Opinions, art, debate
I recorded this video today, less than 50 hours after the surgery. I’m on no medication, so everything I say is completely conscious.
It’s about tariffs, and you have heard all this here on the blog first. But still, appreciate the discipline, appearance and self-control. If you see my eyes glaze over at times, it’s because I’m breathing through the pain.
The shock that it did fail to inspire the masses is fun to observe.
Notice, also, the COVID vibes in the air. The COVID hysteria also started in late March – early April and produced riots by the end of May. It was also an effort of the Zoom class to position itself as more virtuous and caring as the plebs delivering its packages and bagging their groceries.
Reich was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. Together with Clinton, they laid the foundations for the following tragedy:
Reich was one of the main proponents of NAFTA, arguing that shipping jobs to Mexico would be great for US labor. Here’s an example of his statements from the Clinton era which readers of this blog will immediately recognize as neoliberal:
Great change demands great flexibility — the capacity to adapt quickly and continuously, to change jobs, change directions, gain new skills.
In the past few days Reich tried to show the flexibility that he so likes. He didn’t change jobs or gain new skills, remaining the rich, self-serving douche he always was. But he completely changed his opinion that “the stock market is not the economy”:
Still, there are limits to Reich’s flexibility. He still believes that shipping US jobs overseas is a wonderful idea. And workers who are affected should simply learn to be more flexible and embrace change.
Every neoliberal architect of de-industrialization and economic globalization is wailing that Trump’s tariffs are just absolutely horrible. That these people received no punishment for the horror they inflicted with their insane economic policies is shocking. That they still have an audience after everything they’ve done is even more so.
Reich is one angry neoliberal among many. They are currently wailing on social media, newspapers and TV like cats with chopped off tails. Something is causing their neoliberal souls a lot of pain. I, for one, am glad for it.
So how exactly was JD Vance wrong when he denounced this? Everybody on here knows that I’m not a fan of JD Vance but when he’s right, he’s right. A society where police come for people over online messages has gone very much off the rails.
Truly incredible that these are the descendants of Anthony Trollope’s characters who had more of a backbone that today’s Brits can begin to imagine.
Let’s say Trump is doing de-globalization and anti-free-marketeering incorrectly. But then why didn’t anybody try to do it correctly or in any other way? People who are so convinced that this isn’t the right way, what is their plan? What alternative are they suggesting besides continuing as is, with more “free trade”, more open borders, and more globalization?
De-industrialization and other neoliberal beauties have been ravaging us for over 3 decades. Why has nobody done anything to stop them? All these people who today claim to know exactly how Trump is mishandling his project. Why didn’t they do it right 10, 15, 20, etc years ago? Surely, there’s been enough time.
I’ve noticed this on a very small scale in my own life. Any project I’ve undertaken as an administrator, there was always a crowd of people ready to point out the erroneous way in which I was going about it and give lists of suggestions on how to do it better. They never do anything themselves, though. They know exactly how but somehow always fail to bring this exquisite knowledge of theirs into practice.
It is success that creates success and decay that produces decay.
Anthony Trollope, Dr Wortle’s School
My university’s administrators most certainly don’t understand what Trollope’s character Dr Wortle, a school director, understood so well. A school in a grip of an endless budget crisis that eliminates programs and can’t sustain its offerings isn’t attractive. People stop coming. We lost 18% of our students since these austerity cuts began. This is an exercise that tends towards zero.
Here’s the problem with this logic. “Better embrace free markets and free trade” means “better embrace neoliberalism”. And neoliberalism always leads to wokeness.
“Freedom above all” means “freedom from biology, reality, and facts.” No barriers to capital means no barriers to anything else. If country borders are eliminated for capital, they are eliminated for the labor that capital needs. Freedom above all means no boundaries exist for the truly endless and always raging human desires.
It’s not possible to worship “free markets” and oppose open borders, men in women’s toilets, and BLM. They are a package deal. You buy into the cause, you get the consequences.
Yes, it was not clear in 1982 that this was going to happen, that neoliberalism will lead to middle aged men prancing around, forcing us to “affirm” them as little girls. But things have happened since then. It’s time to notice. It’s time to adjust our thinking based on the consequences we have long observed.
I love the American healthcare system. It’s truly phenomenal, and I’m deeply grateful to it for many things.
There’s one area, though, where I wish it would improve. I wish doctors were taught that there’s a connection between body and soul. They treat patients like the physical and the mental parts are non-communicating vessels. Even in the USSR doctors were more mindful of patients’ emotional states. For example, a Soviet patient would never be told if he had a terminal diagnosis. In the US, on the other hand, a patient in what’s supposed to be a short outpatient procedure is asked what she wants to be done with her organs in case she doesn’t wake up from the anesthesia.
People are suggestible. Don’t tell them they might not wake up if you want them to wake up.
To make matters worse, the nurses demanded that I remove my underwear. I don’t want to say what the surgery was for now but I can say that it was nowhere remotely near the genital area. Given the childhood I had, there’s no likelihood I’m spending six hours without underwear anywhere at any time and for any reason. I ignored the nurses and kept the underwear on, which nobody noticed because, as I said, that’s not where the surgery took place.
Even worse than that, the surgeon had to come in before the operation and put his signature on my body. The surgeon apologized and said he knew it was horrid but I did feel like I was being prepped to donate those body parts everybody was so obsessed with. I still have his signature on me right now as I’m not allowed to shower. Good thing I didn’t get operated in the genital area because that is one place I wouldn’t have enjoyed having anybody’s signature.
Just like practicing psychologists need some training in the human anatomy, physicians need to be trained in the basics of psychology. For one, it would help them avoid burnout and become less addiction prone.
Other than that, it’s really a sensational healthcare system. Everything is very well thought-out, the schedule works like clockwork, no time is wasted but also no resource is spared. I was in a hospital in the middle of absolute nowhere (the closest restaurant was a Denny’s, 4 miles away) but everything was top of the line. The anaesthesiologists were talented people. I’m half-Slav, my general anesthesia takes a different path for biological reasons. For an American specialist in an area with no Slavs, you really need to be on top of your game to make it a smooth experience.
I’m fine, people, I’m back home from the surgery!
It was really funny that when nurses would ask me the standard question of “what do you think will happen here today?” to check if I was compos mentis, I’d rattle off the entire long and sciencey title of the procedure with relish. I didn’t get that college education in vain, it seems, and used it successfully to impress the nurses.
I was prescribed Tramadol which I know by reputation as the favorite recreational drug of the mistresses of Russian oligarchs. For that alone, I will not be filling the prescription. I’m planning to stay completely unmedicated for the recovery.
My main challenge currently is to stay in bed and not start running around doing housework and being a hero. I’ve started a new book by Anthony Trollope because that’s the only thing likely to keep me put.
Do you remember Michael Moore’s 1989 movie Roger and Me? It’s about the devastation experienced by 30,000 workers when GMC closed its factories in Flint, Michigan. Since then, most manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. Everywhere became Flint, Michigan.
Workers who were no longer needed turned to drugs and alcohol. Google opioid epidemic. Google deaths of despair. An enormous amount of suffering was visited on an enormous number of people in the name of free trade. Of course, it’s free only for people like Roger Smith, the CEO of GMC who ordered the firings. For everybody else, it’s dispossession and suffering.
Since then, more jobs of all kinds were offshored. Economic globalization means that companies go wherever on the globe labor is cheaper and regulations are laxer. Everybody who wants decent working conditions and decent pay is screwed. It also means that many things are no longer manufactured at all in countries where workers have legal protections against being abused. This makes countries with good, decent people completely dependent on horrible inhuman regimes. To give an example, Western Europe outsourced its energy production to Russia instead of building clean, green nuclear plants. As a result, Western Europe is paying huge amounts for Russian oil and gas. And Russia uses that money to bomb Ukraine.
In economic terms, this is what neoliberalism is. Capital is free to disregard national borders and move wherever it wants. Nation-states become irrelevant because capital doesn’t need to notice their existence. And no nation-states means no rights, no democracy in any meaningful way.
Is that what you want? Is that what you personally really like in life? Seeing yours or your neighbor’s job being given to some exploited Bangladeshi who’ll do it for $2 per hour? Meaningless elections? A fraying standard of living? More precarization? Being utterly dependent on some bloodthirsty dictatorial regime to manufacture your medication because nobody knows how to do it on this hemisphere? Do you like all this shit? I mean, if you are sincerely into all this then yay for you. But people who watched Roger and Me, who always said they are against globalization, who always knew that “free trade” was an absolute mockery, what the bloody fucking fuck are you doing now, foaming at the mouth in defense of globalization? Do you have no principles at all? Will you embrace even this because it’s politically expedient in the moment?
Maybe Trump’s tariffs won’t work. Maybe we are too far gone and are trapped by globalization forever. But at least he’s trying. Nobody else is. Nobody else is suggesting another way out of this. Globalized economy is terrible for everybody but the very rich. It’s not doing anything good for you and me. If somebody wants to take an axe to Roger Smith’s plans to steal our jobs and make us dependent on some third-world dictator who can make his population work for free, why should we oppose it? Why shouldn’t we instead use this opportunity to talk about how badly “free trade” worked out for all of us. We have one last chance to save the nation-state and instead we are making dumb jokes about penguins.
Today, in this moment, you are Roger from Michael Moore’s movie. It’s a great opportunity to sit and ponder what brought you from feeling solidarity and compassion with the workers to siding with their shady, nasty CEO. What happened in the intervening years that made you switch sides? Maybe watch the movie again and try to figure that out.
PEG is right. Maybe we are too far gone and the nation-state is truly doomed. But we’ve got to try, people. The only alternative is more austerity, more precarity, more of everything we’ve seen since Roger and Me.
At least, somebody has started asking why we are doing this, why we have decided that “free trade” and economic globalization are such a great good.
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