When you shrug your shoulders when corrupt elites flout parliamentary means of accountability you abandon the surest peaceful means of addressing that corruption. If you simultaneously delude yourselves that your usual means of protesting constitutes "holding their feet to the fire" when, in reality, they accomplish nothing, it means that the corruption continues. You could use the legal system. But corrupt elites often use their time in power to de-criminalize their actions, pack the judiciary, and hire the police.
For decades there has been a concerted effort on the part of elites to neuter the regulatory state (such as it was) to allow oligarchs to "regulate" themselves and to abolish or weaken or abuse those bodies tasked with oversight of government.
More and more, with stephen harper's Conservatives' election fraud and the Republicans in the USA hypocritically whining that the election was stolen from them (ignoring their own sabotage, gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts) it's clear that "throwing the bums out" (to replace them with other stinky bums) is becoming less likely.
This leaves violence as the only way an injured public can effect retribution on elite actors who have/are harming them. And violence is dehumanizing. And, nowadays, elites and the states they control have a vastly superior arsenal of the means of violence to what the people have.
I'd wanted to say something to that effect on my last post about "De-Democratization." But it also fits as a response to these two articles that I saw recently. The first (another one from Juan Cole: "From Covid to Power outages in Ice Storms: the Texas Republican Party has created a Failed State."
The GOP is about coddling the very rich. The poor babies don’t like being regulated, being made to spend money on the welfare of the people, or being taxed. Who will will take these burdens off the snowflake business classes? Never fear, the GOP is here.
The Republican Party is the victim of magical thinking that the market can solve all problems if only it is unleashed and freed of the shackles of government.
These precepts are ugly, producing an ever ratcheting economic inequality in which much of the country’s wealth is in the talons of a handful of billionaires while millions live in poverty and food insecurity and even many workers are part of the growing class of working poor.
...
Would it not be better to have a larger public sector and electricity during ice storms than capitalism and 4 million people without power?
The state’s privately owned power plants have not been weatherized to deal with severe winter storms. The equipment at the electricity plants itself froze and stopped working.
Because the private companies that own the plants did not want to spend the money to weatherize them. Indeed, the deregulation of the electricity grid may have encouraged companies not to weatherize. This, even though severe winter storms hit the Southwest roughly once every 8-10 years. They are not rare.
Officials of the Texas Republican Party were aware of this problem and did nothing. The companies were aware and did nothing. The market does not like investing money to forestall a disaster that may be 8 years away.
We see the same thing with right-wing governments here in Canada, whether federal or provincial. The governments of stephen harper (some minority governments and a majority) were all freak shows. harper's front bench were either disgusting troglodytes like Jason Kenney, John Baird or Pierre Pollievre, or shamelessly incompetent ciphers like Joe Oliver or Tony Clement. Their policies were always based on their moronic ideology and their defenses of their stupid behaviour were always laughable.
Nowadays the torch has been passed to Doug Ford (brother of [the now deceased] international disgrace/Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford) in Ontario, with Jason Kenney having relocated from Ottawa to Edmonton, Alberta. Doug Ford begain "strong," braying like an arrogant jackass and attempting all sorts of rotten policies. There was an enormous social pushback against him and he found himself universally hated. Chagrined already, the coronavirus crisis saw Ford mouthing the words of a serious person and making token steps to follow fact-based policies. In a world containing deluded cretins like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, this behaviour garnered a lot of public compliments. Remember though, Doug Ford is a 21st Century "conservative." A a key tenet of this ideology is that if spending money on safeguards to keep the elderly clients of Long-Term Care facilities costs money that eats into the profits of the facilities' scumbag owners, then that money should not, and will not be spent. It is the politicians' job in such instances to lie their fat, stupid faces off about how they're "moving heaven and earth" to protect the seniors and their overworked, underpaid, unprotected caregivers.
Meanwhile, in Alberta, Jason Kenney, having won his leadership of the United Conservative Party through corruption and fraud, and led that party to power by an electorate that had kept the earlier, Progressive Conservative Party in power for four decades, only replacing them with the Alberta NDP when the last PC government responded to a financial crisis caused by a drop in oil prices as being the fault of Albertans selfishness. It wasn't the FORTY-FOUR YEARS of PC governments' giving away a non-renewable resource at firesale prices, failing to invest what money they did raise, and telling Albertans that not having to pay sales taxes was their birthright.
Kenney has gone on to declare war on Alberta's healthcare system (because he's a shameless servant of private healthcare providers and insurers and he doesn't care how many shlubs have to be bankrupted and killed as a result), welcome environmentally devastating mountain-top removal coal mining (COAL for gawd's sake!!!) and treating COVID-19 as an annoying urban legend. Because the man is a fucking idiot and a crazed religious freak.
But the thing is, how did we get this way? Conservatives were not so brain-dead in the 1950's to the 1980's, were they? Certainly, as I've been saying a lot recently; conservative brains are hard-wired to see and focus on potential threats more than other brains are. But that shouldn't be a cause for 24-7 stupidity. You can fear "the mob" and rapid changes to the social fabric without being a reality-denying incompetent. The main problem with conservative politics is that they are wedded to traditional power balances and traditional morals and they ignore their own beliefs about human motivation. If individuals are selfish, grasping and greedy, then why insulate elites/oligarchs from change? Why allow them to pursue their selfish goals with impunity? If group politics are "culture wars" or chances for lazy people to use politics to get what they couldn't achieve on their own merits, then how are traditional morals and customs not simultaneously ways for already privileged groups to keep what they have?
More and more, our oligarchs have become non-productive, self-centred, pampered psychopaths. And even those who demonstrate talent and ability and thereby build something new get vastly overcompensated. The majority of the capitalist class is dedicated to short-term plundering and this has been going on for a long time. The only way to sell such a political movement is by ignoring the results of their crimes and blaming everything on scapegoats. The ridiculousness and stupidity of such a politics is revealed with the revolting spectacles of the Ford and Kenney governments.
The other article is from something called "BMJ" and I saw it via Accidental Deliberations:
Murder is an emotive word. In law, it requires premeditation. Death must be deemed to be unlawful. How could “murder” apply to failures of a pandemic response? Perhaps it can’t, and never will, but it is worth considering. When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life? If policy failures lead to recurrent and mistimed lockdowns, who is responsible for the resulting non-covid excess deaths? When politicians wilfully neglect scientific advice, international and historical experience, and their own alarming statistics and modelling because to act goes against their political strategy or ideology, is that lawful? Is inaction, action?1 How big an omission is not acting immediately after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020?
At the very least, covid-19 might be classified as “social murder,” as recently explained by two professors of criminology.2 The philosopher Friedrich Engels coined the phrase when describing the political and social power held by the ruling elite over the working classes in 19th century England. His argument was that the conditions created by privileged classes inevitably led to premature and “unnatural” death among the poorest classes.3
...
If not murder or a crime against humanity, are we seeing involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in public office, or criminal negligence? Laws on political misconduct or negligence are complex and not designed to react to unprecedented events, but as more than two million people have died, we must not look on impotently as elected representatives around the world remain unaccountable and unrepentant. What standard should leaders be judged by? Is it the small number of deaths in countries such as New Zealand and Taiwan, or the harsher standard of zero excess deaths? Deaths do not come as single spies but as a battalion of bereaved families, shattered lives, long term illness, and economic ruin.
Now then, ACCOUNTABILITY. When someone like Doug Ford refuses to invest in testing and tracking during a deadly pandemic, because it costs money, that means that he is deliberately allowing the deadly virus to spread. When he lies about protecting seniors in LTC facilities and passes legislation protecting LTC operators from liability for deaths caused by their selfish refusal to pay for safeguards for their clients, how is it that he is able to escape criminal charges? How is he not deliberately causing suffering and death? This isn't an "accident." It's one thing to pursue a policy that you stupidly think will benefit everyone and then belatedly realize it's been a disaster. Doug Ford is simply refusing to spend money even though he knows it needs to be done. Class sizes have to be smaller. Schools need better ventiliation. Businesses have to be subsidized during inevitable lockdowns. People who legitimately can't work should be subsidized.
The same can be said, obviously, for Jason Kenney's stupid behaviour.
It is we, on the Left, through our adherence to demonstrably futile methods of protest, and our long-term refusal to work with the political system that we have, who have allowed right-wing psychopaths to eviscerate the formal safeguards and oversights of elite depredations. And this includes all progressives who are capable of whining on the internet about the crimes of harper, Harris, Ford, Trump, etc., but who revert to slavering devotion whenever an Obama, or a Trudeau, or a Biden takes power.
5 comments:
With regards to the privately-owned power companies in Texas:
Yes, Virginia, essential services in the hands of private companies fare no better than they do in the hands of the government.
"Privatization" is not the panacea many claim. Because, just like government, they too have a primary agenda of their own ....
Government: Exists primarily to control the population any way it can
Corporations/Big Businesses: Exist primarily to profit financially any way they can
The "designated services" they're assigned to provide and the general public's best interests are always going to be secondary to the self-serving priorities each one considers "most important" to their organizations and institutions.
Looking at the beginning of this, while I agree that the options have been whittled down, violence isn't all that's left. Direct action is almost all that's left, but that's not quite the same thing.
While the left has occasionally been successful with violence (Cuba eg), I'd say over the years most success the left has had has been from things like general strikes, occupying factories and whatnot . . . which may well involve some tussles with police, but not as the main point.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not theoretically against violence to change political situations. There are times and places where it's what needs to be done. But violence only works for the left when the status quo is very weak--when so much of the tax base is being embezzled that even the state's enforcers are having a hard time getting paid, when the loss of legitimacy is so obvious that nobody is outraged any more by violent challenge to the government--when "hegemony" is already lost. They're not there in the US yet, let alone here. But we are reaching the point where direct actions in the 30s style, or the Argentinian early-2000s style, might be worth trying for.
The other thing I wanna say is, we shouldn't beat up the left too much for losing. Look, the game is rigged. Through all of history, how often has the ruling class been successfully deposed? And, how often has the ruling class been successfully deposed without a new ruling class swapping in, for little real gain? I'm counting it as "once"--Cuba. That's it, so far. This isn't chess, or even monopoly, it's an asymmetric thing where the power is stacked against the good guys, whether it's in terms of force or propaganda or resources of almost any sort. To win, we have to not just be better than the ruling class, we have to be five times as good. The ruling class can be fucking morons, even their fixers and spin doctors can be pretty mediocre, and they'll still win most of the time because money.
So OK, we always want to aspire to play the perfect game that will manage to beat the odds, do just the right strategies, just the right tactics, the best organizing, the best slogans, the most unity, shutting down the CSIS plants, everything. But if we don't manage it, it's not because the left sucks, it's because the left only managed to be say twice as smart as the right instead of the five times that would be needed.
So sure, obviously if you lose you need to improve what you're doing if you want to win. But it's not a surprise, it's not like "how could we suck so bad"? The left doesn't suck, there's a lot of good thought and good effort happening . . . it's just up against a really hard problem.
Tad,
If we were to do a thought experiment and imagine an entrepreneurial, innovative private firm wanting to provide a superior service to the general public at the lowest cost, it would still have to tack on the profit motive. It's inner workings and decisions would still be opaque.
The ideal public sector utility provider, staffed by dedicated public servants and run by people appointed by democratically-elected politicians would have its records open to the public and would not have to add on the profit motive.
Of course, neither of these ideal institutions exist in reality. Oftentimes, "privatization" means paying some oligarch with public funds to run something such as to fleece the public.
My only real dispute with you is your contention that nothing provided by A government or A state could ever be anything but a means of control.
Were we to have a truly democratic society anywhere in the world, with more than a few dozen people, there would have to be some sort of government and some sort of state providing services out of the collective efforts of the society.
PLG,
Whenever I left a comment I always wanted to see it published and given a response.
I got very drunk between reading your comment and now, so I'll answer it tomorrow ....
PLG,
I suppose that I rushed past other options before landing on violence. But my point wasn't to advocate violence. My point was that eventually, after we've allowed elites to trample on all the legal, procedural, parliamentary, protections from bad behaviour, that we're eventually left with only violence.
And, even then, please understand that I'm not saying the people would win. By that point we would have allowed them to have amassed the greater preponderance of physical power needed to suppress our desperate lashing back.
I was really trying to argue in defense of boring old official avenues.
I'm afraid that I'm going to have to dispute with you about the efficacy of the Left. As always, I maintain that we don't so much fail as much as we fail to attempt anything. Or we blurt out "radical," "revolutionary" slogans and imagine that they're magic spells that can actually have real effects in the real world.
I recently wrote a long, rambling essay, "I'm Quite Mad You Know" describing this. (You can read it if you have a lot of free time and a mood to tolerate self-pitying whining.)
But basically it details how besides identifying the problems (through what is called "good journalism") most of the rest of the Left's literary output is generalizations about how shitty the overall system is, or how shitty individual representatives of the system are. Scroll through the daily offerings of any left-wing site like CounterPunch, CommonDreams, Rabble, Jacobin, etc., ... how much of it is actually dedicated to tactics and strategies for Leftist victories? And by "victories" I don't mean blocking some oligarch initiative. I mean actual strategies and tactics to defeat the system itself, or some major aspect of it?
I'm talking about something along the lines of the "Waffle" in the NDP or "The Leap Manifesto," or even as large as the old 20th-Century Marxist-Leninists.
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