Dana Blankenhorn

Word of the Year: Enshitification

Enshitification is what happens when principles go out the window.

Principles like service, like honor, like honesty, like “a little looking for the other fella,” as James Stewart said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, are what make civilization possible. When they disappear, as they have over the last several years, it doesn’t matter much what your system is or what your laws say. Those with power will take it, and only the strongest will survive.

This is mostly discussed today in the realm of politics. Words have lost their meaning and are often used to mean their opposite in the name of victory. Facts mean nothing and are simply denied in the name of power.

Health Care Mystery Solved

Around the time Barack Obama became President, I ran a health IT beat for ZDNet.

One point hammered home to me was that 75% of America’s health care bill relates to chronic conditions. These are things like heart disease, diabetes, and complications from smoking or drinking.

The way to cut the bill is through preventive care, I learned. Make sure people see a doctor regularly. Use those visits to monitor their condition, to hector people about their choices, and to get us to take our medicine. Keep us out of the hospital and everyone wins.

Obamacare covered that, for most people, especially those on Medicare. It also covered the cost of computerizing clinics and hospitals. While too many people are still forced to fill out too many forms, there are now electronic records on most of us. Hospitals can find out what patients are supposed to be doing and (through test results) whether we’re doing it.

What No One Wants to Hear

America is doing great. Anger burns itself out. We’re playing the 1983 Game. Ask your folks what happened in 1984.

No one wants to hear this, let alone admit it.

The Reich won’t hear it because it’s their job to be angry. The left won’t hear it because they think anger is necessary to beat the Reich.

The truth is different.

Could Xi Fall?

It’s a question no one is even asking.

Could Xi Jinping fall from power?

There is no evidence for this. He is in his third term as China’s President, and increasingly acts like Vladimir Putin. He’s committing genocide in Xinjiang, he has destroyed Hong Kong’s economy, and he is threatening to invade Taiwan. He has absolute impunity. He is the world’s strongest dictator.

But how secure is he?

Unlike every other dictator on this planet, Xi Jinping presides over a complex, post-industrial economy. As I’ve been writing for decades, such an economy relies on highly trained, educated, and motivated people. The secret to America’s success lies in our ability to create, encourage, and (when necessary) import such people. (I know Trumpism threatens all this, but that’s another story for another time.)

Biden’s Plan Worked. Get Over It

Business reporting should be about telling people what they need to know, not what they want to know.

That’s not businesses are buying. Sad. It’s not what they’re getting, either.

Too many businessmen only want their egos massaged, and their political inclinations confirmed. This is true when it comes to reporting, my own field, where we have Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, and a host of other Republican-leaning publishers spinning the news. It’s doubly true for CNN and CNBC. The latter has an on-staff “wealth reporter” specifically hired to fluff the egos of his betters.  

Sadly, it’s also true for economists, those “experts” hired by big banks and brokerages to figure out where things are headed.

Over the last month I’ve been treated on TV to a parade of so-called financial experts, each one confidently predicting that a recession is imminent, that it’s baked in, that it will likely be severe. These jamokes have insisted this will end the drive for working from home, that it will end demands for higher pay, that it will bring employees crawling on their knees to their bosses for a crust of bread, a revived dress code, and a two-hour daily commute.

It was all bullshit. It was spin. It was politics. It was telling people what they wanted to hear.

The evidence is in. GDP grew 2.4% in the last quarter. The economy isn’t slowing. It’s speeding up.

Want to know why? I’ll tell you.

A Lesser Class of Billionaire

I’m old enough to remember when the image of a billionaire was of a man like Sam Walton, who walked humbly and became the source of stories focused on how he was just like the rest of us.

He was followed by people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who saw wealth as a tool, and who resolved to give that tool away when they were done with it. Other wealthy people emulated them, signing pledges to give their wealth back to the commons, because everything we have is merely borrowed from our time and must be recycled when we’re gone.

Over the 15 years, however, a new kind of billionaire has emerged. They’re malevolent, not benevolent. Some of their fortunes, like that of Elon Musk, are self-created. Others, like that of David Sachs, are built using other peoples’ money. Still others, like Harlan Crow, just inherited their wealth.

But this new class of billionaire is uninterested in their fellow citizens. They see wealth as a means with which to both obtain political power and maintain it even after they’re dead. They now control our courts, they fund our elections, and they think they’re better than anyone else.

Billionaires are now threatening the very structure they built.  

Food Riots

I wish I had better news today, but how can you grow food at temperatures that kill germs? 

You can’t.

Food riots are coming, all around the world, in the wake of the “new normal” that is 2023. 

With temperatures averaging over 100 in the growing regions of Europe and North America, I can’t see a big crop coming in. Those temperatures are going to move to the southern hemisphere this winter, burning Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Everyone’s talking about El Nino. Fewer are talking about this new normal.

Food may be an inflationary story in the west, but it’s a survival story in the global south. Few are paying attention to the coming starvation. Wars, even “good wars” like the one in Ukraine, are environmental disasters on many levels. That war needs to be ended, quickly, which means a deeper involvement in the near term, and greater risk.

The Last Conservative President

When the Greatest Generation rebelled against FDR, in the 1960s, they didn’t stop with Nixon.

Or even Goldwater.

Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s VP when liberals dominated the political conversation, embodied the New Right’s Id but resisted implementing its worst impulses in policy. He wound up as the last “liberal” President, and the ascendent right hated him. Hates him still.

I know. I was one of them. What young conservatives wanted in 1971 was Ronald Reagan.

The Premise of Democracy

“You can fool all people some of the time, and some people all the time. But you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

This line, often (falsely) attributed to Abraham Lincoln, nevertheless is the basic premise of democracy.

People make mistakes. Masses of people make mistakes. But most people, given time, correct their mistakes. That’s the difference between democracies and autocracies. We can change. They can’t.

Faith in this thesis is the bedrock of America. We screw up, but we correct. We elect Trump, but we correct.

What upsets me most about 2023 is that many people, not just those on the right, but liberals and even journalists, seem determined not to believe this.

Fascists think they can extend their control beyond their mandate, indoctrinate young people into believing what they tell them, and rule forever.

Liberals and pundits tell us they might be right. They’re not.

Can China Be Turned?

A quiet effort is underway to turn China from the path of war back to the path of prosperity.

If it works, it’s the biggest story of the decade.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken got a surprisingly warm reception in Beijing last week. He even got an audience with Xi Jinping, complete with a handshake that shows Xi as an old Chairman Mao.

China’s establishment is torn between two ambitions.

Its military and political establishment want Taiwan back. They’re willing to kill millions of their own people to get it. They see the price being paid for their depredations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong as worthwhile. They want what Japan wanted before World War II – a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” that can stand as an equal to America’s dominance of Latin America.

China’s business establishment, and its people, want the deal they signed up for 45 years ago. Deng Xiaoping made a compact with his citizens in 1978, capitalist prosperity in exchange for absolutist unity. Westerners read Tiananmen as the destruction of freedom, and China’s efforts to forget it as ignoring the lessons of history. Both are true. But the other side in that exchange, an apartment, a car, and a chance at real wealth, is just as real.