Post-Putsch: Why There Should Be Consequences for Enablers of the Capitol Invasion

 I usually find myself agreeing with Glenn Greenwald, but not today.  GG has posted a heartfelt warning against overreaction to the attempted fur-and-horn putsch at the Capitol Building Wednesday.  He says the mob trampled on symbols of state power but otherwise did little of consequence, and vilifying them and their supporters will lead to repressive overreach, just like we saw after 9/11.  Cool it, says Glen.

Actually, I agree with one piece of this, the use of the “t” word, terrorism.  No the mob was not a terrorist brigade; it was mostly unarmed and did not commit mass or random violence to induce passive cowering from the rest of us.  There was minimal effort to locate and assault politicians; the intent was mostly to physically prevent the certification of the electoral college votes that would legally end any opposition to the replacement of Trump by Biden.

But that’s why the invasion mattered.  Repeat: it was an attempt to physically prevent the winner of an election from taking office.  This is where GG misses the point in his narrow comparisons of body counts and weapons supplies.

Yes, it was confused and amateurish, much like the president whose bluster it expressed.  But the danger of mob violence is not so much what the mob does as what the police do.  If the police (and military) go over to the side of the mob, the mob wins no matter how disorganized or ill-equipped it is.  

That’s not a threat when the mob represents the Left, but it is always a risk when the mob comes from the Right.  And in fact we did see a softness on the part of many (but not all) Capitol police officers who fraternized with the invaders and forgot (or “forgot”) the part of their mission that was about protecting not only the building, but the political leaders inside it.  It is extraordinary that senators and congresspeople were not warned about the breach until their own chambers were under attack.  The unwillingness of Trump to call out the National Guard makes it clear that the Guard was unlikely to be so accommodating, which we can take as reassuring news.  Nevertheless, we should never forget that the threat of right wing putschists is never just a product of their own arms or numbers but always comes down in the end to whether the armed protectors of the state will resist or join them.

So this is why I disagree with GG about the importance of this event: it was very important.  Its purpose was to prevent the winner of an election from taking office, and it is only because Trump’s popularity among those with badges, stripes and guns is not stronger that we could view the invasion as almost a joke and not something far worse.

Because the attempt to overturn a democratic election is so serious, its suppression justifies exceptional measures.  Of course, Trump should be denied any media platform from which he can be excluded.  Of course, other politicians who gave support to this putsch should be expelled from office.  This should take place immediately, understood as a response to this specific episode and not as a precedent for all dissent or demonstrations.

Longer term, we need to give urgent attention to the characteristics of our political and communication systems that nurtured the Trump disaster.  For starters, no private corporation should own the platforms over which most people receive and send communication, except perhaps in the limited role of common carrier.  The rules by which such platforms function should be publicly set for the purpose of enhancing real democratic discourse.

Call Republican Senators immediately!

 Tell them to find 16 colleagues, enough to constitute a credible threat of conviction if he is impeached, and make him resign.

You've Already Seen These Questions

1. Why is it that no existing society, nor society that ever existed, has arrived at universal prosperity, considering that in all times, and in all societies, excepting only the very barbarous, a few years would naturally have led to it?
2. How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of machinery, canals, transportation, and all other things that either facilitate labour or increase its produce; that the population instead of having its labours abridged, works more hours per capita than it did years ago?
3. Why has society never arrived at the enviable situation of universal abundant leisure, although so immediately within its grasp?

An Attempted Autogolpe

Not an attempted coup d'etat, as many are saying in the media.

I must credit Juan Cole with making aware of this useful term, which apparently comes out of Latin America.  According to Cole, a coup attempt traditionally involves military and also is directed at overthrowing a leader in power.  What happened yesterday in the Capitol did no fit either of these criteria.

But it does fit an autogolpe very well.  This is a self-coup, if you well, a situation where a leader, especially one who is about to be removed from office, acts to overthrow the established rules to remain in power, usually assuming authoritarian power in doing so.  This certainly looks like what Trump was trying to do, but failed to achieve.  So it was an attempted autogolpe.

Barkley Rosser 

These Questions are HUGE!

1. Is there any means of adding to national prosperity other than adding to the facilities of living?
2. What is liberty?
3. What is wealth if it does not add to liberty?
4. Who should determine how individuals dispose of their free time?

Thoughts on the Invasion of the US Capitol

 It’s all happening as I write, but here are a few reactions:

1. Fortunately we see Q-Anonics, Loud Boys and other right wing crazies invading the Capitol Building and not Black Lives Matter or the Left.  Think how many lives would have been lost if it had been the other way around.

2. It will be interesting to see how deeply investigators will delve into the lax security preparations for today’s senate meeting.

3. In the end, it all comes down to one question: where do the loyalties of the police and armed forces lie?  That is always the bottom line, but we can go for decades without confronting it directly.  When the left challenges state authority the issue is never in doubt, at least in the U.S.  When the challenge comes from the right we have to hold our breath.  There were video images a few moments ago of police gently escorting Trumpists out the door and down the stairs with no apparent thought to arresting them.  This indicates at least some softness toward the cause on their part.  On the other hand, I don’t expect there will be military or police resistance to the eventual securing of the building.  If the folks in uniforms were to go over to the other side, that would be the end of the political order.

This has happened in the past.  The end of Reconstruction was marked by white mobs that assaulted elected Black officials and were backed by “law enforcement”.  That was a counterrevolution that succeeded.  Around the world it has been a general rule: civil rebellions succeed if and only if the police and military are turned or at least neutralized.  It all comes down to that and always will.

4. Invading and shutting down the capitol makes sense if you think that a demonstrably fraudulent election has been imposed on the public.  If crooked election officials had doctored the results, those trying to stop the process would be heroes.  Actually, I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which people meekly assent to real evidence of stolen elections.  What makes today a travesty is that there isn’t a shred of evidence to support allegations of fraud; it is a product of cynical disinformation sponsored by people who believe honesty is an unnecessary constraint on attaining and exercising power.  Anyone who has propagated this disinformation is responsible in part for what has now happened: an insurrection is the predictable end product of widely-disseminated claims of electoral fraud.

The same goes, incidentally, for those purveying baseless claims that the coronavirus is a hoax imposed on us by Bill Gates, George Soros and their puppet Anthony Fauci.  If there really were a fake public health crisis seized on by governments to permanently regiment their citizenry, storming state capitols would be justified.  Disseminating disinformation along these lines is assuming responsibility for potential insurrectionary responses or violent attacks on public health and other officials.

The heroic defense of democracy and the fascist putsch take the same form, invading and occupying places of government and disrupting its operations.  The difference depends entirely on whether the motives derive from genuine evidence of wrongdoing or cynical, power-hungry bullshit.

Yes, More Questions

1. If the whole labour of the country was just sufficient for the support of the whole population; would there be any surplus labour or capital accumulation?
2. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in one year as would maintain the population for two years, would the country cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, the erection of machinery?
3. If surplus produce from the first year is invested in machinery or other productive capital in the second year would the annual output in the third year be the same as, less than, or more than that in the first year?  
4. If the whole labour of the country could raise as much in the third year as would maintain it for two years plus the addition output enabled by machinery would they cease working for a year, would the surplus be left to perish or would the possessors of the surplus produce use it to employ people on something not directly and immediately productive, for instance, in the erection of more machinery, etc.?

The End Of The Embargo Against Qatar

 Yesterday Saudi Arabia announced that it is ending the embargo/boycott of Qatar, and though reportedly the UAE leadership is not entirely happy with this, they are going along with this as are the other nations involved in this, Bahrain and Egypt. This had begun in June, 2017, reportedly with the encouragement and initial support by Trump and Jared Kushner, with them buying into it as part of an anti-Iran alliance, given that Qatar was accused of having dealings with Iran, with which it shares a major natural gas pool in the Persian Gulf. It took Trump and Kushner a few months to realize that the very important al-Ubeid air base used by the US was there, so they shifted to trying to end the boycott, which involved a set of 13 demands that Qatar was not remotely going to follow, including shutting down al-Jazeera. It looked for awhile that the quartet, or some of its members, might invade Qatar, but then Turkey sent a bunch of troops to Qatar and in various ways began supporting it.  Probably the greatest cost to Qatar of this whole mess was not being able to use the airspace of these nations.

In the immediate news reports Jared Kushner is being credited with having worked this deal out, which really is not so much a deal as simply a full cave by the Saudis, although apparently what the quartet gains is that Qatar had been bringing complaints to the WTO about all this, and these complaints are now withdrawn. I guess Kushner gets some credit for playing a role in undoing something ridiculous that he played a major role in getting put into place initially. He has also been the major player in getting the recognition deals cut between Israel and two of these, UAE and Bahrain, as well as Sudan and Morocco.

However, Juan Cole and other sources say that what really lies behind this move is the Saudis seeing the Biden administration coming in and recognizing that Biden does not at all approve of a lot of things they have been doing, including the assassination of WaPo journalist Jamal Khashoggi, some other human rights violations especially against female womens' rights activists, and the awful war in Yemen, which it must be recognized was supported to some degree by the Obama admin, but has gotten much worse since.  Supposedly the Saudis are scrambling and want to "clear some plates off the table" before the Biden admin gets in, and this also explains the Saudis quickly recognizing Biden's victory over Trump, even as some other foreign leaders held off doing so for some time.  They know they are in deep doo doo with Biden and those around him, and really do need US support.

An aspect of this is that is may be that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has for at least a moment lost some power.  Supposedly it was his father, King Salman, who has been the main mover on making this deal.  In any case, it looks like a good thing, whatever it is really behind it.

Barkley Rosser

Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint

 I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom.  What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”.

PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker.  This defeats the core purpose of public speaking in the post-Gutenberg era, which is to use the audience’s engagement with the speaker as a vehicle for communicating thoughts and feelings that the written word, even accompanied by pictures, can’t express.  The worst scenario, which all of us have experienced way too often, is when a speaker crams lots of text in tiny fonts into each slide and then reads it word for word.

As a teacher, I deliberately tried to upend this tendency without abandoning PowerPoint altogether.  I constructed very simple slides with as little text as possible, using very large fonts and relying on spatial organization, like lists and things pointing to other things with arrows to give listeners a sense of the ongoing structure of my presentation.  Sometimes I would insert charts or tables, but usually with only two or three headline quantities or relationships, easily seen in brief glimpse.  I wanted students’ attention to be focused on me, not my slides.

A few of the speakers I saw this week had the same strategy, but it was defeated by Zoom.  The standard Zoom screen gives you a tiny speaker window next to a massive space for slides; the main effect of PowerPoint minimalism was to produce a screenful of whitespace.  You could barely see the speaker even if you wanted to.

Why isn’t the ratio of screen space devoted to slides versus speaker image customizable?

More Questions?

1. What would be the ultimate effect on interest rates of a perpetually increasing accumulation of capital?
2. What would be the logical social response to a situation in which the interest rate on money is effectively zero?
3. What was the principal intention and object of the early political economists?
4. What effect does the detail of figures, the jargon of political economists, or the complexity of existing institutions have on the accumulation of capital?

Updating Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble

 On Dec. 21 I posted on "Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble."  Mostly things have not changed too much.  Oil is still running around $50 per barrel, stocks are not too different from where they were then.  I have no new data on real estate.  Gold is up a bit, now over $1900 again and scraping all time highs, but that is not too much higher than it was on 12.21/20.

What has been shooting up again, quite dramatically in the last few days, have been the cryptocurrencies again, especially bitcoin that has hit a substantially higher new high over $31,000 today. Others have followed, although not as dramatically, although second largest market Ethereum has passed $1,000 for the first time ever.  In any case, this is not a particularly informative post because I have no new information on why this is happening or what is driving this.  There are the same rumors that were around before about possible official digital currencies, and so on, although not any new news on those fronts.  Indeed, I remind that the outcome of any major rollout of official digital currencies might well crash the cryptos, with some people speculating they could also crash regular monies and even banks, although I am doubtful things would go that far.  But in any case, the crypto markets are going wild again, for whatever reason.

Oh, and happy new year, you all.

Barkley Rosser

The “it” Pronoun

The pronoun wars show no sign of abating.  How to replace the use of “him” and “his” to refer to people who are not male or whose gender is unknown?  For a while I used “him and her” or “his and hers”, but it is much too clunky, especially if repeated over the course of several sentences.  Then I switched to alternating genders, first using her/hers and then when the next opportunity arose him/his and so on.  But this is unsatisfactory as well, since it doesn’t distinguish clearly between instances where you know the gender (and can use the appropriate pronoun) and those where you don’t and are just throwing one out there.  Finally I gravitated to they/theirs, despite the deep belief, inculcated through decades of indoctrination, that it is a crime to mixed up singular and plural forms.

None of these is satisfactory, yet it is important to de-gender our language.  We shouldn’t default to a locution that places one gender ahead of another, and we should even go further and not impose a gender binary either.  All of that should be expunged.  Where to go from here?

I have a proposal, and this is “it”.  Very broadly, it/its has been used to designate things that are non- or insufficiently human instead of the him/her/his/hers complex, which is mostly reserved for our own species.  So-called higher animals whose sex is known, like your pet dog or cat, could be graced with him/his or her/hers, but if you don’t have this knowledge, or if the creature is considered lower, it merits only an it/its in common with inanimate objects.  A fish, for instance, is an it.  If you see a bird at some distance and are unable to sex it, it is an it.

Drawing the line in this way is objectionable.  I have been reading a bit of popular writing on animal cognition (Frans de Waal, Jennifer Ackerman), and it’s clear that referring to such organisms in a way that lumps them together with rocks compared to higher beings like us misrepresents them.

But what if we used it/its for everything and everyone?  A rock would be an it, yes, but also a bird and even a human.  Complete and universal itification.  In one swoop it would do away with illegitimate gendering and the Descartes-ish denigration of nonhuman beings.  The only drawback would be the erasure of a linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate referents, but the current use of it/its violates this anyway.  Yes, we would be uncomfortable referring to each other itishly, but any de-gendered linguistic change takes getting used to.

What do you think?  Are we ready for “it”?

And More Questions

1. Are there limits to the accumulation of capital?
2. Under what condition is there a limit to the accumulation of capital?
3. If there are limits to the accumulation of capital, what defines those limits?

Even More Questions

1. What is capital?
2. What power does capital have when invested in machinery, lands, agricultural improvements, etc.?
3. What happens to individuals when they have experienced the accumulative power of money?

A Few More Questions

1. What objections are there to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
2. How may one answer objections to the proposition that wealth consists of reserved surplus labour?
3. What is the difference between value in use and value in exchange of goods?
4. Why should calculation of the wealth of a nation exclude (or include) its usual and necessary consumption?