformists eager to redress what they see as the problems of capitalism out of genuine social and economic concern rather than merely "upholding consensus" in the fashion of the centrists in those days in which their equation with liberalism was most justified, and supportive of much more reform than the minimalism toward which centrists tended even before the neoliberal turn. There are classically class-minded leftists interested in deeper change. But while one may speak of liberal or left individuals, media outlets, even political parties, and even argue that the associated sentiments are widely held among a large part of the population, none is an organized and significant force at the level of national politics. That is a very different thing from those tendencies having somehow disappeared, and anyone who writes them off totally makes a profound mistake (just as mid-century centrists made a profound mistake when they thought the "pseudo-conservative" right finished)--but there is no question that, as things have generally stood in recent decades, they have been very marginalized, so much so that those who would like to pretend they did not exist anymore have been able to get away with it (at least, in the muddled mainstream mind).

Discussing Centrism

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:05:00 +0000

The indifference to clarity and precision in the use of political terminology by persons presented to the world as "experts" has long been a theme of my writing, mainly by way of the muddle they unnecessarily and unhelpfully make of a great many terms, with one particularly fraught case "centrism." Most of the term's users think it means middle-of-the-roadness, oblivious as they are to the extent to which it is a very specific, highly articulated way of looking at the world spelled out explicitly by a great many thinkers in a great many classics of history and sociology in the mid-century period that were read not just by academic specialists but the more alert members of the general public as well (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's The Age of Jackson and The Vital Center, Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, various works by "consensus historians" such as Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, etc.).

Of course, some will dismiss that theorizing as a relic of the past simply because of how far back in time it was, and how oblivious many in the present seem to be to it. However, American political culture at large, the content of the American news media, the conduct of policy and politics--the mainstream's notions of what views are allowable or not allowable in public, who is and is not an expert, how the news is to be presented, its apparent propensity for "both sidesism," etc., etc.--are explicable in terms of that mid-century theory, one reflection of which is how a great many persons in and out of public life who cannot even begin to provide a coherent explanation of centrism in the sense in which I am discussing it here nevertheless speak, act and give every sign of thinking like textbook centrists, the principles come to be so embedded in American political culture that without any exposure to explicit presentation of the theory they are sure of the associated prescriptions being correct, somehow. Indeed, they even speak the language of centrist theory--speaking of "pragmatism," "pluralism," "civility," "objectivity," "expertise" as good things, and "ideology" and "extremism" as bad things, even as they have only the haziest grasp of these concepts, let alone the larger thinking from which they are inextricable.

A reminder of how much power unconsidered ideas have over us, the result is that it seems well worthwhile to flatly explain what it is that they are talking about.