Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | Nick Hanauer

Opportunity in a World of Hurt

Creative writers, people who document the times, and journalists are being boxed in by creeping censorship.  The letter behind this link tells the story of self-censorship by writers and artists who depend on advertisers, corporate sponsors and  paymasters for their living.  Their argument leads one to consider those among us who have other means to sustain themselves than the royalties.

Pandemic attrition is making the problem worse.  Already under pressure, livelihoods for journalists have  been wiped out weekly since early March.  Documentary film-makers have a tough time to produce given the overheads involved.  Non-fiction writers, bloggers and others can work anywhere.  All they need is an idea and an  internet account.  So, the gauntlet of social criticism is being handed to those of us who have the experience, the education, the opinions and access to the audience.

The situation is causing this reporter to consider reviving prophetsofboom.com after a decade of neglect since outrage over economic inequality fizzled out with Occupy Walk Street fatigue.  Single-issue activists motivated by racial, sexual and economic inequalities have created a forceful coalition in 2020.  Their common cause provides an impetus for change.  We suspect that many outliers in  America see the movement as a force for removal of the narcissist con-man they insist on calling 'Mr. President'.

It remains to be seen if their combined zeal is enough to oust the most dangerous man whoever occupied The White House.  Meanwhile, the platform for pointed analysis is open, as salaried and sponsored opinions disappear.   

A Rear View on Pandemics

Prophet or Pretender?

The text below is something I wrote in 1998/99 as part of a treatment on futurism in Health  Care.  Be cautious how you handle this.  It can give you whiplash:

In Canada,  the provinces are locked in danse macabre with the federal government over their respective shares of national health care expenditures.  Managed care doesn’t have the same profile as privately-run HMOs do in the U.S., but provincial health programs exhibit many of the same characteristics.  Gaps have appeared in medicare coverage as provinces have eliminated overlap and  duplication and, in some cases reduced expenditures.

 Until the 1990s, equality of access to care was assumed by most Canadians to be another of their birthrights.  However, as public health has become a commodity as well as a medical service, there are widespread fears that a two-tier system -- one in which people with the most means will get the best care -- will one day be the norm.   The concept of “two-tier” health care has become the dividing line between those who consider equal access to high-quality medical treatment to be a sacred trust of national governance and those who fear that soaring medical costs could sink the Canadian federation almost as surely as the traditional ideology of Quebec separatism.           

At mid-century, few people imagined -- the lifestyles editor of The Futurist among them -- that along the way, the economics of distribution would create bottlenecks that may be more difficult to overcome, in the long run, than the diseases themselves.  As it has turned out in the Nineties, the cost of health care has become nearly as problematic as disease itself.

Medical technology has demonstrated repeatedly that it can deliver great advances in the treatment of many illnesses that have plagued humanity for at least as long as there have been records of public health.   Our faith in the promise of science has proved to be well-placed as each age-old malady has succombed to the accumulated knowledge and skill of medical research.  By the 1970s, it was common wisdom to declare that the war of bugs versus drugs had been won decisively.  Yet new challenges have emerged with each success.  New diseases, like AIDS, have probably crossed over from exotic jungle creatures to attack the human organism as greater numbers of people have ventured into the dark recesses of the planet.  Ebola, a ghastly hemorrhagic fever that causes the body to ooze streams of blood, was first identified in western Sudan and Zaire in 1976.  It had likely existed for eons in some forest rodent or bat species.  And now old diseases like influenza and common infections, once thought to have been eradicated, are threatening to invade us.   Technology is surrendering its power to newly resistant strains of micro-organisms that have co-existed with us peaceably for generations.

Medical researchers understand that our weakness for a sure thing is almost certain to be our downfall.  The question is not whether this will come about, but when it will occur.   We have become so accustomed to a life without the risk of the age-old infections that our very aversion to any such risk will be our undoing.  We insist so firmly on narrowing the probability of a foreshortened future that our very insistence will be the death of us.  Our demands for antibiotic insurance against every discomfort have become so strong that doctors have given in to the pressure.  According to one U.S. study, between 20 and 50 per cent of the 145-million prescriptions given each year to outpatients are unnecessary.^[1]   Between 25 and 45 per cent of the 190-million antibiotic doses administered in the hospital each year are equally superfluous, the study found.  Antibiotics are often taken for illnesses that they are not even designed to fight, like colds or flu, that are caused by viruses.  

Bacteria are among the oldest organisms on the planet.  What they do best of all is to survive.  They were doing this according to Darwinian principles eons before the great 19th century botanist enunciated his Theory of Evolution.  The emergence of resistant bacteria was inevitable.  But nobody predicted how quickly it would happen.  It has taken these organisms with a genius for adaptation less than half a century to overcome the most potent concoctions that mankind could devise.  Bacteria now exist for which there is no antibiotic antidote.  Some are resistant not to one drug, but to many. 

North America has become addicted to the antibiotic cocktail.  What happens next may turn out to be the nightmare of all hangovers. The next pandemic will almost certainly be the result of resistance to the cure.  The growing list of dangerously infectious, drug-resistant microbes is comprised of common household bugs that cause everyday maladies like sore throats, ear infections and influenza.  Headline writers have enthusiastically taken to calling them the “Superbugs”.  As the headlines tell the story, it’s as though each microbe has assumed heroic dimensions of virulence.  It is an imperfect caricature.  The real story is far more banal and, because of that, infinitely more menacing.  Organisms that live on the skin and in the nostrils of otherwise healthy people are threatening to overcome all the miracle drugs now known to medical research.  Their supremacy would be a terrible thing to behold.  More unsettling than this apocalyptic vision, however, is the consensus among epidemiologists.  They are nearly unanimous about the high probability of the threat.

Between 20 and 30 million people died world-wide in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919.  The one-month death toll was more than 200,000 North Americans from a population at the time of less than 60-million. Epidemiologists agree that athere is a good probability of a pandemic of similar proportions  within the first five years of the new century, based on the calculation that major epidemics occur three or four times a century.  Thirty years have elapsed since the last one.  The longest span without one in the 20th Century was 39 years.  How prepared is the medical estabishment?  “I don’t think anyone could ever be ready for something like that,” says Health Canada’s chief epidemiologist. “How can you prepare?” ^[2]     

Ironically, the man who created the first miracle drug foresaw where all this was headed.  Penicillin was introduced in 1943.   Just two years later Alexander Fleming, the drug’s discoverer, warned in an interview that misuse of penicillin would cause bacteria to mutate into new strains.  These new organisms would exist solely to resist the new drug.   As things have turned out, the evolution of bacteria into increasingly virulent strains has been occurring faster than the ability to produce new medicines.   In part that is because drug manufacturers all but abandoned the search for new antibiotics in the early 1980s, believing that bacterial infections were under control once and for all. 

If medical science is about to lose its grip on infectious diseases, it  couldn happen at a worse time. Hospital cutbacks mean there is little capacity in the health system to care for  the victims of any  new pandemic.  Most likely, if one should occur, the corridors would be choked with [seething] masses, like some medieval mortuary.  

---

            ^[1] Superbugs, New York Times Magazine, August 2, 1998, p. 42.

            ^[2] Interview January 11, 1999 with Dr. John Spika (957-4243)

Supercharged for Tuesday

A year after Wall Street nearly bankrupted western economies Michael Moore produced and directed Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009 to document ways North Americans were manoeuvered into a consumerist frenzy lasting several decades in order to stoke the engines of U.S.-style capitalism.  Well before the financial collapse of 2007-2008, prophetsofboom.com described how the advertising industry, other mass media -- in fact, all aspects of the commercial propaganda machine  -- were harnessed to the same task.

Happy warriors have earned  a Trumpian epithet: are they socialists or just democrats?

Big business has refined a 'take-no-prisoners' style of capitalism in recent decades that reached its nadir and simultaneously its lowest point with the  near-collapse of the economy.  As a result, inequality of income and opportunity now anchors the system.  Reaction in the form of the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and the improbable election of Donald Trump in 2016 have morphed into the shambolic Democratic primary race. Now septuagenarian Bernie Sanders is the unlikely recipient of impatience with the status quo.  Interestingly, Michael Moore is back in the mix.  Now he is one of Bernie's biggest election boosters.

By double-teaming the U.S. president, Bernie and Michael have earned Trump's enmity.  They have also handed him a club to beat them off with:  As a result, the clash between Sanders and moderate Joe Biden has become the race to watch on the eve of Super Tuesday. 

Does the Conversation Make Sense?

We're all out on  a limb

Is the conversation of a generation starting to take hold?  We turned this archaic blog to a new purpose out of  the debris of the Occupy Wall Street movement more than a decade ago. That seemed to make sense until the 2016 election, when the orange Disruptor-in-Chief made the U.S. of A. the world capital of nonsense.  For nearly four years the conversation has been incoherent.  That's why we quit trying to make sense of it as Donald Trump, the putative president, sowed havoc wherever his flighty attention landed.

American CEOs, assembled at Davos  (where all rational  thought is supposed to happen these days)  are beginning to realize that take-no-prisoners capitalism is a bad idea.  Why?  Because Hong Kong demonstrators showed them what real revolution looks like.  The piece that follows draws the lines between these seemingly random events.   Self-examination seems to be beyond the American political system at this time.Ironically,  it's an outsider writing in a Canadian news magazine who makes sense of the chaos.

Does the conversation of a generation make sense?  Only if people with divergent views are talking to each other.  So  far Canadians are able to do so.  But  as America goes, so too often do we. Watch this space for more developments.  And let us know what you think.   There's a link for  that.

Bystanders Beware

John Ibbitson encapsulates what's really at stake in  this shambolic U.S. election. The Republicans' standard-bearer, Trump personifies the future of America if the power elites' grip isn't soon  loosened.  Whether he wins or not, the 99 percent will opt  for iconoclasts of one sort or another until the fabric of the republic comes apart.  The schisms between rich and poor, red or blue states, black, white or brown people and authority figures over heavily-armed resistors are too obvious to deny any longer.

We hope that Hillary Clinton  recognizes the domestic challenges she would face as President-elect --to say nothing of the opportunistic Russian autocrat, suicidal Middle Easterners or that nuclear loon in North Korea.

We also hope that  Canadians understand how we have  gone  along with corporate America to get along for decades.  Our time is coming too.  The spillover effect from an American train wreck would send us crawling back into the farm fields and forests as sure as if the republican elephant sat on us.  
     

A Frank Assessment

Pollster Frank Graves offers this assessment of the state of the public's attitudes to their economic prospects.  Increasing pessimism begs many questions.  One that comes to my mind is how Canadians are going to react if the Liberal government's happy talk and moneybags financing fails to produce results.  But this is the risk we decided to take to rid ourselves of the  Harper gang's distorted interpretation of Canadian values.

Make no mistake:  we are on a course that we freely chose.  We will have to see it to its logical conclusion.  The odds seem to have changed since election day October 19, with the collapse of energy prices and the relative value of the dollar.  But the world has a way of offering unexpected new opportunities.  So hang on and enjoy the ride.

Meanwhile, we need to ask how we can insulate ourselves if global market forces turn out to be too resistant to the  Keynsian bargain.  The question for individuals is this:  does it make sense to abandon ourselves to deficit financing just because we've chosen that option collectively?

This University of Calgary analysis of public attitudes seems to line up with the facts.  Consumer-driven economic theory is creating fortunes at the top of an increasingly hierarchical heap, while the rest make do with the small money.  If Canadians are already pessimistic, will we continue to mortgage ourselves to the future, especially if  Justin's "beau risque" turns sour?

The message of this study seems to be that Canadians no longer buy into  right-wing economics any more than they did the expediency and ethical lapses of Harper's approach to governance.  Right-wing economics plays itself out most vividly in America.  The broken promise of "trickle-down" prosperity seems to be driving the campaigns of the most ardent iconoclasts.  You  have to wonder what  lesson Canadians are taking from that circus spectacle.  

          

The Universal Basic Income Sham

The notion that a universal basic income can plug the gaps in an economy built on myths and techno-hype are a cover for the  guilty minds who  have put America in this  position.  For every new digital innovation that creates fortunes for a few, jobs are disappearing by the thousands.  This discussion between two knowledgeable columnists makes me think all the more that a UBI is simply an escape hatch for dream-weavers from the inevitability of a jobless future.  

Meanwhile, the world's most robust engine of innovation is toying with leadership choices who would prolong the dream-induced fantasy that America can be "made strong again" by  the  same old lies.  Wealth doesn't trickle down.  Mostly it sticks to the innovators as real estate, luxury goods and investment portfolios.  

Nobody  seems to be  able  to answer the obvious question:  where is the  wealth going  to come from  to pay everybody  a basic income to be unemployed and like it well enough not to  revolt?  Surely nobody  thinks that the same folks who hoarded their wealth while the public bailed out  the economy in 2008-9 are going  to  underwrite  a new economic reality.

  

The Graveyard of the Elites: Chris Hedges

The Graveyard of the Elites: Chris Hedges: The establishment structure is sliding toward its death, and the foremost sign of this is the silly and sickening display of “junk politics” that we call an election campaign.
- 2016/02/28

Uncanny Predictions Sealed Our Fate

Nikola Tesla didn't invent techno-hype.  That had been going on for generations, picking up tempo when railways first linked communities, spanned continents and spawned electronic communications.  But his astonishing  predictions, captured in the pages of Colliers magazine in 1926 were perhaps the most accurate of any.

What Tesla and his colleague Hugo Gernsback energized after the  first world war, others inflated into a cultural tsunami, with the proliferation of consumer-based economics and the explosion of mass media after WWll.

Most of Tesla's followers were less accurate, even careless.  But their purpose wasn't to be prescient. They filled the print  media and the airwaves with predictions to generate demand for consumer goods.  They succeeded beyond their own fertile imaginations, driving economic growth and prosperity throughout the 20th Century.

Industrialists and businessmen soon realized the potential of future-hype.  Their zeal propelled the advertising industry to unprecedented heights.  It created the futurist  movement, when they began to worry  that the engines of commerce were producing a population saturated with choice.

Only now are we beginning to understand the real cost  of expectations inflated by decades of  hype. Crippling consumer debt has collided with income inequality to create a middle class only now waking up to the fact that economic growth doesn't follow some trickle-down theory.

This new reality may  have played a role in Justin Trudeau's election victory October 19.  It is now certainly being played out in the U.S. primaries, where voters are  ready  to choose any option as long as they believe they aren't being duped.    

           

Falsehoods and Faery Dust

Here's an insightful look at how North Americans have come to understand 'the big lie' that  we can all share in trickle-down economics.  As a result, both Republicans and Democrats are shifting their support from establishment candidates.

Populism is in political vogue here too.  Justin Trudeau's Liberals enjoy 70 per cent support  from Canadians -- for the moment.  But a day of reckoning is at hand.

If the U.S. elects another wingnut as President, the disappointment and  the self-induced chaos will tear apart the fabric of America.  If Trudeau finance minister Bill Morneau can't find the right balance in his first  budget ... if Justin can't forego the selfies and faery dust act ...  if he can't at least look like he's paying attention to the balance sheet, Liberal fortunes will begin a downward slide that may not end until the next election.

But  for the moment, it's worth reflecting on how we got  here.    

Justin's Faery Dust Dims

It's somehow fitting that our new prime minister is tying Canada's future to the "fourth industrial revolution" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week.

Klaus Schwab in 2012

Just four years ago Davos co-founder Klaus Schwab astonished observers with his keynote remarks at the opening of the 2012 gathering of world political leaders and businessmen.  At the time, we posted a blog item that we called a placeholder in the Conversation of a Generation.  That was because we frankly didn't  know what to make of Professor Schwab's assertions that capitalism, in its present form, has outlived its usefulness.

The professor's analysis came on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement that caused people to question the sustainability of the gulf opening up between the economically disadvantaged and the crony capitalists who are killing their own golden goose one big slice at a time.

This time Justin Trudeau is the keynote speaker, an acknowledgement of his miraculous political upset of Stephen Harper only three months ago.  With the global economy sliding toward the brink of the unknown,  organizers undoubtedly felt that some boosterism might help. 

 Trudeau rose to the occasion  with the pitch that "My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources.  I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness."

Neil Nails It

It took CBC correspondent Neil Macdonald to rein in this show horse: "prime ministers have to cheerlead; they all do. But Trudeau's ... happy talk is beginning to sound a bit detached from certain realties that the unimaginably important heavy-hitters in Davos are probably quite aware of".

In other words, enough of the faery dust already. When Trudeau gets back on Canadian terra firma there are real issues to be addressed with more than incantations of diversity, cooperation and inclusivity.  It's time we had more to tell our partners in counter-terrorism who didn't invite Canada to the NATO conference on that subject this week.  Provinces and municipalities deserve a better sense of how the government plans to deliver its infrastructure commitments than Trudeau's standard reminder of how many 'just  folks'  he listened to while he was wandering in the political wilderness as leader of the third party.   

Leave it to Neil to state  the obvious:  "... we must all have internalized that there is value in diversity, and that we must work together as Canadians, and that we are an incredible, wonderful, virtuous place."

"We also have problems, though. Time to get at them, no?"