It's scary in several ways. Look particularly at the bottom left under "Unfunded Liabilities".
Unfunded Liability - (n) liability is a debt or obligation one party owes to other(s) some future date in time. Debt gets commonly settled by payment or performance of a service. An Unfunded Liability describes any liability, debt, mortgage, or obligation that one either does not have savings set aside for it.
At present the US Government has unfunded liabilities of $126 trillion. Just to be clear the US government has promised to $126 trillion but has no budget for paying any of it. This is medicare, pensions, social security, government debt, and so on.
And the GDP of the USA is $19 trillion. So the unfunded liabilities are 679% of GDP.
What happens when the US government defaults on its obligations? The constraints on debts to banks and other nations mean they will get priority. A major power defaulting on debts would threaten global chaos on a scale that would make the global financial crisis look like a day in the park. So what will happen is defaulting on domestic obligations: medicare, pensions, social security.
The other thing to notice is the differential between rise in wages and the rise in health care and education. Comparing 2000 and now.
mean income: $30,872 → $33,445 (+ 8.3%) healthcare costs: $5,508 → $11,516 (+109.1%) college tuition: $11,897 → $24,568 (+106.5%)
This trend is only continuing. It goes with another fact: successive generations have saved less, and fewer have saved at all, for retirement. Saving for retirement requires that we earn enough to put some aside. In my life time the developed world has moved from the wages of one man supporting the entire family with some put aside for a pension, to the wages of both parents being insufficient for live on.
This has been great for corporate profit margins. It has been great for shareholder dividends in this generation. But in another 50 years not only will the population be aging and longer lived, but it won't have saved for retirement. Just at the time when the government's own financial crisis is forcing them to stop spending on domestic obligations.
“We are not from the Right
nor from the Left.
We are from the Bottom
and we are coming for the ones at the Top”
In the politics of the Bottom we have to acknowledge that the Bottom have a uniformly terrible experience of government bureaucracy. They especially have a terrible experience of the legal system and the welfare system. Less money is spent on the Bottom. They get a worse education. They work harder. They don't live as long. They are bullied by the state and management. They are despised.
So the Bottom might not see socialism (the state running things) as a great idea. Handing power to the people who torment, torture, and kill the Bottom may seem like a bad idea to folk at the Bottom. Hence, many vote on the right to the consternation of the left. And they would not be wrong. You cannot empower the disempowered, by handing power to the state. The social liberal aims to give the Bottom a step up through education, healthcare, etc. But the bias in the system constantly sabotages this.
Unfortunately, contra the Liberal myth, the Bottom want to be empowered without taking responsibility. Who appears to offer this? Fascists. The Mafia. Gangs...
"Join us! No one will push you around (except us), we'll look after you and your family, you'll make good money, and there is a career path if you want it."
Fascists understand the bottom better than Socialists or Social Liberals. This is not a good thing... Economic Liberals (NeoLiberals) see the Bottom as an obstacle to prosperity.
The is a problem of Essentialism: the idea that being at the Bottom is not a matter of circumstances or chance; that is is somehow meaningful. If you trace back, people at the Bottom usually had everything taken away by the Top at some point and never recovered.
We have to somehow find a new dynamic. The court cases in the USA which aim to hold the oil companies to account for their deceptions on climate change is one good sign. Similarly the holding of big pharma to account for the opioid crisis.
Orwellian doublespeak has become the norm for politicians and big business. The tools of semantics leave us scratching our heads when someone says something and then claims not to have said it, or to have said something different, or to have meant something different. Pragmatics takes the nonsense in it's stride and asks the same question: what is the author of the speech act trying to do.
Sowing confusion amongst your enemies using disinformation is a classic military tactic. It undermines the ability of the enemy to understand your true intent and leaves them expending time, energy, and resources sifting through your utterances looking for the truth.
The use of disinformation and propaganda in warfare is not new. The routine overt use of them in domestic politics is. This tells us that the elite are on a war footing. And we, the people, are their enemy.
Google and other large internet companies rely on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to avoid liability for what people like me publish on my Google-owned blogs. This part of the CDA offers the internet giant legal immunity for content I create using their platform "in effect treating them as distributors of content and not publishers". And this seems fair enough. Google owns Blogger. There are millions of blogs on this platform and Google cannot reasonably moderate them expect retroactively if people complain. Google merely distribute my words. And I should be the one who has the liability.
Still, this doesn't explain why Google are giving a lot of money to quite so many right-wing think tanks. Nor why Google have been so defensive about being caught out.
“We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organisations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy,” the spokesperson said.
The reason they have been making contributions is that Republican senators, particular Ted Cruz have been calling for repeal of §320. And in particular Cruz argues that Google is biased in favour of the Democrats. That is that Google search results are biased. Here is Cruz grilling a Google representative on 16 July 2019:
Make no mistake, this is a disaster for Google! Because senators have power to change laws. If Google were deemed to be a publisher then they would be open to vast number of lawsuits from Republican supporters.
In Aug 2019 Slate ran an article with a bit more information on this.
"Fox News’ sister network Fox Business had discussed the July Senate testimony of a psychologist named Robert Epstein, who said that “Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.”
And President translated this into a Tweet that said in part "Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!" Now this is an obvious distortion of the facts and one of tens of thousands of lies that Trump has told.
Epstein works at the American Institute for Behavioral Research. But Epstein was already in a long standing conflict with Google: "In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website" (NYTimes). He subsequently made a career of criticizing Google and other big internet companies. And of course in the increasingly divided and paranoid politics of the US, Republicans latched onto this idea that Google had manipulated search results.
Of course Google has responded through the usual channels - the mainstream media. They have testified in But the parts of the media controlled by Republicans of the extreme views we associate with Cruz and Trump are not bound to give Google a fair hearing. The comments under that Ted Cruz video are disturbing in their partisan credulity and paranoia.
The original liberal country, the home of liberal democracy, the nation that has inscribed liberalism into the very fabric of their constitution has produced a generation, of mainly younger white men, who hate liberalism. I saw yesterday that young white men have issued death threats to Greta Thunberg who they see as representing a vast conspiracy against them. Angry older white men like Jordan Peterson have only stoked the fire higher by confirming their fears of a liberal conspiracy. It's not quite clear what this liberal conspiracy will achieve apart from free healthcare and green energy, but the paranoiacs associate it with gun control and with progressive social values.
We often see negative comments about Google bowing to political pressure to censor results in China. We seldom see analysis of the kind of political pressure that Google has to deal with in the USA where society was always economically right wing, but has become increasingly socially conservative and authoritarian. And make no mistake, Epstein has put Google firmly in the cross hairs.
Google should be scrutinised. It enjoys a monopoly on the market and it is not always a friend to the individual citizen. Issues about privacy, data, metadata, and censorship are important and Google should be seen to be conforming to social norms on these issues, or at the very least complying with relevant law.
But the pressure Google face from paranoid Republicans and the rednecks who support Trump is something else. We can perhaps understand why they have resorted to giving large (but undisclosed sums) to right-wing think tanks. Google is fighting for survival and needs allies in the Republican Party to help thwart the insane clown posse that is Trump and his supporters. They cannot simply make a rational argument and present evidence because the other side don't operate on facts and reason. They operate on emotions and prejudice.
Still there is something fundamentally immoral about supporting these organisations that are contributing to climate change denial. Sure, other big companies are doing it, but since when has that been a valid moral argument? Two wrongs don't make a right. Climate change is the issue of our time. And even if we are wrong about everything and we clean up the environment only to realise that we needn't have, we still have clean air, clean water, lower deaths from pollution, and so on. We have to make the transition to a Green Economy anyway. Climate change just makes it urgent.
Lewis Powell argued in 1971 that the American free enterprise system was under attack by progressive social attitudes (by which he specifically meant the environmental movement, but at that time presumably also the civil rights movement as well).
The freedom of economic liberals has always been about the freedom to exploit the people and world for profit. The so-called free enterprise system only ever worked well for large multinationals that pursued and gained monopoly power. It wasn't free for anyone else. The free market ideology that combined classical economic liberalism and the new economic theory of monetarism never really addressed the complete lack of freedom of markets. Google is fighting to survive and against a pernicious trend led by a corrupt politician who is misusing his office, but they are using their wealth to buy political influence. This is the flaw in the free market system: those who could, always have manipulated markets for their own benefit.
Capitalism always ends up being about the elites fighting for power over the workers. If that means drafting our workers to kill your workers, then so be it. The various factions get involved in the deluded idea that by backing the right tyrant they will get special treatment in the new dispensation. So suddenly the young right-wing white men of the USA are against Google, even though Google's contribution to their lives far exceeds that of senator Cruz and this cronies. It's all part of a sinister plot.
All this is frankly terrifying. Trump, Cruz, the Republican Party, are corrupt and disinterested in dealing with climate change because it shifts profit making to other industries. Google, in a shameless attempt to buy political influence with the allies of these corrupt politicians in order to stave off a disadvantageous change i the law, are making large contributions to the very think tanks that fuel the Republican climate change denial. The only winner here is climate change denial.
The UK where I live is scarcely any better. Venal millionaire politicians are destroying democracy for money.
"By the end of the 19th century, some unforeseen but serious consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America had produced a deepening disenchantment with the principal economic basis of classical liberalism—the ideal of a market economy. The main problem was that the profit system had concentrated vast wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of industrialists and financiers, with several adverse consequences. First, great masses of people failed to benefit from the wealth flowing from factories and lived in poverty in vast slums. Second, because the greatly expanded system of production created many goods and services that people often could not afford to buy, markets became glutted and the system periodically came to a near halt in periods of stagnation that came to be called depressions. Finally, those who owned or managed the means of production had acquired enormous economic power that they used to influence and control government, to manipulate an inchoate electorate, to limit competition, and to obstruct substantive social reform. In short, some of the same forces that had once released the productive energies of Western society now restrained them; some of the very energies that had demolished the power of despots now nourished a new despotism."
"As modern liberals struggled to meet the challenge of stagnating living standards in mature industrial economies, others saw an opportunity for a revival of classical liberalism. The intellectual foundations of this revival were primarily the work of the Austrian-born British economist Friedrich von Hayek and the American economist Milton Friedman. One of Hayek’s greatest achievements was to demonstrate, on purely logical grounds, that a centrally planned economy is impossible. He also famously argued, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), that interventionist measures aimed at the redistribution of wealth lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Friedman, as one of the founders of the modern monetarist school of economics, held that the business cycle is determined mainly by the supply of money and by interest rates, rather than by government fiscal policy—contrary to the long-prevailing view of Keynes and his followers. These arguments were enthusiastically embraced by the major conservative political parties in Britain and the United States, which had never abandoned the classical liberal conviction that the market, for all its faults, guides economic policy better than governments do."
I believe the present wave of authoritarian, nationalistic, and violent politics is the direct result of 40 years of neoliberalism undercutting workers pay and conditions, undermining job security, and generally telling the citizen that they don't matter. 40 years of neoliberal politicians and corporate CEOs corrupting public office and subverting democracy.
There is no govt money for the people because it's all going to subsidise multinational corporations. We have pogroms against "benefit cheats" but tax cheats who steal 100x more are routinely ignored.
This is a mirror of what we saw during the decline of classical liberalism. It "concentrated vast wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of industrialists and financiers," and the masses did not benefit; it caused cycles of boom and bust; and lastly those who had great wealthy used it to buy influence in and control of government, and to manipulate the electorate. (Adapted from Encyclopedia Britannica).
While authoritarian, nationalistic, and violent politics did not take hold everywhere as a result, it did take hold in enough places that we had to fight WWII to stop it. And after that we saw a brief period of humanistic, society-oriented politics until the early 1970s when the economic liberals merged their ideas with the new monetarism to create the new classical liberalism or neoliberalism. The neoliberals launched a "counterattack" against what Lewis Powell called the attack on the free enterprise system. They bought up the media. They bought up business schools. They founded think tanks to employ the business school graduates to keep the message in the media. They built power base that is more or less impervious to governance and democracy.
We did not learn the lessons of history. And now the farce is playing out as tragedy. The difference this time is that 40 years of neoliberalism have ignited climate change, which may well already be irreversible.
In response to this, Monbiot really does have much to offer beyond some simple common sense. I agree that insulting the opposition is a mistake. Insults raise the tension and make resolution less likely. Of course appeasement is not going to work in this case either. This also has historical precedent.
I think we have to take to the streets in large numbers and demand change. But the UK is a deeply divided country at present, and this favours the Romans Tories, while the Judeans Left cannot stop their infighting even for a second. So a political solution seems a long way off, because the party that creates discord is not going to be stopped by the party embodying discord. In the USA the impeachment of Trump looks encouraging, but remember that Pence will be his replacement. Elsewhere things seem to hang in the balance. And every day the earth is heating up...
