McKinsey's Effect on Public Health

Almost two years ago, the Canadian government published a Covid response plan that's largely vague and useless. Who benefits from that?

Canadian Public Health Response Plan

The 3rd edition of the guide was published in March 2022, and it appears to be the most recent edition. They outline the "worst case scenario," and it's pretty much what we're living through right this minute: a large wave with a peak of prolonged duration, concurrent with other respiratory pathogens, with a new variant of concern that has immune escape properties that reduce vaccine effectiveness at a time where people are reluctant to get vaccinated, and a shortage of health care providers. Check, check, and check! 

So when do public health measure kick in??

On Policing: Time for Change

In 1982, Milton Friedman advised,

"Keep options open until circumstances make change necessary. There is enormous inertia--a tyranny of the status quo--in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable" (xiii-xiv).

And then he helped usher in the neoliberal free market policies that have decimate health care, destroyed unions, privatized public services, deregulated banks and businesses, and provoked inequality like we haven't seen since 1929.

I know, master's tools and all, but I do think this part of his analysis is accurate. There IS a tyranny of the status quo! And when people are in a state of upheaval, they'll grab on to whatever message helps to stabilize them. This crisis is an opportunity for change, and we have to be awake to what that entails. We can be railroaded, or we can be ready.

The tech giants are already on it. We had been opposed to a few people-replacing technologies before the pandemic, but, as Naomi Klein explains, now we're embracing them:

"The future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent--and highly profitable--no-touch future. . . . There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology. . . .  It's a future that claims to be run on 'artificial intelligence' but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploitation. . . . We had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication. . . . Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic. . . . We face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both." 

This is going to obliterate privacy, wipe out good jobs and mass produce bad ones. Education, just for one example, could face a dystopia that accelerates remote learning under the guise of providing the best teachers, maybe just one government approved set of teachers for all to watch remotely, and set up marking mills for faceless people with advanced degrees to grade assignment all day without ever meeting their "clients." Of course that will never happen, right? But being isolated in our homes also removes opportunities for solidarity.

Good thing we're taking to the streets.

Paying for It: On the Slow Death of Journalism

I watch Last Week Tonight pretty faithfully, but I do Monday mornings on YouTube rather than subscribe to HBO. Last night's show was all about the problem with people like me who don't pay for journalism:



If we don't pay for papers, we're not going to have any more real journalism with any semblance of integrity. And most people really do want to look at puppies over news. They won't seek out stories on bombing Libya, or Israel's control over water, or US support in Syria. It has to be the top headline of the day or the first thing they see when they turn on the news at night, or else they'll just never know. Remember when everyone watched the 11:00 news every single night, and parents were all prompted to check on their children?

Things are radically different now. I get most headlines from following people on facebook and twitter who share news intelligently, and from following fellow bloggers. It feels more like a civic duty these days to share the news personally instead of counting on the populous to follow well. I try to share an important quote or brief summary with the article because I know too many people who form opinions based entirely on the headline without ever reading the article. That's one issue that's hard to solve.

But I think we can save journalism - online at least.

I used to subscribe to my local paper, but they would just pile up for recycling, most of it unread because the stories are all online. I subscribe to Philosophy Now only because I know I'll read the whole thing. Most papers don't cater to my particular interests throughout, so I love that I can pick and choose articles about different topics from different sources. That's one delightful benefit of the internet. I have an on-line subscription to the NYT, and I sometimes donate to Truthdig, but then I read and watch a ton of news that I don't pay for at all.

But, here's the thing: I would pay for it if it were easy to do. I don't want to fill in a form and subscribe to the whole paper because there's just too much there I won't read. It feels like I'm being ripped off when a couple busy weeks go by and I haven't read anything. But I would happily pay for individual articles. I'd likely even pay more per month on individual articles than I would for the whole paper without even noticing.

It has to be easy though because I'm really lazy. Amazon's model is perfect. Whenever I look at a book cover, it prompts me with a "One-Click Payment" option. I set it up once, and now I'm screwed. My local bookstore should do the same thing!  If the paywall on an article asked for a dollar or two to keep reading, and I just have to click a button for the blocker to go away and money to come out of my Paypal account, I'd click that button! I'd even click to pay extra to have the article ad-free!

Louis CK figured this out for his concerts and his newest TV show. I get alerts when a new episode is ready, and I pay a couple bucks to watch it. I can download it and share it if I want to, but why bother? There's no point sharing it when everyone can get it so cheaply and easily.

But here's the important bit: I don't think twice about forking over a couple bucks for each episode, but I would never pay $31 for the season, even though it's cheaper. Nobody cares about dropping some change here and there, but a larger amount for a longer time is daunting. I'm not sure I can commit to watch the whole thing.

It's not that we're too poor or thieving to pay for shows or articles; we just don't want to pay for all that extra stuff, and we don't want to have to do anything too complicated to see what we want to see right this minute. I would only really work if it became adopted by all print media at once, though. And then I might even have more time in the day because I'm not about to check out clickbait that actually costs me.

On Sublime Madness

"You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist."
     - Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

In my previous post, I intended to write about Hedges' new book, Wages of Rebellion, but I got thoroughly overcome by a rant that's been building inspired by his subtitle.  So here's the gist of his writing without repeating ideas from previous posts of late (lots about the prison system that I already mentioned).


The Courage to Know, and to Join Together:

The greatest existential crisis we face is to at once accept what lies before us - for the effects of climate change and financial instability are now inevitable - and yet find the resilience to fight back. (28).  The last days of any civilization, when populations are averting their eyes from the unpleasant realities before them, become carnivals of hedonism and folly.... Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions, elaborate public spectacle, and empty clichés (33-34).   

We will have to find ways to fend for ourselves. And we will fend for ourselves only by building communitarian organizations (25).  It is the religion of capitalism, the maniacal quest for wealth at the expense of others, that turns human beings into beasts of prey...As those who build these communitarian structures discard the religion of capitalism, their acts of charity and resistance will merge - and they will be condemned by the corporate state (42-43). 

The goals of wholesale surveillance...is not, in the end, to discover crimes, "but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population" ... This fear and loss of spontaneity keep a population traumatized and immobilized and turn the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms that legalize the crimes of state (54-55).

Lynne Stewart, a lawyer for the poor, convicted on charges of conspiracy, was allowed to leave prison because of stage 4 cancer.  Her advice:

Don't let yourself get isolated....Find the other people who think like you....This is a pretty loveless world we live in....We have lots of romantic love. We have lots of Sex and the City. But real love, love that is the kind that saves people, and makes the world better, and makes you go to bed with a smile on your face, that love is lacking greatly.  You have to search for that (50).

Class Struggles and the Origins of Revolution:

Moral courage....is always defined by the state as treason (59).  The modern corporate incarnation of this nineteenth-century oligarchic elite has created a world-wide neofeudalism under which workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass hundreds of millions in personal wealth.... Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs upward. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. The only route left to us, as Aristotle (Part IX) knew, is either submission or revolt (66). 

Revolutions, when they begin, are invisible, at least to the wider society.  They start with the slow discrediting and dismantling of an old ideology and an old language used to interpret reality and justify power (67).  Berkman said, "Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot 'make' a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle. It is the fire underneath that makes it boil; how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is" (86).  Thomas Paine, partly because he did not come to America from England until he was thirty-seven [kinda like John Oliver], understood that the British monarchy - not unlike our corporate state - had no interest in accommodation (154). 

In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented. It is the yearning that we now see.  if we do not swiftly reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration. Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press" (162).

Sublime Madness:

He starts his discussion of sublime madness with a quote from Nietzsche, but it's taken from a book by Max Weber rather from the original source.  Curious.  Anyway, here it is from the horse's mouth (Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, 39):

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure - or to put it more clear, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

Nietzsche's saying that most people need the truth to be watered down in order to cope with it, because it's painful to know.  It takes great strength and courage to face reality.  Hedges goes on to Kant:

It is impossible to defy "radical evil" - a phrase originally coined by Immanuel Kant to describe those who surrender their freedom and morality to an extreme form of self-adulation and later adopted by Hannah Arendt to describe totalitarianism - without "sublime madness (211).

Here's Kant's explanation of radical evil from Theory of Religion (aka Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason), pages 42-44 (caps are his).  It's less about a group of people, as Hedges' words might imply, but about the evil within us all:

The vitiosity of human nature is, therefore, not so much WICKEDNESS - this word being understood in its severest sense, namely, as an inward wickedness, or intent of choosing evil as evil (for that were diabolical), - as rather PERVERSITY of heart, which, on account of the consequences flowing from it, is called AN EVIL HEART. This, however, is not inconsistent with a state of Will that may generally and on the whole be good, and arises from the infirmity of human nature, which is not sufficiently strong to adhere to the good principles it may once of all have adopted; coupled, however, with the impurity (insincerity) of not duly sifting and arranging the springs according to their ethic content, and of having an eye mainly to this, that actions quadrate with the Law, although they have not been originated by it. Now, although from such a state of matters VICE may not immediately arise, still the cast of thinking, whereby the absence of vice is looked upon as virtue, is already a radial perversity of the human heart.... 

This insincerity, shrouding our real inward character from our view, prevents the founding of genuine moral principles within, and spreads, after having deceived ourselves, so as next to beguile and impose upon others, which, if not wickedness, is at least worthlessness, and proceeds from the radical evil of human nature, which, by distorting and untuning our moral understanding in regard of what a man is to be taken for, renders slippery and uncertain all ethical imputation, and constitutes that rotten spot in humanity, which, until entirely severed, keeps back the germ of good from unfolding itself, as it otherwise infallibly would do.

But the important bit from Hedges is reaching this state of sublime madness:

The message of the rebel is disturbing because of the consequences of the truth he or she speaks.....To accept that nearly all forms of electronic communication are captured and stored by the government is to give up the illusion of freedom (213).  The moral life, celebrated only in the afterglow of history and often not celebrated at all, is lonely, frightening, and hard... The rebel knows the odds. To defy radical evil does not mean to be irrational. It is to have a sober clarity about the power of evil and one's insignificance and yet to rebel anyway. To face radical evil is to accept self-sacrifice (215). 

Those with sublime madness accept the possibility of their own death as the price paid for defending life. This curious mixture of gloom and hope, of defiance and resignation, or absurdity and meaning, is born of the rebel's awareness of the enormity of the forces that must be defeated and the remote chances for success. "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism," Havel wrote.  "It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." (219).   

People of all creeds and people of no creeds must make an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good.... and in theses acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us (226).

Hedges' Suggested Readings:

Emma Goldman's articles in Appeal to Reason
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
Ralph Nader's writings  - many pieces of legislation were written by him
Hannah Arendt - Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem
Auguste Blanqui's writings
Sheldon Wolin - Democracy Incorporated
Clive Hamilton - Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change
Alexander Berkman - The Idea is the Thing
Thomas Paine - Common Sense

On Helping People Get Outraged

John Oliver's show about surveillance is a must see:



Amazing, right!?!

But what sticks with me most, as a teacher and an environmentalist, is this line:  "Is this a conversation we [American citizens] have a capacity to have?"

Bingo.

When intelligent people speak passionately about what they think is most important for the world to understand, they often go over people's heads or provide too many details that nobody really cares about, and then their message is lost.  Are you paying attention, Naomi Klein??*   Maybe Oliver could interview her next!

If we can't find a way to get people to understand the significance of what's happening to our ecosystems right now, we're screwed.  Maybe it would help to remind everyone that, if the atmosphere is filled with more greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and supporting factory farms, then they'll be too worried about finding drinking water and a home at a higher elevation to be able to have sex.

Except, that happened with phthalates years ago, and nobody cared.  There was a huge Globe & Mail spread on how phthalates and plastics affect male fertility and even penis size, and I thought at the time, "Now things will change."  But it didn't.  At all.  Because it's not happening to people in a way they can see, and it's not happening to them RIGHT FREAKING NOW.

Blarg.  How do we get the message across in a way that people will get pissed off and actually change the way they live and the types of politicians and platforms they'll support??

Help me, John Oliver. You're our only hope.


________

*Yes, I know I could use a lesson on this too, but I'm a C list blogger, so I'll just putter away here how I like, thank-you very much.

Inequality for All

I watched Robert Reich's film last summer on a camping trip.  I woke up in the middle of a pitch-dark night and couldn't fall back asleep.  I tried a movie on my phone to lull me into a coma, but this was the wrong one to choose.

Reich's film clearly explains how we've gotten into this economic pickle, and he offers solutions to get ourselves out.  Here's a synopsis the 90 minute film.  It's about the U.S., but much of it applies to Canada as well, so I use "we" throughout.

The (corporate controlled) media has created the illusion that the U.S. is poor, and we don't have any taxes to pay for anything, but that's a myth.  The U.S. is very wealthy, richer than it's ever been, but it's just no longer sharing the wealth in a way that can support itself.

The media also contributes to the problem by spinning any attempt to discuss income inequality into a conversation about class warfare - which, apparently, is a topic to avoid.  Jon Oliver gets at this issue very well and in only 14 minutes (with jokes!):



We have the same disparity now as we did in the 1920s - just before the great depression.  Policies that benefit a few at the expense of the many, according to Oliver, get passed because we've been brainwashed to believe erroneously that we, too, will end up in the upper echelons with the very wealthy:

"60% believe our system unfairly favours the wealthy, but, and here's the key, 60% also believe that those who work hard enough can make it.  Or, in other words, 'I can clearly see this game is rigged, which is what's going to make it so sweet when I win this thing!'"

Or, as Steinbeck said,

Federal estate tax is created to tax anything over 5 million, and is on the verve of being abolished because people think it might apply to them one day.  The problem with inheritance is it keeps the wealth circulating in few hands, and the poor have less chance of every getting out of poverty.  Marx was on the problems of inheritance, but from the other end.  He warned about the error of dismantling inheritance first while leaving the economic system intact:

"The disappearance of the right of inheritance will be the natural results of a social change superseding private property in the means of production; but the abolition of the right of inheritance can never be the starting point of such a social transformation."  

And we're back to Reich.

The Class Struggle

Reich and Oliver agree that, like cinnamon, a little inequality is a good thing, but too much is dangerous.  Reich uses a graph that looks like a suspension bridge, with the peaks - the danger points - in the 1920s and now.  In 1928 as in 2007, the top 1% took home more than 23% of all income, and the middle class stagnated. That's what too much inequality looks like.

The middle class is imperative to a healthy economy.  The rich buy very little proportionate to their numbers ("a person making a thousand times as much money, doesn't buy a thousand times as much stuff"), so we count on the masses to keep shopping. A good economy will support the middle class and the poor who will create jobs by spending money.  But they are struggling too much to survive for them to shop any day except, of course, Black Friday.

Policy Changes in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s

There's no such thing as a truly free market.  There are always governmental rules necessary to run things.  The real question is who do the rules benefit and who do they hurt. Middle class wages rose from the late 40s until the late 70s, and then flattened out.

The best book to understand this period of history, for my money, is The Shock Doctrine.  Naomi Klein outlines in detail exactly how the US, UK, and Canada (under Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney) changed the economic system with worldwide repercussions.  From the film:  The tax rate on top earners dropped from 70% to 28% under Reagan.  In the late 50s it peaked at 91% under Eisenhower for top earners, which was set at incomes over $400,000 (about $3.5 million in today's money).  That was dismantled in the name of equality: Why should some people be taxed higher than others.  But that confuses equality and equity.

The financial markets were granted more power as governments moved to deregulate the market, so they engaged in more excessive behaviour.  Labour unions declined (often by force) which mirrored a decline in the middle class share of income.  And globalization and technology added to the destruction of the middle class.

Where a company's headquartered means less and less.  We can outsource jobs which undercuts wages of workers in the US.  And automation has reduced the need for as many employees.

On the positive side, we have more cool stuff that's cheaper, and CEOs and financiers are much richer.  But CEOs raised their own salaries as they fired workers.  When companies depend on shareholders, there's a growing pressure to increase profits, which plays out by pushing down wages and benefits to the bare minimum.  But then they have fewer consumers available to buy their products, so they have to widen their market worldwide, make products that self-destruct, and encourage people to buy crap they really don't need.

What Worked in the Past

Policies that were around from 1947-77 (Keynes' economics) worked for the general prosperity of all.

• Higher education was a priority, and universities expanded. 
• Labour unions were strong, and more than a third belonged to a union.
• The middle class bought more, so companies could hire more, providing a stronger tax base for governments to invest more in people.

Today tuition is rising as the government is taking money out of education.  Infrastructure is crumbling and becoming dangerous.  There isn't a tax base to use to fix the problems because we've lowered taxes on the very wealthy, shipped jobs overseas, and flattened middle class wages so they no longer keep up with inflation.  If the wealthy don't pay their fair share, and the middle class doesn't have enough to pay tax on, then there's less revenue for social services like public education and health care.  Then tuitions go up, and the population becomes less educated, and, globally, less competitive.  In the 1960s, tuition at Berkeley was free.  In the 1970s, it was $700 in today's dollars. Now it's $15,000/year.

In the 1980s, we coped with declining incomes for a time by introducing double wage families with more women in the workforce.  Families worked longer hours, taking on second and third jobs.  And we borrowed money with fewer restrictions on loans - that, to some, seemed like a good idea at the time, but later blew up.  Now the coping mechanisms the middle class used are exhausted.

The Effect on Democracy

Inequality is a problem for democracy too.  When so many resources accumulate at the top, there comes the capacity to control politics through wealthy lobby groups who give the maximum amount allowed to election campaigns.  All politics have shifted to the right, so that Reich maintained the same views, but shifted from a Republican to a Democrat over a few decades.  (And some of us NDP supporters are left without a truly leftist party to back.)  High inequality brings with it a high degree of political polarization with politicians disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing instead of working together for the good of the country (like Howarth rejecting a very left-leaning budget).  For $300 million, you can buy a president.  We can't have government on an auction block.

There's a polarization of citizens too.  Losers of a rigged game can get very angry.  These trends of society pulling apart are very dangerous.  Reich sees fights on the Berkeley campus.

Solutions

The economy does better when everyone does better, and history is on the side of positive social change.  There's no "single magic bullet," be we need to mobilize, organize, and energize other people, from what I gleaned from the film, to...

• shop locally - avoid automated check-out line, on-line shopping, or anything that reduces jobs
• decrease technological use in manufacturing to increase jobs for the working class at home which will increase wages, increase shopping, and increase our tax base
• put tax money into infrastructure to decrease risk of collapse and create jobs
• support union creation and maintenance
• convince the government to invest in education, skills, and infrastructure
• regulate corporations to prevent companies from being allowed to deduct executive pay
• raise the tax rate for the very wealthy to increase the tax base which will allow for more money in education and health care

But the question, as always, is... how do we get from here to there?  I can do the shop locally thing, and support unions, but everything else seems horrifically out of reach.

But then...  There's always art:

The Benevolent Dictator isn't a Fascist

In a post a while back I advocate the best of our worst options for saving our species:  a government that forces us be less wasteful.  It's an idea that James Lovelock proposed, and some called it fascist. But there's a world of difference between enforcing legislation that actually protects the citizens in the long term and a police state.

John Oliver did a series of clips about how Australia managed to change their laws to ban semi-automatic weapons and seriously restrict other guns.  The trilogy is well worth a watch at only 18 minutes in total.  But the part that interests me is the idea that politicians had to commit political suicide in order to pass the legislation through, AND they were willing to do this for the good of the country.  People protested the new restrictions and voted the politicians who supported it out of office.  But it had already passed.  This was in 1996, and since then, the citizens have gotten used to the restrictions on their freedom and appreciate that mass shootings have gone from almost one/year down to zero.