Sunday, October 21, 2018

Week-end Wrap - October 20, 2018

Week-end Wrap - October 20, 2018
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Dutch court rules that government must help stop climate change
by Quirin Schiermeier, October 10, 2018 [Nature, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-18]
A court of appeal in The Hague has upheld a precedent-setting judgment that forces the Dutch government to step up its efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the Netherlands. In 2015, a district court in The Hague had ruled in favour of the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch citizens' climate-change group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of 886 plaintiffs.
The idea that action against climate change will ‘destroy the economy’ couldn’t be more wrong 
by Jared Bernstein [Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]

Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt 
[National Geographic, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18]
[Conversable Economist, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18]

The Deceptive, Shameful, Lucratively Funded War Against Rent Control 
[The New Republic, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18]

Trump Models U.S. Economy on Kansas. That’s a Mistake.
by Barry Ritholtz [Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 10-19-18]

From The Big Picture, which is Ritholtz's blog:
President Trump has attacked the idea of the Californication of America. He has inexplicably blamed California wildfires on regulations that prevented the use of water to put them out. He has complained repeatedly about its high taxes, calling them “way, way out of whack,” even as the Trump Organization got sweetheart deals from cities in the state. He has bemoaned the state’s environmental laws, despite their role in reducing pollution and raising auto efficiency standards. Indeed, Trump wants to end the state’s ability to maintain higher than Federal standards for automobiles (leading to this lawsuit by the state). 
California is far from perfect, but you cannot deny the success of its economy. Ignoring this reality, Trump has instead embraced what we might call Kansasification of America. Taking a page out of the Governor Brownbackplaybook, under Trump we have put into place the same sorts of tax and regulatory incentives as Kansas did circa 2012.
From Bloomberg, which carries a weekly column written by Ritholtz:

Kansas has been a disaster, with giant budget shortfalls, service cuts, slashed education budgets and a brain drain with young people leaving the state. The economy has failed to keep up with growth in the rest of the country and is much weaker in terms of job gains, wage increases and gross domestic product growth than neighboring states with similar economies. In 2015, for example, Kansas had one of the worst job growth rates in the country, at 0.8 percent, adding just 10,900 nonfarm jobs. 
In the five years before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, no state economy performed worse than Kansas. Things became so bad that Kansas decided to simply stop updating the public about state economic news.... 
Compare that record with California's robust economy, increased tax base, balanced budget and job growth that exceeds the national average. The president may criticize the politics of the state, but there is little to find fault with its economy.... 
...there are obvious lessons to be learned. When Jerry Brown retires as governor next year, part of his legacy will be leaving the state with a $6.1 billion budget surplus. Kansas, meanwhile, is trying to dig itself out from the deficits that are a consequence of tax cuts -- cuts that the state legislature has since reversed.
by Denise Cummins, February 16, 2016  [PBS, via the Big Picture 10-18-18]
The core of Rand’s philosophy — which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels — is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature, the guiding principle by which one ought to live one’s life. In “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” Rand put it this way: 
Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.
By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rand’s book “The Fountainhead” is a rape in which “she fought like an animal.”) 
....To many of Rand’s readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others....

Modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. In a recent Planet Money episode, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor of economics and former member of the Central Bank of England, laughed out loud when one of the hosts asked, “Is that fair?”
Then, Cummins examined what actually happened when Ayn Rand's ideas were put into practice.
....In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand’s principles. 
Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business: 
An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance. 
Instead, the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.
A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013.... 
Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words: 
The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation. 
He described the living conditions this way: 
On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel. In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top. As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Sears’ Terminal Slide: Bankruptcy and Likely Liquidation
By Wolf Richter [via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]

The story of the criminal mismanagement that drove Sears to bankruptcy is typical of what's happened in the past half century of fincialization and deindustrialization. Go to the link for the details of this particular case of financial looting. I want to comment on one aspect>
The Seritage deal is one reason the bankruptcy filing had to be dragged out so long. The two-year look-back period for “fraudulent conveyance” in the federal bankruptcy code incentivized Lampert to keep the company out of bankruptcy at least through July 2017. And state law often provides a longer look-back period. So now was apparently long enough to avoid “fraudulent conveyance” issues of the Seritage deal under state law as well.
With the effects of criminal mismanagement financial looting, and the time required to assemble a case for prosecution, both lasting for years, there clearly should not be any time limit on “fraudulent conveyance.” If we are truly to move society closer to the moral arc of the universe, then the most successful people of the past half century like these, who have destroyed entire companies and ruined and sidetracked the lives of millions of people, must be driven out of society and incarcerated, their  “audacious feat[s] of financial engineering.” reviled and scorned. Justice must prevail, and that means enforcing not the letter of the law (such as time limits on prosecuting “fraudulent conveyance” but the spirit of the law. Clearly Eddie Lampert looted and destroyed Sears. It is unacceptable that there is apparently no way to bring him to justice and lock him up as the criminal he is.

Perhaps, therefore, the most important fact in all this: "Our current U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is a former a college room mate of ESL’s founder Eddie Lampert, and also an ESL investor."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was on the board of Sears when Trump said it was 'improperly run'
Sinéad Baker, October 16, 2018 [Business Insider]

See also David Dayen, November 14, 2017, The Cause and Consequences of the Retail Apocalypse, and Sears Didn’t ‘Die.’ Vulture Capitalists Killed It [Huffington Post, via The Big Picture 10-16-18]


“Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice” (PDF) 
[Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, Suresh Naidu, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18]  
From the abstract: “Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts and 1 million District Court criminal sentencing decisions linked to judge identity, we estimate the effect of attendance in the controversial Manne economics training program, an intensive two-week course attended by almost half of federal judges. After attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language, render more conservative verdicts in economics cases, rule against regulatory agencies more often, and render longer criminal sentences. These results are robust to adjusting for a wide variety of covariates that predict the timing of attendance. Comparing non-Manne and Manne judges prior to program start and exploiting variation in instructors further assuage selection concerns. Non-Manne judges randomly exposed to Manne peers on previous cases increase their use of economics language in subsequent opinions, suggesting economic ideas diffused throughout the judiciary. Variation in topic ordering finds that economic ideas were portable from regulatory to criminal cases.”
The Manne economics training program is conducted by George Mason University, which became a key bastion of conservative economic ideology, helped by millions of dollars of donations from the usual suspects, including the Kochs.


Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States
[Sic Semper Tyrannus, via Mike Norman Economics 10-16-18]
The other side of the deindustrialization coin is financialization. There will never be a real economic recovery with generally shared prosperity, nor a recovery of our industrial base, until usury and speculation is systematically curbed, and Wall Street and the financial system are returned to a position of subservience to the rest of the economy. That especially means that the outlandish rewards of a career in "financial engineering" are shrunken, and the rewards of a career in manufacturing and real engineering have been been restored to a position of parity, if not superiority. The Reagan presidency was disastrous. All the economic trend lines that indicate industrial strength turned sideways and south during the Reagan presidency. Unleashing Wall Street and "animal spirits" have had severely negative consequences. I doubt whether this new study -- however welcome it is -- faces up to that fact.


Delta A220 introduction breaks with sworn statements to Trade Commission
[FlightGlobal, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18] 
“Delta Air Lines is preparing to introduce its first Airbus A220-100 in January, a year after a US trade commission ruled that the aircraft did not compete with Boeing’s 737 line.... Both the delivery and initial service plan, however, differ from Bombardier and Delta’s sworn testimony to the ITC in 2017…. Neither Bombardier nor Delta have held to their statements to the commission… Statements to the ITC are made under oath making false testimony a potential criminal offense. However, few such cases are pursued as the commission must refer them to the US Department of Justice to investigate before any charges can be brought. ‘From a practical perspective, there’s not the means to chase these things,’ a lawyer active in ITC cases tells FlightGlobal.”

The U.S. Needs to Crack Down on White-Collar Crime 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-15-18]
Since the financial crisis, the lack of criminal prosecutions has been widely deplored. Yet white-collar prosecutions are still on course to fall to their lowest level in at least 20 years, down more than 40 percent from 1998. 
Why is this? After Sept. 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation diverted personnel and resources to battling terrorism. The Internal Revenue Service is under constant assault, with congressional Republicans vilifying its personnel and gutting its budget. The Federal Election Commission has been all but incapacitated by those opposed to regulating politics. Civil investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission rarely develop into big criminal cases. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress he was concerned that some financial firms had become so large that it makes it “difficult for us to prosecute them.” Lately, environmental crimes have been all but encouraged by the Trump administration. 
All too often, even when companies have been punished, the people in charge have not. Deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements have reduced the risk. Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett’s data show that from 2001 to 2014, federal prosecutors entered into 306 deferred or non-prosecution agreements with companies. In only 104 of those companies were individuals charged with a crime. 
In 2015, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates explained why prosecutors struggle to hold individuals accountable. “In modern corporations, where responsibility is often diffuse, it can be extremely difficult to identify the single person or group of people who possessed the knowledge or criminal intent necessary to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said. “This is particularly true of high-level executives, who are often insulated from the day-to-day activity in which the misconduct occurs.”

by Eoin Higgins, October 9 2018 [The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-18]
I have no doubt that this article will greatly upset (if they read it) Democrats loyal to Obama or Clinton, but I concluded several years ago that some of the greatest political errors in USA history resulted from following Lincoln's famous forgiving spirit "with malice toward none, with charity toward all." For example, if Franklin Roosevelt had ordered a vigorous investigation and prosecution of the "Business Plot" to conduct a military coup against him in 1933, many of the funders of the modern conservative movement would have been taken out of the picture. Or, imagine if Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal had been used to destroy the careers of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
In January 2009, George W. Bush left office with an abysmal 22 percent approval rating, the lowest ever recorded. Almost everyone with anything to do with his administration was considered politically toxic. 
With full Democratic control of the federal government, calls came for an investigation into the scandals of the Bush administration, including torture, mass surveillance, and war profiteering. While some called for criminal prosecutions, others wanted hearings or an independent investigation that would — at minimum — put into the public record the details of who did what and when. At the least, the argument went, Democrats could ensure that the GOP had to wear the Bush administration for years; that the officials involved in wrongdoing would be written out of polite society; and that future administrations would not revert to those practices. 
Obama refused. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he said famously on January 11, 2009, days before he took office.

Had he looked forward far enough, he would have seen one of the chief boosters of the torture program elevated to CIA director, and a Bush administration attorney with complicity in a wide array of its most controversial programs lifted up to the U.S. Supreme Court....
Just by looking at the National Archives description of the records, it appears clear that Kavanaugh was involved in the planning of the Bush-era surveillance rules which led to warrantless wiretapping being codified into the American national security state. Further, Kavanaugh’s alleged involvement in Bush-era judicial subterfuge by Republican hatchet man Manuel Miranda is still an open question, though Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied having any involvement in funneling the stolen information Miranda hacked from Senate Democrats in 2003 to the Bush administration. 
Over the past decade, the political world has done everything possible to minimize and forget the crimes of the early to mid-2000s. The effect has been felt ever since. Members of the Bush administration and their hangers-on have spent their time working diligently to return to good standing in the social and professional worlds they once dominated in Washington and New York. Allowing them to reintegrate into elite society has had almost as catastrophic an effect on American politics as Donald Trump.
[OpinioJuris, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-18]
by Daphne Eviatar, Director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Program.
The Obama administration, like the three administrations before it, dating back to 1995, explicitly denied the applicability of international human rights law, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to any US actions abroad. The consequences have been devastating. 
In the context of detention, for example, the US consistently maintained that the right to due process provided by the ICCPR did not apply to its detention of hundreds of Afghans at the Bagram air base in their country. President Obama eventually washed his hands of the problem by turning most, but not all, of those detainees over to the Afghan government as part of a larger negotiated troop withdrawal. The detainees at Guantanamo, meanwhile, have remained stuck there without a legal process that meets internationally recognized standards for more than 16 years. 
Perhaps even more destructive is the legacy this legal interpretation left for the Trump administration when it comes to the United States’ use of lethal force.
President Obama was criticized from both the political Left and Right because he intensified the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as “drones,” to conduct what were then called “targeted killings,” often in secret and outside war zones. Human rights organizations like the one where I work, Amnesty International,  strenuously objected that such strikes outside recognized zones of armed conflict violated the right to life, enshrined in the ICCPR, unless they were in the service of thwarting an imminent attack on human life. From the right, lawmakers such as Rand Paul called such extrajudicial killings an outrage – at least if they were targeting US citizens.
Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change
by Luke Darby, October 11, 2018 [GQ, via Naked Capitalism 10-15-18]
There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."
In line with the articles on how Obama's forgiving the Republicans helped lead us into the present political wilderness, Mayer also details, in one chapter of her book, how the Koch brothers were allowed to avoid prosecution in the 1990s for an extraordinary string of violations of environmental laws and regulations. What would the USA political scene today look like today if the hundreds of millions of dollars the Kochs have poured into the conservative and libertarian movements had been eradicated along with the Koch business empire?

McConnell Bloomberg Interview on Entitlements, Rising Deficits 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is without shame as he entirely ignores the Trump / Republican tax cuts, and asserts Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are to blame for rapidly bloating federal deficits. 
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”
.... 
“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell said.
 The Austerity Hawks Are Coming for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
By John Nichols, October 17, 2018 [TheNation, via John Claydon]
Less than a year ago, Mitch McConnell assured Americans that his $1.5 trillion program of tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations would not increase debts and deficits. “I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue neutral,” the Senate majority leader chirped. “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.” 
....Now, amid reports that the deficit had grown by 17 percent to almost $800 billion in fiscal year 2018, and that it is headed toward—you guessed it—the $1 trillion mark, McConnell says it’s not his fault. Nor, he claims, is it the fault of the billionaires and corporations he and Ryan represent. 
....The blame, said McConnell, lies with “a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs.” While most Republicans try to talk around the issue—for obvious reasons—McConnell admits that “we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

Britain fell for a neoliberal con trick – even the IMF says so
by Aditya Chakrabortty, October 17, 2018 [Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]
...for much of my life, and probably yours, the political class has made this pledge: that the best way to run an economy is to hack back the public realm as far as possible and let the private sector run free. That way, services operate better, businesses get the resources they need, and our national finances are healthier. 
It’s why your tax credits keep dropping, and your mum has to wait half a year to see a hospital consultant – because David Cameron slashed public spending, to stop it “crowding out” private money. It’s why water bills are so high and train services can never be counted on – because both industries have been privatised. 
From the debacle of universal credit to the forced conversion of state schools into corporate-run academies, the ideology of the small state – defined by no less a body than the International Monetary Fund as neoliberalism – is all pervasive....
Homelessness in New York Public Schools Is at a Record High: 114,659 Students
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]

US Unemployment Rate Hits 50-Year Low: What Does the Number Reveal and Conceal?
[CNBC, via John Claydon]
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes says the federal government could give U.S. workers a stipend of $500 per month by repealing the Trump tax cuts. Hughes, an advocate for a basic income, contends that less than a third of Americans have reaped the benefits of the president's tax cuts.

Bay area hotel workers determined to fight as union, Democrats try to derail strike
[Naked Capitalism, comments, 10-19-18]
Strikers on the picket lines at Marriott hotels in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland have expressed their determination to fight poverty level wages and increased medical costs as they struggle to live in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in America. The 2,700 workers in the Bay Area who walked out on October 4 and 5 are part of nearly 8,000 workers in Boston, Detroit and the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Maui who are striking against the world’s largest hotel chain. 
“We’re all overworked,” Alfredo, a 38-year-old cook with Marriott Oakland, told the World Socialist Web Site. “After I come out of the kitchen, I have been working so hard, I’m sweating like I just spent a couple hours in the gym.” 
Alfredo continued, “They’re raising the cost of our medical benefits from $25 to $300 a month. You have workers here who have worked with Marriott for over 35 years. They are old, and they gave their life to this company. The main reason they don’t retire is because they’ll lose their medical benefits if they quit, and now Marriott does this. Nobody can afford these costs and still make ends meet on our pay. 
The Sweetheart Union:

Far from mobilizing the broad support hotel workers have to shut down the hotel industry, the UNITE HERE union has limited picketing to symbolic levels, allowing Marriott to continue operations with strikebreakers. At the same time, it has left workers on starvation-level strike benefits of $60 a day, even though the union has assets worth more than $150 million and pays its union president, Donald Taylor, a salary of $362,034. 
The Sweetheart Union, and the California Democratic Party:

While isolating the striking workers, the UNITE HERE union has given the Democratic Party a platform to posture as their saviors and hustle for workers’ votes in the run up to the November 6 election. Last week, the union staged a civil disobedience protest in conjunction with the Democrats in downtown San Francisco. Anand Singh, the head of UNITE HERE Local 2, and Wei-Ling Huber, president of East Bay’s Local 2850, were among dozens who were arrested. 
The bottom line of the piece:
Far from speaking for workers, the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have overseen more than a decade of declining worker living standards even as they handed over trillions of dollars to bailout the Wall Street banks. In Illinois, the unions are backing billionaire gubernatorial candidate JB Pritzker, one of the heirs to the Hyatt Hotel fortune. The Chicago-based Pritzkers—who played a prominent role in Obama’s rise to the White House—are notorious for their attacks on hotel workers.

How tech workers became activists, leading a resistance movement that is shaking up Silicon Valley 
[Fast Company, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]
When news broke in December 2016 that then president–elect Donald Trump would meet with some of the tech world’s most prominent CEOs—Apple’s Tim Cook, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, among them—many tech workers were furious. In an industry that draws talent and ideas from around the world, Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign promises were abhorrent, and just meeting with him seemed like a tacit endorsement of these views.... 
“We were seeing what felt like a new energy in tech-employee organizing,” says Honeywell, who had volunteered for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The result was the Never Again pledge, signed by 2,843 engineers, designers, and other workers at companies including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Referencing the role of IBM’s punch-card technology in Holocaust record-keeping, the signatories vowed not to participate in the creation of any targeted databases for the U.S. government. And they laid out a playbook for worker-led resistance: Raise issues with leadership, whistle-blow, protest, and—as a last resort—resign.
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]


Be sure to explore the entire article, especially the snippets of quotes in the last half. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it.
To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country. 
The advertising model of the internet was different from anything that came before. Whatever you might say about broadcast advertising, it drew you into a kind of community, even if it was a community of consumers. The culture of the social-media era, by contrast, doesn’t draw you anywhere. It meets you exactly where you are, with your preferences and prejudices — at least as best as an algorithm can intuit them. “Microtargeting” is nothing more than a fancy term for social atomization — a business logic that promises community while promoting its opposite.
Steve Jobs (left) in his parents’ garage in 1976, working on the first Apple computer with Steve Wozniak. Photo: Db Apple/Polaris 
The Silicon Valley dream was born of the counterculture. A generation of computer programmers and designers flocked to the Bay Area’s tech scene in the 1970s and ’80s, embracing new technology as a tool to transform the world for good.

New EIA report shows wind pulls its weight
[Into the Wind blog (10/18), via American Wind Energy Association 10-19-18]
A new report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) found that wind and solar generated over 20 percent of the total electricity in 10 states last year. This offers yet another data point that renewables like wind power have become an important part of America's electricity mix.


Sony bumps up US timeline for 100% renewables by 10 years
[Engadget (10/17), via American Wind Energy Association 10-18-18]
Sony has accelerated its plan for moving to 100% renewables in the US, and says it will now meet that goal by 2030. Currently, renewables power 25% of its US operations.

GM hits 100% wind-powered milestone at Texas site
[Environmental Leader (10/15), via American Wind Energy Association 10-16-18]
General Motors officially began sourcing 100% of the total electricity used at its manufacturing site in Arlington, Texas, from wind energy on Oct. 9. The power comes from the 148-megawatt Cactus Flats Wind Farm in Concho County.


‘I leave the car at home’: how free buses are revolutionising one French city 
By Kim Willsher, October 15, 2018  [Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]
One month ago, Dunkirk – with a metropolitan population of 200,000 – became the largest city in Europe to offer free public transport. There are no trams, trolleybuses or local commuter trains, but the hop-on-hop-off buses are accessible and free – requiring no tickets, passes or cards – for all passengers, even visitors. 
The scheme took its inspiration from Tallinn in Estonia, which in 2013 became the first European capital to offer a fare-free service on buses, trams and trolleybuses, but only to residents who are registered with the municipality. They pay €2 for a “green card”, after which all journeys are free. The city has reported an increase of 25,000 in the number of registered residents – the number previously stood at 416,000 – for which the local authorities receives €1,000 of each resident’s income tax every year. 
Free urban transport is spreading. In his research Wojciech Keblowski, an expert on urban research at Brussels Free University, says that in 2017 there were 99 fare-free public transport networks around the world: 57 in Europe, 27 in North America, 11 in South America, 3 in China and one in Australia. Many are smaller than Dunkirk and offer free transit limited to certain times, routes and people.
“Dirty water, dirtier practices” 
[Le Monde Diplomatique, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]
“Medardo Shingre, a peasant farmer who has lived in Tarapoa for about 40 years, is one of Texaco’s 30,000 victims. He showed me how severely his land has been poisoned: over a wide area, push a stick about 20cm into the ground and crude oil bubbles up. At first sight, the soil looks compact and normal. But as the day warms up, it softens and clings to shoes. Nature has been affected: there are severely stunted adult banana trees, strangely shaped tubers, plants with colourless fruit and leaves.” 
[Le Monde Diplomatique, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18] 
“The Guaraní aquifer is one of the world’s largest underground water reserves in terms of surface area (1.2m sq km, as big as France, Spain and Portugal combined), volume of water available (55,000 cubic km) and above all annual renewal capacity, estimated at 160 cubic km.This precious resource is a major geostrategic asset for part of the Southern Cone. Four countries share it: Brazil (840,000 sq km), Argentina (225,000), Paraguay (71,700) and Uruguay (58,500).”

“Uwe Reinhardt, 80, Dies; a Listened-to Voice on Health Care Policy”
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-18]
“In 2015, the Republic of China awarded Professor Reinhardt its Presidential Prize for having devised Taiwan’s single-payer National Health Insurance program. The system now provides virtually the entire population with common benefits and costs 6.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (about one-third the share that the United States spends).”


Global industrial robot sales doubled over the past five years
International Federation of Robotics
The new World Robotics Report shows that a new record high of 381,000 units were shipped globally in 2017 – an increase of 30 percent compared to the previous year. This means that the annual sales volume of industrial robots increased by 114 percent over the last five years (2013-2017). The sales value increased by 21 percent compared to 2016 to a new peak of US$16.2 billion in 2017.

The number of robots worldwide is a fraction of the number of USA manufacturing jobs lost, so I very much doubt the causality -- which many Democrats who embraced the idea of a "post-industrial Information Age" cling to as they seek to avoid seeing how disastrous their policies have been for the working class.


A Look At Projects Staking A Future On The Moon
Irene Klotz, October 19, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
More than 25 public and private organizations are working on lunar exploration and development programs, and NASA is now front and center among them. Here is a look at some of the projects staking a future on the Moon.

Can Clean, Quiet Hydrogen-Electric Power Redefine Regional Travel?
Graham Warwick, October 19, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
Hydrogen fuel-cell producer unveils a concept for a zero-emissions regional aircraft designed to link smaller communities.
by Barry Ritholtz, October 16, 2018 [The Big Picture]
In 2016 election, for example, Donald Trump won the electoral college with 62,984,828 votes, but loss the popular vote, as his opponent, Hillary Clinton garnered 65,853,514 votes. But that was surpassed by 101,230,126 people who were eligible to vote but didn’t. They are the ones who determined the outcome of the contest — simply by staying home on election day:

2016 Presidential Elections Votes
27.4% Trump
28.6% Clinton
44.0% Eligible But Did Not Vote


How the gutting of the Voting Rights Act led to hundreds of closed polls
By Rob Arthur and Allison McCann, October 16, 2018 [Vice, via The Big Picture 10-19-18]
....an exclusive analysis by VICE News has found that these worries were justified. In the years following the Shelby decision, jurisdictions once subject to federal supervision shut down, on average, almost 20 percent more polling stations per capita than jurisdictions in the rest of the country. There are now 10 percent more people per polling place in the formerly-supervised areas than in the rest of the country. 
Furthermore, within 18 counties in 13 states examined at a granular level, many of the closed polls were in neighborhoods with large minority populations. This analysis is the first attempt to look nationally at poll closures since the heart of the Voting Rights Act was removed. 
With the expansion of early voting and voting by mail, there are valid reasons for counties to close or consolidate polling places that have nothing to do with discrimination. Across the country, more than 2,000 polling places closed between the 2012 and 2016 general elections.... 
But VICE News found that for every 10 polling places that closed in the rest of the country, 13 closed within the jurisdictions once under oversight. Policies that introduce barriers to voting — like Texas’ strict voter ID requirements and North Carolina’s elimination of same-day registration and limits on early voting — have been widely criticized for discouraging minority voters, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The vast majority of the jurisdictions once under federal supervision are in states with GOP leadership.
by Laura Clawson, October 19, 2018 [DailyKos]
Imagine being in a city with 27,000 people—13,000 voters—and just one polling place. Imagine if you were one of the 60 percent of the people in the city who are Latino, and the only polling place was in a wealthy white neighborhood … and then it got moved to an even more difficult location, outside the city limits altogether and more than a mile from the closest bus stop.... In a stark contrast with the 13,000 voters this one polling place outside the city limits is expected to service in a majority Latino city, the average Kansas polling site has 1,200 voters.


“Not Just Georgia’s Brian Kemp: Other Secretaries of State Accused of Abusing Elections Power” [Governing, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]
“‘There is a fundamental conflict of interest for an official to administer an election at the same time that he is running for office,’ says David Kimball, a voting expert at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. ‘The tension around this conflict is raised because issues around election laws and voting rights have become more divided and partisan.’ In most countries, Kimball notes, elections are overseen by independent bodies. The role of secretary of state in overseeing elections was once viewed as purely technical, much like their other responsibilities, such as issuing business licenses. That’s changed….Secretaries of state have started serving as campaign cochairs for their parties’ presidential nominees, while super PACs and other outside groups have sprung up specifically to give partisan secretary of states a boost in elections.” • The article notes problems in AZ, IN, KS, and KY.

Meet the Mathematicians Fighting against Gerrymandering
[Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]

Newt: The Man Who Broke Politics 
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 10-19-18]

“Registration is a voter-suppression tool. Let’s finally end it.”
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]
“The burden should be on the government — not individuals — to ensure the right to vote. And this wouldn’t be too difficult: Our government already records every American in various ways. Why can’t voting be automatic with Selective Service registration and expanded to include women? Or with a Social Security number? In other democracies such as Canada, Sweden and Argentina, governments automatically compile rolls using information from other federal agencies. These efforts can serve as a model for the United States to pursue.”

“A Former Obama Operative Built a New Anti-Republican Attack Machine”
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-18]
 “Tanya, Genevieve, and Vadim have never met and probably never will. But they have two things in common: They’re members of the so-called Resistance, working to oust Republicans. And they’re being directed by a former J.P. Morgan banker named John Burton, who’s become a field general of sorts in the liberal opposition—and soon, he hopes, the cause of consternation and, ultimately, unemployment for dozens of Republican lawmakers in races from Maine to California… Burton’s project, dubbed Citizen Strong, has operated by stealth, waiting until just now to publicly declare its existence as a 501(c)4 “dark money” group with three affiliated political action committees..”
"a former J.P. Morgan banker" makes me uneasy, but I think Democrats need to become much more combative in their political and ideological contests with Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.

IA-04 “Seed, Pesticide, and Banking Monopolies — Not Immigrants — Are Destroying Farm Country. An Iowa Insurgent Hopes That Message Can Dethrone Steve King”
[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-18]
“National Democrats have mostly focused on suburban, well-educated districts that have grown disenchanted with Donald Trump’s GOP. But flippable voters also exist in farm country — including in Amish country in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — which Democrats have ignored for decades. In fact, rural America presents unique opportunities for populists.”


CA Legislature: “Democratic Socialist Jovanka Beckles Could Upset Buffy ‘the Bernie Slayer’ Wicks in CA” [In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18]

UPDATE CA Legislature: “Meet the Pro-Kavanaugh Republican Running the Newest Buffy Wicks PAC” 
[East Bay DSA, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-18] 
Voters in AD15 received a deluge of political mailers this week, so one in particular probably didn’t stick out. It’s a glossy sheet 8.5″ x 11″ sheet with a huge picture of a frothing Donald Trump and a small picture of a smiling Buffy Wicks. The cover says, ‘With the Right Leaders, CA CAN DO A LOT TO STOP DONALD TRUMP.’ You can’t tell from looking at it, but this mailer, suggesting that Buffy can protect us from Trump, was conceived in an elite Republican law firm in Sacramento and paid for by an unholy alliance of right-wing billionaires, anti-public education crusaders, and big healthcare PACs. The whole process was overseen by Ashlee Titus, president of the Sacramento Federalist Society, who recently signed a letter in support of accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh.”

Fierce Battle for State Assembly Between Socialist and Obama Staffer in Richmond, CA
[The Real News Network 10-14-18]
“About 20 percent of all metro and community newspapers in the United States — about 1,800 — have gone out of business or merged since 2004, when about 9,000 were being published. Hundreds more have scaled back coverage so much that they’ve become what the researchers call “ghost newspapers.” Almost all other newspapers still publishing have also scaled back, just less drastically… About 70 percent of the newspapers that have died since 2004 were in suburban areas of metropolitan areas that historically offered many news choices, the researchers say, but counties with no coverage at all tend to be rural. State and regional papers have also pulled back dramatically, and this “has dealt a double blow to residents of outlying rural counties as well as close-in suburban areas.”

Facebook Erases Hundreds of Alternative Media Pages in Mass Purge (1/2)
[The Real News Network 10-18-19]
Facebook is erasing popular alternative media pages that had millions of likes and suspending anti-war and anti-police brutality accounts, in coordination with Twitter. Journalist Max Blumenthal says this is part of a larger political crackdown; EFF’s David Greene says the implications are dangerous



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