‘Feed the Rich’ Dominates Politics
The Niceness of the Next Nine
Ukrainian Lives Matter
China Rejects Feed-the-Rich
Japanese Cherish Their ‘Honorary White’ Status
Snippets
Navalny: a Martyr for Libertarian Follies
Israel’s Wrong Turn
Falling Down for a Privatised Moon
‘Feed the Rich’ Dominates Politics
We’re being told that those old people who lack private wealth are an intolerable burden on the economy:
“UK state pension age will soon need to rise to 71, say experts…
“The UK pension age of 66 is set to rise to 67 between May 2026 and March 2028. From 2044, it is expected to rise to 68…
“By age 70, only 50% of adults in England and Wales are now disability-free and able to work. A smaller working population and a large economically inactive population reduces the tax base to pay for pensions – and creates huge labour shortages, which creates its own problems”[1]
That’s the capitalist viewpoint. Workers no longer working are unwanted if they have not got private savings.
Will older people put up with it?
I’m from the Baby Boomer generation. Sadly, most of my generation switched to Thatcherism when they started paying income tax. Reaganites in the USA.
In Britain, no one dared touch the pensions of the Baby Boomers, though these are low compared to other developed economies. Later generations have mostly been weak and gullible, believing that the only reality is Thatcherite economics.
Her policies were based on the idea that wealth came only from profit-making enterprises, and that both taxes and state regulations were a crushing burden.
The reality after four decades is that taxes still take a huge proportion of the national wealth. The rich pay a much smaller share, mostly by legal tax evasion. But even illegality is treated very lightly:
“HMRC investigations of wealthy ‘tax dodgers’ halve in five years
“The drop in civil inquiries by fraud unit sparks criticism that the authority’s use of its powers of enforcement are waning.”[2]
We were promised ‘trickle-down’: faster growth if we stopped burdening business with tax and regulations. Most of the left forget to say much about this false promise.
Small businesses, praised and flattered by the Tories, have continued to decline. Have been hurt by what the Tories actually did.
There has been no increase in the rate of wealth creation in Britain. Nor in the USA, if you allow for an increased population that includes vast numbers of immigrants, encouraged by both parties despite the Republican rhetoric.
From the 1980s there was an actual slowing in economic growth for Italy, Japan, and the former West Germany. The ‘economic miracles’ that had done so much to win the Cold War were not seen again where the ‘Miracle of the Market’ became the fixed belief.
I’ve been calling it Feed-the-Rich economics. I did a detailed study several years ago of what was happening,[3]
I’ve been surprised no one else has taken this up
The Niceness of the Next Nine
One problem is that a lot of the thinking in the society is done by the Next Nine. The richest tenth of the society, but excluding the richest 1%.
It is better to call the top elite the multi-millionaires: many non-millionaires flatter themselves:
“19% of American taxpayers believe themselves to be in the top 1% of earners. A further 20% expected to end up in the top 1%.” (Economist, September 6th 2003).[4]
Globally, there are several million multi-millionaires. Billionaires are just the top layer of this aggressive Overclass. They can’t demand respect and obedience, in the way the older ruling classes did. But they can play on human weakness and keep control.
They have flourished, while 90% of us suffer. (Though low paid workers and the unemployed more than the middle classes.) But they depend on the Next Nine going along with it. Public opinion has shifted:
“Are older, richer voters really against big spending? Maybe not as much as Labour fears”[5]
But would Labour’s leaders admit that Thatcherism was a con? Or that New Labour was part of it?
Don’t forget that all Labour MPs are among the Next Nine, with a basic salary of £86,584. They can hope to enter the richest 1%, especially if they make friends pushing pro-rich policies.
Tony Blair did just that. Starmer and others might well follow.
These personal prospects seem to outweigh the mess that Thatcherism has made of Britain. Socially, life is much nastier and less just. Economically, it has been slightly inferior to what we had when most people accepted the Mixed Economy as a desirable norm.
The Mixed Economy has remained the reality, but treated as an evil we are mysteriously unable to cure.
And the system continues to eliminate independent small property, which Marx correctly identified as the capitalist norm. What you have are start-ups that occasionally become enormous, but more commonly fail. And supposed self-employed who are contractors and who are mostly badly-paid and badly-treated employees.
This mess was not what they were after. But the New Right are not much good at predicting the likely results of their own actions. Not when it gets beyond the familiar and limited areas of finance and media.
Areas that are meaningful only because the wider society exists and creates solid wealth. And that is just where they have wasted Britain’s potential.
Turned the once-respected BBC News into just another voice for their falsehoods and fantasies.
Ukrainian Lives Matter
Both Israelis and Kiev’s Ukrainians have been persuaded that their opponents are hate-filled monsters determined to destroy them. That any offer of compromise would be false.
Very much the New Right vision. ‘Do it to them before they do it to us’, as they used to say in the US police drama Hill Street Blues.
I have all along been critical of the Kiev government, but I see them as wastrels. Fools, or people who expect grand careers globally while wrecking Ukraine’s real wealth.
The sort of oligarchs that Putin partly tamed in Russia. That President Xi has brought wholly under control in China, demanding that they stay out of politics and stick to business.
Authoritarian leaders, which is what you need to fix broken politics. Or to create Western norms in societies where they have never existed before.
The Financial Times, which is expected to report unwelcome news to working business people, included a recent article in which a columnist noticed a trend that they found baffling:
“It would be comforting to believe that the death of Alexei Navalny will finally make Vladimir Putin an international pariah. But recent history and current politics suggest otherwise. It is sadly likely that Russia’s leader will continue to be treated with respect — and even admiration — in large parts of the world…
“It is entirely possible that the world’s three largest democracies — India, the US and Indonesia — will all elect admirers of Putin as their leaders this year. Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia, Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US are all notable for standing aside from the international condemnation of Putin — for reasons that go beyond realpolitik.”[6]
Western Liberals spent four decades pushing a system that spreads war and gives an increasing slice of wealth to the rich. And which has slower economic growth than the Western norm before the 1980s.
And they cannot understand why much of the world views them as aggressors and failures.
They have written out of history the appalling mess that Yeltsin made, when he trusted Western advice. He made the Presidency more powerful, but at that time it served Western interests. And he shrank the economy, and allowed a privatisation that rewarded criminals and speculators.
What holds together the global Western system is the selfish interest of the multi-millionaires, and a swarm of people around them who hope to join their number, as some of them actually do. This crowd will continue scooping up wealth for as long as the show lasts. And if politics turns against them, they can count on there being safe havens secure from any pretence of International Law.
One of which will be the USA, where dissent is expressed mostly by support for the ultra-rich Trump. Who may still be a better option than four more years of Biden.
Even before Kiev’s Summer 2023 offensive proved a hopeless flop, I was certain that a continuing war wasn’t good even for Far Right Ukrainian Nationalism. But the West admitting this would risk a more general collapse, just as Vietnam’s 1975 victory in its American War left the USA briefly uncertain of where it was going.
Uncertain, but justly offended by the way the Soviet Bloc took advantage of US weakness to do all the wrong things. Paving the way for a bad type of US regeneration under Ronald Reagan.
China Rejects Feed-the-Rich
“Evergrande collapse means foreign investors in China face even greater uncertainty…
“Thousands of homebuyers who have paid deposits for homes in China could find their nest eggs at risk after liquidation order…
“Evergrande can still appeal against Monday’s ruling. More importantly, over 90% of its assets – which include more than 1,300 housing projects in 280 cities – are in mainland China, a separate jurisdiction from Hong Kong, where it is far from clear if Justice Chan’s order will be enforced.
“‘Good luck enforcing,’ says Anne Stevenson-Yang, founder of J Capital research. She recalled that when Kaisa, another Chinese property developer, defaulted on its debts in 2015, local governments in China took control of Kaisa developments and renamed them, in some cases physically barring Kaisa staff from accessing the properties.
“This means that foreign bondholders – including Top Shine Global, which brought the winding-up petition against the Evergrande – will be ‘hung out to dry’, says George Magnus, an economist and associate at SOAS University of London.
“And a bailout is unlikely. The Chinese government ‘certainly don’t want to give priority to making good the losses of foreign creditors over domestic citizens,’ says Magnus. ‘That just wouldn’t be a good look. So to the extent that somebody is going to pay a price, it will be the foreign bondholders.’…
“Beijing taking over the restructuring of financial institutions rather than bailing them out or paying out to creditors.”[7]
This Guardian columnist is offended that rich investors are going to make a loss from poor choices. That the Chinese government will not squeeze ordinary citizens to give the rich a reward for their failures.
China is doing what Western governments failed to do in 2008. Saying that capitalist investors should not be bailed out whenever large numbers of them get it wrong. Nationalising failed corporations with minimal compensation would have avoided a social collapse.
Which tells you who is actually in charge of all Western governments. An elite that MPs quite easily join.
When a risky investment pays off, as much as possible must go to the rich, with most taxes legally avoided.
When large numbers of them mess up, the government steps in and limits the losses.
But money for anyone else’s needs is always mysteriously unavailable.
Japanese Cherish Their ‘Honorary White’ Status
‘Honorary White’ was what Japanese were in South Africa under apartheid – creating difficulties, because few South Africans could tell them from the similar-looking North Chinese.
But it’s what the Japanese keep choosing. Beginning with joining with Western powers to crush the Boxer Rebellion.
Playing at being Champions of Asia in the 1930s, but at the same time showing enormous brutality in trying to conquer the semi-independent China that Chiang Kai-Shek was running as an lackey of Western Imperialism.
They alienated nationalists in Burma, now Myanmar. Had they got to India, they might also have alienated their allies in the Indian National Army: people viewed as heros by most Indians.
I recently read a book about what really happened when Japan built their Thailand-Burma railway.[8] It helpfully details how Pierre Boulle’s book The Bridge over the River Kwai was nonsense, as was the later film.
This new book concentrates on Western suffering, and corrects the notion that British officers did more than was essential for survival. But it also corrects Boulle’s racist idea of incompetent Japanese bridge-builders needing Western help: the designs were very good.
What most interested me was mention of how South Asians recruited for promised good jobs were treated even worse than the Western prisoners of war. An appendix shows shocking details. British deaths: 22.9%. Javanese deaths: 38.7%. Burmese deaths: 44.4%. Malay deaths: 56.0%. 6904 British deaths, and 85,000 South Asians.
A recent BBC report mentions Japanese resentment after the USA chose to pardon and even cherish a US sailor who killed two Japanese after carrying on driving when he knew he was unfit to do so.[9] But it’s a resentment that will lead to nothing much:
“There is a sense of resignation among many Japanese that their powerful American allies do not treat them as equals and never will. The Alkonis incident underlines that even when parties and presidents change in the United States, this sense of inequality persists.”[10]
The alternative would be to stop being part of the West and join the Global South, where their success in copying Western science and technology is widely admired. But it seems that being second-rate Westerners is preferred to being first among equals in the Global South.
Netflix is showing a remake of the historic novel Shogun. Rewritten history, making the rise of the Tokugawas much more uncertain than it actually was. But many agree that the novel is fully accurate about their strange and isolationist culture.
Snippets
Navalny: a Martyr for Libertarian Follies
Navalny died on 16 February and Kiev’s army was driven out of the key Donbass city of Avdiivka on the 17th. Which is suspicious, but I also don’t see how it benefited Putin. Navalny was no longer a rival
A few years back, Navalny almost succeeded as a right-wing populist on the lines of Trump, Berlusconi, and Bolsonaro. And now Milei in Argentina: they keep coming:
“With his anticorruption crusade that exposed the illicit riches of top regime figures in a series of brilliantly produced YouTube videos, he built a vast support base and Russia’s biggest regional opposition network. He brought together liberals, nationalists and left-wingers – everyone who was tired of the corrupt securitocracy that has ruled Russia for a quarter-century.”[11]
Which ignores how the mess was created in the 1990s, after Yeltsin followed damaging Western advice. What happened in the last quarter century is that Russia stopped following Western advice, and recovered some of what it had lost in the 1990s.
The decline began with Libertarians being allowed to recommend a system of privatisation that was wide open to fraud.
Workers were given shares, but were free to sell them, which could easily have been prevented. For proper businesses like startups, there are severe limits on when people can cash in the shares they have been lured by.
What happened was that a few daring spirits borrowed money and bought shares for cash. They became owners of huge businesses without doing anything to merit it.
Also here and in most of the former Warsaw Pact countries, police were viewed as part of wasteful public expenditure. Some at least of the Western advisors may have believed in Criminal Paladins, who are a very rare breed outside of thriller movies.
Crime and violence multiplied. Most of the Western public believed this was somehow the Russians’ fault. But an actual Russian would need to be particularly obsessive not to realise it.
It seems likely he was largely a US creation, but took more risks than most.
He must have made enemies in his earlier anticorruption crusade. People still vulnerable, in a way Putin is not. I’d been wondering even before news broke that negotiations were almost complete to free him.[12]
*
Israel’s Wrong Turn
Up until the early 1990s, I had sympathised with Israel. Arabs were not responsible for what had happened to Jews in Europe, but Jews in the Arab and wider Muslim world had also moved to Israel. And remembered that they had been treated as inferiors in the Muslim world.
But when the collapse of the Soviet Union led the Palestinians to finally accept the Two-States Solution that the United Nations had authorised back in 1947, an increasing number of Israelis felt that Jews alone should own the entire territory that the British Empire had opened for Jewish settlement.
Yitzhak Rabin, the first native-born prime minister of Israel, was assassinated by a Jewish hard-liner because he seemed serious about allowing a real Palestinian state. A state much smaller than the UN had specified in 1947, and probably not including all of the land that Israel had taken after 1967. But enough that most Palestinians might have accepted it and lived in peace.
Losing Rabin would not have been fatal, had Western leaders defended the cause he died for. Sadly, it was easier to be mindlessly in favour of whatever the current government of Israel was doing.
To enshrine the notion that anything that offended such governments should be denounced as anti-Semitic.
Part of attitudes that the New Right have spread to much of the world. Hurting both Ukraine and Israel, as I said earlier.
*
Falling Down for a Privatised Moon
The Soviets managed the first soft landing on the moon. One of 7 successes out of 27 attempts.
The USA followed and caught up. 5 soft landings out of 7 attempts. Then 6 soft-landings with humans – the 7th was Apollo 13, which had to sacrifice its lunar lander to survive an accident in their service module.
The Soviets hoped to cast a slur on the US achievement by getting the first moon rocks with a robotic probe. That was after four successive failures of a rocket big enough to take humans, something they kept hidden until 1990. But the robot probes kept failing. They only got rocks after the USA had returned their own, along with humans.
Since then, China has managed 3 out of 3 for lunar landers, including returning more moon rocks. No one else tried, though both Japan and the European Space Agency have brought back samples of asteroids. Yet Japan, 4th into space and just ahead of China, has a surprisingly weak space program. This and its little-remembered MSX home computers were part of a failure by Japan to be the Global Power it was once seen as. Its decline from its brief time as the world’s second economy.
Meanwhile India has a respectable record. Three attempts have yielded one successful soft landing, and a second that works badly, with the lander having turned upside down.
The USA’s new lander also had glitches, and is now known to have fallen on one side. But it is a part of a general feed-the-rich lunar venture. Humans from the USA are planned for 2026.
China plans to send humans in the 2030s. Part of a long-term program that may end up stronger.
*
Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/feb/05/uk-state-pension-age-will-soon-need-to-rise-to-71-say-experts
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/18/hmrc-investigations-of-wealthy-tax-dodgers-halve-in-five-years
[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/
[4]Newsnotes, November 2003, page 17. https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/2024/02/06/magazines-for-the-year-2003-the-iraq-invasion-as-fraud-and-blunder/ and https://labouraffairsmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/ltur-134-november-2003.pdf.
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/11/older-richer-voters-public-spending-labour-keir-starmer
[6] https://www.ft.com/content/e801a8e4-8a17-4e56-b06a-7fef9e311d7a – pay site
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/30/evergrande-collapse-china-property-developer-liquidation-details-impact
[8] The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai, by Julie Summers.
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_Alkonis
[10] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68137582
[11] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/2/17/why-navalny-was-hated-in-the-kremlin-and-in-some-western-circles
Labour Affairs 