Life under Capitalism

Rich people may be old, but old people are not rich

Published on May 9, 2012Leave a comment

The Mighty Mighty Godking imagines a commencement address for coffin dodgers, giving old people some of their own medicine in the form of unwanted advice. The key paragraph is the following

Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people – who were also old people – all decided it really wasn’t that important any more, and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.

Most rich people might be old, but most old people aren’t rich. While it is true that younger people are affected more by the current economic crisis, for a lot of elder baby boomers it’s not been a happy time either. MGK’s hypothetical sixty year old, who in his version has had everything going for him would’ve also been eligble for the draft when the war in Vietnam was still ongoing, left university just as the mid-seventies economic depressions (stagflation!) hit, had to suffer years of low to non-existing wage raises in the early eighties in order to safeguard his pension later, be suckered into all kinds of 401(k) schemes that paid out more to the fund managers than to his retirement fund, had hoped to have his house as a nest egg but saw the bottom drop out of the housing market just as he lost his job as well, while the only new job he can find is as greeter at Wal-Mart. And to add insult to injury, he now keeps hearing that social security is broken and needs to be privatised to be saved, when he spent most of the eighties moderating his wage demands to save it…

We shouldn’t really be talking about a generational conflict, of a struggle between old and young people, but rather realise that both generations have been suckered by a small elite of rich people. After the Second World War we had roughly thirty years in which all western countries build up an as fair and equal welfare state as was possible in each country, which in the last thiry years has been steadily attacked by those who saw profit in dismantling it. Talking too much about “old” versus “young” just plays in their hands.

Ymere is pissing me off

Published on March 16, 2012Leave a comment

For the priviledge of belonging to the mandatory owners association, I pay them about sixty euros a month, which I always pay at the end of the month, with all the other bills. The owners association is run by Ymere Beheer, who’ve just sent me a reminder that I haven’t paid my March dues yet, with another fifteen euros in “cost” for sending me this reminder. This is seriously pissing me off. Especially because for some reason best known to themselves, the fsckers are only available to be argued with from 8:30 to 11:00 AM on workdays which is when I, like most people with a job, am at work.

A while back on Unfogged, during yet another discussion about the stupid hoops American health care insurers have their clients jump through, somebody made the brilliant observation that any company big enough is able to send you a bill for some arbitrary amount and there’s little you can about it to fight it that it’s easier just to pay up. Insurers, public utilities and other big necessary evils are particularly able to do this, but I never thought this would happen to me…

Insomnia

Published on January 31, 20121 Comment

(The following post is courtesy of Sore Eyes.)

If you stay awake late enough, eventually you remember everything. All your usual defenses dissolve. Your mind is weary, and there is nothing in your white, silent room to distract it. Your exhausted brain can no longer apply the pressure needed to repress your memories, and they all come back, all of them, every one, and especially the ones that prove you are the worst version of yourself: the lies, the evasions, the unreturned emails, the shoplifted packs of gum. And, of course, every single ungenerous thing you have ever thought, no matter how fleetingly or how long ago, about the people you love most. Anxiety cascades: just when you’ve drained one disaster from your mind, another breaks the dam. The panic and shame that overcome you when you find a really old to-do list and realize you haven’t done a single item on it? Multiply that feeling by the number of minutes left until sunrise. You can tell yourself to be reasonable, to count your blessings, to get it together, but such reassurances will ring hollow. As Fitzgerald put it, at three o’clock in the morning a forgotten package feels as tragic as a death sentence.

Insomnia is an old friend, a disease that has been with us since the first homonid managed to walk upright, but it’s particularly suited to our current post-modern, post-industrial, networked but atomised lives. You’re never as alone as when your partner is asleep next to you and you’re trying desperately to claw back some few hours of futile rest while the clock ticks endlessly forward and you know the moment that the alarm will go off creeps closer and close, but for now the endless, sleepless night stretches in front of you and all your inner defences have crumpled and you’re there alone, with just the darkest, most despondent parts of your soul to keep you company.

As a child in the eighties it was nightmares of nuclear holocaust, no; the anticipation of nightmares about nuclear holocaust that would keep me awake at night, turning on the brighest light in my room and looking for anything to take my mind of what was waiting in the dark, reading the simplest, most upbeat little kids books I could swipe from my little brothers, hoping that would calm my brains enough to go to sleep, perchance not to dream — sometimes it even worked.

As a teenager, it was Sunday nights and having to go back to school the next morning that would keep me awake, aware of how much I did not want to go and how little homework I had done. That existential anxiety still rules my Sunday nights, even though the best part of being an adult is that you can leave your job behind at four o’clock and not have to think about. The nightmares have become more mundane, anxiety dreams about being in bookstores with huge selections of everything I ever wanted to read but the books slipping through my hands, or costing more than I could pay, endless dreams of trying to catch a train and get ready to go to the station, always against the background of the monstrously swollen geography of my hometown, always dissolving into frustration, five, ten, fifteen times a night.

But worse than that is stumbling into bed late on a weekday and not falling immediately asleep, but lying there tossing and turning, alone or with somebody next to you fast asleep, either having to get up early or knowning you can sleep late the next morning, it doesn’t matter, it’s all awful. A few years back, in 2004, when I had been made redundant in a reorganisation of the company I worked for (long since swallowed up by a larger company and that in turn by a yet larger one), there were weeks and months when I didn’t need to get up in the morning and so could go to bed late, but there was always a point when I was lying in the darkness and Radio 4 would end with Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast and I’d be scolding myself for not going to bed at a reasonable hour. And now sometimes I do go to bed reasonably early, at eleven or twelve to get up the next morning at six and there I’m lying and suddenly I hear that tune again at a quarter to two and I know I won’t have slept enough again and will pay for it…

If the ballot can’t change anything all that remains is the bullet

Published on January 9, 20121 Comment

Even the arch-technocratic Crooked Timber is a bit distraught at the European Central Bank’s policies:

I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.

This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.

The people at the ECB may very well be smart — or at least middleclass and polite– but you will never convince them of any facts their paychecks depend on denying. They cannot be reasoned with, they can only be forced to abandon their neoliberal economic orthodoxies and since they cannot be forced through the ballot, it will have to be by the bullet. The radical austerity policies the ECB, IMF, EU and all the other parts of the alphabet soup are enforcing on Europe are pushed through not to benefit the voters, but the banks. Simplistic? Yes, but closer through the truth than what you read in respectable newspapers or hear explained on the news.

Politics and the mainstream media together form a closed system, where only limited deviancy from the orthodoxy is accepted and which has been carefully designed to give the impression of democratic control while making sure to limit any influence ordinary voters might have. Anybody who paid attention could see this in the runup to the War on Iraq: on a single day two million people marched in London alone, millions more across the world but it didn’t stop the war, didn’t even slow it down. It wasn’t an election year and therefore it was easy to ignore the voters: let them march, let them write letter to the editor that won’t be published, let them vent their outrage on Question Time or Any Questions, the smart people know it won’t matter. Give it a month or a year and the smart people can all pretend everybody was in favour of the war; well everybody who counted anyway.

Yeah, sure, Blair had to give up being prime minister a couple of years later, when the smart money was already shifting towards the Tories anyway, but he’s got millions in the banks thanks to cushy jobs given to him by his grateful friends in the private sector and all the respectable newspapers and televion newsshows still take him seriously as peace envoy to the Middle East. Some people might spit on him in the streets, but when was the last time Tony walked anywhere anyway?

Democracy has been made safe for capitalism again; voting won’t change anything important. And if voting doesn’t work, if the ballot is powerless, then the bullet remains…

Merry Christmas my arse

Published on December 7, 20112 Comments

And then it was exactly a month ago I was facing my first night without Sandra. Here in the Netherlands fortunately the Christmas insanity starts late, as we have to deal with Sinterklaas first, but it has started now. At work the Christmas trees are being put up, the shops have traded in the Sinterklaas tat for Santa tat; worse the X-Mas adverts are back on telly. Awful as they are though, with the incredibly annoying yet very very earwurmable Sky Radio jingle being the worst, none of them can match the horrors of this particular example from the UK, as Charlie Brooks shows:

The rest of the lyrics are worse still. It’s a terribly sad song. So sad Leonard Cohen should be singing it. “Mum” appears to have purchased an entire nervous breakdown’s worth of cold branded goods in a pathetic bid to win the affections of her own family. Her desperate offerings include a top-of-the-range MacBook for Grandad, “an HTC for Uncle Ken”, a “Fuji camera for Jen”, and a “D&G” for Dad. In case you’re wondering what a “D&G” is, the advert makes clear it’s a truly disgusting designer watch even Jordan might balk at. In the mad Littlewoods universe “Dad” seems inexplicably delighted by the sudden appearance of this ghastly bling tumour on his wrist, instead of screaming and trying to kill it with a shoe, like any sensible human would.

Everybody involved with this ad should’ve topped themselves rather than kill their souls this way. Christmas has always been a festival of commercial greed of course, but I’ve not seen it as blatant as this yet. It’s as if the naked lust for more stuff has burst out from behind the veneer of asperation it was made slightly more respectable by.

For Sandra Christmas never was about presents, though she did like the ritual of buying each other slightly more expensive gifts than we could afford, the one time of year we could legitimately spoil ourselves. She loved the rituals of Christmas, the food: mince pies, turkey or another sort of roast, even brussel sprouts, but especially Christmas cake. She made them each year, even in 2009 while we were preparing to go to hospital for the kidney transplant operation she made two, one of which is still on the top shelf of one of the kitchen cupboards. Last year she was in hospital, so I brought Christmas to her, getting all sorts of nice little treats that could be eaten cold or heated up in the ward’s microwave. It wasn’t perfect, but it was Christmas.

This year I’m going back to my family, the first without her and also the first I will be spending entirely with my family since I first met her; it’s like going back to my childhood, not entirely pleasant even had the circumstances been different. It’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful, but it’s going back from having your family, no matter how small, to being part again of the family; the dynamics of Christmas are altered. It’s only a small complaint in the scheme of things, but I’m still dreading going home a bit, especially with the sentimentality surrounding these holidays.

Never mind, at least I’ll get to enjoy my father’s oliebollen again, which nobody does better…