While Russia played a role in convincing the United States to vote for Donald Trump and the United Kingdom to vote for Brexit, it only has so much influence. Ultimately, Putin needed very stupid populations to do very stupid and self-destructive things. So, how did the US and the UK get so stupid?
It’s now an urgent question because stupidity has translated directly into death. The Financial Times reports that twice as many Brits have died as are listed in official reports:
The coronavirus pandemic has already caused as many as 41,000 deaths in the UK, according to a Financial Times analysis of the latest data from the Office for National Statistics. The estimate is more than double the official figure of 17,337 released by ministers on Tuesday, which is updated daily and only counts those who have died in hospitals after testing positive for the virus. The FT extrapolation, based on figures from the ONS that were also published on Tuesday, includes deaths that occurred outside hospitals updated to reflect recent mortality trends.
In fact, the pandemic almost took the life of Boris Johnson, the UK’s “Brexit” prime minister, who insisted on shaking hands as a sign of defiance against the seriousness of the outbreak. On this side of the pond, Donald Trump acted similarly, holding his trademark MAGA rallies through March 2, as the virus silently spread throughout the country.
Even using the official numbers, the US and UK rank 1st and 5th in total Covid-19 deaths, while ranking 42nd and 56th, respectively, in tests per million in population. The actual fatality numbers are surely far worse, but the UK rates 5th and the US 13th in deaths per million in population. Considering the strength of their health care systems, this is an abysmal result. This is only happening because of the stupidity of voters in each country, which enabled cripplingly stupid and inept leadership.
It’s hard to say how the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance become so idiotic, especially when they started out with such well-educated and industrious populations. Some people will blame video games, but every country has video games. Others will point to the influence of right-wing media, but few countries have freer and better-trained journalists. I’m more inclined to blame the end of the Cold War.
Ironically, old school conservative thinking predicts that organizations that don’t face stiff competition will grow bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and lose the ability to innovate. This is one of their biggest arguments against big government and government=run health systems. In the past, it formed their rationale for supporting tough antitrust policies. Competition keeps people sharp, as does the threat of nuclear annihilation and the resulting focus on science that dominated in the West through the mid-to-late 20th Century. Competition keeps people sharp and prevents them from resting on their laurels.
Once the USSR came apart, however, the US and the UK lost their edge. Sitting on top of the global food chain seemed like a reward for virtue, but the work that went into it wasn’t understood or respected. While voluntary armies were sent around the world to invade and occupy peripheral powers, at home we started to lose our educational advantage and the national calling to be first in knowledge.
In the US, the Gingrich Revolution was the first sign that America was turning away from what had put it is such a commanding position. Pretty soon, the country would see leaders like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump emerge, none of whom would have been thinkable to a country that was aware of facing serious global competition.
The resulting destruction is almost unimaginable. The US and the UK are now doing almost the worst job in the world of protecting their citizens from the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and this is in spite of still maintaining massive advantages over most other countries. It’s entirely attributable to stupid leadership that was enable by stupid voters.
It turns out that waving a flag and boasting that “Were No. 1” is no substitute for being hungry for knowledge and determined to lead the world in education.
This virus seems tailor made to cull the terminally stupid. I hope enough of us non-stupid people survive to out-vote the stupid this year.
Also, racism. Anti Chinese racism has a long and dark history in this country. Anti Asian racism too. Add in our fascination with Russian style “communism”, and that created a giant blind spot that China has used to gather its power.
Its tailor made to cull the victims of our processed food system. Unfortunately, that’s about 60% of Americans, and sadly tilts towards America’s most true blue demographic.
There’s much stupidity in this nation. Just this morning, the sheriff of Snohomish County, Washington — home to the first Covid-19 case in the U.S. and the first major outbreak — announced he would no longer enforce Governor Inslee’s lockdown order. If only the virus could be contained among the stupid!
Will the WA Governor be ordering the national guard to pay a little visit to Snohomish county?
I like the post-Cold War hypothesis, but I would argue that the stupid starts with the Baby Boomers. What made them go cray cray and soft? Or were they always that way? Millennials figured it out, but the Baby Boomers prevented Obama from enacting true change…and killed the Revolution.
Perhaps the Baby Boomers have become convinced there is something wrong with populist ideas, that they are somehow evil. What other reason is there the M4A can’t get passed?
No, its not Baby Boomers, most of us are in the same boat everybody else is in.
>What other reason is there the M4A can’t get passed?
The state of Maine investigated and here is what they found:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170214121354/http://www.maine.gov/legis/opla/ctpchlthcaresub.pdf
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No doubt you are into something, although I hadn’t really thought all that much about the UK being of decisive importance in Cold War calculations. Sort of like the fact that Slovakia was a Nazi ally in the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Russia in 1941, haha.
I would note that London and New York were/are the world’s financial capitols, and thus the seats of the most toxic form of adventure capitalism, whose abusive plutocrats (and their media organs) likely infected the governmental systems of both countries very badly. Certainly that was what happened in the US, as you wisely observed with the Gingrich revolution—which unquestionably began the most systematic destruction of the federal government via funding cuts and repeal of New Deal laws.
I think we’d find that the 90s were the starting point of the most obvious anti-science/anti-expertise attitudes of the “conservative” movement as well, which is what we are dealing with in this Covid-19 crisis. And once that level of self-inflicted retardation hits critical mass in a populace (as has happened here), there’s no route to recovery.
Interesting puzzle for historians as they document the colossal failures of both nations and both peoples. But there will be many more decades of US/UK failure and decay in which to come to conclusions…
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Oh yes, this is exactly what happened and is happening. They have literally taken over.
This is mostly about US but also a bit about the UK but those parts also applies to us, as I’m describing the underlying madness that is going on. Which is based in ‘trade and einvestment agreements’
https://www.allysonpollock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lancet_1999_Price_WTODomesticPolicies.pdf
And the cost of the money has risen, because of what is called the Trilemma of the global economy.
But let me not get sidetracked..
The following is an attempt to explain what I think has happened and document it, please read my links because they explain this mess. Also when I quite things, you might find something interesting searching on those phrases.
Public services, with healthcare being the best example, is so much more efficient. And it has the possibility of being very very good, really by far the best. Because money is not the best motivator, altruism is.
—–But, a war has been and is being waged on them all around the world, by us, the UK and a the EU and a few other countries.
By “the neoliberal project”
Because, the plutocrats also saw progressivism, the real progressivism, they saw the rising of standards – as a huge problem,
they want to monopolize and deepen the advantages that better healthcare than the ‘masses’ brings them. They want to widen not shrink the gaps.. They feel its their entitlement as labor becomes more plentiful and jobs scarcer.. “Economics 101” as they put it. Wages must fall. Which is not right, because we make choises in democracy.. innumerable choices.. They want that choice to END.
— thats what this ost tries to explain, how-
They don’t want poor people to live longer than now, they feel people already live too long. Plus public services cannot be milked for the cream if everybody is in, nobody is out. Quality is too high, in a pure public system because everybody rich and poor has to use it (unfortunately thats not what they did in the UK, if they had they would NOT have the problems they do today. This is explained in the Note, WTO document T/C/W/50 (.doc)
Here we go.. “Background Note on Health and Social Services”, S/C/W/50, 18 September 1998.
So they created the GATS so they could use it, its jobs and a race to the bottom on regulation, quality and wages, as bait in international trade negotiations. To give them what they call “water”.
And there is the problem. They traded both our nations jobs away, in what amounted to an IOU. Wages had always been a sticking point in the postwar era, tolerated during the labor shortages of the past but rich people always saw it as temporary. Territory to be revisited in the future as labor become more of a buyers market, as jobs dried up. They see this as an inexorable law of Nature, that wages will fall, but the low birthrates and general reluctance of people to accept that made them want to stack the deck a bit in their favor. So that is what the WTO and its GATS did.
There is a hidden set of rules which make the flexibility we need impossible to effectuate as we are locked into a one way “progressive liberalization” (or liberalisation, you may get more hits on that one) What it means is that under a set of rules that everybody who joins our club, the WTO has to accept and agree to, everything has to become more and more privatized and globalized.
To get out of this deal, which now is 25 years old, unless they called it out for what it is, a huge fraud, a huge crime, we absolutely cannot win, countries would have to make extensive concessions.
For example, the main thing we, the US got out of GATS is we got the developing countries to accept the TRIPS agreement and the patent system we’ve created with its insanely high drug prices. Which have killed great many poor people and more recently, everyday people who had diseases like diabetes – of course they intend to do the same thing with COVID-19 drugs. So, now, while we still can, we need to speak out. But unfortunately, we dont have any voice. We dont have any standing in these forums, not being corporations, or countries, (or “civil society organizations” many of which are fake. (Not quite the same as “Ladies Against Women”, anybody remember them? – but kind of. NGOs now in many situations are not what they used to be, they have been co-opted. Because we live in a captured state my friends. )
We should abandon both GATS and TRIPS, in my opinion. And frree the world of their madness.
If we did both at the same time, everybody would be happy except the drug and health insurance companies. The drug companies’ employees, however, the scientists who actually do the work, would be overjoyed, however.
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The beginnings of the WTO go back to around 1982, or so I was told by a trade activist who was actually there. But officially, the “standstill” clause that begun the gridlock we are in today is construed by some in the developing world to have begun in the early 80s. However, the second paragraph, I think it was in the Punta Del Este Declaration of September 20, 1986 is the first instance of one that I have been able to locate. This is where officially the dirty deal between the North and South oligarchs to prop one another up, and steal both of our democracies, begun.
This is referred to in a UN document ( ” A/RES/44/232. Trends in the transfer of resources to and from the developing countries and their impact on the economic growth and sustained development of those countries” )
Which is open to interpretation.
My interpretation is that now they are supposed to resell their children’s labor at a huge markup and use that money to pay off the odious Third World Debt without defaulting on it (which they should have done, instead going after the crooks who borrowed all that money intending to steal it and not pay, but instead they didn’t they got off scot free, and the debt still stands, establishing a bad precedent, a way too favorable one for looters and crooks.)
In order so this could be pulled off we lost democracy and got a sort of theatrical performance in exchange. the same thing in the UK.
Because if we had a real democracy, Bernie Sanders would have called them out on GATS and Jeremy Corbyn would have too. Also the media would have told the country about this very real and very dangerous sword hanging over our heads in the form of this WTO suit. DS503. (Read the three articles in Inside US Trade at the beginning of March 2016, you’ll see there that unlimited numbers of jobs in qualified companies are what they claim was promised, also that GATS does not allow limits of the kinds we use to prevent the flow of Mode Four workers from becoming a flood.)
Which could result in the number of jobs being outsourced and offshored increasing to some significant percentage of the jobs, basically most of the good ones. (and the wages paid for them plummeting to around the current minimum wage or even lower, yes of course that would require workers all living together, six to a bedroom, which is what they do elsewhere, and yes its problematic and many are getting sick in those places a great many, but they also cannot afford healthcare in those places, GATS has made it okay to treat foreign workers (or patients!) very badly, theirrights strictly a matter of contract! Thats important considering that that is the healthcare pan for the future here. See “The Scope of GATS and of Its Obligations” by Bregt Natens, Jan Wouters for a bit on that. (under “medical tourism” or “patient mobility”
Once slavery started, it proved exceptionally difficult to eradicate, this will be no different. Its already spawned a huge amount of dishonesty here.
Look at how countries are grappling with it now.They dont want to give up the cheap, disempowered labor, which is becoming the new normal in country after country. Where its not Mode Four its prison labor.
Thats likely how a great many Americans will spend their golden years. Imprisoned until they can no longer work, and then released onto the mean streets. GATS prevents the establishment of new social services and requires that ones existing on certain dates be eliminated or reduced in scope based on those ceilings. (In the case of healthcare in the US its February 26, 1998, the “standstill date” of the Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services and Annex on Financial Services – the date they both were both filed in Geneva. This is because that service sector repesents a large number of jobs which are “measures” included in the scope of the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Whose definitions are nothing if not broad. See the very concise description near the beginning of this course from UNCTAD. http://unctad.org/en/docs/edmmisc232add31_en.pdf
Once it starts it never ends. It would be like a return to slavery. And of course what is the point of educating our young people with peoples rapidly declining savings, when there wont be any jobs for them?
I have had this argument with neoliberals many times. They see all this as some inexorable law of nature. But at the same time, they hid it, knowing that people never would have voted for it if they knew. See how we were never given a choice this time around. This is why, this deal they signed decades ago, planning in advance to rig the outcomes all around the world. GATS is like a neutron bomb that wiped out democracy, that will leave a very few owning the world and its policy space.
Without an education, and with people with advanced degrees available to work for so little most of the people who are alive today will become non-entities. Pushed off the edge of the economic map.
If the Democratic Party is really Democratic, it must inform itself about this and figure out some way to get democracy back, or our country’s future is doomed. Many Democrats are at best disillusioned and this is the underlying reason why. Because with GATS and the other global economic governance orgs, which we were key in setting up, back when we were much more trusted than we are today, we set up this really hrrible thing, which was a huge mistake, so that we could capture more investment. But that investment is based on a promise that we will be the most hard nnosed country in the coming years, which means that we have to treat our own people worst of them all, on principle,
With the WTO comes a restriction (led by the US via the OECD and its STRI) that only the most “minimally trade restrictive” (Basically, Republican) policies are allowed, which means progressive liberalization, a one way street, with no side exits, allowing only more and more deregulation. On top of that there is the insanely restrictive standstill which makes it even worse. That means we are supposed to go back to the state pre-ACA. We wont wiggle on that because every country wants out now becase of coronavirus. Biden canot expand the ACA, its supposed to be temporary and be phased out. (Like the other “post 2008 protectionist measures” elsewhere)
On the very last page of the third additional supplement in those same documents filed in Geneva at the WTO in Feb 1998 there is also a promise to ‘reform’ the Glass_steagall act, made to the WTO, in the next Congress. They did, they actually repealed it, (and almost all copies of the original Glass Steagall Act vanished.)
You can find the one line under GATS “Specific Committments” for the United States. There are additional references formatted for legal citation in this student paper, FEDERALISM IN AN ERA OF INTERNATIONAL FREE TRADE https://www.jstor.org/stable/26421283 and especially “The Potential Impact of the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services on Health System Reform and Regulation in the United States” in the International Journal of Health Services. It is available at CiteSeerX https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.405.5725 Also read Patricia Arnold’s https://www.citizen.org/documents/GATS-financial-dereg.pdf for its isights on Social Security. Also this essay is very good, really a must read. http://www.iatp.org/files/GATS_and_Public_Service_Systems.htm IATP hosts a great many worthwhile document on this issue. But this one is exceptionally good, a document by the Candian government that explains why Canada still has its healthcare system relatively intact while the UKs NHS has been subjected to the death of a thousand cuts, readit and you will understand a lot that seems incomprehensibe today. Also read its footnotes for their insight on the Annex on FS definition. I hope that this has been helpful! We can get our democracy back, but it will take some self examination and honesty on all of our parts to do it. Its not just about Trump. Its about a deep seated kind of corruption at the top everywhere thats literally trying and succeeding to steal the entire planet out from underneath all of us, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican. We had something quite precious and their deception means they know that we could take it back again, we will make our country into the country it always wanted to be but never was. But we have to be honest and admit this all was a huge mistake. Lets dump GATS and TRIPS and apologize for them. We were led astray by evil greedy people.
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I’m sorry, but I have to disagree. Certainly the Gingrich Revolution was a turning point, but growth of the stupid goes at least back to the Carter administration and the official acceptance of the “free market” as the supreme arbiter of truth, justice, and The American Way. When a Democratic President adopted deregulation to make natural monopolies “more competitive” because that would “improve efficiency” we were doomed. The decline was cemented into place when Al From established the Democratic Leadership Council in 1983 on the principles that we needed more police and the New Deal was outdated. The belief that the only purpose of politics was to gain power then became the motivation on both sides, and the question of what the power was to be used for became irrelevant. I was appalled that Lovable Old Uncle Joe Biden was able to brag that he drafted the Patriot Act in 1994 and nobody noticed. The election is half a year away, a very long time, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, but writing in Cthulhu is not unthinkable.
IIRC, in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly she has a chapter about the British bungling that lost them their 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast of North America in which she recounts as an example of arrogance by English policymakers the fact that not a single one of them ever traveled to the colonies to gain a better understanding of what was going on.
That kind of willful ignorance has painful resonances with today.
By the way, love how the photos used answer your question before another word is read.
Selfishness, greed and apathy, fed by the intentional dumbing down of public discourse has led to the inevitable – a deeply stupid and disengaged electorate, enthralled with reality TV and a shallow focus of “my family” has led us to this point.
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There are a number of initiatives to put aside the current drug regulatory frameworks and put together worldwide, nonprofit patent and IP pools to rise to meet the challenge of COVID-19.
Normal profits are not improper, the kind of pricing though that we are moving towards prices drugs by a new mechanism that does not look at costs of the drug, it looks at the cost of a disease, without the drug, and the amount of competition. Exploitative profits are what this model produces. For example, $1000 a pill for a recent cure for Hepatitis C. Or similarly insane prices for cancer chemotherapy drugs.
But the good thing is that a lot of people are realizing that we need to change direction on all this. We don’t need radical changes, we just need for the government to actually be what it had always professed to be. I think we are far more in agreement on many things than many make us out to be.
Also, nobody deserves to die from anything. Especially not being stupid. A lot of people are seeing their lives fall apart. What the government needs to do is rise to the challenge. They should call a nationwide delay/moratorium on all mortgage and rent payments, as well as the bills landlords must pay, to keep people housed, so they can keep the quarantine going on a bit longer, just delay them all with no balloon payments. The problem is, many landlords in big cities dont want their longterm tenants, they want to replace them with new ones that pay higher rents. Thats a serious problem that has nothing to do with COVID-19.
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