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    The Death Spiral Of Trust In Capitalism

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    In the US, UK and Ireland Trump, Johnson – and throttled SMEs – threaten a revolution By Gary McCarthy Ireland’s consumption collapsed by 20% in the first half of 2020 – the worst in Europe except Spain and the UK. The economy is on its knees and SMEs have only drawn on €180 million of state funding’ All that was missing from the Truman balcony of the White House was the horse. The mad emperor was back. Only a few days previously a seemingly healthy President Trump had hosted a Supreme Court nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett (not a horse) in the gardens below. Historians with a fondness for the Game of Thrones fantasy series may in years to come refer to this Rose Garden event as the ‘Red Wedding’ viral massacre of the Republican leadership. The Covid-19 super-spreading ceremony resulted in the hospitalisation of Trump, the infection of 34 people across the Trump White House staff and the quarantine of most of the top brass in the US military. Trump instructed the nation to face the Covid-19 virus without fear and witness the “immunity” of their “favourite President”. There was no mention of the now 225,000 deaths caused by the virus, the millions of jobs lost and levels of social unrest not seen since the Vietnam War era. The world’s foremost capitalist empire is burning literally and politically but the Washington DC insanity continues. Trump wanted a Supreme Court appointment secured before a fiscal support package for the nation’s struggling economy. The traditional Republican and big business voices of ‘responsible capitalism’ and economic liberty for the individual are curiously quiet and in effect enabling an administration swamped by its own corruption, lies and incompetence. US capitalism has reached a crisis where the pandemic is revealing truths which cannot be spun through the Fox News fear factory. The deaths of more than 225,000 people, 25% of the global total, is already adding to the decades-long erosion of trust in US institutions. However, the emergence of a K-shaped economic recovery which destroys the livelihoods of the asset poor and accelerates the wealth build of the asset-own- ing top 1% of the population might be the tip- ping point for trust in capitalism itself. Income inequality fueled by strong financial markets of recent years has been as pronounced as it was in the 1930s. That’s probably not a great decade with which to resonate. Worryingly, the situation has worsened with the global pandemic. According to the Guardian, ten of the richest people in the world boosted their already vast wealth by more than $400bn in the first nine months of the coronavirus pandemic b as their businesses were boosted by lockdowns and financial crises across the globe. In a related report, the campaign group Americans for Tax Fairness estimated the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has risen by $1.1tn over the same period. Meanwhile, only 9 million of the 22 million US jobs lost in pandemic shutdown had returned by November 2020. Vast swathes of the US retail, travel and hospitality landscape remain in deep freeze. Yes, there is recovery in the broader US economy but there is a real danger of capital- ism evolving into K-shaped ‘Kapitalism’ with a subsequent extreme social and political back- lash. The Trump report card will be brutal and lay bare an exercise in mass delusion. Twenty years of successful capitalism and economic growth has been based on three key drivers: technology, trade, and population/immigration growth. The final one might surprise but the US has added an additional 100 million people to its current population of 330 million in less than 40 years. The current stewards of right-wing capitalism in the Republican party have misty-eyed economic memories of the Reagan years but they depend on facilitating immigration. Trump of course has curtailed it. Instead, the Trump economic focus is on “clean coal” and automobile factories. Technology, science and climate change are mistrusted. Trade wars and ripped-up international treaties are apparently putting America first but the US monthly trade deficit has just hit a 14-year high. US farmers must be thrilled. Furthermore, the first and second generation immigrant founders of much of the US technology sector are warning of similar unplanned damage being inflicted on the economy if the world’s best minds and ideas can no longer find a home in the United States. However, the US is not the only capitalist champion trying to convince its citizens to em- bark on a nostalgic economic journey. Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party don’t even have the benefit of a world-beating technology sector. The recent Covid-19 testing fiasco involving an Excel spread sheet error is a stark reminder of how badly the UK has fallen behind in global technology leadership. The UK has chosen Brexit to “take back control” of trade and immigration on an Elgar sound track of ‘Rule Britannia!’. Sadly, dreams of empire have spawned epic levels of delusion and in- competence. The mad emperor Boris has not yet managed to appoint a horse to sit in Cabinet but there are no shortage of donkeys in his current administration. The risky and complex departure from the largest trading bloc in the world is in the hands of serial incompetents like Gove, Patel, Williamson and Hancock. Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches aghast as the Brexit clown car hurtles towards economic chaos whose enormity remains unclear. They are not just watching, they are selling UK assets too. The once proud benchmark of UK capitalism, the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s finest, is now boasting a total value which doesn’t even match the value of one technology company, Apple Inc. The Great British Pound now trades with a volatility which would typically be associated with emerging market currencies but the delusion of future trade success continues. Ireland would be tempted to laugh but not this time. The damage of Brexit will have a big economic impact here and the timing is particularly poor as the

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    Capitalisteracy

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    Ireland has a dreadful, inequitable, dangerously failing healthcare system. The State’s answer is the likes of healthy Ireland, which runs a public campaign that, in essence, throws the responsibility for health on to individuals – who seemingly just need help from an initiative to ‘empower and motivate them’. February saw the launching conference – hosted by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) at Facebook Ireland HQ – of a new network, Media Literacy Ireland (disclosure: I’m in it). From the conference stage there was lots of talk about empowerment and not much talk exploring from whom it might be necessary to take power away. There was even a speaker from healthy Ireland, lest the analogy be missed. Don’t be surprised, then, to encounter an Irish campaign in the next year or two imploring you to the media equivalent of ‘eat your vegetables, get some exercise, don’t smoke cigarettes’. Something along the lines of ‘read the Irish Times, trust in Miriam, don’t tweet fake news’. Or maybe not. Media Literacy Ireland potentially has some of the hallmarks of industry-friendly campaigns like Drink Aware and Gamble Aware, plus the involvement of a regulator, the BAI, which might like a campaign that implicitly justifies light-touch regulation abetted by ‘greater public awareness’. On the other hand – and credit to its organisers for this – Media Literacy Ireland has come into being as a genuine network of interested researchers, activists, community-media practitioners and others. And most of us in it are not disposed to frame the problem with Irish media as one of public credulousness, to be addressed by offering tips for spotting ‘extremism’ online. Regular readers will know my view: that media (like healthcare) have a capitalism problem, and that everything from fake news to clickbait to inadequate investigative resources to Denis O’Brien ows from that basic source. But you don’t have to agree with me and name the underlying problem as capitalism to understand that there are structural causes for crises such as the one that erupted recently over Government ‘advertorial’. “I believe the Government is attempting to exploit the difficulties many local and regional titles are facing to promote their party interests”, said no less a media critic than Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the party’s spokesman on communications. (How sweetly old-fashioned that word ‘communications’ can sound as it grapples with the changing world.) Media literacy, if it is to be of any use, has to do more than implore us to look for the little ‘special feature’ tag on the top of a piece of paid corporate or government puffery, then to regard the ‘journalism’ below with due scepticism. It must mean understanding ‘the difficulties’ for all journalism that operates in the current market, especially one in which technological change has accelerated existing trends toward blurred lines, and in which advertisers have alternatives to local and regional newspapers when it comes to reaching eyeballs. If the most poignant aspect of that brief, quickly snowed-under ‘Ireland 2040’ crisis was the image of the Taoiseach issuing guidelines for labelling advertorial content – guidelines of which the most callow intern in a local newsroom should surely already be aware – we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that media have been operating at the edges of such guidelines for decades, for the benefit of advertisers looking to buy a little ersatz editorial credibility. How can this fail to be a lesson about how fragile, at best, any such credibility has become ? As the media may or may not have told you, global research shows trust in media is in tatters – media are less trusted than governments, NGOs, businesses – and Irish people are at the mistrustful end of the distribution. In this context, media literacy can hardly consist of legacy media saying ‘trust us, not them’. What can be done ? (Yes, short of getting rid of capitalism.) Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows what a frightening prospect it would be to try to earn the public’s trust with transparency and accountability about our editorial practices. On a daily basis, contingent and incomplete information is transformed into definitive statements of ringing certitude. That’s one sausage factory we don’t want you to see inside, especially since the work often consists of sticking our label on someone else’s meat. The irony is that the technology often over-simplistically blamed for creating the journalism crisis has long offered tools for remarkable transparency, tools that most journalists have chosen to use only in limited ways. What if hyperlinks in journalists’ stories led not to dull pages of cross-references or to Wikipedia, but rather to images of documents and notebook pages, audio of interviews, pictures of the journalist in the field ? It can be done and has been done, but the experiments in transparency of the early web – notably the extraordinary 1996 investigative series by the aptly named Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury news, about the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine trade – have rarely been repeated, let alone built upon. Such transparency would foster media literacy without the onus being placed on the audience. Whether it would foster trust is, of course, a matter of what audiences thought of the practices revealed by transparency. Interactivity and social media mean we have some tools whereby that reaction could be tested and gauged. Dublin Institute of Technology, thankfully, is prepared to put its money where my media-literacy mouth is: it’s funding a project that will will use the Liberty, a student- produced ‘hyperlocal’ newspaper and website for Dublin’s Liberties area, to innovate in the area of journalistic transparency. We’ll employ social media as a forum for sharing ‘the story behind the story’, with tweets, Facebook updates, Youtube videos and Instagram posts that unveil aspects of the production of journalism, from notebook pages to editing history, from who-was-interviewed to who-refused. A doctoral-level researcher will be responsible for implementation, monitoring, community engagement and evaluation of this project, which should help readers to understand better the process of news construction, and help journalists-in-training become accustomed to

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    How maths will destroy capitalism

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    The consumerism-generating-capitalism- it usefully loyal, generating-consumerism cycle that characterises the developed or ‘Northern’ world depends on inequality, even as it purveys certain equalities, and is the main obstacle to tackling climate change, the most serious long-term problem facing humanity. Capitalism is struggling to maintain itself. In one formal sense this is good for equality. A crucial weakness of capitalism (not sufficiently noted by the Left) is that by relentlessly pushing its ‘free’ market into every corner of life to seek profit, it puts a cash-price on everything,and it thereby becomes a great social leveller: status, is replaced by capital or money as the measure of societal eminence. As a result, other than the great inequalities of money, we now live in communities with a level of personal and legal equality that was totally unimaginable throughout human history or even 40 years ago – for gender, sexual orientation, race, ‘legitimacy’, nationality, and religion, for example. Capitalism eschews the personal inequalities which torpid caste-based civilisations emphasised. Only money matters now. But the crucial point is that the promotion of personal equality by capitalism also causes constantly growing agitation by workers for a just share of their social production as they now see themselves as equal to their bosses. In response to this growing agitation for equality, the capital-owning class must react, like any ruling-class or mafia, in two ways: one section of the exploited must violently be repressed, the other will be bribed to keep inside. England, as one of the biggest imperialist powers has done this regularly and systematically. It did it in the 1819 Peterloo massacre of demonstrating workers. It did it in the 1840s when famine starved a million people in ireland while massive amounts of food were being exported under British army guard to Liverpool. Towards 1850 when Chartist agitation for equality again became strong in england, instead of violence the Corn Laws were dropped to allow imports of cheap food as the ‘bribe’ to quieten agitation. Colonies were brutally plundered by England’s imperialism to deliver bribes to English workers. Friedrich Engels noted this in a letter from 1882 to Kautsky: “English workers gaily share the feast of England’s colonies”. Ireland at this time was used as one source of those bribes as part of the effort to maintain the English working-class comfortable enough to forgo dangerous agitation, even to join the imperial army. But the equality drive continued, Ireland demanded and won independence, and after two diverting world wars and the likes of the Jarrow march in the 1930s, in the 1970s and 1980s there again arose agitation among the English working-class against capitalism’s economic inequality – most noticeably the 1974 and 1985 miners’ strike and opposition to the poll tax from 1990, in spite of the material benefits to the working classes third world imports of cheap food and raw materials. There was also strong, often violent agitation by the colonies, following Ireland and Viet Nam‘s example, for national liberation, for the equality of races and nations. This new agitation was a dangerous crisis for capitalism, and as there were no further colonies to plunder, a new source of wealth, beyond cheap food and raw materials, had to be found. Thatcher’s capitalism achieved this: up to the 1970s colonies were generally not allowed to manufacture, this was reserved for the North so that for example India was forced to send its raw cotton to England and to buy back spun and woven goods. The new policy was that the ex-colonies and third world in general needed to get the national liberation they were increasingly demanding and could then develop manufacturing on their low wages to export the new agitation-quitening bribe of cheap manufactured goods back to England. Reagan and the North in general did the same. Ireland had become part of this group, exploiting not exploited. This new system worked well and subsists: a surfeit of cheap manufactures from the southern nations, often produced by children working in horrible conditions, as the North’s diminishing manufacturing drifts toward a financial economy where billionaires speculate to produce damaging bubbles and get bailed-out when a bubble bursts, as Thomas Piketty notes in ‘Capital in the 21st Century’. The class-struggle, previously within nations, has become global, between nations. The ‘bribes’ mentioned are not just cash incentives, there is an intrinsic turbocharge for the enthusiastic wealthy consumer. Consumerism thrives when a worker in the US or Ireland receives the equivalent of $15/hr while the worker in, for example, China producing equally-sophisticated manufactured goods is only paid $2/hour. Capitalists gloat at the classic opportunities to trade the spoils, the only issue is the ‘terms’ of trade. A worker in the US or Ireland can trade one hour’s labour, in a shopping mall, for several hours of equal-quality Chinese labour. This looks like a winning gambler cashing in the chips. The more you shop for consumer goods the more your profit grows as you indirectly exploit foreign workers. This is the economic basis of that particular ‘buzz’ element of our Consumerist consciousness. The incentive is inbuilt, the process stacked to the advantage of consumers in the North. It is the instinctive grasp of this situation by a worker who is comfortable with capitalism that matters. a worker might exchange 30 minutes labour at a routine retail job for the price of a pair of imported jeans. the cotton must be: planted-grown-harvested-spunwoven-dyed-cut-sewn,then zips-pockets-hems-buttons- belt-loops-rivets-labels applied, and the lot transported. The same is true, though it is less obvious, if both workers are on car-assembly lines in their own countries. The consumerist ‘buzz’ arises from an unequal worker-to-worker relationship, not worker-to-capitalist. In striking contrast shopping for manufactured goods before 1980 felt like the much cruder experience of being mugged by capitalists as the wages earned exchanged for a less than equal amount of labour because when a worker shopped, those workers who produced the manufactured goods were in the same economic area and so were paid the same wage rate (the missing labour-value of course expropriated as profit by capitalists). This is why shopping for the working

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