RCEP With China Minus India: Spotlight On ASEAN

RCEP

Last week at the most recent ASEAN conference, China announced that they would be joining RCEP (Regional Cooperative Economic Plan). The previous video features the stuffed shirt talking head hot takes from India and Japan. RCEP becomes the largest free trade agreement in the world covering 30% of the world's population and an equal amount of global GDP--and that's without India, who has flirted with RCEP over the years but ultimately (for now) backed away. RCEP is currently: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam. 

But...no USA (*).  

You may recall that in 2016, US presidential candidates Trump and Clinton agreed on pretty much only one thing: that the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) was a bad idea for American workers and both poo-pooed the idea of joining in--even though it was Hillary Clinton that initially put the organization together while Secretary of State under President Obama. The whole point of the TPP was to create an East Asian trade block that would be aligned against China but Trump was against this because of his rabid anti-China policy (uh...wait that doesn't make any sense) and Clinton caved in the face of the Bernie Bros that (for whatever reason) think global trade is somehow bad for American industrial production. *sigh* Even when Americans have the right idea they manage to talk themselves out of it. 

So instead of an American-based free trade coalition spanning vast chunks of human population arrayed in opposition to China, now we have a China-based group without the need of American economic muscle behind it. Between the Bernie crowd and the Trump idiots (**), I'm certain I'm in the minority when I say this is a colossal wasted opportunity for USA. And likely an all-out triumph for China. 

Instead of TPP, Trump pursued a trade war with China built around unilateral tariffs--which would've been greatly aided by a TPP-like organization but somehow he didn't see it that way. My personal belief is that Trump's anti-China rhetoric was merely a staged attempt to create a détente with China going into the 2020 election and that the first three years of tariffs were really just a pantomimed attempt to gin up rapprochement. (***) But once Covid-19 appeared, the hope of détente with China evaporated. So instead, Xi Jinping has moved on with other plans: testing nuclear weapons again, cracking down on Hong Kong, picking fights with India, continuing to grow a military presence in the South China Sea and snatching the free trade bonanza the Americans let wither on the vine. 

About 15 minutes into this video, Ambassador Fujisaki refers to the 1990s-era belief (mostly in USA) that expanding trade with China would bring about a democratic revolution among Chinese workers/consumers. To further flesh out this belief that he refers to, I went back to "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner from the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs (****). The authors say things like, "Growth was supposed to bring not just further economic opening but also political liberalization...with a burgeoning Chinese middle class demanding new rights and pragmatic officials embracing legal reforms...for further progress." But "(r)ather than becoming a force for greater openness, consistent growth has served to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party". I think it's fair to say the first sentence was a popular belief in American foreign policy circles in the 1990s and that the second sentence is a popular belief in current American foreign policy circles. 

So, in short, the Americans believed that expanding economic cooperation with China was a necessary post-Cold War step to make sure that Chinese growth came with an American imprimatur and that over time the growth would create a more liberal, open Chinese establishment that would fall in line with Western democratic capitalism. We had become accustomed to pictures like this. We saw China's leadership as capable only of oppressing the in-born desires of millions--billions--of good hearted Chinese people that yearned only to buy more stuff (I mean, it's not insignificant the man in this iconic picture carries a grocery bag, is it?). And we saw ourselves as a force for good by way of infiltrating the Chinese economy and allowing a newly burgeoning middle class to demand more democratic representation. (Or perhaps we saw the opportunity to co-opt the inevitable economic expansion of China and to get rich off of China getting rich....there's that, too) 

But when Xi Jinping came to power in 2010 and then retained power in 2015 (and will be granted another 5-year term any day now), something previously unconstitutional in China, Americans began to wake up to the idea that the grand design of democratic capitalism wasn't taking hold as it should. Indeed, the power structure seems all the more powerful because the last 20 years of Chinese economic growth hasn't produced a middle class but a thin layer of super-rich private citizens eager to wed themselves to the CCP's hold on the culture. Oh...yeah....there has to be a middle class to have a middle class revolution.

For my part, I never really bought the idea back in the 1990s. China has been China for more than 3000 years and the only hint of democracy they've ever had was a brief flirtation with Republican gov't in the early 20th century that was not popular, not successful and is likely considered their lowest point in the last 3000 years (at least by the Chinese themselves). The people of China have been ruled by the imperial Middle Kingdom since before the beginning of time--yeah, check it out: Chinese history kicks off with several hundred years worth of a dynasty that no one's sure even existed. The Emperor emerged from the mythological primordial ooze of life itself and that's all they've ever known. And--here's the thing Americans will NEVER understand--the Chinese people are...pretty cool with that. They don't mind it, they rage against it every once in a while but nothing else has ever replaced it. So expecting the Chinese people to rise up and demand more self-determination is gonna take some time. Like, a lot of time. Like, I dunno, a thousand years...? The idea that two decades of selling Chinese people Wal-Mart bedsheets was gonna completely reverse several millennia of culture...uh...never made any sense to me. Americans are beholden to iconic images like the one above, but I gotta tell ya: you don't control a billion and a half people with a line of tanks.  

Frankly, it just shows a misapprehension on the part of the West of how China works. We look at the Chinese Communist Party and see only the Communist part and totally neglect the Chinese part. I would suggest the CCP functions pretty much just like the Confucian bureaucracy that was the spine of the last thousand years of the Middle Kingdom. Hell, I would suggest the CCP is way more enlightened, egalitarian, forward-looking, responsible and inclusive than the Confucians ever were. So what the Chinese people have is already light years more advanced than what their ancestors would've expected from their emperors. Furthermore what they have is not actually something that we would recognize as "Communist". The way the CCP operates in China is not at all how Communism has ever been practiced anywhere else--and certainly not what Karl Marx would've imagined (an agrarian peasant rebellion was not what Marx had in mind (*****)).  

Actually what Americans think of as Communism is just Authoritarianism with a fancy name on it. In the west we fear Communism for its authoritarian tendencies and we use Stalin and Mao as the examples; but the authoritarianism in both cases pre-dates Marx and has little to do with top-down Marxist economics. When we say that Communism has never worked, that isn't really true: it's never been tried. When the Russians latched on to Marxist thought, they were working within a tradition of brutal authoritarianism and they saw the opportunity to push the Czar out and grab that authoritarianism for themselves. Stalin grabbed power and glommed onto Marxist ideas about committees and class warfare, neither of which really come from Marx, but I see no evidence that Stalin had any interest in the economic precepts of Marxism. I am convinced that Marxist top-down economic doctrines are doomed to failure but I am not convinced the failure of the Russian Soviets was because of Marxist economic dogma. As for the authoritarianism, it wasn't a product of Marxism, it was already there, the Czars ruled with an iron fist long before Karl Marx was born (******). Stalin was born from a tradition of Czarism more than Marxism and Mao represented a new type of Middle Kingdom rather than being the Marxist ideal.

As for the economics, the reason Americans fear it is because we are born of commerce and bristle at any notion of fettering it. In America we have created not a worker's paradise but a consumer's paradise: it is still not uncommon to find items in your local grocery that are cheaper than the lands they came from. That's because we're awesome and those other places suck and the likely reason those other places don't have the options that Americans have is because there is some top-down authority keeping the citizenry from full self-expression. We have a tendency to call this "Communism", whether or not that is actually the case. Thus, we equate Communism with Authoritarianism and Capitalism with Democracy: it is only in a free economy than we can have a free society (or something like that). And, the thinking goes, the expansion of Chinese economy must necessarily be joined with the expansion of civil liberties and voting rights, while a decrease of Chinese Communism will produce a decrease of Authoritarianism. We have come to see these things as two separate poles and presume the rise of one will spell the doom of the other. But this isn't necessarily so. I never bought that Chinese capitalism would lead to freer gov't because I think the gov't and the economy are two separate and distinct paradigms. And in this case it shows our fundamental misunderstanding of Communism. 

The Chinese are doing something that no one else has ever done before: they're actually following Marxist economic ideology. The authoritarianism has been there for thousands of years but their recent forays into global trade are because Marx says quite explicitly that Communism derives from Capitalism. Marx says you must indulge entrepreneurial industrial Capitalism in order for Communism to arise (re: you have to create wealth that so that you can then have wealth to control). Thus, the Chinese have allowed a greater expansion of market activity and wealth creation among the citizenry over the last 30 years because that's what Marx says to do--not because it seeks to adhere to American-style capitalist democracy. Capitalism will morph into Socialism, then Socialism will morph into Communism. I think Marx is probably right (*******) but whereas in the West we fear the steady decrease of individual choice due to the imposition of more and more top-down economic activity, in China they already have the top-down activity and are trying to bring the relative wealth of the citizenry up through a burst of macroeconomic activity. In the long run, the Chinese will either become prisoners of the endless chase for economic growth or they will actually achieve the Marxist Utopia (which is basically just Europe before the French Revolution). Neither of those options sound very "Chinese" to me but they gotta do something, I guess. 

And so here we are at a juncture of history where the Chinese are expanding their economic frontiers and reaching out to their neighbors (something they've done very little of in 3000 years), while the Americans are acting like trade is bad for workers. Yes, I was skeptical back in the 1990s of the political liberalization the Americans promised would happen, but I did kinda believe that Chinese people would get used to having choices and that would filter into the Party structure on the local level. Not on the national level, because that is now and will forever be just a room full of chain smoking old men making the decisions for a billion other souls. But I did think and still do that on the local level the reach of the CCP will actually--perhaps in spite of itself--give more people more opportunity to exert some bottom-up control. But that would be relatively invisible to American eyes and probably have little to do with the foreign policy/foreign trade powers of the Party. So while I didn't really buy it back in the day, I think it's much too early to say the liberalization didn't work because even if it does work, foreigners probably won't be able to tell. And it'll take a while before it works anyway, maybe not a thousand years but probably something like a hundred years. 

Marx was not talking about Russia, Marx was certainly not talking about China. Marx was talking about England--and by extension America. Marx presumed that the Capitalism Americans so cherish will eventually devolve (evolve/devolve? You decide) into Communism: a world where all the economic decisions are made by a handful of old men in committees telling everyone else what will be available to purchase. I understand Marx's point: as economic growth binds social structures together, an overarching abstract power will naturally arise on top--indeed, may be forced to arise--in order to smooth the flow of resource distribution. But Marx (like Einstein) was wedded to a steady state universe. For some reason he didn't account for economic expansion, so his notion that wealth would entropically rise to the top is not quite how things work. Also the notion that economic power and political power are the same thing is frankly not how America ever worked.

Granted, the super rich in America become super richer all the time but they don't hoard that wealth, they put it back into the markets. Indeed, the rich people are the ones creating the wealth that drives all economic growth. So while Marx was correct that a handful of rich people would control all the money, he was mistaken in that it would be controlled by a gov't force. It is not. That is private wealth put to private ends and the aim of of private wealth is to create ever more private wealth, which is not at all what a gov't would do. And Marx's notion that a gov't committee would be the best source of resource distribution is...man, as wrong as it could be!

Only private wealth can create capital; the gov't produces merely inflation. "Helping" people through gov't demand doesn't help anyone because it doesn't create sustainable economic structures, it just creates inflation. A sugar rush is fine for a while but it isn't nutrition, it won't keep the body from dying. Likewise, gov't spending can be an occasionally worthwhile stopgap but it does not provide nourishment. Only markets build into the future.

The American Congress is ruled by a series of committees but frankly the sheer amount of wealth it controls is pretty piddly compared to the private wealth in our capital markets. The politicians (and the politically minded citizenry) are fighting over tax dollars, which by definition is a tiny percentage of the overall economy. They can be as Marxist as they like, it'll actually have a pretty minimal effect on the wealth redistribution that happens all day long in the American economy. The politicians like to act important--and the citizenry is eager to make them appear important--but they're pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. They have the ability to waste a lot of time and money but not much more than that--they certainly can't make money or invest it. Congress's only real economic power is making money go away. Congress is absolutely invested in helping the citizenry be more productive (re: produce more capital) because that's where the wealth comes from. It doesn't come from the gov't. Wealth can never and will never come from gov't spending. That's just as true in China as it is in America. 

The Russian Soviets didn't care about economics, they cared only for the maintenance of their iron fist, generally by cowing people into silence and inactivity. China, too, has a long history of just shutting people up rather than dealing with their desires. In America we blame the political structure but frankly it doesn't do much because it actually effects a pittance of the overall spending. Marx's assumption that gov't power is real power is only true when you follow the top-down economic structures that Americans have always eschewed. But the idea that Capitalism and Democracy go hand in hand is not plainly obvious. I think its quite possible to have free economies in a tyrannical state and loads of democracy in a top-down economy. Market forces are latent, permanent and exist regardless of the particular ruling authority; ruling authorities can make economies worse but they have no power to make them better because economy comes from the People not the State. 

The fact that we've lumped all of these ideas in a single stew is an unnecessary complication that clouds our vision of objective reality (an effect of Media, I'd say). It makes Americans think that our politicians should do more and then complain when they try to do anything. And it makes us fear any other country in the world doing anything because we see competition as a zero-sum game rather than a source of continual growth. 

I've long been "soft" on China, even though I didn't buy the 1990s-era rhetoric of Chinese capitalist democracy. The Chinese people have been empowered over the last few decades but that doesn't mean they have much political participation. Yeah....because they don't want it. They like American-style improvement of standard of living but they think our politics is stupid and corrupt (and I agree). But I believe that China's continued growth and international influence is coming whether we like it or not--and, personally, I like it. I do not fear it and I think economic growth in all places is good because it empowers the citizens, the individuals, the People, even if has the unfortunate by-product of making States seem more powerful than they actually are. 

But it's hard to wrap my mind around a China that yearns for free trade while in America our politicians are clamoring for the cancellation of student loans; while I agree that our method of financing higher education is shameful and stupid, using the gov't as a mechanism to release people from their contractual obligations is precisely the opposite of what our gov't should be doing (and would be ruinously expensive for the higher educational opportunities of future generations). When American Liberals dream of a "better world", they are invariably thinking only of a more expensive one...and then expect the price to be paid by someone else. For some reason, they think that's what Socialism is but I bet they wouldn't if they ever read Marx.

(*) You will notice that North Korea and Taiwan, the two inescapable lightning rods of Pacific Asia, aren't there, either. But why isn't Bangladesh in the RCEP? 

(**) Obama gave lip service to TPP in 2016 but I suspect this was simply because he knew it was a losing cause. I thought at the time that Congress might've wanted TPP so much that they would actually let Obama have a little victory on the way out, but either Obama didn't care enough to take up the offer or Congress didn't care enough to extend it. Instead, the presidential candidates both talked Americans out of its usefulness...and we got a lame-ass trade war instead. *sigh* The business of America is business and we forget that at our peril.  

(***) I think Xi Jinping was on board with this plan. Enduring three years of an American tantrum for the prospect of 4-5 years of American support probably looked pretty good to him So, in case you're trying to read between the lines, I would suggest this shows that Covid-19 is absolutely NOT a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the global economy because I think it actually hinders what Xi wanted to do going forward. Or if this is some kind of devious plot, it is anti-Xi plot more than an anti-American one. 

(****) I started this post on Aug 29, 2018 initially with my thoughts on Foreign Affairs Mar/Apr 2018 essay "The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations" by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner.  But...I'm a lazy guy, picked this back up based on recent events.

(*****) I kept trying to convince my Chinese Political History professor that in an agrarian economy the farmers control the means of production, but he never bought it. I still (sorta) believe it but I still have no way of making anyone else believe it. Like I still believe that when looking at a US electoral map, it's easy to point out that the red states produce little of the overall GDP but how can you not notice it's where all our food comes from? Do you honestly think that's insignificant? 

(******) I'd say it's an outgrowth of the Golden Horde. Prior to the Mongols ransacking Russia circa 1250, there were democratic movements in that area, there was the attempt to make the leadership responsible to the citizenry. The Mongols ruled not merely with an iron fist but went out of their way to humiliate local Russian leaders and for 200 years brutally repressed any kind of movement at all. When the Muscovite princes were able to finally shake off Mongol rule around 1450, they took on the tenor of that bone-crushing leadership and that's the way it's been ever since in Russia. At to that end: Yeah, I know you're not gonna dig this but Vladimir Putin is easily the kindest, sweetest most benevolent leader they've ever had. I would say by a fucking longshot, he's the most enlightened leader they've ever had. Russia today actually has something that could be referred to as a middle class....when in the last thousand years was that even a possibility?

(*******) Though I don't agree with his rationale. To Marx economic growth will necessarily create an underclass that can only be cared for by the State and the State will then have to collect more and more from the citizenry to account for the left behind. I think the actuality is different: I think the upwardly mobile citizenry want more than they want to pay for and will think that gov't spending will be able to provide more and more. Thus, wealthy gov'ts will steadily drift toward Socialism and ultimately Communism through the force of ever-growing debt obligations. Politicians in charge will take on more and more spending as a means of holding on to power. But as gov't accrues more purchasing power, it will continually depress its own currency and all other markets. And in the long run we'll end up with dwindling consumer choices and more expectation of the gov't to make our choices for us. Kinda the same but Marx thought of helping the poor within a world of economic growth while I see it as steady decrease of economic growth as the people have fewer and fewer choices that only makes life tougher for the poor. 

PS -- Here's the Chinese stuffed shirt talking head hot take version. I think its noteworthy that they close by allowing the Singaporean representative to remind everyone that RCEP does not keep these Asian nations from militarily hedging against China (oh yeah: militarism is another separate and distinct paradigm that I didn't even touch on here). The agenda for the Americans is clear: guns but not butter. 

Election 2020 (The Aftermath)

Ahhhhhhhhhh....it didn't feel like this was gonna happen but I gotta say this is just about the perfect outcome. The woke socialism message was firmly rejected--and so was Trump! It was a 2-for-1! In the end (end-ish) it was exactly what Wall Street prayed for and, again, probably the perfect outcome for the country. It's like waking up on Xmas morning and realizing you don't have to go to the dentist. There was no Blue Wave as Republicans won more governorships and state legislatures and even won seats in the House and will likely maintain their slim majority in the Senate, while the Democrats held their majority in the House  and took the bully pulpit of the White House, allowing them to pretend like they run the place. Joe Biden has $11 trillion worth of proposed spending (*) and--with or without Mitch McConnell and 51 Reps in the Senate--there's no way he's passing anywhere near that much. Glorious gridlock! 

And an announcement of a Covid-19 vaccine on the way? Oh man, it's like a Led Zeppelin concert on a Xmas morning.

Trump still has to fight this result and there are theories of an ace up his sleeve, which isn't impossible. But Trump's biggest decision right now--the toughest decision of his life--is figuring just how/when to concede. He's never had to concede before (multiple bankruptcies don't require an Oscar speech, apparently), and graciously doing the right thing is kinda off-brand for him. But I've come back around to where I was on the eve of the 2016 election: Trump now has time to go back to building a media empire where he can trash Joe Biden and Rupert Murdoch in equal doses all day long. So if you think this is the end of Donald Trump, *long sigh*, no...no, I don't think so (**). I think now he has room to be louder and more obnoxious than ever before. Stifling him in the Oval Office actually shut that dude up for four years. But he has to fight for a while before he concedes so he can at least pretend like none of this is his fault and if he concedes without fighting then his fans will be let down. Never forget: Trump was our first wrestling POTUS. 

The most irritating part of the recent election cycle was the constant drumbeat about the decay of democracy, how we have to defend our yadda yadda yadda. That kind of fear-mongering is the last refuge of a scoundrel--only in politics does bullshit like that get rewarded! But, since everyone else brought up the topic, there is a serious drawback of democracy as a form of gov't that never gets discussed: a propensity toward deficit spending. Why? Because politicians are just entertainers who will say whatever they have to say to win your love but know full well that they're going to be replaced soon enough. So, like the GM of a sports franchise, they know their lifespan is short and won't think twice about trading away future draft picks or minor league talent in hopes of winning now. A GM with a target on his back does not care about the #1 pick five years from now because either he will be gone (likely) or he will be cemented in the organization by that time (unlikely, but hey, that's the dream, right?). Notice that other forms of gov't do not work that way. A tyrant has to go to the bank over and over and over again and they have the power to say no and they will eventually. The productivity of our working class is such that we've been able to get away with foolish spending since the end of the Civil War; that productivity will eventually run out....but when? So for now it will be gridlock but with increased gov't spending. 

The problem is we call everything "politics". Then we confuse politics with "government". Then we act like the POTUS runs the gov't. So everything rides on the POTUS, when in fact that dude is far away as Siberia or the Middle Ages. This is the danger of our collective ways: we fall prey to blaming and blame-shifting rather than rationally ascertaining problems and solutions. The POTUS ought to be the most boring bean counter we can find, when instead we go out looking for a megalomaniac rock star that can woo people rhetorically, as if that has anything to do with being president. We've totally disconnected becoming president from being president in a way that produces--thankfully--mostly just mediocrity. The job of POTUS is hard, why do we then make it harder by demanding that the POTUS also be popular? What good is that? The problem of American democracy is it encourages the citizenry to think they have to like everything. They do not and the sooner they realize that, the sooner we could actually hire the right people for these jobs instead of simply the most attractive liars (and we'll also be more able to ignore the shit we're not interested in instead of hating on it).

Trump has shown us our future: POTUS is merely a douche with a Twitter account now. Our polity has truly joined the 21st century. I'm not on Twitter myself, but every liberal I know is glued to Trump's Twitter like its a nicotine delivery device. They made him awfully popular--and will keep him relevant even after he's gone!--seems like they must like him a lot. Remember: most real conservatives still giggle/scoff at the word "Twitter", so it ain't your racist grandma giving Trump all that attention. And while Twitter has the power to raise nobodies into somebodies, it is a bitch goddess that takes away as it gives. Can any politician on Twitter ever truly be popular with more than 50% of the country? I don't see how that's possible. (The heart of Cal Ripken Jr. with the iron fist of J. Edgar Hoover...? Yeah, see that doesn't work at all) 

Social media is our society now. We live not in a state of nature but in a state of media. We can deny it, we can try to go back to the old way, but that's not how progress works (then again, most people who call themselves "Progressive" strike me as merely backward-looking). Twitter empowers the People, not the politicians. Unfortunately, the People can be talked into awful spending habits and sometimes buy into bizarrely nonsensical bullshit, so Twittering them into a frenzy could be the downfall of our nation....just throwing that out there. 

Earlier in the year I wrote a bunch of blog posts about what I call 'digital citizenship'. The idea is that once your gov't fully protects your right to be on-line and to maximize your data, then frankly that'll be all we need to the gov't to do. The people can maximize their earnings and experiences and the gov't would be simply the thin gray line where business runs into regulation and/or adjudication (and politics will stay in the home, where it belongs). This will allow people to vote online, pay their taxes online, educate their kids online, etc., with the proper protection of the gov't as the guarantor of contracts (the only thing we actually need the gov't to do, I would suggest). The Libertarians have a tradition of fearing the power of gov't, but that was in a state of Nature; in the state of Media, we need to be protected from each other far more than we need to fear the central authority. Identity theft is the scourge of the future, but what is identity but gov't details? I'm not worried about the gov't stealing my identity--the gov't is the force that cements my identity--I'm worried about my neighbors, professional rivals, vengeful strangers, psycho assholes, bored trolls, radical no-good-niks, old girlfriends, foreign powers, etc. The gov't at this stage is the least of our worries (except, of course, for the deficit spending that erodes the value of our work). 

These thoughts are not political--indeed, what do we even need political parties for any more? It is a matter of wedding the Constitution with modern technology. Technology is outstripping gov't power. 

For example, some wag on Reddit posted the other day that Joe Biden was not in fact the "president-elect" until after the meeting of the Electoral College and that the media is....I dunno....hypnotizing us or something. Now, technically he is probably correct: in the old days the election really wasn't decided until the electors met and did their secret handshakes and all that shit. But now we expect to know who won on election night--that is a function of technology, not politics or mind control. We have the ability (well, we almost do anyway) to know who will win by the end of Election Day and communicate it all over the world. This was not possible in the 19th century, it is possible now. The Constitution isn't to blame for not keeping up with the technology, it is the technology that must align itself with the Constitution. And calling Joe Biden the President-elect before the meeting of the Electors is merely a blip of scheduling, not a coup d'etat. 

The People are now nearly fully empowered. All we need is for gov't spending to dry up and interest rates to track true economic activity and everything'll be great....oh yeah, none of that is happening any time soon. This is some O. Henry shit right here: we have already sold out our future right as we're ready to take control of it. 

The moves of Congress and the Fed (and how that meshes with Wall Street, foreign investment, and American consumers), are going to be far more influential, meaningful and pervasive than anything the President does in the next four years. 

I wrote in the previous post that I would prefer four more years of Trump. I stand by that but I can't say as I was ever too enthusiastic about it. Trump doesn't do much I particularly like, indeed he is so uninteresting that I find him quite easy to ignore as there is nothing he can say that could possibly impact me. What I feared was an onslaught bent on out-Trumping Trump and I don't think that's gonna happen. Neither of these candidates matter because we are in service to the Fed-run economy for the foreseeable future. (***) Since the Presidency doesn't matter, if the American people prefer a nice guy to dole out their daily press briefings, then that's fine with me.  

Democracy has never been more robust (robust!) and never more sadly useless. All this voting, all these procedures, all these courts (oh yeah, I think that's coming) and states, and it's the same dumb way to choose a leader and the same dumb choice between two old-ass white guys. Hey, don't blame me--I voted for Corn Pop.

(*) By contrast Hillary Clinton had $2 trillion of spending proposals in 2016. Joe Biden needed every vote, might as well promise everyone the moon.

(**) I hesitate to even write this but it struck me as plainly obvious the other day and now I have to get it out. Here's the scenario: for three years Biden rolls along, not too high, not too low, but after Trump the world sorta appreciates the even keel-ness of the Biden White House. Then, he dies. And going into the 2024 election is President Kamala Harris running for re-election. That's how Trump comes back. I don't otherwise see him being interested in trying to navigate the party politics for 2024 because I think the Republicans are already divided against him and the fear that he would energize the Democrats would be prohibitive....unless he's running against Kamala Harris. Trump thinks he can beat her and I'm not sure he's wrong. And I think the Republicans would have to kick the tires on that proposition because I don't see anyone else out there on the Republican side ready to take a crack at 2024. 

(***) Jerome Powell doesn't remind me of Oliver Cromwell, but could a usurper rise from the Fed to basically take over the country? Or has that already happened? 

Election 2020 (The Pre-Game)

What Joe Biden thought 2020 was gonna be: Look, kids, Bernie just isn't gonna make it, you gotta go with me. And to all the newcomers, get on board with me, there's room for all of you and none of you are ready to do it on your own so I'm your best shot. I'm the leader, I got the money, everyone knows me, Obama loves me, and I can beat Trump. Everyone just get behind me, I'll give jobs to all (most) of you and I'll get you into the White House. All you gotta do is get behind me, tell everyone how great I am and that they need to vote for me. I am the great unifier! Believe in me and we will crush this idiot Trump!

But the Democrats couldn't get over their own fine grained selfish disappointments (the epitome of white privilege) to pull together. (Beware the "inclusive": they never agree on anything) Nancy Pelosi used Biden as a puppet in her Impeachment hearing, AOC never got on board with Biden or the "normal" wing that runs the Democratic Party, the young Progressives have yet to flock to the Biden camp, Obama waited til the bitter end to throw the full weight of his support to Biden, and Biden was bullet absorber #1 in the primary debates. And even though he got smoked in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden was comfortably in control by the third primary. The pundits would say it was only because the rest of the party couldn't build enough of a coalition against him; but I would suggest he was the only candidate the whole time. The first two primaries were a showcase for everyone/everything else the Democratic Party has to offer and it all led back to Joe Biden. No one wanted him to win and even when he did win, no one wanted to give him the credit. Biden walks ahead of the grumpiest bunch of brats in American history--and that's no mean feat.  

What Donald Trump thought 2020 was gonna be: Make a big trade deal with China in the Spring; Wall Street loves it, unemployment hovers near all-time lows; pull troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; unveil a series of normalized relations with Israel; lure Russia and China into a tripartite arms limitations treaty. That's what he had set up in front of him. Turning China from a great enemy into a great friend, a new bigshot deal with Russia, Wall Street fat and happy, Israel gaining some significant victories, taxes lowered, (bond markets limping along), soccer moms are happy and the churches will never vote for a Democrat anyway, so everyone's happy--or at least not unhappy enough to wanna do anything about it--and pulling troops out all at the same time. He pulled off some of that stuff anyway but if that had all gone his way you gotta admit: that's not bad, at home and abroad.  And even if he did fail, it does suggest that perhaps he had much more of a broad sense of leadership in the world than we ever really got to see. (Oh...and we'd probably be in a decent size standoff with Iran...but even the fly he built into the buttermilk didn't turn out right, as even that has yet to materialize)

Then Covid-19 comes along and wrecks all of it. 

China goes back to being an enemy, to blame for all the ills of the world (literal and metaphorical). Russia is more estranged than ever--and breaking off arms treaties without actually doing the follow up isn't necessarily a great idea. Turns out the Israeli lobby isn't as powerful as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. Europe never did develop any fondness for Trump, nor did Canada or Latin America. But if he'd pull off his vision, it would have worked....but this just shows why entrusting so much power to shape the future in the hands of a single POTUS is something we should take more seriously than ever having someone like Trump to be considered. He walked us into a trade war with China with the intention of pulling his punches going into the election, turning a concocted crisis into a generational victory, then throwing down a 'peacemaking' kinda deal for Xi and Putin and pleasing Wall Street, the generals and America's allies all at once....except that Covid-19 kept him from completing his vision, so now everything's half-finished right when he suddenly needs support (and he's left his presumed successor with a pile of god awful tariffs on China that Trump himself probably meant to get rid of). Trump is such a fucking cursed dude--how the fuck did we ever let him get elected? 

Trump's potential for reelection was based not on anyone liking Trump but on Trump being so successful that the world would have to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, that's not how American politics works. You have to be liked, not respected. Nobody really gives a shit what you accomplished--and most 'accomplishments' are just phony baloney positioning anyway. And Trump is not well-liked--least of all by the 'Trumpists' (*). And whatever the state of his 'plans', Covid-19 came along and upended all that.

I believe it was Jamelle Bouie who pointed out that a crisis like Covid-19 would be a godsend for most politicians. All you gotta do is look solemn and talk like you're in church at Xmas time. A scared captive audience that just wants to hear some soothing words is what most politicians dream of because that such a moment requires the blandest possible human to speak. A nice haircut with some harmless platitudes and everyone will be reassured and tell you how caring you are. But Trump is incapable of even that basic political opportunism. So instead he treats Covid-19 like it's Tuesday night at Wrestlemania and he'll defeat the disease but ridiculing its white trash girlfriend. 

But the complaint that Trump bungled the coronavirus is itself pure cynicism: what Trump bungled was his chance to make himself look like a nice guy. The idea that the POTUS is going to stop a viral pandemic is delusional, there was little for Trump to do except self-aggrandize--he failed at his best chance to win unparalleled support! The coronavirus was a states' issue not a federal one (**), I suggest there was very little for the POTUS to do and not much different from any other POTUS in the same position (although most any other POTUS would've handled the self-aggrandizement with more grace). And...wait...isn't Trump going on TV and telling everyone what to do exactly what we're supposed to be afraid of...and that's precisely what he did not do when the time arose...?

To me, the disgusting part of Trump's response was the severe lack of testing, which is something I think he could've been at the forefront for encouraging people to seek out and enforcing localities' ability to offer. I don't know what the POTUS can actually do but at least his bully pulpit could speed up the market mechanisms for more testing, more evaluation, etc., to properly understand how the virus was moving and its effects, to separate the spreaders from the at-risk population. But he seemed to think testing would merely make him look bad--it probably would, but that's no reason not to do the right thing anyway. Trump made it clear that getting reelected was more important to him than America. And no was surprised by this. 

Then when the George Floyd protests took over in May/June, Trump's powerlessness was as big as the great outdoors and he showed that POTUS has little control over situations like what happened to George Floyd or the response to what happened to George Floyd. There was nothing Trump could do but try to weather the storm, which looked impossible at the time. But the protests which started off with such force and such mainstream support actually accomplished...not much. The calls for police reform morphed into an attack on statues and a bizarre thrust toward the "Karens" of the world and then just sorta melted away into ordinary summertime frustrations, as the People shook off the coronavirus and went back to their lives. 

Americans: easy to incite but impossible to satisfy, so even rioting in the street bores them. Though I would say Americans looked more likely to register and vote and do all that shit more than usual and that's probably just the way of things now: more divisiveness will likely bring more voters into the electorate, which is the first step to modernizing the process. 

As for Biden, he was able to loll the summer away in his basement doing very little campaigning, instead relying on Trump to self-combust, which was pretty much the correct strategy. Biden brought in Kamala Harris as a running mate, which was the obvious move: at this time last year she struck me as every Democrat's second favorite choice, making her a virtual lock for the VP slot no matter who the candidate turned out to be. Biden has taken on Buttigieg to his team but has more or less ditched all the other comers that chose to attack him (rather than fall in behind him) back in Iowa. To my mind this shows that Biden never really had any more faith in the next generation of Democrats than they had in him--if he did, he'd be holding Kamala up for Attorney General rather than Vice President! He'd be telling you Cory Booker is gonna be a great Secretary of Housing or Beto O'Rourke is our next UN Ambassador or Stacey Abrams will be our new VP, but he's not doing any of that. And all those non-Biden candidates are mostly all just gone. Yeah, Democrats, you may hate Biden but he's easily the best you got and that was always true. 

The Democrats hate Trump but they've done nothing but attack him since he arrived and frankly I think their attacks have come up wanting. They suggest only one thing: Democrats don't like Donald Trump. Yeah, I get that...is there more to this? They were wiretapping General Flynn before the inauguration and tripped him up with the sort of ticky-tack nonsense that federal prosecutors do all the time. They spent two years on an FBI-driven investigation that yielded...some Russian Facebook accounts (are those even illegal?). They impeached him without even bothering to prove a crime. I'm no fan of Trump but do you honestly think the engine of our gov't is solely built for rival politicians to wage war on each other? 

And...wait...if they don't like Joe Biden, then what's the point? They hate Trump but really what they're saying is they want a president to be likable. They need to like the POTUS but then their nominee is a guy they don't even like....? So the Dems didn't want to vote for Hillary in 2016 and they don't want to vote for Biden in 2020 and really all they want is a president that they like. When you realize that the "Trumpists" only like Trump because he riles up the people that hate Trump, then the vacillations of the Democrats becomes, to my mind, all the more unforgivable. They've done nothing but attack Trump as hard as they can and yet they still can't get excited about their own guy...what do they want? 

They're gonna hate-vote Trump back into office because they love hating him so much. And they'll continue to hate him and read his Tweets hourly after he's out of office, so its not like this is even an attempt to get rid of Trump. Just a chance to hate on him a little louder than usual. 

Personally I couldn't give a shit about the POTUS being likable--indeed, I think it's weird to wanna like your leaders! If this summer has taught us anything it is that liking your leaders simply means future generations will tear down their statues. (And why the fuck do we build statues of people that ruled over us, anyway?)  I am suggesting that Trump does have a larger sense of his image that goes beyond his twitterings and that being hate-followed can be very lucrative (shit, man, got Trump all the way to the White House, there's really no reason why that should've happened). 

Trump is an unlikable a human being as I think I've ever seen. He goes way above and beyond most assholes and I understand completely why the left/liberals/Democrats don't like him. I get that, I understand...I just don't care. To me the fact that Trump is unlikable is a meaningless detail. I don't care that I don't like the POTUS and I don't understand why anyone needs to. And even though Biden seems like a much nicer guy, that does not instill me with any greater desire to vote for him. 

Rather than reminding me of 2016 (when Hillary (***) was such a sure thing to beat Trump that Democrats didn't even bother to vote for her), this reminds me more of 2004: George W. Bush was exceedingly unpopular and John Kerry seemed a shoo-in to wrest the Presidency away from him...but then forgot to win the election. Trump is so uniquely unpopular that this scenario might not play out, but I wouldn't be surprised. If all Biden has to offer is that he's not Trump, that doesn't mean much to me. It doesn't mean anything at all really. 

Democrats have attacked Trump from Day One (well, before Day One actually) and all they've done is remind everyone that Trump is an asshole, which we already knew. Even the relative corruption they've uncovered is really just the clumsiness of an unskilled politician--which suggests his corruption is actually less than average! They've done nothing to establish a different way of running the gov't, merely that they'd prefer someone more in line with their cult of personality. But hating on Trump is all the Left has to offer and it is no better than it was on Election Day 2016. Trump makes everyone him around him stupid and the Democrats have only gotten dumber in the last four years. 

Covid-19 has turned everything upside down. And what we're just now realizing (right?) is that it hasn't even happened yet. The Fed and Congress have been over-promising since March, which has forestalled economic turmoil for this year (though I would expect end of the year profit-taking to be pretty severe this December). But January 1st is a whole new ball game and if the infections are rising again, then more lockdowns, more mask turmoil, and more volatility in the markets, all that stuff. So at best, we've pushed off til next year the true economic impact of the coronavirus; at worst, we've done the same thing with the virus, too. 

USA has avoided the rising tide of viruses and pandemics over the last 20 years or so but Covid-19 hit us squarely in the crotch. You're free to believe that your gov't is gonna save us from that but I don't see any reason to believe the gov't has that power (or inclination). Viruses have bedeviled humanity since before it looked anything like humanity, governments are much more recent by comparison. As the population rises and the temperature rises, seems like we should be having pandemics a lot more often, so social distancing and wearing masks will likely be long term effects. And elections will come and go--each the most important of your lifetime!

Meanwhile, Congress this year has passed multiple trillion dollar spending bills. The Fed has tripled its debt load!

The Congress/Fed tandem is vastly larger and more influential than the POTUS. That is our future, regardless of who wins the election. And there's still no arms deals with Russia, nor trade deals with China, and Brexit guarantees you pretty much gotta re-do Europe, too. Oh, and war with Iran can break out at a moment's notice. And we just had our single highest day of new cases of Covid-19.  

The good news as we go to election day: look, man, I know it seems like everything's falling apart but actually I think the noise itself suggests more participation by individual people, the People are more powerful than ever. And that is the great leap forward for Humanity, not the outcome of any particular election. The fact that there is complaint in the world is a result of more people being heard. Complaint is not mitigated by growth because there is always someone that wants more and will voice that desire; complaint never goes away regardless of how secure/rich everyone becomes. Indeed, as lives become better and more numerous, the amount of complaint should skyrocket. The scary images you see on the TV would be a lot scarier if the doomsayers were actually right.   

Truth be told: I'd prefer four more years of Trump. Because I love Trump? No, good lord, what's to love? It is that I fear what comes after Trump more than I fear Trump. And term limits allow us to have Trump serve his time and leave rather than being vanquished and giving his successors a mandate they shouldn't rightly possess. Also, I kinda hope that four more years of Trump will show us that the power of Twitter is greater than the power of the Presidency and perhaps we will properly bring ourselves in line with the real power (re: social media) instead of the endless exhortations of piddling politicians. Social media allows the People to rule (for better and for worse). 

I don't dislike Joe Biden--that is, I seem to like him better than most Democrats do! But I don't have any great faith in his snake oil and the fact that he's a nice guy means nothing to me. More than any election of my lifetime this is a referendum on the deep bench of the parties in that I think it's extremely possible that both Trump and Biden are dead four years from now. So you're really betting on the supporting cast as much as the main players. (I've seen more of the Democrats, therefore I like them less)

I think the main player is Twitter. And the supporting cast is the People. Merely a matter of waiting for the People to realize how much social power they already have--and how little political power is worth in an age of tripled debt loads and a viral pandemic that we still haven't stopped. 

It's the economy, stupid. It always was, it likely always will be. What a gov't does is collect taxes from a citizenry and then provides services (or more accurately, the assurance of services, not the actual services). We can argue about the color of our skin or our hair or our shoes or our bandannas or our favorite politicians or commentators. Or we could acknowledge that the gov't doesn't do any of that stuff, that all of that shit is a product of political media and not a product of gov't itself. Instead of having the substantive public debate about infrastructure spending (and raison d'etre), politics encourages cultural mudslinging between the hippies and bluenoses, a story as old as off-Broadway theater. What a gov't does is collect taxes from a citizenry in promise of providing certain amenities to enhance the productivity of the populace.  

Economic productivity is the point of gov't service. It wants us to make more money (re: create more value) and what Covid-19 has done has tripled (at least!) our commitment to this way of life in the form of Fed promises to keep interest rates unnaturally low if need be and Congress's quest to spend more and more on "relief" (****). But who the POTUS is...has never mattered less to me than right now. More than ever the POTUS is a channel I can change whenever I like. 

(*) There are no "Trumpists". This is something that Left wingers say because they need icons, they need cult of personality to sway their passions. Conservatives do not. Liberals need a movement, conservatives do not. Liberals have things they want done, conservatives have things they don't want done. The Left needs personalities and acolytes, the Right does not need any of that stuff. The Right basically wants nothing and nothing doesn't require any activity, any movement, any anything. The Left needs movements and it thinks in terms of movements because as a natural minority, it needs a swirl of passions to create enough volatility for them to find success; the Right needs nothing at all, wants nothing at all and will live with nothing at all if that is what is offered. The "Trumpists" like Trump for his ability make Leftists lose their minds...and nothing else. As long as Leftists gladly lose their minds over Trump, he is dangerous to them but as soon as the Left figures out to ignore him....Trump will be gone.  *poof*

(**)  For the federal gov't as a whole 2020 will simply be an anomalous year in taxation income. Nothing more. It won't even be a significant blip in terms of population. Yet another reason why expecting the federal gov't to do...anything...is unrealistic. It's too fuckin' big to notice your piddly problems. (200,000 dead is a 'piddly problem', you ask? Yes. To a gov't that was here when you were born and will be here when you die, 200,000 dead means nothing. Waiting for it to solve your problems is like waiting for the sky to give you rain: it'll do so when it god damn feels like and not until)

(***) A weird counterfactual on the nature of power to ponder: Personally I think Biden could've/would've beaten Trump in 2016. I think he had a better chance to hold together Obama voters than Hillary Clinton did. I think Biden could've peeled away some of the white voters that went to Trump, whereas Hillary thought her advantage among women and African-Americans was enough. Okay. Now think of it this way: if Biden had won in 2016, he would likely be looking pretty good going into 2020, and what if Hillary had stayed Secretary of State? What if Hillary had seen the State Dept as her fortress and dug in?  She stays all 8 years under Obama and then potentially has another 8 years under Biden...what could a single individual accomplish in 16 years of running the State Dept? She could've had a major effect on USA's foreign policy leading into the entire 21st century. Instead "power" meant running for President, even though the coalition wasn't actually there and she bungled all forward progress for her party. What is political power? Does 16 years in the State Dept equal 8 years in the White House? Can owning the State Dept have a wider, deeper effect than just being another ol' POTUS?

(****) I'd like to leave off with something like good news...here's my best shot at it. I've longed believed that the next great global economic downturn would pull countries down together in such a way that the subsequent economic boom would be of astronomical proportions. The 2007-8 crisis wasn't uniform enough worldwide to tug down on all economies in a similar way. But Covid-19 is. The entire global economy is getting pulled like a sheet and when it straightens back out, it'll grow and grow and grow like a fuckin' beanstalk....at least, I hope it does because the alternative is not worth pondering (think Weimar Germany but with fewer night clubs). The spring 2020 moves of the Fed and Congress will either snap the American economy in half or it'll be the catalyst of the next giant leap of the global economy. I'm betting on growth--because the other side is not at all appetizing. 2021 will suck, it might suck real bad. But think about it: by 2022 USA, China, Europe, Russia, the Arab World, India, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Latin America and everyone else that I left out will all be on economic upswings that will swell like no other economic surge ever in history. I'm talking decades of worldwide growth. Or that's the hope anyway. I've been waiting for it and I think this is it. 

The Protests: Where Do We Go from Here?

On May 25, 2020, a man named George Floyd died of asphyxiation while being sat upon by a Minneapolis police officer. (*) The death of Floyd was video taped and as the horrific images washed around the internet, public outrage bubbled over into a series of protests first in Minneapolis (where the officer's precinct was burned to the ground, along with an unfinished housing project) and then around the country and even around the world.

The protests in some cases have been perfectly peaceful, in other cases there has been violence, confrontation and looting. I thought many of the cops were particularly aggressive exacerbating the confrontations but video images are never as complete as you'd like to think, so I won't go too far down that alley except to suggest that the images of looting and destruction aren't perhaps as obvious as they first appear either. At any rate, whatever your political persuasion, there is plenty of video evidence of....whatever you wanna see.

People say 'this time is different' but I'm old enough now to have heard that phrase a million trillion times and I gotta say, most of this doesn't look all that different to me. What happened to George Floyd happens routinely in America (and everywhere else, for what it's worth) and the reaction to his death does, too. This is hardly the first batch of protests I've seen and generally they fizzle out because people never really understood what they were protesting to begin with. Crowds are motivated by large abstract causes often times based around a single event or image or concept, but as time wears on the abstractions and the imagery fall away from each other and no one can quite articulate what they ever felt. As the paradigms get tangled, the problems and the solutions overlap in a way that isn't clear and could even become unproductive, reinforcing the tangle rather than loosening it.

The wrinkle in this current situation is Covid-19. Ironically the thing we obsessed over for three months and then discarded without a second thought is the real agent of change coming in the form of economic dislocations which haven't taken shape yet. The changes are coming--and don't be fooled by the recent market rally, that is not a sign of recovery but a sign of 'irrational exuberance'. We won't really get the full effect until the fall and then probably into next spring. The fact that this is an election year makes the turmoil even more confusing and the outcome even harder to see coming. (**)

I'm relatively optimistic. There's still enough time before the election that the energy could dissipate, but I suspect...well....this time is different. (Oh shit, I kinda walked right into that) The idea that protests in the street or even real widespread reform are going to end racism....well, no, that's not a function of marches in the street. But it could lead to reforming police departments across the country which would be a great outcome. Would it end violence against black citizens? No...uh....no. Racism and police departments are not synonymous, one does not imply the other, reforming one does not necessarily reform the other. So while race in this paradigm is, I think, a canard, it could still be a useful one.

The difference this time is I'm hearing the correct rhetoric--which ironically almost never happens!--and the energy underneath all of this seems genuine enough that perhaps this could lead to worthwhile change. A few things in the air I'd love to see happen:

1) Outlaw police unions. Absolutely! They should never have been allowed to exist to begin with! The only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples--the good apples don't need unions. (***).

2) Outlaw no-knock raids. If any police force ever does anything like this they better be prepared to walk into court with a wealth of irrefutable evidence that violence or danger to the public was imminent. And they better bring all their body camera footage. (The FBI could still use this technique and while I don't trust the FBI to be perfect and I do trust them to get the fucking address correct!)

3) Reform qualified immunity. This one is a little tougher to pull off because the State has to maintain a monopoly of force, thus its agents can't be truly independent--indeed, you don't want them to be, you want the State to control them and take the blame when they fuck up. Okay. But their agents (re: cops) can still be held to judicial standard in keeping with the sensitivity of their positions. I heard one suggestion that cops should be forced to own malpractice insurance like doctors: I don't think this is realistic to the position of law enforcers as it would give the cops the right to not do their jobs ('Oh, I don't like that neighborhood, I don't care if dispatch wants me to go, I'll pass'). The cops are cops, they're not normal citizens. Making them truly independent is not in keeping with what a police force is: it is a representation of the State, backed by the State, and controlled by the State. Losing that would lose all shape to what police protection actually is.

4) End asset forfeiture. I'm thinking mostly of War on Drugs type bull shit here. Seizing the assets of people accused--not convicted, ACCUSED!--is pure theft (or as Libertarians call it: taxation without representation). Armed goons from the State taking your stuff should never have been the norm.

5) Body cameras. This is a bit of double-edged sword in that if a cop shows video footage of you committing a crime in court, well, you're done, pal. The public defender ain't gonna help you out. And, again, video footage is not always the easiest to interpret. But the cops need to understand that body cameras protect them! Cops need to see body cameras as a means of establishing their credibility and warding off liability. The Cops need to be constantly proving that they are correctly administering their duties and cameras (and other monitoring systems) are the way to do it.

6) More civilian oversight boards. Okay, protesters, this one's on you: you've shown that you're capable every few years of marching in the streets to demand someone else solve your problems, are you ready to show up every Monday morning for a volunteer job of mediating between cops and criminals? Time to put your money where your mouth is and actually get your hands dirty doing the civic work. And, that's right, for little or no money. Do you love your community enough to do this? Because no one else is going to do it--this is not something you slough off on a gov't agency. Civilian oversight is the heart of any worthwhile change we're going to see. (****)

7) How about civilian parole boards that work like jury duty? I imagine a system where each potential parolee has an advocate to make the positive case and an advocate to make the negative case and a civilian panel to 'yea' or 'nay' every one up for parole. This already happens somewhat but the process could cast a wider net and lure more civilians in, which would deepen our understanding of who the real dangerous criminals are and who is ready for another chance at freedom. Again, if the civilians want control, they have to step up and be responsible for these things--and until they do they are at the mercy of politicians and their mouthpieces characterizing the agenda.

8) Keep going on prison reform. It seems to me we should be giving prisoners every opportunity to get out of jail. And, well, really what I'm suggesting here is further punishing the ones that neglect these opportunities. I'm not in favor of getting rid of prisons, I wholeheartedly believe that there are human beings that are too violent to be around other people. But my gut is that prisons contain vastly more than just those violent offenders and that the rest are in danger of becoming worse rather than better. Some sort of testing or something could be used to separate the un-reformable people from those that truly want to return to the outside world.

9) More home incarceration and monitoring. I suspect this is the way of the future regardless of the current unrest because this is purely a function of technology. It will be cheaper and easier for everyone involved if most criminals are confined to their homes and monitored remotely (this still would not apply to violent offenders, but most everyone else doesn't really need to go to prison). The downside of this is that judges could become trigger happy if they feel like there's no cost to incarcerating people, they may toss out sentences like candy and we could end up with a massive amount of citizens basically in quarantine and with a long record of petty bullshit. 

10) I'm down with de-funding various police departments. It should be noted here that 'de-funding' doesn't mean getting rid of police departments, rather it means reforming or reconstituting them, which in some locations is probably long over due. But in other locations that may not be useful at all. All this policing stuff is extremely local, so thinking of this as a blanket reform is probably not realistic. Also this is probably the kind of concept that won't find much purchase at first but may continue to percolate for the next few decades, this could become a slow motion reform movement where some communities see it as a salvation and others see it as unnecessary.  

11) I don't really know how to go about reforming this but I think the problem in the courts over the last 40-50 years is plea bargaining. First time offenders are expected to plead guilty and take the punishment rather than arguing their case on its merits. The effect of this over time is devastating: our judicial system is built on precedents and if the precedent is the accused is supposed to accept guilt without a proper defense then no one is doing their jobs. Prosecutors, defenders, judges and juries become agents of paperwork instead of actually building a judicial infrastructure--which is the whole point of that third branch of gov't. This is incredibly slanted against the poor--blacks, especially--who basically abrogate their own defense because that's what they're told to do rather than fighting for justice. This is why we have overcrowded prisons and this is why way too many people are getting serious time (or other ramifications) for mostly petty nonsense that the system shouldn't even worry about. (*****)

12) More cops with less guns. The pandemic had the glimmers of where local police departments should allow themselves to go: more community involvement with the elderly, the infirm, and others that are at the margins of society. Police departments should seek to be proactive in reaching into their communities in a way above and beyond simply apprehending criminals. Local police could be at the vanguard of coordinating civic participation in a way that is not directed at 'bad apple' police officers and doesn't require any guns. When you get into a car accident and you need an officer of the law to fill out the proper legal paperwork, you don't need that guy to have a gun on his hip--how does that help anything? The fact that the police feel the need to show off their deadly force as a means of earning the respect of the community is precisely what the community fucking hates about them! Yes, when guns are the only answer for enforcing the law, that needs to come from agents of the State. But until that force is required, that force needn't be on display.

People suggest that changing the composition of city and police department leadership is crucial and in certain cases I suppose that's true. But that's a largely political observation that I don't have much knowledge of since each police district is going to be distinct. Having more black mayors, for example, is fine with me but I seriously doubt that will change much on its own and since the necessity for these changes is entirely local, just voting for (fill in the stupid partisan bullshit you believe in) across the nation doesn't strike me as of any use at all. I'm fine with change but those changes are local, will be local and must be determined locally, so suggesting that this is necessary everywhere--and will be effective everywhere--is just empty rhetoric.

In a contemporary political sense, I would suggest ending the protests immediately but keeping the peaceful marches going periodically right up to election day. The key is to keep the spirit of the George Floyd protests alive while keeping the chaos to a minimum without being overtly political. When you insert politics you also insert the equal and opposite politics, and now you've got a soup of nonsense rather than a coherent message. The politics will handle itself and if the protests lose their shape, then that's when it becomes a detriment rather than a boon to one's political wants and needs. And I think seeing celebrities and other public intellectual types keeping that fervor alive is better than politicians positioning themselves in relation to it.

As for the election in November, well, I don't see it as nearly as important as most commentators simply because these are city/county/state issues more than national ones. Blaming/crediting the president (or the president wannbe) is just missing the point that the White House doesn't really have much contact with local police forces. But whoever you're voting for, keeping these protests going is probably necessary. 

(*) On March 13, 2020 (the day the Covid-19 lock down began if memory serves), Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed by Louisville police officers during the course of a no-knock raid seeking a drug dealer; police subsequently admitted they had the wrong address. To my mind this is an even more egregious offense but as there is no video evidence (*ahem* that we know of) this hasn't had quite the same impact on the recent protests.

(**) I think it's a bit weird that the Flu Pandemic of 1919 killed huge numbers of people worldwide and affected huge numbers more...and is virtually invisible in the literature of the time. Movies don't mention it, the theater and music of the time don't dwell on it, nor does the poetry or the politics. Just because it's effect is massive does not mean history will properly record it or culture will hold on to it. Indeed, how will the current pandemic appear in the next decade's worth of books, movies and music?

(***) Ditto with teachers unions, they should be next on the chopping block. Let me repeat: the only purpose unions serve is to shield the bad apples. Or didn't you realize that schools are every bit as racist, self-serving, and ineffective as the police?

(****) Combine this with a 25-30 hour work week and...are you getting more interested? With more and more people working from home cutting down on travel time...this sweetening the deal for you? More gig economy jobs where you set your own hours...ready to give more of that extra time to your community? This is where the nature of work is going which will leave a lot more time for volunteering and other civic participation--and I don't mean marching the streets! I mean actually doing stuff.

(*****) The recent obsession with the 13th amendment, for example, is totally lost on me. The prisons are not the meaningful part of the justice process, they are the last stop of it. That's not the problem--the problem is the first day in court. If you bungle that, you're in trouble. Most of the 13th amendment reexamination seemingly revolves around private (or for-profit) prisons, but again, that isn't the problem at all--and focusing on that is a really unfortunate waste of time. I don't pretend to know how private prisons work but it seems to me that gov't has monopsony power meaning the prison company has no market power whatsoever in the relationship (except the gov'ts naturally move very slow and are at the mercy of sudden changes). The relative ownership of the facility is irrelevant. If the gov't actually ran its own prisons does that somehow guarantee better treatment? That was never true in the past, don't know why it would be in the future. If the prison company was a joint stock company and all the stock was owned by black people, would that make a difference in the life of black prisoners? No, not necessarily. Was life better for black people in America before the advent of private prisons? No. You don't end up in prison because prisons exist, you end up in prison because your lawyer didn't get the job done. And plea bargaining is another way of saying your lawyer didn't get it done. You need to fight the battle in the court, fighting it in the prison is too late. (Incidentally as an side to this footnote: I'm not opposed to prisoners being allowed to work inside of prison if they are fairly compensated, but they should not be forced to work; I believe each citizen's surplus value is their god-given possession until they die, something the gov't should nurture rather than capture)

The Protests: How We Got Here (The manner of protest)

When Martin Luther King was putting together the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, he first went to white churches and implored to them that this was not a matter of race, that it was in fact a matter of economics and that poor whites were suffering alongside blacks and the two communities would do well to join forces. To which the white churches responded....no, it's about race.

The 'system' isn't racist. The 'system' is ruthlessly economic and wants everyone to be productive and make money. In fact, the 'system' cannot abide those that don't produce, so having a chunk of population off to the separate-but-equal side that doesn't participate in the larger economy is anathema to the 'system'. Which is why (I contend) that expanded industrial production of WWII demanded that blacks (among others) must participate in the economy in order to reach economic efficiency (which is the inborn desire of any economic system). Blacks must no longer be seen as separate and must in fact actually become equal because anything less makes no sense to the 'system'. MLK saw that black workers needed the buses to get to work and that polite society must honor that simple necessity. And he put it to the test. 

Transportation issues, too, were at the heart of Plessy v Ferguson (1896): separate but equal would imply, in that case, that railroad companies would now need to have a Blacks-only 1st class railroad car for every trip even though hardly any blacks at the time would've been able to afford a ticket. A railroad company carrying around an extra empty car could be ruinously expensive and is at best utterly useless. But the Culture of the South at the time demanded that blacks and whites remain separate. This is bad business but if the customer base makes demands, the corporations are obliged to supply. 

Plessy v Ferguson (1896) reminds us that the working class has the power to bend the Supreme Court and the corporate structures to their demands and at this point the working class demand was still decidedly white. Was it the 'system' that imposed separate but equal? No, this is a warping of the 'system'. It was the People, the illogical People who chose wastefulness and animosity over integrated forms of travel because social change is a hard thing to endure. Seeing someone else prosper gives the feeling of losing ground, even if that isn't the case. And in 1955, MLK was right: the economic circumstances were just as disadvantageous for the whites as it was for the blacks. But that was true in 1896 and the white people bungled justice then, too. In both cases the State, the corporations and the wealthy allowed this injustice to take place because another Civil War would've been worse (for them) than just letting poor people fight each other. 

MLK, echoing Gandhi (who became enlightened when he, like Homer Plessy, was thrown out of a 1st class train compartment in 1895), ushers in a wave of peaceful protests building on the legal victories of Thurgood Marshall before the war and the beloved stardom of Jackie Robinson after the war. He was adamant that the movement be peaceful and (even more to the point) legal. The point was to show that black people were citizens deserving of Constitutional protection and cultural assimilation just like everyone else and that it was their birthright. The notion of separate but equal was never real because it never applied to anyone else--there was no one to be equal to! Brown v Board of Education (1954) stamps this out judicially and even puts forth pronouncements for how it is to spread (namely "at all deliberate speed"). Again, the 'system' is ready to move on from segregation and embrace full economic efficiency, it is the Culture that drags its feet because social change must be forced.

The example of the Civil Rights movement forms the template of ongoing complaints of all stripes for the rest of the 20th century (re: the peaceful righteous fight is co-opted and re-purposed for everyone else's uses). From here the culture of protest takes over in America and, to my mind, has an entirely counter-intuitive effect: it makes people think they're rising up in the streets when increasingly they're just blowing off some steam. They congratulate themselves on speaking truth to power when really they've been given a place to stand and rigid rules of conduct and are mostly just harmlessly absorbed. Protests rarely lead to violence, indeed they are rarely even worth mentioning as they have become so ingrained in the civic culture. Protests have replaced parades: people are getting together to complain rather than celebrate, but the effect isn't wildly different. MLK was fighting for something, most people since have just been trying to look like they're fighting for something.

The turmoil of the 1960s begins an era where the white middle class was tearing itself apart and had no need whatsoever for the poor whites. They would rather magnanimously grant freedom to African-Americans than deal with the white underclass, which is now even more beholden to keeping black people down as a means of deluding themselves into feeling like they are living the American dream, that they are doing things right, that they are in God's good graces, etc. 

For the wealthy 'race' is an illusion. They don't need to pretend to be superior to blacks--they have more money in the bank, which is the only superiority they ever needed. The enlightened whites have discarded 'race', thus they want to treat blacks and other whites the same. This works for the wealthy because since they are in better economic standing (the only thing that matters), everyone else is naturally kinda all the same anyway. 

But to the poor whites, they see their world steadily eroding because they can't keep up with the pace of advancing technology and social change. Poor blacks have increasingly imbibed their suffering as race-related and while that may well be true, it is ultimately secondary to what they need to be doing: namely, accumulating capital to escape the misery of economic impoverishment. As the wealthy grow ever-wealthier, they grow further away from the others of their society, while the poor are continually getting pushed together and the racial differences that used to separate them are no longer honored in polite society.

Blacks are not victimized by the 'system', they are victimized by those keeping them from being a part of the 'system'. Blaming the 'system' is missing the true danger, it is the barriers to joining the 'system' that bedevils them. Separate but equal was not the 'system', it was the absence of 'system'. Homer Plessy bought his ticket for the 'system' and was denied; Rosa Parks bought a ticket for the 'system' and was taken to jail.  

The 'system' is color blind--it is completely blind. But we don't experience the 'system' in our day to day lives, we experience each other in what we call 'culture'. But we live in a multiplicity of paradigms with a range of metaphors, tastes and social signals. You might find it easy to know which side you're on, but how to represent that and/or aid your chosen group is not at all plain to see.

With the outgrowth of social media and smart phones in the early 2000s, the culture is now primed on a granular level. This could be dangerous, riotous, but more often than not is petty and minimal and burns out quickly. Social media has a more insidious effect--creepy because it is inside of our homes rather than out there in the streets--but at its best it does at least suggest that the 'bad apples' can be singled out. At its worst, though, it is a replay of the Cultural Revolution: each citizen is now a petty tyrant and the People are a mass of judges, juries and executioners. 

The MLK model of peaceful protest is probably dead. From here the cancel culture will mature and take root.

So far in my reckoning I've basically only dealt with the richest of rich and poorest of poor. This makes up roughly zilch percentage of the population, but establishes the visual template seen by the vastly larger middle class. The middle class watches this all play out on their media screens and they choose sides and they go forth in righteous indignation. Race is just a detail but by now this has created a schism within white rhetoric causing people to choose sides, generally based around either preserving the past or looking to the future. Some of the wealthy may enjoy the new middle class war, some may hate it; some rich are unaffected by it, some rich are in great peril. Some poor folks may be encouraged by the turmoil they see in the streets, some may be horrified by it. Some will see the looting as an unfortunate by-product of so much chaos, some will see it as the point all along. Some will become enlightened to the crimes of local police, some will see those police as more important than ever! These may be entirely different groups of people that think they've chosen the same thing. And they don't understand that they're now in opposition to each other. And a lot of the people who think they disagree with each other may be working side by side, while some who see each other as enemies will be doing all the same shit.

We exist in a multiplicity of paradigms and when a variety of paradigms converge, no one really knows what's going on any more. All of life becomes inchoate and the active people aren't really doing anything while the inactive people may have far more influence than they realize. This is, I believe, what is living in our television sets and smart phones right now.

According to Wikipedia, the violence of the past two weeks is pretty much evenly split: protesters injuring cops, cops injuring protesters, protesters injuring each other at a pretty similar clip. Some cities are perfectly peaceful, some are experiencing all kinds of wanton destruction. Some people just want to fuck shit up, some people truly want to be heard, some people want to publicly grieve, some want to express their anger, some want to keep others from expressing anything at all. And they're all doing what they're doing in the same place at the same time. The tangle of desires and motivations and plans of action threaten to be merely a meaningless jumble. 

As for the 'system', all it wants is money. No Lives have ever mattered to the 'system' because the 'system' is going to outlive us all and therefore does not need us as much as we need it. And the only differentiation it makes between us is the money in our pockets--not the kindness in our hearts, not the color of our skin, not the sweat of our brows. It'll take black money and yellow money and red money and white money, too. (It'll take stolen money, inherited money, gambled money, criminal money, found money....) When your ability to make money has been eclipsed, that's when rioting in the streets becomes the only answer. 

Lives matter to other lives. We should be taking care of each other. The 'system' will help us stay healthy, it will help educate our children and it'll help us feed ourselves and have fun. It isn't going to give our lives worth because that's not what it does. We have to do that for ourselves and each other and if we don't no one else will. The 'system' is built for those who help themselves and the enemies of the 'system' are those that attempt to keep others out. Homer Plessy knew that in 1896...and the Supreme Court buckled under the weight of apartheid instead of doing its job. MLK knew that in 1955....and the white churches blew their opportunity to be on the right side of history. 

Right now, the 'system' is trying to repair itself from the corona virus lock downs. The 'system' will be going through a major overhaul in the next 12 months or so and these protests are about (hopefully) positively positioning the Culture to get it right this time. I don't think things are different, I think the Culture has evolved to where they always should've been: namely by realizing that the problem isn't the 'system', it is the lack of 'system'.

The Protests: How We Got Here (A selection of American history)

Many years ago while killing time in the basement of a college library, I saw a graph in a giant book of gov't data. The graph always stayed with me (though I have no clue how to find it again now): it ran from 1870-1930 and showed a perfect inverse relationship between the price of cotton and the lynchings of black people. When the price of cotton was up, lynchings were down and when the price of cotton was not good, then the target minority of American society became terrorized even more than usual.

That chart still sums up well in my mind the nature of life for black people in America to this day. When times are good, they're given a little more room to breathe, when times are bad black folks are made to suffer the worst of it. The unequal lives of blacks in America is cultural and at the heart of it, I'd say that's what these ongoing protests are about: cultural togetherness. But beware: the pointless nonsense of politics (which is not gov't, by the way) always lurks in American culture and how the citizenry interprets what it sees varies wildly.

I've recently developed a whole new understanding of the importance of separating church from state in the early days of the Republic. The church was largely where the anti-British revolutionary fervor came from because of the inborn fear that the Church of England would seek to dominate religious expression in the colonies. But once the Revolution was won, the fears of Anglicization were assuaged and the Republic was in place, it was necessary for the founding fathers to cut that shit off in a hurry. By separating the church in a bold and public fashion, it removed all hint that the churches were being oppressed, thus their message of oppression was now neutered and the gains of the white colonists would not be mingled with ongoing talk of the abolition of slavery. The abolitionist movement in the early 19th century largely existed among the church-y types, who were now free (eh, free-ish) to keep the revolutionary fervor going but in a decidedly watered down context, where every church was free to interpret the ills of slavery in their own way rather than in a singular voice. By removing the gov't from church oversight, it set the churches against each other and kept a unified message from ringing out from the pulpits.

Legally speaking, slavery was a bargain the North were stuck with since before the Revolution (*) so they had to continue to endure it. The economic downturn of the 1830s and the great territorial expansion that followed war with Mexico in the 1840s kept the politics of the North engaged in other areas but slavery steadily pulled at the fabric of the nation. To my mind it was the Dred Scott decision (1857) that finally broke the whole system because the judiciary could no longer figure out how to incorporate slavery into the legal structure any more. It just didn't make sense, it spooked the population, the fugitive slave laws weakened northern governors and the component of slave labor infiltrates all markets making them at the very least unrealistic. Slavery had to go because by this point it pervaded the lives of people who didn't care about slavery--that's when social change becomes unavoidable.

Civil War...Emancipation Proclamation...Lincoln is assassinated...the Reconstruction....

And here we come back to the graph I mentioned above. During the period between the Civil War and World War II life is okay for black people in the good economic years and utterly terrifying in the bad years. In the post-Civil War economy 'good' periods and 'bad' periods were more pronounced than ever before (this is the large scale introduction of boom-and-bust into American economic cycles). Existing largely at the bottom of the economic scale, they would've felt the bad years worse than everybody else while feeling the good years the least. After the Civil War the North is more interested in controlling the political and economic paradigm shifts (such as the Credit Mobilier Scandal of 1872) than it is in properly enforcing the re-born Constitution in the South. It is the newly freed slaves that bear the brunt of that inattention, for though they were the bedrock of the new changes in American politics and culture, once the slaves were freed they no longer served any political purpose. The 'system' is newly re-built with a 'culture' that is not welcoming to the newly freed blacks.

During this time we see the birth of Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes and the steady extension of Jim Crow laws specifically aimed at keeping blacks from voting and otherwise participating in the culture. One could point out that the subsequent sharecropper system (pretty much the only option for most of the freed slaves in the south) and the work farm prison structure were at least somewhat egalitarian in that whites would've been forced into these structures just as blacks were. This suggests that the social 'demonization' (for lack of a better term) is of the poor rather than any specific group of the poor while the legislation suggests that it  is specifically designed to keep blacks in a state of permanent poverty. The State is reinforcing the Culture and while this is entirely un-Constitutional, the favored classes are cool with letting this slide as long as they are untouched by those living at the bottom of the scale. But we see quickly: the scourge of slavery has been replaced by the scourge of poverty.

So when the Supreme Court delivers Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the under girding laws and social mores are in place such that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' must've seemed an elegant legal remedy as opposed to the twisted logic necessary for the Dred Scott Decision some four decades (what Lincoln might've referred to as 'two score') earlier. Thinking the black people could be free within their pocket of the law is something that smart people probably patted themselves on the back for because it gives the appearance that the wretched underclass possesses the chance to grow on their own....except that it doesn't. In fact, it reinforces the inability of that underclass to participate in the larger society, while allowing the leisure classes to think they've done a good thing.

And again we come back to the aforementioned graph: in good times blacks may have luxuriated in their separateness, free from the attacks of aggressive mobs of people who felt themselves left out of the prosperity of the larger economy; but in the bad times, there was only, as Ida B. Wells famously suggested, the Winchester rifle separating black people from that collective (misplaced) anger. 'Separate but equal' was never equal and, actually, never even separate because the deprived population was always available as a target minority when times were bad--a circumstance willingly allowed by politicians who would rather feed Christians to lions than take any of the blame for a bad economy.

It is easy to paint this arrangement in the most harrowing of Biblical terms. But there is one thing still offered to the black population of USA: the economy. Economic growth lifts all boats--which is a phrase that ignores that all boats will still maintain the same relation to each other, such that when the poorest people are richer, they are still the poorest. But within the segregationist framework of the post-Reconstruction USA, there is still economic growth that allows for a hint of social mobility. So in the early 20th century there is the establishment of the NAACP and the faint stirrings of change in the form of the legal fund that finally found some success in the 1930s. Notice the fight for black people to be included in polite society with access to proper legal remedies and the larger economy takes decades of finding legal loopholes.

I've been watching films of the 1930s lately and one thing I've noticed is the seeming explosion of ethnic voices: Greta Garbo, Adolphe Menjou, Charles Boyer, Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Bela Lugosi, just to mention a few. The pre-code years of cinema were a place where people who had largely been left out of the upper crust were able to find a footing and popularity in the American culture. (Morris Dickstein reinforces this observation in the novels, poetry and theater of the time, as well, in his book Dancing in the Dark) However, this clearly does not include black people. Sure, there are a handful of notable Hollywood titles with prominent black characters (Imitation of Life, for example), but blacks are certainly not a part of the new inclusion that Italians, Jews and other Europeans experience. Part of the reason would've been Plessy v Ferguson: since the movie theaters were segregated, it meant that blacks got their own movies, so there were 'race pictures' and other representations of art just for them. (**) White society didn't have to do anything for black people because they had their own 'equal' culture.

I bring this up to mention one of the few black images I've noticed so far from this time: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). There is one telling montage of this white man's descent into the horrors of work farm life: shots of men staring off in despair inter cut such that the white men and black men are equal in their despair. A moment of 'equality' that is actually quite the inverse: the white man's despair is that he is now equal to a black man. The black despair is normal, the white despair is horrific and that they are equal is the chill meant to run down your spine. And though we are to feel the injustice the white protagonist feels, it isn't meant to transfer to the blacks; indeed, the blacks are there to show just how horrible life can be even for whites. This is a specific image in a specific film but couldn't this have extended to how white Americans generally felt during the Great Depression of the 1930s?

December 7, 1941: the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. The next day Congress declared war on Japan and in the spring of 1942 began building up the military (***). In order to do this USA had to vastly increase the production of electricity (namely by damming every river west of the Mississippi for hydroelectric power).

I mention this because it is my contention that once the power is created, it is not turned off. And the subsequent economic growth after WWII came from this excess industrial production and that the social changes of the Civil Rights era were necessitated by this change in the supply of electricity. (Changes in the means of production yield changes in the relations of society...or something like that)

Soon after the war, Major League Baseball integrates with the appearance of Jackie Robinson in 1947. I would suggest the reason for integrating baseball earlier than pretty much everything else in America was purely economic. During the war baseball's biggest stars went off to fight in Europe and in their absence the Negro Leagues actually became quite popular. While the Negro Leagues weren't the only game in town, for a while there they were the best. After the war, when the white stars came back home, they were still struggling at the box office compared to the Negro Leagues. Black stars had been born, black talent had been identified and the white audiences didn't mind coming to their games. Major League Baseball was in crisis and the only solution was integration. The audience demanded the best talent and for the first time Major League Baseball was obliged to give it to them, as opposed to just the best white talent.

Even though the African-American community between the Civil War and WWII wasn't allowed to do much, it still managed to produce a number of fascinating writers, activists and artists; I would suggest this is due to the overwhelming economic growth in the late 19th century, which would've provided opportunities even to the lowest on the social scale. But Jackie Robinson was the first true black celebrity, the first to be able to shine in his chosen field in front of a nationwide audience. all because the economic opportunities in the black community were finally allowing for the ability to compete with white society: the price of cotton was no longer the key to social existence.



(*) In short: the North needed the Revolution, the South did not. The colonies were not able to develop their own international trade pacts because England held a monopoly on all colonial production. This hampered the northern colonies, which more or less produced all the same stuff England did; but this was no hindrance to the southern colonies that produced a variety of goods otherwise unavailable in England. If the northern colonies revolt and are successful, then they are just surrounded on all sides by still-British colonies (recall that the War of 1812 just a few decades later is a war with Canada, a group the northern colonies were unable to convince to join their revolutionary effort). The northern colonies needed allies, they needed the southern colonies to come along. The northern colonies had steadily removed slavery and disliked the practice but they needed the southern colonies, so they agreed to keep slavery in place.

(**) As a 21st century movie nerd, I ask the question: where are those race pictures now? Hardly any of them survive--for there surely must've been a lot more than are currently available. We've gotten loving restorations of Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, but where are the restorations of Oscar Micheaux and....well, I don't know any others (Micheaux being the exception that proves the rule)? What exactly did that parallel (separate but certainly not equal) representation of black entertainment look like? And where is it now?

(***) Which never stopped.