Unprecedented Unemployment

More than 6.6 million people filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, setting a grim record for the second straight week.

Added to 3.3 million claims for the week ending March 21, it means nearly 10 million people have filed for unemployment benefits in two weeks.

The speed and scale of the job losses is without precedent. Until last month, the worst week for unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982. 

"Weekly Jobless Claims Rise to 6.6 Million: Live Business Updates," The New York Times

Even if the pandemic miraculously disappears by the end of this month, everyone will not be able to return to work. A lot of small businesses will remain shuttered. It has only been two weeks since most mandatory shelter-in-place edicts have been issued. Another four-to-eight weeks of lockdown will deliver another Great Depression. Pensions, already shaky, will disappear.

Either there is going to be a massive redistribution of wealth to cope with the crisis or we're headed for a Mad Max world.

"Neoliberalism Kills"

It's difficult to imagine any return to normal once the coronavirus pandemic peaks and recedes. If a beltway television show like The Hill's Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti is raising an alarm that sounds identical to radical Marxism, something is happening.

American Exceptionalism is officially dead, killed by the coronavirus; peak neoliberalism is dead too. Furious efforts will be made by the ruling elite to keep the zombie ambulatory. Massive propaganda combined with total surveillance and dire economic precariousness are on our horizon.

What we the people need to do first is check our head. There must be a broad acceptance of the obvious: The political economy not only failed us, it is killing us. Then we have to figure out a way to replace the system without capturing Washington, D.C. The Republican-Democrat duopoly needs to be destroyed. But that's a generations-long project, and we need transformation now.

The people need to capture a state or two -- the West Coast  (California, Oregon and Washington) is our best bet -- and pursue some sort of nullification.

The End of Peak Neoliberalism

Extremely bad news from The New York Times this morning:

Oil lost nearly a quarter of its value in futures markets on Monday, dragging shares of energy companies lower. It was what one analyst called “another acute shock to markets.”

[snip]

Even before the weekend’s developments, stocks in the United States and other major financial markets had fallen by more than 10 percent in a sudden downdraft that began as the coronavirus began to spread outside of China.

The problem globally is growing worse.

[snip]

To keep cash flowing smoothly through the financial system, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday said it will ramp up the amount of short-term loans it offers banks.

Starting Monday and lasting through Thursday, the New York Fed will increase its daily offering of overnight repurchase agreements — essentially short-term loans to eligible banks — to at least $150 billion from $100 billion. It is also increasing its offering of two-week loans starting Tuesday, to at least $45 billion from at least $20 billion.

The Fed had already been active in the market for short-lived loans between banks and financial institutions — called the repurchase or “repo” market — for months. Those operations started after rates in that obscure but important corner of the financial system’s plumbing spiked in September. It had recently been shrinking the size of its injections as markets calmed.

The moves on Monday “are intended to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures,” the New York Fed said in a statement.

All this before disruptions in the global supply chain have yet to deliver their full impact.

What's bizarre about the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting freak-outs in global stock markets is that it comes at a time when the mainstream corporate press is ejaculating all over itself because of Joe Biden's apparent triumph and voters' rejection of democratic socialism.

Amid the panic selling, panicked self-quarantines and stripping of store shelves of toilet paper is this unseemly self-congratulation and chest-thumping about the genius of neoliberal centrism and the great political gifts of a senile second-tier pol like Joe Biden.

If this doesn't augur an end of peak neoliberalism, I don't know what will.

Jonathan Cook on the 2019 UK General Election Results

A must-read is Jonathan Cook's blog post from Friday, "Corbyn’s defeat has slain the left’s last illusion." I'd say it is definitive.

Shrunken moral horizons
The second illusion was held by the left. We clung to a dream, like a life-raft, that we still had a public space; that, however awful our electoral system was, however biased the red-tops were, we lived in a democracy where real, meaningful change was still possible; that the system wasn’t rigged to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn from ever reaching power.

That illusion rested on a lot of false assumptions. That the BBC was still the institution of our youth, that it would play reasonably fair when it came to election time, giving Corbyn a level playing field with Johnson for the final few weeks of the campaign. That social media – despite the relentless efforts of these new media corporations to skew their algorithms to trap us in our own little echo chambers – would act as a counterweight to the traditional media.

But most importantly, we turned a blind eye to the social changes that 40 years of an unchallenged corporate-sponsored Thatcherism had wreaked on our imaginations, on our ideological lives, on our capacity for compassion.

As public institutions were broken apart and sold off, the public realm shrank dramatically, as did our moral horizons. We stopped caring about a society that Margaret Thatcher had told us didn’t exist anyway.

Large sections of the older generations profited from the sell-off of the public realm, and policies that flagrantly disregarded the planet’s future. They were persuaded that this model of short-term profit, of slash-and-burn economics from which they had personally benefited, was not only sustainable but that it was the only possible, the only good model.

The younger generations have never known any other reality. The profit motive, instant gratification, consumer indulgence are the only yardsticks they have ever been offered to measure value. A growing number have started to understand this is a sick ideology, that we live in an insane, deeply corrupted society, but they struggle to imagine another world, one they have no experience of.

How can they contemplate what the working class achieved decades ago – how a much poorer society created medical care for all, an NHS that our current one is a pale shadow of – when that history, that story of struggle is rarely told, and when it is it is told only through the distorting prism of the billionaire-owned media?

A rigged political system
We on the left didn’t lose this election. We lost our last illusions. The system is rigged – as it always has been – to benefit those in power. It will never willingly allow a real socialist, or any politician deeply committed to the health of society and the planet, to take power away from the corporate class. That, after all, is the very definition of power. That is what the corporate media is there to uphold.

This is not about being a bad loser, or a case of sour grapes.

In the extraordinary circumstances that Corbyn had overcome all these institutional obstacles, all the smears, and won last night, I was planning to write a different post today – and it would not have been celebratory. It would not have gloated, as Johnson’s supporters and Corbyn’s opponents in the Conservative party, large sections of the Labour parliamentary party, and the rightwing and liberal media are doing now.

No, I’d have been warning that the real battle for power was only just beginning. That however bad the past four years had been, we had seen nothing yet. That those generals who threatened a mutiny as soon as Corbyn was elected Labour leader were still there in the shadows. That the media would not give up on their disinformation, they would intensify it. That the security services that have been trying to portray Corbyn as a Russian spy would move from insinuation into more explicit action.

Future on our side
Nonetheless, we have the future on our side, dark as it may be. The planet isn’t going to heal itself with Johnson, Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in charge. It’s going to get a lot sicker, a lot quicker. Our economy isn’t going to become more productive, or more stable, after Brexit. Britain’s economic fate is going to be tied even more tightly to the United States’, as resources run out and environmental and climate catastrophes (storms, rising seas levels, flooding, droughts, crop failures, energy shortages) mount. The contradictions between endless growth and a planet with finite resources will become even starker, the crashes of 2008 more familiar.

The corporate party Johnson’s victory has unleashed is going to lead, sooner or later, to a truly terrifying hangover.

The likelihood is that the Blairites will exploit this defeat to drag Labour back to being a party of neoliberal capital. We will once again be offered a “choice” between the blue and the red Tory parties. If they succeed, Labour’s mass membership will desert the party, and it will become once again an irrelevance, a hollow shell of a workers’ party, as empty ideologically and spiritually as it was until Corbyn sought to reinvent it.

It may be a good thing if this coup happens quickly rather than being dragged out over years, keeping us trapped longer in the illusion that we can fix the system using the tools the corporate class offers us.

We must head to the streets – as we have done before with Occupy, with Extinction Rebellion, with the schools strikes – to reclaim the public space, to reinvent and rediscover it. Society didn’t cease to exist. It wasn’t snuffed out by Thatcher. We just forgot what it looked like, that we are human, not machines. We forgot that we are all part of society, that we are precisely what it is.

Now is the time to put away childish things, and take the future back into our hands.

Maybe I Don't Know Myself

The function of neoliberal government is to serve and protect concentrated wealth. Neoliberalism is defined as "free market trade, deregulation of financial markets, individualization, and the shift away from state welfare provision (austerity)." Mainstream political parties adhere to and enforce the neoliberal credo.

The problem is that voters no longer believe in neoliberalism. Trump is a prime example. Trump is still a market fundamentalist, but he is cagey enough, like a professional wrestler, to "body slam" aspects of neoliberalism, like free trade, and slap a bunch of tariffs on allies and enemies alike.

A real opponent of neoliberalism is something different though. And when a real opponent of neoliberalism appears on the scene and demonstrates an ability to win over voters, then the bloodless zombie snaps to attention.

Tariq Ali predicted five-years ago in The Extreme Centre that neoliberalism had another quarter-century of life left in it. It was hard for me to accept at the time, but Ali is probably right.

Kshama Sawant is another sort of example. She is fearless. She is a socialist who campaigned explicitly in the recent election on the Green New Deal and rent control. Her opponent was a non-entity for whom there was zero -- I kid you not -- visible proof of life in my meanderings throughout the council district. Yet, as of yesterday's ongoing vote count, Kshama is still eight points behind.

According to Lester Black,

Is it time to count Sawant out? It doesn’t look great for Sawant supporters, but we can't write her off yet. King County Elections has counted 35,291 returned ballots from District 3 as of today, but the county has only reported 23,929 votes so far. That means there’s 11,362 votes to be counted—and only 1,925 separate Sawant from Orion.

The chamber of commerce political action committee, engorged with donations from Amazon and Starbucks, blanketed the district with media on behalf of Orion and against Sawant.

At this point it looks like a majority of voters did as they were told and got rid of that pesky brown socialist.

It has left me more discouraged than I imagined. A mini existential crisis. If I don't know my own neighborhood, a place I have lived for more than 25 years, maybe I don't know myself.

One thing is for sure. Money is most powerful. It's going to take an Iraq uprising to shake the neoliberal death-grip. As Bob Dylan sings, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Peak Neoliberalism

The popular uprising in Iraq is heating up again, competing for headline space with Lebanon and Chile. The periphery of global neoliberal rule is in rebellion. Meanwhile, the United States has declared its intention to garrison the Syrian oil fields of Deir ez-Zor with additional troops and tanks. Germany wants to send tens of thousands of NATO troops to occupy Rojava. And The New York Times correspondent Ben Hubbard has penned a lachrymose article from an undisclosed location in "Northeastern Syria" about the ongoing detention of ISIS combatants and their kin, yet the "newspaper of record" has not a word about Julian Assange.

Closer to home, Amazon is attempting to buy the Seattle City Council, having recently dumped $1 million in a chamber of commerce PAC. Amazon's principal target is socialist Kshama Sawant. If Amazon can buy an election in my neighborhood, it can buy an election anywhere. If Kshama Sawant can't swim above the tsunami of mega-corp cash, we're all in trouble -- from Santiago to Baghdad; from Beirut to Seattle; from Kobani to Sinaloa, and everywhere else.

Macron is a Bellwether for Neoliberal Politicians Everywhere

French president Emmanuel Macron held his first press conference on Thursday (see "Macron, Chastened by Yellow Vest Protests, Says ‘I Can Do Better’" by Adam Nossiter) after two years in office. He played the penitent and admitted to coming up short in his efforts to address the grievances of the Yellow Vests.

He promised to lower taxes by about $5.5 billion, put a stop to the vastly unpopular closing of rural schools and hospitals, peg pensions of less than $2,200 per month to inflation, and abolish one of the dominating institutions in French public life, ENA, or the National School for Administration, from which he and much of the government hierarchy have graduated.

Not insignificant but not in proportion to the mass uprising roiling France. How Macron proceeds is important because he is the one spectacular electoral achievement for peak neoliberalism post-Brexit and post-Trump. In other words, Macron is a bellwether for neoliberal politicians everywhere. If he's on the ropes and tossing gumdrops into the crowd, that's a bad sign for the global neoliberal consensus of the ruling elite and a good sign for the rest of us.

The "Anti-Capitalism = Anti-Semitism" Freak Out

Here's the dead-end of conflating dissent against the neoliberal status quo with anti-Semitism. From Chris Marsden's "The assault on Jeremy Corbyn is a warning that must be heeded":

Blairite MP Siobhain McDonagh told John Humphrys on BBC Radio Four that anti-Semitism is “very much part… of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital. Ergo you are anti-Jewish people.”

When Humphrys asked, “In other words, to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-Semitic?” McDonagh replied, “Yes.” This astonishing libel against socialism passed without comment from the BBC’s presenter.

Now another anti-Semitism resolution is to be voted in the U.S. House of Representatives, likely tomorrow (see Sheryl Gay Stolberg's House’s "Anti-Semitism Resolution Exposes Generational Fight Over Ilhan Omar"), all because Ilhan Omar made a statement to the effect, as she tweeted in an exchange with Nita Lowey:

I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.

The "Israel, right or wrong" Democratic leadership of Pelosi and Hoyer are going to be on the losing end of this one. As the American Conservative notes, the polling on this skews heavily to old vs. young:

According to a 2018 Pew Research Center report, the number of Republicans that sympathize with Israel over Palestine has increased to 79 percent, while sympathy for Israel dropped among Democrats to 27 percent, a disturbing trend especially for the anti-BDS movement. Besides growing sympathy for the Palestinians, progressives are echoing the ACLU and other groups who say any law prohibiting [BDS] boycotts won’t ultimately survive a Supreme Court test. They are probably right.

Equating anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism is a true sign of desperation, a flashing red light along a road where the tried-and-true Russian bogeyman hazard has already been passed along the way to our crack-up.

What Hath Neoliberalism Wrought?

A must-read this morning is "‘The Numbers Are So Staggering.’ Overdose Deaths Set a Record Last Year." by Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz:

The recent increases in drug overdose deaths have been so steep that they have contributed to reductions in the country’s life expectancy over the last three years, a pattern unprecedented since World War II. Life expectancy at birth has fallen by nearly four months, and drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for adults under 55.

“The idea that a developed wealthy nation like ours has declining life expectancy just doesn’t seem right,” said Robert Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the C.D.C., who helped prepare the reports. “If you look at the other wealthy countries of the world, they're not seeing the same thing.”

In a separate report, the C.D.C. also documented a 3.7 percent increase in the suicide rate, another continuation of a recent trend. The increases were particularly concentrated in rural America, and among middle-aged women, though the suicide rate for men remains higher than that for women at every age.

What hath neoliberalism wrought?  This. A culture whose goal is to monetize everything. It doesn't offer much in the way of "chicken soup for the soul," does it?

The gist of the story by the Katzes is that opioid prescriptions are falling while overdose deaths continue to rise. The increase is attributable to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

Peak neoliberalism is distinguished by drug overdoses, suicide and homelessness. Make no mistake. This is a political problem. The divination of markets and the monetization of everything does not lead to a healthy society.

The Yellow Vests protests underway in France are being compared to a medieval peasant rebellion. The French elected Macron thanks to a huge PSYOP -- how else to explain a significant victory for a candidate of the elite espousing ideas from the era of Clinton and Blair? --  whose effects appear to be wearing off.

Macron is doomed, and so too is his parliamentary organization, En Marche! Good news. Unfortunately the zombie nature of neoliberalism allows it to shamble along even though it is dead. Look at Theresa May. How long is her Tory government going to tear and gnash, scratch and slobber in governance before new elections are held?

The hyper concentration of wealth combined with the quasi-ambient nature of digital technology has given us a savage society that is killing the planet. Will we find a way out of this necropolis?

Ours is a Sick, Failed Society

The whole reason one reads newspapers can be found in a story by Tara Siegel Bernard, "‘Too Little Too Late’: Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans," which appeared in yesterday's national edition. Ours is a failed society. We are often told that our politics are skewed to the elderly, who receive the lion's share of the benefits. But Siegel Bernard makes clear that even Medicare and Social Security are not enough to protect a growing number of senior citizens:

For a rapidly growing share of older Americans, traditional ideas about life in retirement are being upended by a dismal reality: bankruptcy.

The signs of potential trouble — vanishing pensions, soaring medical expenses, inadequate savings — have been building for years. Now, new research sheds light on the scope of the problem: The rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991, the study found, and the same group accounts for a far greater share of all filers.

Driving the surge, the study suggests, is a three-decade shift of financial risk from government and employers to individuals, who are bearing an ever-greater responsibility for their own financial well-being as the social safety net shrinks.

The transfer has come in the form of, among other things, longer waits for full Social Security benefits, the replacement of employer-provided pensions with 401(k) savings plans and more out-of-pocket spending on health care. Declining incomes, whether in retirement or leading up to it, compound the challenge.

[snip]

As the study, from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, explains, older people whose finances are precarious have few places to turn. “When the costs of aging are off-loaded onto a population that simply does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give,” the study says, “and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social safety net — bankruptcy court.”

Of course this tip-of-the-iceberg crisis -- it's going to get much worse -- has been foreseen for a long time. The disappearance of defined benefit pensions in favor of inadequate 401(k) plans; the usurious nature of health care; skyrocketing housing costs -- a regular wage worker will not be able to retire in such an environment.

What was interesting about Siegel Bernard's story is the role that student debt plays in the financial woes of seniors:

A little more than a third of the older filers who answered the researchers’ questionnaire said that helping others, like children or older parents, had contributed to their seeking bankruptcy protection. Marc Stern, a bankruptcy lawyer in Seattle, said he had seen the phenomenon again and again.

Some parents, Mr. Stern said, had co-signed loans for $10,000 or $20,000 for adult children and suddenly could no longer afford them. “When you are living on $2,000 a month and that includes Social Security — and you have rent and savings are minuscule — it is extremely difficult to recover from something like that,” he said.

Others had co-signed their children’s student loans. “I never saw parents with student loans 20 or 30 years ago,” Mr. Stern said.

“It is not uncommon to see student loans of $100,000,” he added. “Then, you see parents who have guaranteed some of these loans. They are no longer working, and they have these student loans that are difficult if not impossible to pay or discharge in bankruptcy, and these are the kids’ loans.”

The Trump administration is actively working to make housing more expensive, not to mention what DeVos is doing to unleash for-profit colleges.

It is a sick, failed society, the paradigm for which was put in place as a reaction to the spirit of '68 50 years ago. I don't think it can continue much longer.

France's Boy King on the Ropes

There has been some good news recently. The French boy king, the darling of the neoliberal ruling class, Emmanuel Macron, is looking increasingly wobbly.

Macron and his administration have been caught up in the Benalla affair. Alexandre Benalla, the head of presidential security for Macron, was caught on video roughing up May Day protesters. Benalla was terminated belatedly once the video became public, but opposition parties in the French Assembly are demanding to know why it took so long.

Macron has remained silent until today, when he accepted responsibility. An Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed Macron had reached a new low. Sixty percent of poll respondents report an unfavorable opinion of the boy king, a low not even Macron's fondling partner Donald Trump has reached.

Even the usually supportive New York Times has started to publish pointed criticism. This is from Adam Nossiter's "Macron’s Image and an Ex-Aide Give Critics Plenty of Ammunition" which appeared in yesterday's national edition:

Mr. Macron’s distance from his constituents — highlighted by a string of recent missteps, including the public upbraiding of a bewildered teenager and the ordering up of a costly dinner service for the Élysée — was on display during his trip last week. He engaged with the crowds easily enough, smiling and shaking hands.

But he couldn’t resist lecturing a middle-aged woman in the crowded receiving line in the provincial capital, Périgueux. She was distraught over her shaky financial situation. For 10 minutes the woman engaged stubbornly with the president, pleading for help, as hundreds watched.

“Listen to me well, Mr. Macron,” she said. “I work but I no longer have the means to live. My life was better before. I work and I have a diploma. I work every day. I have children, and I can’t even pay for their vacations. We’re just not making it.”

“You say you are lightening up taxes on the one hand, but on the other you are loading us up,” she added. “And we are just not making it.”

Mr. Macron responded fluently but with abstractions and little empathy, describing a series of government programs and plans he insisted confidently were going to make life better.

“No, no,” the president said. “First of all what you are saying isn’t strictly speaking true. And then, when you pay your phone bill and your gas bill, it’s not the state that’s setting the rates. You can blame the state for everything, this or that is going up, but, it’s not all the state’s fault.”

“Yes, but I can’t change the tires on my car,” the woman responded. “I can’t afford the inspection. I can’t even maintain my car. We’re really in the hole. This is not the life I dreamed of.”

Later, Mr. Macron made a speech in this rural village, promising more attention from the state, a “reinvention” of state services. The crowd listened politely but the applause was light. 

“That was absolutely nothing, nothing, it’s the usual promises,” said Thierry Krevisan, a salesman who had stood for hours in the hot sun waiting for the president to show up. “It’s always the same speech.”

Neoliberalism does not work for the masses. Neoliberalism works for the wealthy, allowing the rich to capture an ever-larger portion of the pie; it can't be defended anymore as "a tide which lifts all boats." 

That's It. That's the News.

The corporate media seems to be getting worse. I reference here, in full, yesterday's post by Craig Murray, "Those Who Die in Palestine: Those With Dead Souls Here," which succinctly captures the perverted contortions of the prestige press, in this case the Guardian:

I cannot imagine the cold courage it must take to be a Palestinian, walking in protest, unarmed, towards the fence that contains the agony of their long drawn-out genocide, in the knowledge that the bullets will start splintering bones and ripping out brain matter around them, and every millisecond could be their own last. 

I cannot imagine the cold viciousness it must take to work on the Guardian newspaper, where on the homepage the small headline of the latest six Palestinians to be shot dead, is way below the larger headline of the several hundredth article associating Jeremy Corbyn with anti-Semitism, on the basis of the quite deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel.

The corporate press serves the government, and the government serves the wealthy corporate elite, a simple identity statement that leaves out almost everyone else.

Newspapers are organized mostly around the identification of official enemies, like Russia, Venezuela, "the animal Assad," Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orban, Jeremy Corbyn, et al. Normal people are treated as un-people, not really material, usually just victims, hopeless, embarrassing. Then there is the constant boosting of the marvels of technology, the right-around-the-corner splendor of AI and autonomous vehicles.

That's it. That's the news.

The Emerald City is Going to Shit

From yesterday's Significant Digits:

5,400 people
That’s the number of people in Seattle who live on the street, according to one 2017 survey, about half of whom live in their vehicle. A judge ruled in favor of a Seattle man whose vehicle, where he also lived, was impounded to pay for parking debts, saying that the vehicle was covered under the 123-year old Homestead Act. That law says the government cannot force people to sell their homes to pay for a debt. [KIRO 7 News]

And this from Wednesday's Charles Mudede post, "Seattle Housing Prices Continue to Soar, as Congress Prepares to Deregulate Banks":

Two important pieces of news to consider this afternoon. The first, reported by the Seattle Times, is that the median for single-family-home prices in Seattle has reached an astounding $777,000. That is an increase of $20,000 from the last peak, which was reached in January. As for the Eastside, the median cost is almost $1 million. As expected, the explanation provided for these ever-rising prices is not speculation, but a hot jobs market.

From Seattle Times:
The hyper job market in the Pacific Northwest continues to outpace almost every metro area in the nation, and thus our housing market is booming; for now, there is no end in sight,” Mike Grady, president and COO at Coldwell Banker Bain, said in a statement.

The reporter, Mike Rosenberg, felt that the opinion of this Bain banker settled the matter. Rosenberg did, however, mention that while incomes are rising in the Seattle area, home prices are "still increasing much faster." 

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., several Dems in alliance with lots of Republicans are preparing to remove significant rules that were imposed on the banking industry after it destroyed the global economy in 2008. These rules are a part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

I live near downtown Ground Zero of all this. Homelessness is visible everywhere in spite of an atypically harsh winter (part of the polar vortex thing). The nuts and bolts are this: a small business, like a gym or neighborhood saloon, move into a storefront and then closes after not too many months. The main reason? Can't afford the high rent. So the storefront goes vacant and the homeless move in and squat. There has been one a couple blocks from my apartment building for a year now.

Another aspect of living in the hottest job market/real estate market is the massive amount of dog shit on the sidewalk. Maybe it's human shit. I don't know. I assumed it was from a dog based on the large number of people I see walking their precious pooches. More so than at points in the past. More condos and high-end multi-story apartment buildings have shot up in my neighborhood and they cater to the single professional who usually shares her living quarters with a canine pet.

Rampant homelessness, no doubt far worse than that documented by the quote at the top of the post, and sidewalks slathered in shit that's what you get in this iteration of "as good as it gets" neoliberalism.

And now comes the news that Michael Bennett has been traded to Philadelphia and that Richard Sherman will be cut today  The Emerald City is definitely going to shit.

****

POSTSCRIPT: There is a really good piece by Brian Floyd, "A Seahawks fan’s elegy for the Legion of Boom," on what appears to be a done deal -- Richard Sherman will be cut today. It is definitely the end of an era:

The history of the Legion of Boom is full of trials and errors, huge mistakes and amazing successes. In the 2013 playoffs, the Seahawks defense gave up a last-second field goal to the Falcons in the divisional round, ending their season. The next year, with the 49ers driving in the NFC Championship, Richard Sherman tipped a Colin Kaepernick pass to the end zone to Malcolm Smith to seal a Seahawks win. Failure, a lesson learned, and a success. What happened two weeks later was a foregone conclusion and a victory lap for the Seahawks defense. The Legion of Boom had a ring, and the experiment worked.

The question is always how long will it keep working. Getting the experiment off the ground is half the battle. In the NFL, the window is short and so is the shelf life for players. And it’s a contact sport so injury luck is involved.

It wasn’t hard to spot the seams. The blowups on the sidelines became more frequent, and there was more tension. Age catches up and the margin for error on defense goes down. Injuries happen, including freak ones like a leg whip from Chancellor, which ended Thomas’ season in painful and devastating fashion. The wear and tear later caught up to Chancellor, and he may never play football again. Playing at the speed and level the Legion of Boom did takes its toll.

The realization that it was over came as Sherman laid on the turf during a brutal Thursday night game against the Cardinals. His Achilles was ruptured, and had been just barely hanging on all season anyway. The Legion of Boom was aging and injured, and the Seahawks had to make some decisions. The seams had been showing, and this was the last gasp before they, too, burst.

Sherman will be released, and may or may not be back. Michael Bennett is gone and Cliff Avrilmay never play again. The Seahawks are moving players around left and right, signaling a large-scale roster shakeup. Earl Thomas may be the only remaining member of the Legion of Boom. Seattle’s defense will look different, and sound quieter.

The Seahawks will try to rebuild, and try to recapture what the Legion of Boom created. There are holdovers, and new faces will emerge. But it’s impossible to re-create what the LOB became because it was an experiment all along: careful scouting, some patience, an environment they could flourish in, a scheme that fit their skills to a perfectly, and a whole lot of luck. What you’re left with is the end of an era and attitude, and a whole bunch of fun memories.

Those Seahawks teams from the 2012 season through the Super Bowl loss that capped the 2014 season were some of the greatest of all time. It's a shame that Carroll and Bevell didn't let Marshawn Lynch run the ball into the end zone against the Patriots. Back-to-back Super Bowl wins would have memorialized the team's greatness. Now it's being junked as a matter of routine business.

The Neoliberal Center Burns

You have to tip your hat to the The New York Times. Though it is one of the principal outlets for the New Cold War with Russia, in its Saturday edition it published a shattering rebuttal from one of its Moscow-based reporters.

"Why Putin’s Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling" by Andrew Higgins is an assessment of the U.S. media's Russophobia from the perspective of pro-Western Russian intellectuals:

Ultimately, they say, Americans are using Russia as a scapegoat to explain the deep political discord in the United States. That has left many westward-leaning Russians, who have long looked to America for their ideals, in bitter disappointment that the United States seems to be mimicking some of their own country’s least appealing traits.

The hunt for a hidden Russian hand behind President Trump’s election victory has caused particular disquiet among liberal-minded Russian journalists.

“The image of Putin’s Russia constructed by Western and, above all, American media outlets over the past 18 months shocks even the most anti-Putin reader in Russia,” Oleg V. Kashin, a journalist critical of the Kremlin, wrote last week in Republic, a Russian news site. He complained that the American media has consistently misconstrued the way Russia works, presenting marginal opportunists and self-interested businessmen with no real link to the Kremlin as state-controlled agents working on orders from Mr. Putin.

For Ivan I. Kurilla, a professor of history and an America specialist at the European University at St. Petersburg, a bastion of liberal thinking, Russia’s prominent and almost entirely negative role on America’s political stage since the November election reprises a phenomenon first seen in the late 1800s.

“Americans use Russia each time they feel their own identity in crisis,” said Mr. Kurilla, the author of a new book on the history of Russian-American relations, “Frenemies.”

But don't expect from "the newspaper of record" a reduction in the number of stories devoted to Russian troll farms and Russian hackers disseminating fake news "weaponized" to destroy Western democracy. On the same day Higgins' story ran, The Times published Jason Horowitz's "Italy, Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Demands Facebook’s Help":

In a global atmosphere already thick with suspicion of Russian meddling in elections in the United States, France and Germany, as well as in the British referendum to leave the European Union and the Catalan independence movement in Spain, many analysts consider Italy to be the weak link in an increasingly vulnerable European Union.

No one in Italy is more worried than the governing Democratic Party. In recent days, its members have made an orchestrated attempt to focus the attention of the country — and of powerful social media platforms like Facebook — on a misinformation campaign that they believe is devised to damage one of the last major center-left governments standing in Europe.

Mr. Renzi, a wily political operator who partly blames online misinformation campaigns and fake news for the failure of a referendum that forced his resignation in December, is not only seeking to protect himself, but also to go on the offensive.

(Before being dispatched to Rome, Horowitz held the "Get Bernie!" portfolio during the 2016 presidential election campaign.)

The template is a simple one. Any organized electoral challenge to the neoliberal center is tarred as a Russian psyops crafted personally by the evil Putin. The template is provided by U.S. intelligence agencies and dutifully applied by the corporate media. Brexit, Trump, Geert Wilders, Le Pen, AfD, Catalan independence, Italy's Five Star Movement -- every bogeyman tracks back to Moscow.

It's infantile and superficial. But it is also a strong indication how dead-ended the "Washington Consensus" has become. When you're desperate and trying to make it day to day, week to week, month to month, the tendency apparently is to revert to old patterns.

That's why I was surprised that in the run up to Germany's September elections there was no effort to inflate the online Russian bogeyman. This was obviously a failure of Western intelligence. No one predicted the precipitous drop off in support for the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. There were predictions that Alternative for Germany might reach the Bundestag, but not that Merkel would have to rely on a minority government. We'll see if Martin Schultz eats his words and ends up resuscitating the grand coalition. In any event, rest assured that if new elections are called, this time around, there will be plenty of Russophobia.

An interesting development in the disintegration of the neoliberal center is the recent hysteria over sexual harassment. Male animality is exposed. Celebrity scalps are piling up. Where and when it will end is hard to gauge. It could go on for a long time. I welcome it. Because it promises to burn, baby, burn.

The Zombie Shall Go Off-Road

Since the end of August I have been confronted with a series of significant demands at work. One of the units of the local went out on strike and was on the picket line for a month before reaching an agreement with the employer. Unions rarely go on strike anymore. There are a variety of reasons for this, none of which are positive for labor, but the bottom line is that strikes are supremely difficult to manage. They are physically exhausting and emotionally taxing.

Once the strike ended, the local's bookkeeper resigned, which put me on the hot seat for taking care of all the finances, a web of a various arcane transactions -- payroll, tax filings, accounts payable and receivable -- electronic and otherwise. Then, if that wasn't enough, the local's general fund was targeted in a string of fraud attempts, which necessitated opening up a case with the local police, establishing a new account, reaching out to employers who remit dues payments electronically, etc.

All in all, a tale of professional woe since August. And there is no end in sight. If anything, things will grow worse as the year end approaches. My brain feels bruised.

I have no time to cogitate on current events. I've been workings Saturdays, and Saturday is my main reading day; so a lot of the grist for my mill has been depleted.

The dynamic remains the same though: The Western-led neoliberal world order is capsizing, and no mainstream political rescue operation is on the horizon. Democratic leaders in the U.S. think they can muddle along and beat Trump in 2020 with a Wall Street candidate; in other words, a redo of 2016.

The problem is a major new war is coming. The U.S.-Saudi jihadist response to the Arab Spring revolt(s) of 2011 has lost its steam. When blocked or defeated, the neoconservative response -- and neoconservative decision making is the only type of decision making that exists in Riyadh and Washington, D.C. these days -- is to make the problem bigger. That's how we should interpret the latest news out of Saudi Arabia.

Will Lebanon be destroyed again? Will Iran be attacked directly? I don't know. But the U.S. is at its limit politically and militarily. Europe will soon have to go its own way. Finally. But can Europe make this transition without cracking up itself? Probably not. Germany, like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (and the bygone Republic of Vietnam), is organically connected to the U.S. deep state.

This particular path that the West is on has come to end. The zombie must go off-road.

Dystopia Fatigue

Since 2009 the primary cultural -- not to be confused with official -- narrative has been dystopian, exemplified by the popularity of all things zombie, such as the eight-season television series The Walking Dead.

But Western civilization is now experiencing dystopia fatigue. The problem, as Naomi Klein perceptively identified in No is Not Enough, is that we have lost the ability to conceptualize utopias. Decades of neoliberal triumphalism -- TINA, "there is no alternative" -- has left us intellectually blinkered.

So right when the neoliberal zombie appears headed for a fall -- Catalonia, Kurdistan, Dixiecrat absorption of the entire GOP, the construction of a Great Firewall in the West -- we are clueless what to do. Maybe Catalans will show us the way.

Which means that the zombie will probably find its feet and stumble on, only to fall again, until its head bursts apart.

Davos Man and Fake News

Marcy Wheeler has a good post rebutting DCI John Brennan's denial that the intelligence community was behind the leak of the "dirty dossier" on Trump. Brennan argues that the dossier was bouncing around in the press long before it was published; therefore, you cannot lay it at the IC's doorstep. But Wheeler points out that the dossier that was released included a report that postdates all the versions known to be circulating in the press. The idea that this is a domestic color revolution is the one that makes the most sense.

Wall Street lickspittle Andrew Ross Sorkin, in Davos for the World Economic Forum, has a piece worth reading. In "What to Make of the ‘Davos Class’ in the Trump Era" Sorkin outlines an emerging understanding among the elite that globalization has become very unpopular to the voting public.

Sorkin's story has a hopeful "and this too shall pass" aspect to it. Towards the end he mentions how reviled Davos was during the efflorescence of activism around the millennium:

This is not the first time that the World Economic Forum has come under fire from critics about its globalist, free-trade message. In 2000, a group of more than 1,000 demonstrators carrying signs that said “Against the New World Order” smashed the windows of a McDonald’s franchise here in Davos just down the road from the conference, protesting open trade policies espoused by then-President Bill Clinton, who was speaking at the event.

Marcy Wheeler in another post ties the sudden elite panic over Fake News to the inability to think beyond corporate globalization:

Finally, one reason there is such a panic about “fake news” is because the western ideology of neoliberalism has failed. It has led to increased authoritarianism, decreased qualify of life in developed countries (but not parts of Africa and other developing nations), and it has led to serial destabilizing wars along with the refugee crises that further destabilize Europe. It has failed in the same way that communism failed before it, but the elites backing it haven’t figured this out yet. I’ll write more on this (Ian Welsh has been doing good work here). All details of the media environment aside, this has disrupted the value-laden system in which “truth” exists, creating a great deal of panic and confusion among the elite that expects itself to lead the way out of this morass. Part of what we’re seeing in “fake news” panic stems from that, as well as a continued disinterest in accountability for the underlying policies — the Iraq War and the Wall Street crash and aftermath especially — enabled by failures in our elite media environment. But our media environment is likely to be contested until such time as a viable ideology forms to replace failed neoliberalism. Sadly, that ideology will be Trumpism unless the elite starts making the world a better place for average folks. Instead, the elite is policing discourse-making by claiming other things — the bad true and false narratives it, itself, doesn’t propagate — as illegitimate.

Secret Avengers #15

When I want to give my legs a rest from road running I go to an artificial turf soccer field in my neighborhood and jog square laps. It is a particularly nice winter location because early in the morning on the weekend no one is there. Freezing temperatures keep everyone, besides an occasional dog walker, away.

A couple Sundays back I noticed spray-painted on a concrete utility outbuilding next to the soccer pitch the slogan "GIRLS RULE!"

Since I had just finished reading the final issue of Secret Avengers #15, a title Marvel cancelled the spring of 2015, I thought it very auspicious.

The Secret Avengers are a black ops group of Avengers (sort of a superhero SEAL Team 6) put together by Steve Rogers, a.k.a., Captain America, to handle certain unsavory jobs, i.e., extraordinary renditions. Heroes enlisted, like Hawkeye, even undergo memory wipes, a la Jason Bourne. This shows how commonly accepted all murderous and illegal aspects of the Deep State have become. They appear only thinly veiled in a Marvel comic book.

Thematically what Secret Avengers provided Marvel was a way to continue Dark Avengers -- super-villains masquerading with official imprimatur as Avengers -- into the sunny Age of Obama. Dark Avengers was Brian Michael Bendis' superb commentary on the darkness of the Bush years, Norman Osborn as a stand-in for W. Darkness mainstreamed in the body politic.

Secret Avengers was Marvel's way of saying that this darkness would not be banished under Obama. And of course it wasn't. The title's cancellation in early 2015, soon after the disastrous 2014 midterms, is an acknowledgement that this darkness is not a strand of government, an aberrant strain, a subplot; it is the very essence of government, the Deep State itself.

Ales Kot, the writer on the final run of the series, put Maria Hill -- the butch, belligerent head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Marvel's all-important equivalent of the U.S. national security apparatus) -- at the heart of the narrative, a heady story about a sentient bomb, communal mindspace, love and extinction.

Maria Hill is necessary because men -- white men at least -- can no longer front an almost universally discredited plutocratic warfare state.  We need women or minorities to act the shill; Obama did ably for most of his two terms, despite presiding over enormous losses for the Democratic Party.

These losses, which likely confirm Zach Galifianakis' quip about Obama being the last black president, could be obscured -- such was the hope -- by nominating a woman to preside over the wealthiest, most militarily powerful nation on the planet, indeed, in the history of the world.

It didn't work out that way. And more than any other single factor (and Democrat evasions about Russian hacking and interference from the FBI) it didn't work out that way because women did not vote for a sister in numbers greater than when only men were the nominees of the duopoly. Hillary reaped no record female gender gap; in fact, she only improved upon Obama's 2012 total by a single percentage point.

The ace Clinton held in the sleeve of her paintsuit right up to the exit polls on election day turned out to be a regular pip card. Trump won 53% of white women. Partisan identity "trumped" gender identity.

To put a positive spin on this result one could say that voters saw through the sham of the Democratic Party's identity politics. Hillary, like Maria Hill, is fronting the Deep State, and Clinton had about as much to offer feminism as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. In other words, nothing. Worse than nothing -- a thin lacquered feminine veneer on the old bloodthirsty divine right of kings, a truly devastating subversion of feminism.

True feminism has to be part of a radically egalitarian order, glimpses of which can be seen in areas where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is in power. (See Rod Nordland's "Crackdown in Turkey Threatens a Haven of Gender Equality Built by Kurds.")

Late stage capitalism has been highly successful in integrating women into the workforce, so much so that the gender pay gap might not be as wide as commonly reported. But late stage capitalism is also peak neoliberalism, a savage celebration of elitism and competition. Women, even those that enjoy the benefit of paid maternity leave, think twice before exiting the rat race, and this translates into the problem of low birthrates, a problem that recently reached the headlines. (See "South Korea’s Plan to Rank Towns by Fertility Rate Backfires" by Choe Sang-Hun.) Francis Fukuyama has identified low birthrates as part of a "Great Disruption" that is concomitant with the rise of the Information Society, another name for late stage capitalism or peak neoliberalism.

Helene Cooper's story about the little Cameroonian boy crushed by Samantha Power's speeding motorcade (see "The Boy, the Ambassador and the Deadly Encounter on the Road" and her crucial followup "I Was in the Motorcade That Struck and Killed 6-Year-Old Toussaint Birwe") says it all about the slogan "GIRLS RULE!"

Yes, girls rule. But according to the all the old rules.

Below, from the final issue of Secret Avengers, Maria recounts the time from her childhood when she happened upon a shark in the void. The art is Michael Walsh's.

Whose Scalp Next? Italy's Neoliberal Matinee Idol, Matteo Renzi

The Italian constitutional referendum is in a little more than three weeks, December 6. Italy's PM, Matteo Renzi, has vowed to resign if it fails to pass. He has since hedged on that. Renzi wants to centralize power to make it easier to implement labor market reforms and other neoliberal delicacies. His impending defeat will be another body blow to the rapidly disintegrating mainstream political order: This is Crispian Balmer's "Trump's triumph puts Italy's Renzi in difficult position," published yesterday by Reuters:

Donald Trump's unexpected victory in the U.S. presidential election is likely to make it even harder for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to win a crucial referendum on constitutional reform set for December.

Renzi was one of the few world leaders to publicly endorse Hillary Clinton and Trump's triumph has not only put the Italian premier in a difficult diplomatic position, it has also underlined the rise of anti-elite sentiment around the world.

"This factor is weighing against Renzi because at the moment for many Italians he represents the establishment," said Roberto D'Alimonte, politics professor at Luiss University in Rome. 

Renzi has said he will resign if he loses next month's ballot and was already facing fierce headwinds, with all opposition parties pitted against him and almost every opinion poll over the past two months showing the 'No' camp ahead.

However, a large number of Italians remain undecided, helping to fuel government confidence that the 'Yes' vote will eventually win and stave off a renewed bout of political uncertainty that is feared by the financial markets.

"The Trump win does show that populism continues in 2016 and suggests a 'no' vote in the Italian referendum could be stronger than we assumed," David Zahn, the head of European fixed income at U.S. fund manager Franklin Templeton, told Reuters.

The spread between Italian and German 10-year benchmark bonds was up 7.8 basis points at 1200 GMT at 154.05, the highest level since June when the closely watched gap jumped in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union. 

The constitutional reform proposes drastically curbing the role of the upper house Senate, a move that Renzi says will simplify decision-making and ensure stable government. Opponents say it will make the legislative process more complicated and reduce checks and balances.

"WE ARE THE BARBARIANS!"

Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement currently heads the opinion polls and its founder, Beppe Grillo, hailed Trump's victory, seeing it as a vindication of his own maverick stance.

"It is those who dare, the obstinate, the barbarians who will take the world forward. We are the barbarians! The real idiots, populists and demagogues are the journalists and the establishment intellectuals," Grillo wrote on his blog.

Jumping on the U.S. election bandwagon with an eye to the forthcoming referendum, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party put out Tweets saying "In America, they voted NO".

The group's parliamentary leader Renato Brunetta called on Renzi to resign immediately and not even wait until Dec. 4, saying his pro-Clinton stance had weakened Italy's standing.

"From this day forward Matteo Renzi is politically finished, he is a dead man walking," Brunetta said in a statement. "No other European country sided with one of the two contenders like Italy did. Now Renzi must reap the consequences and take responsibility for his bad choices."

Renzi himself offered Trump his congratulations and said Italy's relations with the United States, its NATO ally, were "solid". 

The new U.S. president is due to visit Italy next May when the country hosts the 2017 summit of Group of Seven leaders.

More Signs of the End

The debate -- six years or six decades? -- is one worth having. The guy who works on the same floor of the building where I work still insists that six decades is the safer bet when it comes to the longevity of the status quo. My position is six years. Violence is now ever present. The state, with all the wonders of technology at its disposal, is unable to guarantee peace. Going back to Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), the primary rationale for the state is security. Security breaks down, and we are allowed to declare the state a failure and withhold our allegiance.

There are many kinds of security other than protection from physical violence. Affordable housing and medical care, meaningful, remunerative employment -- these are as important to the security of a state as safe streets. In no way are we more secure now than a decade ago.

I read something yesterday that under Obamacare,  "A conservative projection shows that premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures for the average family will equal half of the average family income by 2019 and the full average family income itself by 2029." A perfect example of the unsustainable nature of the status quo (though in this gauge, the sustainability of Obamacare, 13 years, not six, is the estimate).

War rages in the Middle East. Eventually the Israel/GCC/U.S. axis is going to tilt at Iran.

It is all coming apart before our eyes and we don't have the ability to knit it back together.