2020: a year in review
Evgenia and I moved to LA from New York right before 2020 because I was in the process of trying to sell a documentary series based on my book, Surveillance Valley. That process was moving along nicely but immediately stalled when COVID hit. So we found ourselves in LA — stranded under these libertarian half-lockdowns, with no real job prospects, and then on top of that facing a frivolous eviction from an apartment we had just moved into. So we’re stuck on Medical, again barely making ends meet.
From right “before.”
Not gonna complain too much. We’ve had it better than a lot of other people out there — and we’re lucky to have family to fall back on. Still, it’s been a long and fucked up year, and it’s not gonna be over just because the ball drops (to an empty crowd). This pandemic has exposed already existing American decline and predation in a way that, even to cynics, was hard to imagine just a year before. And this trend is only gonna ramp up in 2021, and that’s something I’m willing to bet on.
As 2020 is about to end, I figured I’d do the customary roundup of some of the best and most interesting things I sent out this year. I’ve picked 12 — one for every shitty month of this shitty year.
Also, now that Evgenia and I have a kid on the way, it’s time for you to consider upgrading your subscription to a higher membership level. If baby shaming won’t work to shake out some subs, I don’t know what will. Don’t delay! And…Happy New Year!
—Yasha Levine
New Year in Los Angeles — “Kinda weird for a Soviet immigrant like me to realize that you fled one failing society only to end up in a society that was also entering an accelerated phase of decline and degradation.”
Weaponizing Fascism for Democracy — “I’d like to start by going back to the end of World War II — to the days when the weaponization of nationalism was just beginning to crystalize as an American foreign policy strategy.”
How California's oligarch farmers put Japanese-Americans into concentration camps — “California’s anglo oligarchs saw the nativist panic that gripped America after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor as an opportunity.”
Day 18: Mitch O’Farrell — “Evgenia and I got in our car right after sunset and headed out for another round of a “hey, asshole!” car honking protest. A few days ago it was the mayor. This time our convoy targeted the house of Mitch O’Farrell. He’s one of the LA council members who voted against an eviction moratorium last week.”
Respectable Racism: The “War With China” Edition — “Like all elite-driven xenophobic campaigns, this “China did it” propaganda wave displaces blame for domestic political problems onto an inscrutable, foreign enemy and empowers the status quo.”
A portrait of a Soviet CIA propagandist as a Nazi collaborator young man — “The man on the tape wasn’t an armless war veteran, nor was he living in Canada. And he sure didn’t work at a lumber mill. He was a Soviet refugee and a Nazi collaborator — a musician and comedian known for his irresistible charisma and his hard partying and womanizing.”
The schizoid world of a Soviet anti-communist propagandist — “He had collaborated with the Nazis in a genocidal war against his own people, doing whatever it took to stay alive. Now he was working for the CIA, fighting against his own people yet again.”
Shahid Buttar, the cheesy Silicon Valley astroturfer challenging Nancy Pelosi from "the left" — “As someone who grew up in San Francisco and wrote the book on the shady history of Silicon Valley — I simply can’t let this go. I mean, check it out: Turns out that the guy running to unseat Nancy Pelosi from ‘the left’ is a corporate Silicon Valley astroturfer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”
America and Russia in the 1990s: This is what real meddling looks like — “About a year and a half ago, Mark Ames and I put together a modest book proposal about the history of US meddling in Russian politics. The story we wanted to tell would have gone back all the way to the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, when America and its western allies militarily intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the proto-Nazi “White” Russians — putting around 15,000 “boots on the ground,” killing and imprisoning Red Army soldiers…”
Matt Taibbi is a cancel culture hypocrite — “When the cancel mob came for him, he was the "upper class Twitter Robespierre" ratting on his colleagues.”
Episode #2: All the Sad Soviet Immigrant Lit — “This ep’s important — a topic Evgenia Kovda and I talk and complain about a lot: the utterly sad and pathetic state of Soviet immigrant literature that’s being produced today.”
I’m dreading the Biden administration, the next phase of American Decline — “About the only positive thing I see in Joe Biden’s victory is that it will bring the Democratic Party one step closer to death. But maybe that’s wishful thinking?”
A perfect end to 2020 for the left — “If you step back and look at it, this constant focus on DC politics and DC fights is the problem. People should know about what’s happening there, of course. But it’s not the place where you go to do battle. Power is too entrenched there. And the left’s armies aren’t just weak — they’re non-existent. What are people gonna storm that imperial fortress with? Tweets and multi-guest YouTube live streams?”
Happy New Year Yasha and Evgenia!!
Great comment Yasha:
"....exposed already existing American decline and predation in a way that, even to cynics, was hard to imagine just a year before. And this trend is only gonna ramp up in 2021..."
It inspired me to take a closer look at a book one of the regulars mentioned a while back (I think): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34150000-j-is-for-junk-economics
Here's a massive excerpt, but I think the key point is this one:
"...When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage..."
I think that hits the nail on the head. Until people realise that they are in an "Orwellian Finance Matrix" (my new term for it LOL) I think your trend will continue to ramp up in 2021.
Happy New Year though!! 😉
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Frederick Hayek called The Road to Serfdom in 1944 - as if neo-liberalism is not the road to neo-serfdom and debt peonage.
The academic curriculum has been hijacked to replace classical political economy with a seemingly de-politicized but actually pro-rentier ideology. Mathematical symbolism is given the sanctifying role once afforded by Latin. Aping the natural sciences, economists take refuge in abstruse modes of expression. The more complex the math, the more simplistic and banal the postulated relationships and conclusions tend to be. Most of the math refers to choices between different "menus" of goods and services, without much analysis of how these come to be produced, or the long-term economy-wide consequences of buying on credit instead of cash.
Economic theories that focus on the exchange of goods and services without discussing the means of acquiring control over wealth divert attention from examining what is most important in shaping the economy. Ultimately at issue is whether what economic jargon calls the "real" economy of production and consumption is more real than the claims of finance and property.
It is not possible to bail out the banks and somehow enable debtors to pay. One side or the other must lose. That is why the economic problem is ultimately one of insolvency, not merely temporary illiquidity. The major economic problem is whether the economy's debts should be downsized to reflect the ability to pay, or growth and living standards should be sacrificed to preserve the value of creditor claims.
=> The classical distinction between earned and unearned income.
There is false history as well as true history. Factual history rarely is the version promoted by the "victors" (or would-be victors the fight is not yet over). The same is true of economic theory. There is only one economic reality, so in principle there should be only one body of economic theory: reality economics. But special interests (today's victors) promote deception and outright exclusions in order to depict themselves as economic heroes, as if their predatory gains are those of society at large. Their self-congratulatory image characterizes what passes for mainstream economics.
Acting on behalf of financial, real estate and monopoly interests to defend deregulation and un-taxing of their gains, neoliberals have kidnapped the classical economists as part of their pantheon. They brag about Adam Smith, while diverting attention from what he and his classical followers actually said. Their rewriting of the history of economic thought treats Smith's critique of rentiers and debt financing as heresy.
For two centuries the classical economists fought against the vested rentier interests that survived from the post-Roman law codes and subsequent warlord feudalism. But progressive reform was aborted after World War 1. An anti-classical reaction began to emerge in the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 1890s, and gained strength after World War I ended the trend toward the socialization of industrial capitalism (e.g., public health and pensions, public investment in infrastructure and education) and the mobilization of banking for the purposes of financing industry, which had flowered most of all in Germany.
Anglo-American banking practice emerged as the norm, in alliance with real estate and monopolies instead of the formerly expected triad of industrial capitalism, banking and government. The struggle between what seemed to be the waves of the future, "state socialism" and Marxian socialism, were swept aside by a financialized rentier economy. With it came a new set of economic concepts and definitions, whose aim was to deaden resistance to what is now a full-blown Counter-Enlightenment.
The victorious rentier interests recognize that as long as they can capture the minds of politicians and the public to shape how people view the economy's dynamics, there is no need to spend money bribing or fighting them. As long as the One Percent can control the educational curriculum to teach that we are at "The End of History" and that "There Is No Alternative" (TINA), they will deprive voters of the ability to conceptualize an alternative (see hypocognition below). They promote the idea that austerity and the economic polarization that goes with it - are our epoch's natural destiny, not a reversal of civil society's forward momentum.
It is not necessary to re-invent the wheel to replace the current malaise with a more realistic analysis. My economic model aims to lay the groundwork for creating a more realistic accounting format for national income and product accounts by excluding the burden of rentier overhead from "product." Rent is income without product, "empty" price without value. When unearned income is paid to the finance, investment and real estate sector and monopolies, it is at the expense of wages, industrial profits and taxes.
This book therefore is meant as an antidote, starting with a renovation of the language used to describe how our economy works (or doesn't work). The A to Z entries in the vocabulary section illustrate this distinction from the historical and political as well as methodological standpoint
=> Hypocognizant democracy: our newest political oxymoron
When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the Sapir-Whorf approach to linguistics was the standard. Benjamin Lee Whorf described how the vocabulary and semantics of language shape the way in which speakers conceptualize the world around them.
Anthropologist Robert Levy's 1960s studies of Tahitian suicide rates observed that they rose when unfortunate events made people sad. But their language had no word for "sad" or "depressed." They said "sick or "strange," and blamed themselves for the way they felt. Much like other vocabulary poor groups, they attributed their feelings of grief or frustration to demonic presence that seemed to be taking over their life. To describe this phenomenon, the linguist George Lakoff coined a term, hypocognition, to describe a condition in which the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective." In his 2004 book, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", he accuses libertarian free market doctrines of personal responsibility and the concept of "less government" as suffering from "massive hypocognition." Lacking appropriate economic concepts to understand what is making people poorer, the ideology of personal responsibility leads people to blame themselves for not being able to avoid being trapped in a system of debt peonage.
The following A-to-Z guide aims at providing the vocabulary and concepts for a more effective diagnosis of today's economic (and by extension, psychological) depression, by thinking in terms of compound interest, debt peonage, rentier conomics, unearned income, zero-sum activities and economic parasitism. Without such concepts in the forefront of one's mind, today's neoliberalized economies are prone to succumb to the virus of Orwellian Doublespeak.
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