Sunday, November 4, 2018

Week-end Wrap - November 3, 2018

Week-end Wrap - November 3, 2018
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Mike Norman

Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-Wing Government
Ian Welsh [ianwelsh.net 10-31-18] 
These are the fundamentals of effective progressive governance. Judge for yourself how far the Democratic Party is from these fundamentals.

Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]

Record Low Water Levels Are Causing Chaos in Germany
[Weather.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]

The great Himalayan thaw
[Nepali Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]

Changing climate forces desperate Guatemalans to migrate 
[National Geographic, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]

How anti-clean energy campaigns create a mirage of public support 
[Grist, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-18]
[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-18] 
“[M]ost of those [rosy] scenarios rely heavily on “negative emissions” — ways of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere…. The primary instrument of negative emissions is expected to be BECCS: bioenergy (burning plants to generate electricity) with carbon capture and sequestration. The idea is that plants absorb carbon as they grow; when we burn them, we can capture and bury that carbon. The result is electricity generated as carbon is removed from the cycle — net-negative carbon electricity. One small complication in all this: There is currently no commercial BECCS industry….. Plenty of people reasonably conclude that’s a bad idea, but alternatives have been difficult to come by.”
‘The Federal Government Does Not Need Revenue’
David McCann [CFO, via Mike Norman Economics 11-4-18]
A good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), by Bernie Sanders' former economic adviser, Stephanie Kelton. Still waiting for Bernie to talk about this in such a way that he climbs out of the austerity box and stops arguing how he will pay for expanded government programs (such as Medicare for all) by shifting taxes around. 

An intro to MMT, as presented at September’s International MMT Conference in NYC
[Naked Capitalism 10-28-18]

Michael Hudson: Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy
[The Guns and Butter podcast, October 30, 2018, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]
MICHAEL HUDSON: ....To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their homes in the mortgage crisis – if you leave the debts growing at compound interest, raise the debt equity ratios and the debt-to-income ratios, then the economy is going to shrink and shrink, and we’re in a slow crash... people don’t realize that the economy cannot be saved unless there’s a bank crash. 
That’s what Sheila Bair wrote in her memoir about her experience as the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She pointed out that Citibank was insolvent from losing all its net worth on bad gambles. She said it was the worst managed bank in America – as distinct from the just plain crooked banks and criminal banks like Countrywide, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. She said that there was plenty of theft by Citibank, but that all the insured depositors could have been reimbursed. No insured depositor would have lost money. But the stockholders and the bondholders that ran this gambling institution would have been wiped out. She said that Obama and Geithner really represented Citibank. Geithner was a protégé of Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. She wrote that she found out, she was told, “It’s all about the bondholders.”
The problem is that Republican free-enterprise bankers discussing what happened ten years ago are saying, “Nothing to see here folks. Everything’s fixed now. We don’t have to do any regulation. Let the banks be free again.” Or, you have Democrats like Paul Krugman who cannot bring themselves to criticize what Obama did. A week ago, on September 14, Krugman showed himself to be a flack for the banks and for the Democrats’ donor class by writing that the Washington Beltway was crazy to believe that America had a debt problem. As I wrote in my article, he said that all you need is Keynesian policy to run a large enough budget deficit to spend enough money into the economy so that wage earners will have enough to pay the banks what they owe. I think this is the Democratic Party’s position: The role of wage earners is to make enough money so that all of their income over and above survival needs has to be paid for the banks. More and more income is needed to pay carrying charges as their debts keep rising....
There’s no feeling at all within the Democratic Party that somehow the banks should have been subordinate to saving the economy. I think that is a major reason why Hillary lost the 2016 election. She kept saying, “Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago when Mr. Obama was elected?” Well, most people, especially in the Midwest, said, “No, we’re not better off. Are you kidding? We’ve lost our homes, employment’s down, our wages are lower, our pension funds are being seized. Of course we’re not better.” So more and more voters stayed home. Just today I was reading a survey that 55% to 85% of Americans say if there was a rerun of the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary they just wouldn’t vote, because both candidates were so bad....
...But this $4.3 trillion could have been used to write down the debts. It could have been used to buy the excess mortgages, to write down the bank mortgages to realistic values so they wouldn’t be junk mortgages, but realistic mortgages. They could have lowered the cost of housing for people on mortgage. They could have essentially freed much of the economy from debt. And your listeners can imagine: If you didn’t have to pay your credit card debt, your student loan debt and your mortgage debt or your other debts to the bank, think of how much better your life would be. Think of all the things you could spend your money on. You’d buy more, and you wouldn’t be so badly squeezed. 
This was the road that could have been taken. But you can’t bail out the banks, leave the debts in place and rescue the economy too. Somebody has to lose. 
The Crash That Failed
Review of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze (Viking, 2018), by Robert Kuttner {New York Review of Books, November 22, 2018 issue]
The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all of which were quickly crushed, represented “a turning point at which modern history failed to turn.” The same can be said of the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted. We are still experiencing the reverberations. 
In the United States, the bipartisan financial elite escaped largely unscathed. Barack Obama, whose campaign benefited from the timing of the collapse, hired the architects of the Clinton-era deregulation who had created the conditions that led to the crisis. Far from breaking up the big banks or removing their executives, Obama’s team bailed them out.... 
There have been hundreds of illuminating books on the great financial collapse. Crashed, written to mark its tenth anniversary, will stand for a long time as the authoritative account. In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars.
[The Contemporary Condition, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18] 
Neoliberalism is not fascism. But the fact that many famous neoliberals have been moved to support fascism to protect a regime from social democracy or socialism does give one pause. Hayek, Friedman, von Mises, among others, took such a turn under duress. They also had highly expansive views of what counted as a “socialist” threat. Neoliberalism is a set of practices that favors entrepreneurs and corporations, supports--often below the radar--massive state subsidies for the corporate estate, presses for radical deregulation of private markets, treats labor as an abstract factor of production, celebrates the authority of courts governed by a neoliberal jurisprudence, hates collective social movements on the left, protects imperial drives, strives to render democracy minimal, and moves to dismantle or weaken unions, social security, public schools and universal voting if and when the opportunities arise....
 Above, Chile's military dictator Augusto Pincochet, who fully implemented the neoliberal program 
of "the Chicago Boys," such as Milton Friedman, below)

Another key epiphany occurred in the 1980s in the States. Reagan’s massive tax cuts, which were promised to spur rapid growth to pay for them, instead created deficits three times larger than those Jimmy Carter had bequeathed. A public reaction set in as the regime proposed to make radical cuts in Social Security and Medicare to make up the shortfall. But those plans failed. After that failure Buchanan concluded, consonant with advice by Milton Friedman, that such entrenched programs could only be weakened and dismantled through disinformation campaigns. Democracy had to be squeezed. Why? The majority of “takers” will never accept open plans to curtail their benefits to reduce taxes on a minority of “producers”. The takers, let's call them for starters workers, the poor and the elderly, don’t even believe in “liberty”--meaning above all the freedom of entrepreneurs to roam freely in the market. So, you must pretend you are trying to save the very system you seek to unravel. Talk incessantly about its “crisis”. Divide its supporters into older, retired members, who will retain benefits, and younger ones who will have them cut. Celebrate the virtues of private retirement accounts. Propose to have the wealthy be removed from the system, doing all these thing until general support for the social security system weakens and you are free to enact the next steps—steps not to be publicized in advance. Once you finally eliminate the system, people’s general confidence in the state will wane more. And new initiatives can be taken—again in a stealth manner—with respect to Medicare, pollution regulations, climate change, unemployment insurance, and democratic accountability.

A Giant Pile of Money: How Wall Street Drove Public Pensions Into Crisis and Pocketed Billions in Fees 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18] 
“For the first time in a decade, the securities and investment industries are spending more on Democrats than Republicans ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections. Bankers are also giving to Democrats. A big part of that is anti-Trump, but a lot of the money is flowing to moderate Democrats, a sign Wall Street is seeking Washington allies to temper the impact of progressives such as Representative Maxine Waters and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who are poised to hit the industry with subpoenas and tougher oversight….. “It’s going to be a very thin majority,” said Paul Merski, a lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers of America. Moderate Democrats, especially those who win in swing districts, ‘will be the deciding factor. And they agree with us on a lot of things.'”

Jean Pisani-Ferry [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-18]
This makes the discipline China game very different from the third contest, the roll back China game. This game is not about the enforcement of trade rules, or their design, but about the sheer geopolitical rivalry between the incumbent superpower and a rising challenger. As Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, noted in a remarkable speech a few weeks ago, the US security establishment has become convinced that strategic engagement with China has not paid off and should give way to strategic competition – a stance that would encompass all dimensions of the bilateral relationship. In early October, a particularly harsh speech by US Vice President Mike Pence illustrated Rudd’s point.
Now, this is irony: A return to Kissingerian power politics by reversing Kissinger's Opening to China. 

The student debt problem is exploding, growing three times as fast as any other kind of debt, yet the Trump administration is making it more difficult for students to seek debt relief. Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute outlines the implications.
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]
It was a veritable lovefest in Milwaukee in July 2017 when Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou announced their plan to create a heavily subsidized manufacturing plant in southeastern Wisconsin.... a $3 billion state subsidy in return for Foxconn’s $10 billion investment in a Generation 10.5 LCD manufacturing plant that would create 13,000 jobs. 
The size of the subsidy was stunning. It was far and away the largest in Wisconsin history and the largest government handout to a foreign company ever given in America. Like most states, Wisconsin had given subsidies to companies in the past, but never higher than $35,000 per job. Foxconn’s subsidy was $230,000 per job. 
But Walker was elected in 2010 on a promise of creating 250,000 new jobs in the state in his first term as governor. Six years into his tenure, he still was far short. Running for a third term in 2018, he badly needed a big win.... 
Some doubt the subsidy will ever actually be recouped. “Realistically, the payback period for a $100,000 per job deal is not 20 years, not 42 years, but somewhere between hundreds of years and never,” wrote Jeffrey Dorfman, an economics professor at the University of Georgia, in a story for Forbes. “At $230,000 [or more] per job, there is no hope of recapturing the state funds spent.” And this was before the subsidy had risen to $4.1 billion, or about $315,000 per job.

Back during the presidential campaign, one prominent tax lawyer wrote that Trump should *NOT* release his tax returns. The lawyer? He now heads the IRS. 
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]

[via The Big Picture 10-28-18]

[MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]
“Many financial gains by minorities in the preceding decades were wiped out during the Great Recession, the study found. And while whites experienced economic recovery between 2010 and 2016, financial indicators for black and Hispanic consumers remained largely unchanged. Researchers often examine yearly income when observing inequality, but a family’s level of wealth — their stock, real estate, and other holdings — has a larger impact on well-being, the researchers said.”
Income Inequality’s Most Disturbing Side Effect: Homicide 
[Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-18]

Millennial Men Leave Perplexing Hole in a Hot U.S. Labor Market 
[Bloomberg, via  Naked Capitalism 11-2-18]
What is really perplexing is that the Bloomberg reporter was told 3 different ways that wages are too damn low, but stubbornly avoided the obvious question of why USA managers are unable to grasp simple economics: if you need more workers, offer MORE MONEY! 

THE AVERAGE CABLE BILL IS NOW $107 A MONTH, UP MORE THAN 50% SINCE 2010
[Streaming Observer, via  Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]

Thank goodness inflation is under control! Or this could be a real problem. (Snark). 

The point is, since Reagan, many measures of the economy have been jiggered to make the numbers look better, and hide the reality of post-industrial collapse.  Consider, for example, this graph of per capita steel production.  The US Commerce Department ended its quarterly reports on steel production in the mid-1990s. Look at the USA's collapse in this particular indicator of economic performance. It's not like we stopped needing steel for stuff. 
The Democratic Party abandoned any pretense of trying to understand these issues when its elites such as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton embraced the "new information economy" back in the 1980s. This hopefully gives you some historical perspective to begin to understand the source of the rage of Trump supporters, and why Trump's initiation of trade war with China has improved his public approval numbers instead of tanking them. Similar collapses can be seen in aluminum, glass, gaskets, pumps, printing equipment, construction equipment, electricity generating and transmission equipment, and other industrial sectors. For some sectors, the collapse has been even worse, such as machine tools. And some industrial sectors have been wiped out almost entirely: textiles, apparel, footwear, and consumer electronics. This is why almost all American mid-size and small cities look so economically devastated -- their industrial base that used to provide decent jobs to their residents is gone.

Consider footwear -- shoes and boots. Contemplate the following two images.

Imagine if the USA footwear industry and its workers had not been destroyed by the post-industrial policies of free trade and financialization. Imagine if unionized shoeworkers were still a political force, along with steel workers and autoworkers and machinists, and textile workers, and so on. Would the Republican Party still be able to contest for political power after leading the country into two disastrous wars and the worst financial and economic crashes since the Depression? 

Erasing Economics and Economic Policy from Politics: The Race and Xenophobia Sideshow 
Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, interview of Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. [via Naked Capitalism 11-3-18]
REED: My concern, and I’ve gotten more emphatic about it over time, is that if this argument is fundamentally an argument about the strategic direction that progressives and/or the Democratic Party should follow, then it’s really a debate about whether we try to mobilize around a politics that challenges the economic inequalities that are reproduced and intensified under capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, or we pursue a response that accepts the logic of those inequalities and seeks to mobilize around a notion of fairness within that regime of fundamental inequality.
.... 
REED:  AR: A few years ago when Barbara Fields was president of the Southern Historical Association, I was asked to join a presidential panel and I talked about the populist insurgency story, of which the North Carolina populist Fusion victories are the high point. I pointed out that yes, there was as much racial prejudice as you can find but that was not the undoing of those movements. It was violence, fraud, murder, and intimidation. When the panel was over, a black woman came up from the audience and wanted to catechize me about the limits of populism. She mentioned the racism and white supremacy, and I said, yes, there was that but there was also violence, intimidation, and murder on a grand scale. Her response was, yes, well, that’s true, but it was really the racism. Well, what can you say to that? She couldn’t see that the larger objective was to eliminate the threat that the insurgency had posed to planter-merchant class rule.
The Economic and Social Roots of Populist Rebellion: Support for Donald Trump in 2016
Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Jacob E. Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen [Institute for New Economic Thinking, via , via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]

See also Big Money—Not Political Tribalism—Drives US Elections, also by Thomas Ferguson, with Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen [via Naked Capitalism 11-2-18]

A Sense of Alarm as Rural Hospitals Keep Closing
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]
“In every year since 2011, more hospitals have closed than opened. In 2016, for example, 21 hospitals closed, 15 of them in rural communities.”
The American People Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Social Security 
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-18]
A better headline would be: Supreme Court Justices signal intent to continue their bias in favor of corporatism. 
U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled on Monday they may issue more pro-business rulings giving companies wide latitude to use arbitration to resolve disputes with employees, customers or other businesses rather than the courts. The nine justices heard arguments in two cases testing the scope of company agreements forcing disputes to be handled by an arbitrator instead of a judge, one involving a California lamp retailer and the other involving a Texas dental equipment distributor.... 
In May, the justices upheld the legality of compelling workers to sign arbitration agreements waiving their right to bring class-action claims in a blow to employee rights.... 
California retailer Lamps Plus, Inc sought to prevent arbitration by workers as a group instead of as individuals in a dispute in which a warehouse employee named Frank Varela filed a class action lawsuit after his and other workers’ personal information was stolen by hackers in a company data breach.
Quick Thoughts on the Google Walkout
Yves Smith, November 2, 2018 [Naked Capitalism 11-2-18]
In fact, the first demand of the Google strikers is an end to forced arbitration of cases involving harassment and discrimination.

[The Cut, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18] 
“A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity, for example making sure there are women of color at all levels of the organization, and accountability for not meeting this commitment. This must be accompanied by transparent data on the gender, race and ethnicity compensation gap, across both level and years of industry experience, accessible to all Google and Alphabet employees and contractors. Such data must include, but not be limited limited to: information on relative promotion rates, under-leveling at hire, the handling of leaves, and inequity in project and job ladder change opportunities. The methods by which such data was collected and the techniques by which it was analyzed and aggregated must also be transparent.”
I spent the day in an Amazon “fulfilment centre”, and it was worse than I ever imagined 
[New Statesman, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-18] 

Survey: 76% of Americans want more wind, solar
[CBS News (11/1), via American Wind Energy Association 11-2-18]
Seventy-six percent of surveyed Americans support adding more wind and solar in the US, Consumer Reports says. Its survey found strong support for the transition in coal-dominant states, such as Illinois and Ohio, and found that 48% of Americans would pay $5 more per month for electricity if 100% renewables were an option.
Report: 2018 will be a record year for coal plant closures
[CleanTechnica (10/29), via American Wind Energy Association 10-30-18]
A record-breaking 22 coal-burning power plants in 14 states with a collective capacity of 15.4 gigawatts are expected to close in 2018, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. "The competitive environment for coal-fired power in the generation marketplace is becoming ever more challenging as the price of renewables continues to fall and as natural gas prices are expected to remain low for the foreseeable future," report author Seth Feaster says.
N.C. governor Roy Cooper works to curb emissions by 40%
[The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.) (10/29), via American Wind Energy Association 10-30-18]
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper issued an executive order Monday urging the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2025. The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and a climate change committee are expected to submit a report next October outlining how the state can increase its use of renewables.
South African president opens Gibela rolling stock plant
[Railway Age 11-1-18]
Alstom and its partners in the Gibela joint venture, Ubumbano Rail and New Africa Rail, inaugurated a Rand 928m ($US 63.5m) rolling stock manufacturing plant at Dunnottar, South Africa, on October 25. The facility was officially opened by the president of South Africa, Mr Cyril Ramaphosa
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-18]

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]
NASA’s X-56 Demos Flutter Suppression Flexible Wing
Graham Warwick [Aviation Week & Space Technology 11-2-18]
Unmanned experimental aircraft fitted with highly flexible wing shows flutter can be actively suppressed, potentially saving weight and drag....
 “Our ultimate goal is to find a control architecture that allows us to fly past the open-loop flutter instability,” says Chris Miller, NASA chief engineer for the X-56A. “In the 1980s and ’90s, Airbus and Boeing used fly-by-wire to reduce the requirement for static stability. We want to do something similar for flutter so we need less structural margin.” 
The intent, for now, is not to enable future commercial aircraft to fly though flutter instability, but to allow designers to use active suppression to safely fly closer to the flutter boundary and so reduce the structural margin now built into wings. This will enable more slender, lighter and flexible high-aspect-ratio wings that reduce drag and improve fuel efficiency. 
The jet-powered, flying-wing X-56A was originally built by Lockheed’s Skunk Works for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to demonstrate active flutter suppression. 

For the history of NASA's crucial work in aerodynamics, see my  How America Was Built
HAWB 1954-1976: NACA, NASA, Richard Whitcomb, the Area Rule, Supercritical Wings, and Winglets , posted in July 2018.

 Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them 
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]

This Is How We Radicalized The World
Ryan Broderick [Buzzfeed, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]A tour de force of the rising right in countries around the world. Though an obvious question: who is paying this guy to go to all these places?
But it really doesn’t matter what country you’re in. The dance is the same everywhere you go.... 
Chances are, by now, your country has some, if not all, of the following. First off, you probably have some kind of local internet troll problem, like the MAGAsphere in the US, the Netto-uyoku in Japan, Fujitrolls in Peru, or AK-trolls in Turkey. Your trolls will probably have been radicalized online via some kind of community for young men like Gamergate, Jeuxvideo.com ("videogames.com") in France, ForoCoches ("Cars Forum") in Spain, Ilbe Storehouse in South Korea, 2chan in Japan, or banter Facebook pages in the UK.

Then far-right influencers start appearing, aided by algorithms recommending content that increases user watch time. They will use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to transmit and amplify content and organize harassment and intimidation campaigns. If these influencers become sophisticated enough, they will try to organize protests or rallies. The mini fascist comic cons they organize will be livestreamed and operate as an augmented reality game for the people watching at home. Violence and doxxing will follow them.
There are deserts of information where normal people are algorithmically served memes, poorly aggregated news articles, and YouTube videos without any editorial oversight or regulation. Fact-checkers in Brazil complained this month ahead of the election that most voters trust what their friends and family send them on WhatsApp over what they see on TV or in newspapers. 
Some of these trolls and influencers will create more sophisticated far-right groups within the larger movement, like the Proud Boys, Generation Identity, or Movimento Brasil Livre. Or some will reinvigorate older, more established far-right or nationalist institutions like the Nordic Resistance Movement, the Football Lads Alliance, United Patriots Front, or PEGIDA. 
While a far-right community is building in your country, a fake news blitz is usually raging online. It could be a rumor-based culture of misinformation, like the localized hoaxes that circulate in countries like India, Myanmar, or Brazil. Or it could be the more traditional “fake news” or hyperpartisan propaganda we see in predominantly English-speaking countries like the US, Australia, or the UK. 
Typically, large right-wing news channels or conservative tabloids will then take these stories going viral on Facebook and repackage them for older, mainstream audiences. Depending on your country’s media landscape, the far-right trolls and influencers may try to hijack this social-media-to-newspaper-to-television pipeline. Which then creates more content to screenshot, meme, and share. It’s a feedback loop....
In most countries, reliable publications are going behind paywalls. More services like Amazon Prime and Netflix are locking premium entertainment behind subscriptions. Which means all of this — the trolls, the abuse, the fake news, the conspiracy videos, the data leaks, the propaganda — will eventually stop being a problem for people who can afford it. 
Which will most likely leave the poor, the old, and the young to fall into an information divide. This is already happening. A study released this month from the UK found that poorer British readers got less, worse news than wealthier readers. And according to a new study by Pew Research Center, only 17% of people over the age of 65 were able to identify fact from opinion. Teenage Instagram wellness communities are already transforming into mini Infowars-style snake oil empires. 
George Soros and the migrant caravan: How a lie multiplied online 
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-18]

Blue wave of money propels 2018 election to record-breaking $5.2 billion in spending
[Open Secrets, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-18]
“The Center for Responsive Politics projects that more than $5.2 billion will be spent this election cycle, making it the most expensive midterm election ever by a wide margin… While Republican candidates are raising funds at record levels, the huge uptick in spending is driven primarily by unprecedented Democratic fundraising. Democratic candidates are projected to spend more than $2.5 billion this cycle, while Republicans are expected to spend approximately $2.2 billion. Democratic House hopefuls have raised more than $951 million, crushing their Republican opponents’ $637 million haul. Things are closer in the Senate — $513 million to $361 million — but Democrats are still ahead. In every kind of competitive race — even those in red districts — Democrats are either outraising Republicans or keeping pace.”
Greg Palast [Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-18]

Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections 
[Medium. "From June, still germane." Via Naked Capitalism 10-28-18]

[Jimmy Carter, New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]
“To Secretary of State Brian Kemp: I have officially observed scores of doubtful elections in many countries, and one of the key requirements for a fair and trusted process is that there be nonbiased supervision of the electoral process…. you are now overseeing the election in which you are a candidate. This runs counter to the most fundamental principle of democratic elections — that the electoral process be managed by an independent and impartial election authority…. In order to foster voter confidence in the upcoming election, which will be especially important if the race ends up very close, I urge you to step aside and hand over to a neutral authority the responsibility of overseeing the governor’s election.” 
Reports: Votes in Texas, Georgia are being changed at polls
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]
“Some early voters in Texas and Georgia have been reporting that their party selections on their voting machines have been switched to the opposite party, or are not selecting candidates at all, according to reports by ABC13 and USA Today. Why it matters: Such vote recording problems raise questions among voters about whether their votes are being counted properly and whether voting machines are rigged.”
The GOP’s Sneakiest Voter Suppression Tactic
[The New Republic, via Naked Capitalism 11-2-18]
“Over the past decade, Republican elections officials have been shuttering polling places in minority neighborhoods, low-income districts, and on college campuses at a feverish pace. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the U.S. had more than 132,000 polling places; by the time Donald Trump ascended to the White House, eight years later, more than 15,000 of them had been closed nationwide. After 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court basically lifted federal Voting Rights Act oversight from states that were particularly notorious for racial discrimination in elections—including Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas—the pace of poll closures went into hyperdrive. Thanks to Shelby County v. Holder, if you ran elections in a majority-black county in Georgia, or a booming Latino neighborhood in Houston, you no longer had to ask the Department of Justice to approve a change in where people could vote, or to prove the intent wasn’t discriminatory. While voter ID laws must be passed by lawmakers, guaranteeing news coverage and public debate, it’s a snap to move or close polling locations.”

1000s of Polling Places Closed over Past Decade
[via The Big Picture 10-30-18]


The White House Counsel and the Pending Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
[Lawfare, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-18]
Especially interesting is Lambert's comparison of Democratic candidates supported by the DCCC versus Democratic candidates supported by Our Revolution.

Feel the love, feel the hate – my week in the cauldron of Trump’s wild rallies
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-18]
If you have been stereotyping Trump supporters as deplorables, this article will probably be very jarring. 

The Lessons for Western Democracies from the Stunning Victory of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (video) Glenn Greenwald [The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18]

Donald Trump didn’t start the fire: Here are things the midterms can’t fix
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-18] 
“If a slender and defensive congressional majority is seen as an end in itself — or if this election becomes a referendum on the ancien régime, circa 2014 — then I’m sure of the outcome: Everybody loses.”
Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Midterms? 
Democrats miss Trump’s political gifts and the real threat he represents.
By Bret Stephens [New York Times, , via Naked Capitalism 11-3-18]
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