It Need Not Be Like This

Dum Spiro Spero.
 (While I breathe, I hope.)

We would do well, as George Orwell counselled us,
to see the traces of the dystopian world rising  around us,
to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are;
the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination,
never really change.
We can build our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, yet we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, systems that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups.

What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, is
"a dedication to ‘common decency and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.”

You Woke Up This Morning In A Cyberpunk World

The technology, surveillance, and dystopian  reality are obvious
—but it's it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion.

Where is the president in Blade Runner? Beneath the 1982 film based on Philip Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?"  beneath the neo-noir trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life.
A view of  alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers.
Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon or Walmart and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.
 But while Blade Runner is set in the once-distant future of November 2019,  it's resonance is inescapable in so many ways:
Vast corporate power.
Persistent surveillance.
Life finding a way in a time of constant crisis.

Underlying the tale, but perhaps it's most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.

Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent
from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature,
but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.
 Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re on the cusp of the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.

 As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding responsibility, power, and capability.
They have reduced themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility.
This intentional gutting of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time—the earliest texts of cyberpunk—imagines what happens when that process is complete.
Cyberpunk is a genre of vast corporate power and acute personal deprivation.
The technologies at the center of it are all means of control, control bought by the wealthy or broken by criminals. Where recourse is available, in whatever small way, it’s through direct actions.
In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, characters interact with the government
either through past military service or in the law literally made manifest in code.
Real power is reserved only for entrenched wealth.
For Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, politics is visible
but is driven by corporations either bending states to their will
or actively routing around governance.

These dystopias are the logical culmination of a political project designed to fundamentally limit what government can do for people ...
 and expand what it can do for the wealthy.

 “Back in the 1980s, before movies and video games reduced the genre to a mass of unimaginative violence and dim body modification tropes, cyberpunk was the literary movement that was busy projecting our fears about rampant vulture capitalism, media oversaturation, and emerging computer networks into fictional futures,” writes Infinite Detail author and journalist Tim Maughan.
 The 2020s are, in a real, tangible sense, the conclusion of The Long 1980s. Writing in the 1980s, foundational cyberpunk authors were watching as leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursued a set of political reforms collectively known as neoliberalism. Prioritizing competition in the market above all else, these reforms were fundamentally a political project, aimed at shrinking the public sphere and undoing the commitments to social welfare that had been made in the wake of the chaos, upheaval, and deprivation of the first half of the 20th century.
This neoliberal turn was a project of unmaking the state for individuals and communities and remaking it for capital.

Cyberpunk conjured a world at this end state of neoliberal reorganization.
Islands in the Net features drone warfare launched against data havens at the behest of corporations. In Blade Runner, the profit considerations of multinational companies determine worker personhood. There is more than a little of the Tyrell Corporation’s prudent life expectancy design in how corporations respond to worker protests over a lack of personal protective equipment.
Today, cyberpunk’s anticipated neoliberal end state is nothing more fanciful than life as we know it. What is remarkable is not that writers anticipated how the neoliberal turn would go,
but that 40 years and several international economic crises later, politicians still respond to these crises with solutions that prioritize markets over people.

In the United States, greatly decreasing state capacity has been an ongoing bipartisan project since 1981. Even the Affordable Care Act, itself the flagship bill of the furthest-left administration in the United States in a half-century, is fundamentally built around the market first, with the government obliging humans into participating in that market.
 It is easy to see health care markets warping into what we see in cyberpunk.
The genre is rich with augmented bodies and artificial limbs, available at a steep price—a privilege available to the ultrawealthy or for a tremendous debt that obliges the recipient to a benefactor. It is the promise of the best medical care known to history—and the least affordable means to get it.

 Hospitals across the United States are in bidding wars with wealthy enclaves, black market profiteers, Federal agencies like FEMA, and one another for a finite supply of protective equipment.
At every point where the supply chain is open to market incentives, companies built to prioritize profit exploit the absence of state control, bogarting lab test contracts
and protective mask production lines.

 Cyberpunk portrays a world dominated by an insulated wealthy elite,
catered to by exclusive services  offering premium versions of what governments once offered the public.
In 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel, itself a schlocky adaptation of 1990s cyberjunky manga Gunnm, the upper class literally lives in a floating city, where they receive monthly shipments of exceptional organs harvested from the underclass below.
It’s modern organ transplant disparities blasted to hyperbolic proportions.
 That disparity, extended to all aspects of life, is the end stage of a deliberate political process. Historian Nils Gilman describes this policy as a “plutocratic insurgency,” where the wealthy seek “to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (economic) action.” The wealthy do this within elected office and outside it, spending some small portion of their fortunes to ensure politicians meet crises with tax cuts instead of rent freezes.

As the wealthy expand the space where they can act with impunity,
they are aided from below by entrepreneurs of crime. In the void where  governments once offered protection, financial support, and access to medicine instead thrives an alliance of the rich who believe themselves above the law and their accomplices willing to flout the law.
 What might it mean, say, to experience a pandemic knowing that many of the needed medical supplies are getting bought up for personal use by the ultrarich, or captured by the black market and auctioned off to the desperate?
And, more importantly, what happens next, when companies are free to take over functions that in a previous era would have been taken care of by the government?
Amazon’s logistics empire now gets headlines comparing it to the Red Cross, even as warehouse workers protest over lack of personal protective equipment.
While the state of Texas waited until March 31 to issue a stay-at-home order in the face of the pandemic, San Antonio–based H-E-B activated its own Emergency Operations Center on March 4. By contrast, the Pentagon is still waiting for direction on where to send its 2,000 ventilators.
 It is not hard to imagine that after the pandemic, the mishandling of federal resources will be used as a reason to surrender even more state capacity to private companies, which will leave the government even worse equipped to handle whatever crisis comes next.

A significant strategy of the plutocratic insurgency, as enabled by the neoliberal turn, is to intentionally eave the government ill-equipped for a shared crisis. Rationing once-public goods by wealth is a choice societies make, no matter how much market essentialists portray it as natural.
 It is the same logic that deems people ordering goods at home worthy of protection while denying protections to the workers preparing those deliveries.

It is a short hop, skip, and jump from corporations branding the whole of their workforce “essential services” to imagining a future, as envisioned by cartoonist Matt Lubchansky.

One of cyberpunk’s most durable spinoffs is steampunk, which transposes the technological ingenuity and exploration from the imagined near future to an alternate past, from the 21st to the late 19th century. Steam engines and fantastical contraptions aside, it is telling that the conventions of cyberpunk work seamlessly in the Gilded Age. Because  the 2020s are hardly the first era of unaccountable corporate power, or of deprivation and dehumanization in the name of markets and technological progress.

 Escaping a Gilded Age takes more than just clever protagonists who can outwit the cruelties and exploitations of the wealthy few. As insurmountable as the power of robber barons once seemed, cataclysm and political action brought the Gilded Age to a resounding end.

The inoculations against another Gilded Age are found far less in the works of cyberpunk and far more in the Works Progress Administration.

 Escaping a Gilded Age takes an active, collective politics, one that refuses to let governments hide behind algorithms or abdication of responsibility to the market. Without that political movement, we’re not just living in the prologue to a cyberpunk future. We’re living in the first chapter of a "cybourgeoisie"  dystopian reality.

Democracy - For Sale To Highest Bidder?

Back in 2003, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, who led the research team, found that capuchin monkeys respond negatively to inequality and injustice.

In the experiment, capuchins were motivated to perform a task when rewarded with a slice of cucumber, until they became aware that other monkeys were being rewarded with grapes.
When the primates became aware that partners were receiving better rewards for the same task, they became agitated, threw their cucumbers at the researchers, and refused to participate in the experiment.

Humans, who we might argue are at least as intelligent (well we MIGHT),  have similar reactions to injustice. Studies in employee behavior support the equity theory of motivation, showing that effort is tied to the perception that employees are  being treated fair and rewards are distributed equitably and justly, based on performance. When employees perceive that they are not rewarded for their efforts compared to others, they strive to achieve justice by either doing less work, obtaining salary increases, reducing the rewards of others, or leaving these jobs entirely.

In both human and primate examples, social comparisons drive dissatisfaction. People are generally willing to put up with minimal  rewards if those rewards are distributed equitably.
We would rather be collectively poor than treated unfairly.
In a recent OECD Study, the point is made that there is now widespread recognition that GDP measures or GDP per capita are misleading when it comes to understanding economic well-being.
What the study found was that household income, with a particular emphasis on income inequality was by far the truthful measure of a country's well being. It analyzed the distribution of household wealth across 28 countries, finding that wealth inequality is twice the level of income inequality on average.

The study also found that the wealthiest 10 percent of households hold 52 percent of total household wealth on average. By comparison, the 60 percent least wealthy households own little over 12 percent. The situation of inequality is worst in the United States.
In the US, the share of wealth held by the richest 10 percent of households stands at 79 percent.

 The bottom 60 percent of U.S. households only hold 2.4 percent of household wealth.

This inequality gap is also wide in Europe -10 percent of households control 68 percent of wealth in the Netherlands and 64 percent in Denmark. However in both countries, there are strong government investments in social programs. For instance even the poorest citizens have access to healthcare and education.

The United States leads the world in wealth inequality.

Inequality justified by performance isn't a problem. But the idea that one can get ahead and achieve  based solely on merit has become difficult to defend. Research from the Brookings Institution shows there is some minor opportunity for economic mobility at the middle of the economic ladder. (Middle-income kids have some opportunities to shape their own destinies, moving up or down in socioeconomic status)  Yet the middle class is shrinking. It grows smaller every day.

 Those born to wealthy parents stay wealthy, and those born to poor parents stay poor.

Wealthy families provide ample safety nets that allow their children to succeed, quite often despite very poor choices , little effort, and even behavior that; had they been born to a less wealthy parent, would have landed them in jail.

Conversely, poor families become a liability to even the most ambitious offspring.

This effect of parental income on a child’s income, which economists call “intergenerational earnings elasticity,” or IGE, is growing in the U.S. In a comparative analysis across countries, income inequality is correlated with high IGE, and the United States has fallen behind all other Western democracies in both. The “American dream” is now more realistically the “Canadian dream.”

The truth is, despite the misguided belief; "merit" has little to do with income.
Most wealth is simply inherited.
Oh sure, you can find some people who became wealthy because of their intellectual property, or hard work, or intelligent use of their own talents...but on the Forbes list of the world's 100 wealthiest people, only a half dozen or so did not inherit their wealth.

Education is often a mechanism for the transfer of wealth, as the wealthy can send their kids to the best private schools and most expensive colleges, and use their influence to secure high paying positions afterwards.  Yet, even among students at the same college, it is clear that the system favors  wealthier families. Take internships, for example. In the US, the norm has been for companies and organizations to offer unpaid internships, capitalizing on the free labor of a generation desperate for the experience that has become necessary to enter the workforce. But how can a middle class or poor person afford to live while working for free? They can not.

Wealthy families can pay for their summer housing, transportation expenses and even cover tuition so the internship can count for college credit. Yet, other students must work paid retail jobs over the summer to earn money for books and other college expenses. Their resumes can not look as impressive. And what about students who want to go to law school? Students whose families can afford to pay the $1,500 fee for LSAT preparatory courses have a clear advantage over those who cannot. These are but a few examples.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Janus case surprised no one who pays attention to America’s highest judicial panel. Every analyst following the case expected the Supremes to rule against America’s public sector unions. And by a 5-4 margin, they did.

The impact from this decision? The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus will make the United States still more unequal.

The five justices who decided Janus never, of course, mentioned anything about inequality in their ruling that public sector unions cannot collect representational fees from the nonmembers they are legally required to represent. The Janus majority justices talked instead about protecting First Amendment rights. But that lofty philosophizing merely served as a convenient cover for the continuing assault on the basic human right to justice on the job.

This assault was an effort bankrolled over the years by a relentless gang of fiercely anti-union deep pockets and it has been remarkably effective.

Back in the 1950s, over a third of America’s workers belonged to unions.
And that statistic underplayed the actual extent of the nation’s trade union presence.
In the private sector, outside the South, unions represented over half the workforce in the decades  after World War II.

The workers unions didn’t represent in those years directly benefited as well from heavy trade union “density.” Nonunion employers simply couldn’t hire and keep workers unless they improved what they had to offer in pay and benefits.

The business pushback against union influence started picking up considerable momentum in the 1970s, then achieved critical mass in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan in the White House.

In 1981, Reagan fired and permanently replaced striking air traffic controllers.
Two major private sector employers, Phelps Dodge and International Paper, would soon follow Reagan’s example with their own striking unions. Other employers took notes.

This willingness to replace striking workers, historian Joseph McCartin has written, would reshape “the world of the modern workplace.” Strikes would now almost totally disappear from American labor relations. Strikes had given workers leverage. Without them, unions simply couldn’t effectively pressure employers to increase wages as productivity & profits grew.

Other assaults on worker rights aggravated labor’s growing marginality in America’s workplaces.
The nation’s labor laws — statutes meant to protect workers’ right to bargain collectively with their employer — were killed. 
Employers who violated these statutes no longer faced any significant liability.
The assaults took a toll. By 1983, union membership had dropped to 20.1 percent of America’s nonsupervisory workforce. In 2017, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 10.7 percent of the nation’s employees carried union cards.

And these stats overplay the actual extent — in the private sector — of the trade union presence in 21st-century American life. In the mid-20th century, most all union members worked in the private sector. Today union members make up 34.4 percent of the public sector workforce and only 6.5 percent of workers in the private sector.
Nine states now have overall union member rates under 5 percent. In other words, over vast swatches of the American economic landscape, unions  barely exist at all.

What does exist in the United States today?
A level of income and wealth inequality not seen since the 1920s, another era of minimal union influence. The history of America’s past century paints a vividly clear picture: Inequality in America has increased in the years when unions have been at their weakest and decreased in the years when unions have been at their strongest.

For years, the conventional economic wisdom has blamed our contemporary extreme inequality on irreversible trends like advancing technologies and globalization. But this myth is no longer defended by mainstream economists. Recent mainstream research has emphasized how crucial a role union density plays in income and wealth distribution.

Researchers from the International Monetary Fund (of all places!) have examined the economic experiences of 20 developed nations between 1980 and 2010. Most all of these nations showed a declining union presence over the course of these years, with that decline severe in some nations — like the United States — and much less severe in others. What they found was declining union density was “strongly associated” with the growing share of national income going, within each nation, to the richest 10 percent of the population. “The decline in union density,” this IMF research indicates, “explains about 40 percent of the average increase in the top 10 percent of income share in our sample countries.”

Part of that growing income share of the already affluent reflects the lower wages of workers in nonunion workplaces. The de-unionization that “weakens earnings of middle- and low-income workers,” the IMF researchers explain, “necessarily increases” the income share of corporate executives and shareholders.

Another part of that growing top 10 percent income hoarding reflects the loss of influence over basic public policy decisions that average wage earners wielded when unions were stronger.
That shrinking influence leaves the wealthiest 10% in control of the the economic and political system, and they rig it in their favor.

Other global economic bodies — like the OECD, the official economic research agency of the developed world — have concluded that our current high levels of inequality do no society any good.

“By not addressing inequality,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría has pronounced, “governments are cutting into the social fabric of their countries and hurting their long-term economic growth.”

Last year, trade union leaders from around the world descended on an OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris to make the case that significant progress against inequality will only come when workers have the bargaining power to “benefit from structural and technological change.” along with the

The U.S. Supreme Court has totally ignored economic reality with its Janus decision.
Come to think of it, the U.S. government in it's efforts to appease the billionaire class since the 1980s, has ignored economic reality entirely.
As for the rest of us?
Unlike the SCOTUS...or the other branches of government...
We can’t afford to.

Postscript: 
The Rich do not always win...remember that.
The memory of the  triumph over plutocracy that created the American middle class must not be permitted to be extinguished. The future may appear to be bleak, and if we do not change the course we are on, it will be. However that is a matter of choice. We need not choose a bleak future.
We must not let others convince us there is no choice.
Recommended reading on the subject:
an analysis of how America went from a plutocracy to a more egalitarian society and back again.

The Kremlin KKKandidate - From Putin, With Love?...

It's well documented that Putin & his oligarch network runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO.
And why wouldn't they?

Putin has been a patron of the fascists like Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. Russian banks financed the campaign of fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.
In a speech at the Brookings Institution Joe Biden noted: “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he and his oligarch circle can then exploit.”

Ruptures that will likely multiply after Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.

While the destruction of Europe is quite a grandiose objective; so is the weakening of the United States. Until recently, Putin's oligarch network has only focused glancing attention on US elections.

Then along came the barking Tangerine Twitler.
If the Oligarchs could design their perfect patsy, it would look exactly like Trump.
 He celebrated the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU.
 He denounces NATO.
He spits on long time allies.
He praises dictators.
He preaches division.
He wants to build walls, not tear them down.
And he is also a great admirer of Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s devotion to the Russian president has been portrayed in the news as a buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman.  But Trump’s statements of praise are something closer to slavish devotion. In 2007, he praised Putin for “rebuilding Russia.” A year later he added, “He does his work well. Much better than our Bush.” When Putin ripped America in a New York Times op-ed in 2013, Trump called it “a masterpiece.” Despite ample evidence, Trump denies that Putin has assassinated his opponents, “In the event that such killings have transpired, they can be forgiven: At least he’s a leader.” And not just any old head of state: “I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an A.”

Many of Trump's ties to Russian Banks owned by Putin's network of oligarchs are known.
When the American banks stopped loaning him money because of his habit of intentionally declaring bankruptcies to get out of paying labor & creditors, he was bailed out by the Russian banks, owned by Putin's inner circle.  And why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest? Russian propaganda went full throttle for Trump, using its Russia Today apparatus to hail the courage of Trump’s foreign policy. (Sample headline: “Trump Sparks NATO Debate: ‘NATO Obsolete’) Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, purloining its opposition research files on Trump and just about everything else it could find. They also wormed their way into the computers of the Clinton Foundation, a breach reported by Bloomberg. And though it may be a mere coincidence, Trump’s inner circle is populated with advisers and operatives who have long careers advancing the interests of the Kremlin.
There is certainty that a foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States attached itself to a major presidential campaign.

Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public. On his legendary trip to Washington and New York, the Soviet in chief left the confines of his limousine and security cordon to glad-hand with the American people. Donald Trump suggested to reporters that the Soviet leader would be making his way to Trump Tower, a crucial station on his journey to capitalism. This was, in fact, a self-aggrandizing fabrication that Trump himself planted in the tabloids, but it was a convincing lie. A year earlier, Trump had traveled to Russia to attempt to develop luxury hotels in Moscow and Leningrad to feed the regime’s new appetite for Western business.  Newsweek reported this story.
Trump reveled in the newspaper stories that reported Gorbachev’s forthcoming visit to his HQ as fact. But he never expected his fake story to become reality. He must have been gobsmacked when he received word that Gorbachev wanted to pay a spontaneous visit to Trump Tower.
The skyscraper’s namesake rushed down from his penthouse office to pay obeisance.
From the video, we can see the blotched head of Gorbachev emerge from his car.
Trump and his retinue push through the crowd.
 “Great, great honor,” the mogul says as he pumps the hand of the Soviet supremo.
But one of Trump’s many vulnerabilities is that he doesn’t vet his people, whether it’s business partners, or the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.
 As it turns out, this Gorbachev wasn’t really the Soviet leader but an impersonator called Ronald Knapp. Trump was lavishing praise on the winner of a look-alike contest.
The con man was easily conned by a prankster.
Now he's dealing with far more accomplished "pranksters", and the future of the US, as well as our allies and partners hangs in the balance.

And that my friends, abridged as it may be; tells you all you really need to know about this mango Mussolini. That was merely the first instance of Trump carelessly sucking up to Russian power in the hopes of personal gain.

Fuckface Von Clownstick

You can rest assured, there will be plenty of unscrupulous details uncovered via the Mueller investigation. Money laundering, corruption on the grandest scale, and fraud are already obvious.
But none of this is the point of this writing today.
No, this isn't about Russians meddling.
The real issue, the one we ought to be up in arms about has nothing to do with one nation or another.
It has nothing to do with borders on a political map.
The real truth is that this is a class war.
The billionaire oligarchs against everyone else.
America has over time become less democratic and more oligarchic.
The gutting of protections against monopolies, the destruction of labor organization protections, the use of capital to override and overturn laws in favor of the obscenely wealthy...there's a privileged class and there's "the "inferior" who are not billionaires
 The "unnecessary eaters" as they were called in Weimar Germany by Trump's "many good people".
(sarcasm off)

This isn't about Russians, it's about oligarchs -- Birds Of A Feather.
If you think the Fanta Fascist is on YOUR side, unless you own a few Senators and travel in a personal Lear Jet, you likely attended Trump University and are a moron.
What do the Oligarchs want?
From The Kochs and Mercers, to the Kozitsyns, Potanins, and Melnichenkos...they all want one thing. The end of liberal democracies.
They have grown bored and tired with the inconvenience of going through the motions of pretending all you "unnecessary eaters" out there have political voices...the expenses of buying legislatures off.
Beyond your value as an organ donor when their livers are shot, you are less than nothing.

Putin is estimated to be the richest man in the world.
Like Trump, he hides the details.
(Trump's a halfwit who is hiding his debts and money laundering...make no comparison...he wasn't in the oligarch club...he wants in ).
This isn't about the country of Russia, it's about the wealthy going after the last crumbs on earth...yours.