Showing posts with label Welfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Welfare. Show all posts

Sunday 18 March 2018

A Sense of Proportion - Nuclear War and Feeling Secure

As we struggle to find the money for the National Health Service and we squabble over what should or not be paid out to Brussels (nothing in my view), there is another world of money out there that has nothing to do with Wall Street or the City of London. To get a feel for this economy, we must switch to the United States for a while.

On 23 February 2008, a US B-2 bomber crashed on the runway shortly after take-off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The findings of the investigation stated that the B-2 crashed after "heavy, lashing rains" caused moisture to enter skin-flush air-data sensors. There were no munitions on board. With an estimated loss of US$1.4 billion, it was the most expensive crash in USAF history.

Yes, that's right - US$1.4bn sunk into one aircraft whose only function was to drop megatonnage on someone other than us. There are 20 B-2s in service with the United States Air Force (excluding the one written off) which plans to operate the aircraft until 2058, Each can deploy sixteen 2,400 lb (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs.You can add up the sums deployed in any way you like but that is a lot of money, a lot of national infrastructure and a lot of healthcare and education costs.

With a maximum yield of 1.2 megatonnes of TNT (75 times the 16 kt yield of the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945), the B83 is the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon in the United States arsenal. About 650 B83s were built, and the weapon remains in service as part of the United States "Enduring Stockpile".

The cost of each B83 bomb is hard to calculate because one would have to take into account research and development, a cost which is spread amongst several items of mass destruction. According to the [US] Union of Concerned Scientists (note we are only talking about the B83 delivery system (the B-2's B83's could be replaced with yet another bomb, the B1): "It cost some $80 billion to develop and build 21 of these planes, or $4 billion per B-2 bomber, and the current life extension program will cost $10 billion. Each can carry up to 16 bombs, so the total cost of each deployed bomb would be roughly $270 million, taking into account its share of the bomber."

Whether these calculations are accurate or not, 21 B-2s each with 16 B83s (that is 336 B83s) are all utterly useless except to devastate another part of humanity or to maintain a 'theory' of deterrence that may or may not have worked for the last seventy years. Of course, other potentially opposing nations have a similar capacity though nothing near as big but still the total sum is formidable, far more massive in the US than elsewhere in the world.

The US hasn't actually built a new bomb since 1992 (as of 2013) and is spending money only on refurbishments of weaponry so perhaps the investment has been made and we should accept the bad investments as something that comes from another age. But now the ramping up of anti-Chinese and anti-Russian feeling by opposing camps in the US and of the latter in the UK raises once again serious questions about what we spend our money and why.

I am not even going to try and estimate total costs when the B2 and the B83 are only a part of the whole and just one unloaded bomber can wipe out $1.4bn of national wealth because of a few faulty sensors. But, before British readers get too smug at this colossal waste while America's built infrastructure crumbles and its inner cities remain sink-pits and it cannot provide even a basic free national health service (let alone the free education that we British have now lost thanks to that vile abortion of claimed Leftism New Labour), the UCS noted in 2013 that "the DOD also is modifying Trident submarine-based missiles—which initially cost about $100 million each—to extend their lifetimes at a cost of about $140 million apiece."

Now, this is my point. Every one of these expenditures was undertaken because elected representatives approved them, often in a bipartisan way and with minimal opposition. There have, of course, been concerns about cost and not only amongst elected representatives. Intelligent military men have themselves often wondered whether this has been the best use of resources, 

And yet, in every case, these measures passed without serious opposition as to principle through Congress (or Parliament) whether the majority were liberal or conservative (or Labour or Tory). The arguments for national resilience and peace are thrust aside in favour of what amounts to a massive gamble on not having to become genocidal maniacs in what would be as likely as not to be a futile revenge attack at best and a war crime beyond the achievement of Adolf Hitler himself at worst.

Ultimately, this is not some sinister plot by a cabal of miltaristic illuminati but is a democratic decision that results directly from your and my vote. When we vote in our standard party preference, we vote in people who will sign on the nod, or with minimal questioning as to purpose, vast sums of money that cannot be spent on economic infrastructures or on social issues or just be given back to the people. We ensure that we are complicit in the use of this weaponry since deterrence only works if there is general agreement that we can use this stuff. We really cannot blame the so-called elite - collectively we the people maintain this system. It would not exist if we did not approve it by our personal votes.

Try looking up what one single B83 bomb could do to a city of civilian men, women and children and be saddened at the implications of that complicity (we do not consider, of course, the Russians or Chinese to be any less complicit except that the Chinese people do not get to vote in the people who would do this although they probably would if they could). We have a global system here but all countries claim a mandate from their people, directly through a vote or indirectly through a Party mechanism.

So, every voter (where there is a vote) must genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that their country is at threat to a sufficient degree that vast sums must be diverted from socio-economic development and/or private resources and that it is reasonable for that threat to be dealt with by being prepared to immolate tens of millions of other human beings in a forlorn gamble that the machinery of death will never be needed.

I am not sure if this is right or wrong. I only know that it is ridiculous. Perhaps it is true that, without WMD, America and Britain would be like Carthage before Rome. Perhaps, on that basis, the massive and otherwise wasteful expenditure is worth while as is the gamble that it will never be deployed - that being wasteful is part of the game since its use lies in its not being used like some weird metaphysical game fit for continental philosophers.

I don't care. What I am interested in is the institutionalisation of paranoia, the preparedness to spend such vast sums on extreme possible events (like the vast sums spent on anti-terrorism activity that still can't stop a nutter shooting up a school), the unthinking acceptance of this state of affairs by the entire political class and the apparent inability of the voting population to see the levels of cost and, yes, again, the paranoia (which can be manufactured if necessary as we are seeing in London as I write) involved in giving up many social benefits, economic advantages and even personal wealth for what amounts to the mass embracing of a psychological neurosis - existential anxiety about the 'other' - without ever bothering to get to know or understand or compromise with that 'other' in an alternative strategy of 'peaceful co-existence'.

Imagine a world where those sums had made America and the UK wealthier and more socially secure and both had retained only enough firepower to cause sufficient harm while offering us resilient countries that would fight in the streets for their liberty if necessary. Macmillan in 1957 made a decision for budgetary reasons to drop a strategy of resilience for deterrence and he was not malign or even stupid in doing so. It had its logic but it was the logic of Aquinas - the building of an entirely logical system on a few basic false assumptions shared by everyone without further thought. Reagan too made strategic deterrence a platform and it helped to get him elected - his voters liked this system and simply wanted more protection through the futile 'Star Wars' programme.

Perhaps this is what it is all about. As with air power more generally ensuring that there are no body bags amongst the aggressors but only vaporised remains of civilians below, so these expenditures are really protection money paid by 'our' civilians. The people pay over to the 'racketeers' (the Crown or the Federal Government) the funds and, in return, the racketeers 'protect' them, not so much from the enemy but from the costs and risks of having to face the enemy themselves or becoming resilient in adversity.

Maybe that is the secret. Maybe WMD expenditures are much more 'snowflake' than we thought they were. Maybe they exist so that voters can pass over the difficult business of defending something worth defending because they have a stake in it but where they might risk personal hardship, death or injury (in taking that particular gamble over the response to the intentions and strength of an enemy) and thereby they give responsibility for the throw of that dice to an elite that then develops a bit of an economic interest in keeping the system going.

If I am right, then perhaps the people are using democracy just to offset responsibility and thought. In the wisdom of crowds, they are getting what they want. But what do they want? Maybe they simply do not want to think about these things. Maybe they want to hire people to do their thinking for them and to take on responsibility for the acts that might be necessary to survive. They prefer those acts to be separate from themselves under conditions where they do not have to make any choices rather than make choices that are existential. Democratic humanity, under this thesis, is existentially cowardly but not irrational.

The gamble on letting this protection money (aka wasted money) be spent on a system detached from their daily lives and responsibilities might be likened to the money they spend on entertainment - a distraction, an avoidance, an evasion. From this perspective, the gamble on the economy slowly dying in the future and social care and security collapsing or being inadequate in old age is set against the gamble not of the Russians declaring war but on what might happen to themselves if they declare war. But why would they prefer mass immolation? Do they think the 'other' would immolate them 'just for fun'? Has Hitlerism created an idea of the other's intent to general extermination as if we were Carthage-in-the-making?

The mutual immolation somehow looks less dangerous to voters (because it is chosen internally to be unimaginable as much as there is trust in deterrence as game theory) than a resilience strategy when voter resilience is already being tested to the limit precisely by that lack of economic resource and social security in everyday life that might (if they but thought about it) be resolved with massive savings on WMD delivery systems. But something else may be going on here.

For democratic humanity, a simple immolation of the civilian men, women and children of the other side is infinitely preferable to facing them directly in battle. Perhaps they know that they are now flaccid and weak. Perhaps middle class Americans know that the Viet Cong drubbed them because the Viet Cong were not flaccid and weak. Air power then proved fruitless and probably will again. Sometimes I think the admiration for Israel is such a projection - by supporting a people that is resilient and not flaccid and weak, its supporters perhaps think that this makes them strong. Of course, it does not. This is the mentality of nations used to watching screens and not doing things.

The existence of air power allows the democratic human to feel as if he was in control, as if he could win at no cost to himself ... and it is that feeling of control and misplaced hope that has one central purpose - the alleviation of anxiety. In the end, these vast expenditures are, perhaps, a pharmaceutical, an anxiety-relieving drug, more than they are even a protection racket. People simply do not want to have to think about these things because these things make them anxious. A big abstract anxiety (global immolation) is much easier to cope with than the anxiety of taking responsibility in a resilience-driven society.

Still you vote these people in every time, you cowards. Thank you for that. I feel so much more secure now ... 

Thursday 9 March 2017

What is the Problem on the Left - A Very Brief Analysis

"Brexit is a destruction derby's worth of car crashes waiting to happen". This is an almost standard quotation from a rant on Left Futures. Yet the evidence for this is slight, especially after the failed pre-Brexit vote analyses of economic prospects - the expected disaster gets pushed ever further forwards and has now reduced itself to a bout of moderate inflation that is matched by the export opportunities arising and being taken.

The better analysis is that adaptive capitalist entrepreneurialism offers a greater threat to socialism - apparent success through not-so-hidden exploitation. Observers are often letting an 'ought' get in the way of an 'is' as is the way with ideologues.

Corbyn has things partly right by hammering on about those who are going to lose from adaptive capitalism - the public sector workers, cultural workers and the near-marginalised (those between the truly marginalised which adaptive capitalism will care for and the private sector working class which may well benefit or rather appear to benefit sufficiently to continue voting for it rather than higher taxes) - and those 'hidden costs' that the weakening of welfare causes to the wider population even in times of economic growth (social care, lack of housing stock on which he could say more and so on).

The problem is that the analysis stops there. A bloc is mobilised but not one sufficient to take power democratically. Meanwhile middle class ideologues engage in constant misdirection by predicting (or hoping for?) some economic meltdown in a one-off gamble that is as likely to help the populist Right as the Left depending on the circumstances of the time.

Since the Tories under May are almost certainly 'in' for up to four years, they have considerable room for manouevre. Even the strike at their own base with self-employed NI (which Corbyn cannot exploit for ideological reasons) is happening early with deliberation in order to store up giveways later.

Their internal contradiction is their new-found interest in ‘strengthening the state’ for security reasons and their need to contain radical populism that wants either lower taxes or more expenditure and it is in thrusting a pole into that hole that their model can be wedged apart.

But that is not what we get. Beyond the social mobilisation strategy to get the existing bloc in line, all we get is short term ranting and obsessions with ‘done deals’ like Brexit from the ‘intellectuals’ while the old base of the Party drifts into the other camp.

What is required, on the back of the bloc mobilisation strategy, is a second level of national economic strategy that deals in a non-Luddite fashion with techno-innovation, especially techno-innovation in the key areas of social care and the NHS where one suspects it is the public sector unions who are in danger of being the block to changes that could considerably improve lives of citizens and workers.

I have seen robotics used safely for patient-lifting to end or limit back injuries for NHS workers – Labour should be engaged fully in the socially responsible process of assessing, analysing, regulating, promoting and state support for technologies that would make the UK a global leader in the new cost-effective mass welfarism. The People’s State should be the intermediary between capitalist innovation (which, I am afraid, works in its clumsy wasteful way) and the condition of the people.

By engaging in a national debate about the future rather than the past, the middle ground no longer has to be secured on Blairism (minimal taxes, foreign adventurism, cultural manipulation and adaptive neo-liberalism) but on something very different – a neo-socialist commitment to life cycle welfare, lifetime education and retraining to adapt to new innovation, application of innovation to social needs and increasing income security for all citizens within a national sovereign state.

Worrying about who will succeed May is almost certainly idle. She has control of the levers of power until she loses an election and that is at least four years away – if then, at this rate.

Saturday 7 February 2015

A 'Sick' Society - What It Really Means ...

Managing the self as both body and mind, where both have an influence on each other, where both have significant unconscious aspects and where both are dependent on external inputs (such as nutritional on the one side or perceptual on the other) is an art and not a science. It takes place in real time with multiple changes in many components. If, as physicians have suggested, severe stress results in atrophy of the hippocampus and this reduces the memory resources available to allow the body to react appropriately to future stress, this has consequences.

It means that we must engineer our environment (which includes society) to avoid severe stress and we must seek means to engineer our bodies to recover from past severe stress so that they can deal with current and future stress. A degree of social engineering and a degree of corrective personal engineering may be necessary to enable us to live the good life and to make informed decisions about preserving it, but the choice of what constitutes the good life always remains an individual and not a social one.

Social or bodily engineering that creates stress or is non-consensual or is imposed from without (except under the most extreme of diseased or psychotic conditions) is counter-productive. There is a point of balance at which most people most of the time will have to accept their 'difference' from the normal as ‘just who they are’. Take the range of mental issues created by dysfunctionality of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [HPA axis]: anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, insomnia, post-traumatic stress, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, deep depression, burnout, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel and addiction.

The decision on where these issues are dysfunctional is too often a social one and not an individual one. The social often imposes the very demands on the body that result in the mental problem and then the social, instead of changing its own practices, seeks its own solution to a problem that it created. As a result, and this applies across social policy to issues of social exploitation and abuse, instead of a serious problem of painful dysfunction being dealt with under conditions of personal care for a relatively few, large numbers of people divert skilled time into patching up so that people can go back into battle.

Much of modern psychological medicine has degenerated into a form of ‘normalisation’ and into a castigation by implication of 'difference'. This has happened, as in social policy, because a large class of persons can only get a living and meaning from acting as definers of others. We all see the absurdity of a doctor working through the night to save the life of a man who is to be executed next morning. At least the patching up of warriors and workers has the cynical social purpose of defending the system or keeping its economic wheels turning but, today, we are in a different condition again.

Mass health and social services provision has created a half-baked world where a vast class of persons exists to maintain people whose trauma and miseries are real enough but are as likely to be created by social circumstances, poor nutrition and crowded conditions as they are by something organic. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our economic structures now depend on an industry of helpers and a vast mass of persons who must be helped. They do not rely on strong, willful, self-reliant individuals in a position to intevene directly to support the weakest members of the community - we drive the vulnerable into a 'system'.

The sheer scale of the resources required to maintain this system means that the socially isolated and the psycho-somatically ill are increasingly taking resources from the minority who badly need short term sustained intensive help. These last just fall into the mass - the helped - to add more customers for the growing class of helpers. The height of absurdity is reached when our entire culture becomes geared to helping those who appear to need to help by hiring them as helpers ('full employment'), a worthwhile palliative up to a point but one which, in effect, simply accepts that the way we conduct our social affairs should be 'normalised' as a shared 'lesser misery'.

The poverty of aspiration is staggering. The height of our aspiration is now that everyone has a 'job', a functioning role in a dysfunctional system. Nobody appears to be able to consider how the system might be made more functional - perhaps everyone just accepts that it cannot in a form of conservative pessimism that has merely been re-labeled ‘progressive’. Worse, this conservative pessimism on the 'official' Left (which is now the ruling order regardless of party) must bring everyone under the same health and welfare model. No matter that placebos, shamans and herbal medicines might actually reduce demand on the system. These must always be avoided in favour of more expensive interventions (although we re-assert here the absolute primacy of scientific medecine).

Herbal medicines almost certainly regulate the HPA system and, under experienced guidance, can be made to accord with individual body chemistries. The placebo effect may offend rationalists but works - and if it works, why not embrace it pragmatically? Our concern should only be that people do not use alternative self-medication in preference to scientific medication but only to supplement and self-treat in the grey area between serious dysfunction and apparent health. The truth is that a purely scientific approach to the body-mind continuum is not truly scientific when dealing with most needs most of the time - as opposed to serious need some of the time. It is an ideology of rational intervention that has reached its lowest point with the recent bureaucratic interference by the EU to ban the use of herbal substances as ‘untested’. If the fear is that people will believe the local witch can cure cancer, then the fear is justified but if the fear is that people will choose minor irrationalities that offend the sensibilities of rationalists, then the fear is neurotic - and, oddly, irrational.

This ideology of excessive mass scientific interventionism, as opposed to precautionary advice on nutrition, exercise and mental health based on treating people not as children but as autonomous adults, is the last gasp of an over-simplified scientific materialism and it deserves underground resistance at every level. The real reason why this ideology is dominant is because we are talking here about economics and power and not about any real concern for the self development and empowerment of those autonomous individuals.

Welfare systems arose out of real need - the sort of need that still exists in much of the emerging world. Unfortunately, like roads, the solution creates more demand. Because basic care and emergency intervention required taxation, the class interest of the public sector and the need to keep the taxpaying majority supportive came to meant that 'universalism' spread services widely instead of where they were needed most. Hence the anomaly of a massive, expensive and unnecessary child benefits system in place while over a 1,000 kids in a rotten English borough faced appalling sexual abuse because the resources of time and money were not there to protect them.

As demand and expense has increased, the subsequent and necessary 'cutting' process has meant that the same services are just more thinly spread. There is a failure to invest in the wider social infrastructure that caused the stress-related illnesses in the first place and neglect of those who most need expensive but decisive intervention. We now have a grossly inflated public sector whose politics are a deadweight on the economy and on our culture, enforced 'cuts' which harm those in most dire need for political reasons and a grossly dysfunctional social structure that drives psychological and psychosomatic illness.

And what is at the heart of this degraded system in which the 'official' Left is fully complicit? Scientists have found evidence to suggest that social subordination leads to chronic stress - the subordinated are less aggressive, less in control of themselves and constantly anxious about dominant others in our own species. Does this not sound familiar? We have a culture that is ostensibly free but one in which there is no connection between the mass and political decision-making, in which the economy is volatile and dependent on 'global factors' and where most wealth and power trickles down from a tiny group at the top of our tree. We may as well be apes.

And the consequences of this widespread social subordination is chronic stress, expressed as psychosomatic illness and neurosis but also as a lack of engagement in the local community or in enterprise, as addictive behaviour and impulsiveness (especially with bank credit before 2008) and as cynicism. Our politicians are obsessed with grandstanding overseas (apparently we are diminished in the eyes of some Parliamentarians because our Prime Minister is not grandstanding in Kiev instead of worrying about Rotherham), process and keeping the busted system ticking over but none of them understands the central problem of our time - how to return a sense of power and meaning to the people they clearly despise in their hearts or see just as fodder for their own drive to have the power to 'do good' at them or for them instead of with them.

Given our conditions, our problem is not that we are too aggressive as a population but that we are not aggressive enough. Every now and then, some extreme case of violence (such as Raoul Moat, the Ipswich serial killer or gun-killings in South London) creates a surge of anxiety about the psychopaths in our midst but these are tiny events in a country of over 60 million people. What is far more worrying is that the vast bulk of our huge population simply takes the unutterable amount of ordure heaped on them by incompetent governors and experts without protest - and then goes home, gets sick and thanks the system for treating them for the disease the system brought on them in the first place. We are back to the world of Milgram. The few who can capture the machine, the alpha apes, can command millions ... and that should really worry and depress us.