Sunday, December 16, 2018

Week-end Wrap - December 15, 2018

Week-end Wrap - December 15, 2018
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]
No one excels Taibbi at staccato jabbing the powers that be with the facts of their own arrogant incompetence. The protests in France are spreading, not because of a carbon tax on gasoline, but for the same reasons Occupy spread, before it was crushed by Obams's Domestic Security Alliance Council.
The vest movement, a.k.a. gillets jaunes, began as a localized French grievance about a fuel tax and has spiraled into an international phenomenon. In Europe, there have been yellow vests in Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. There are vesters marching in Alberta, Canada (these seem more right-wing and anti-immigration), but also in Basra and Baghdad, where protests are directed at poor living conditions. Egypt banned the sale of yellow vests to stem protests against the al-Sisi dictatorship. 
The common thread seems mostly to do with class. However, since we’re more comfortable covering left-versus-right than rich-versus-poor in America, the journalistic response here has been a jumble. 
The New York Times editorial “Macron Blinks” recognized the battle lines were between the “marginalized” and the “pro-business program” of “the rich and powerful.”

....When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled.... 
Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular....
These policies came gift-wrapped in assurances. NAFTA was to produce one million new jobs* in the first five years. The WTO was supposed to add $1,700 to every family’s income, every year. The 2004 tax holiday, which slashed taxes on $299 billion in offshored profits, would create 500,000 jobs, corporate leaders (and the George W. Bush administration) promised.
The op-ed pages in the late Eighties, Nineties and 2000s were full of chest-thumping editorials about how the global economy was making social problems a thing of the past.... ...Francis Fukuyama famously put it in 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man... “it matters very little what strange thoughts might occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso.” These were no longer serious intellectual challenges to our superior way of life. After all, he said, “the class issue has been resolved in the West.” 
“Those who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free-market capitalism don’t have any ready ideological alternative now,” is how Thomas Friedman put it in his famed “golden straitjacket” argument, the basis of a smash bestseller called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. 
Friedman suggested a non-lethal method of spreading “common marketization.” An “electronic herd” of international banking power would invest in countries that got on board with “marketization.” On the other hand, “those that [refused] are disciplined by the herd — either by the herd avoiding or withdrawing its money from that country.”
Why the Left Must Change: Right-Wing Populism in Context 
[Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]
To introduce this, Lambert Strether wrote: "(This seems to be an entire chapter from a book, Progressive Justice in an Age of Repression.) The whole thing is worth a read. This passage describes the UK, but, localized, it could also describe the France of the gillettes jaunes, or “deaths of despair America.”
What sense does it make to suggest that a white man queuing at a food bank is privileged, when the top 0.1% of the population are worth as much as the bottom 90% (Monaghan, 2014)? What sense does it make to talk of ‘white people’ as if they possess shared interests, cultures, aspirations and dispositions? What sense does it make to connect a white homeless man asleep in a shop doorway with a white super-rich investment banker? Are these two individuals who share nothing more than a similar skin pigmentation really bonded together in cultural and political solidarity? Do they speak with one voice on political, economic and cultural issues, always with the interests of the white race at the forefront of their minds? Are we incapable of constructing a slightly more nuanced account of the dynamics that underpin contemporary cultural enmities and the disintegration of the multiculturalist project? Are we unable to draw out the rather obvious antagonisms that exist within those people born with white skin in the hope that we might more accurately identify who is truly privileged, and whose privilege disempowers, excludes and immiserates all of those without capital?

Lopez Obrador’s Plans to Lead Mexico out of Neoliberalism Will Mean Crossing Swords with the US
[Real News Network, 12-10-18]
We now have a politically experienced president in Mexico – gone are the days when Mexico kowtows to the US. This will mean a more sovereign economic and foreign policy, says Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research
Chris Hedges and Michael Hudson - On Contact: The history of debt forgiveness
[via Mike Norman Economics 12-16-18]
Economist and author, Michael Hudson, in his new book …And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, shares with journalist Chris Hedges how Ancient cultures forgave debt cyclically to prevent debt peonage and the rise of an oligarch elite... Hudson describes how Rome fell when the creditors took over the Senate. They murdered the politicians who stood for the people and for debt reform, and put in charge someone like Trump who cut all the taxes for them. Debts spiralled out of control and the economy crashed. Rome was no more.



[VICE, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]
The intended effect of Republican tax cuts: get government off their back by drowing it in the bathtub.
The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will. 
The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. But even those stark numbers don’t tell the whole story, say current and former IRS employees: Auditors are stretched thin, and they’re often forced to limit their investigations and move on to the next audit as quickly as they can. 
Without enough staff, the IRS has slashed even basic functions. It has drastically pulled back from pursuing people who don’t bother filing their tax returns. New investigations of “nonfilers,” as they’re called, dropped from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 last year.

Beyond GDP
Joseph E. Stiglitz, December 3, 2018 [Project Syndicate]
Just under ten years ago, the International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress issued its report, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up.The title summed it up: GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing. What we measure affects what we do, and if we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing.... Last week, at the OECD’s sixth World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy in Incheon, South Korea, the Group issued its report, Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance....

The new report highlights several topics, like trust and insecurity, which had been only briefly addressed by Mismeasuring Our Lives, and explores several others, like inequality and sustainability, more deeply. And it explains how inadequate metrics have led to deficient policies in many areas. Better indicators would have revealed the highly negative and possibly long-lasting effects of the deep post-2008 downturn on productivity and wellbeing, in which case policymakers might not have been so enamored of austerity, which lowered fiscal deficits, but reduced national wealth, properly measured, even more. 
Political outcomes in the United States and many other countries in recent years have reflected the state of insecurity in which many ordinary citizens live, and to which GDP pays scant attention. A range of policies focused narrowly on GDP and fiscal prudence has fueled this insecurity.... 
Had the US, for example, focused more on health, rather than just on GDP, the decline in life expectancy among those without a college education, and especially among those in America’s deindustrialized regions, would have been apparent years ago. Likewise, metrics of equality of opportunity have only recently exposed the hypocrisy of America’s claim to be a land of opportunity: Yes, anyone can get ahead, so long as they are born of rich, white parents. The data reveal that the US is riddled with so-called inequality traps: Those born at the bottom are likely to remain there.
Jayati Ghosh, December 11, 2018 [Project Syndicate]
Given the global output recovery of recent years, why have conditions for workers in most parts of the world not improved commensurately? Neither of the usual suspects, trade and technology, is entirely to blame.... The real reason workers are getting a raw deal is not so much economic as institutional and political. From country to country, legislation and court judgments are increasingly trampling on long-recognized labor rights. 
For example, governments focused solely on improving “labor-market flexibility” have pursued policies that privilege employers’ interests over those of workers, not least by undercutting workers’ ability to organize. An obsession with fiscal consolidation and austerity has prevented the kind of social spending that could expand public employment and improve workers’ conditions. And the current regulatory environment increasingly allows for large corporations to wield power without accountability, resulting in higher monopoly rents and greater bargaining power. 
In short, neoliberalism’s intellectual capture of economic policymaking across a wide range of countries, is resulting in the exclusion of most wage earners from the gains of economic growth.
Steve Keen Tweet - Rana Foroohah - If you want to kill the economy? Have MBA programs churn out takers not makers
[via Mike Norman Economics 12-16-18]



Dylan Matthews, October 19, 2018 [Vox]
Good explanation of the details of Harris's proposed  LIFT the Middle Class Act.

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-18]
What my conversations, especially with Lissovolik, Diesen and Karaganov, have revealed is something absolutely groundbreaking – and virtually ignored across the West; Russia is aiming to establish a new paradigm not only in geopolitics and geoeconomics, but also on a cultural and ideological level.... 
Culturally, retracing Russia’s past, Greater Eurasia analysts may puzzle misinformed Western eyes. ‘Towards the Great Ocean’, the Valdai report supervised by Karaganov, notes the influence of Byzantium, which “preserved classical culture and made it embrace the best of the Orient culture at a time when Europe was sinking into the Dark Ages.” Byzantium inspired Russia to adopt Orthodox Christianity. 
It also stresses the role of the Mongols over Russia’s political system. “The political traditions of most Asian countries are based on the legacy of the Mongols. Arguably, both Russia and China are rooted in Genghis Khan’s empire,” it says....

As China heads West in myriad forms, Greater Eurasia and the Belt and Road Initiative are bound to merge. Eurasia is crisscrossed by mighty mountain ranges such as the Pamirs and deserts like the Taklamakan and the Karakum. The best ground route runs via Russia or via Kazakhstan to Russia. In crucial soft power terms, Russian remains the lingua franca in Mongolia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. 
And that leads us to the utmost importance of an upgraded Trans-Siberian railway – Eurasia’s current connectivity core. In parallel, the transportation systems of the Central Asian “stans” are closely integrated with the Russian network of roads; all that is bound to be enhanced in the near future by Chinese-built high-speed rail.
People take pictures of the first freight train from Shenzhen to Minsk, capital of Belarus, that set out of Yantian Port in Shenzhen in May 2017. Photo: Reuters / stringer

Compare the above story of the New Silk Road, with this:
RT - ‘Our investments are fair, Russia & China's – predatory’: Bolton unveils new US strategy in Africa
[Mike Norman Economics 12-15-18]
Tom Bolton says that Russia and China are being predatory in Africa by offering bribes. He says they are taking away Africa's independence and financial freedom. He must know he's talking nonsense, and that colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism has not brought independence and freedom to Africa. 
China invests throughout Africa building up its infrastructure, which helps it to gain access into its markets. African countries like it, but the US calls it bribes...
They call this the free market, which they say is fair. They call it property rights. They believe that they earned it because their families had worked hard and made money - out of war, imperalism, looting, corruption, coups, and the slave trade.
The War Against Globalism
Philip M. Giraldi, December 12, 2018 [strategic-culture.org, via Mike Norman Economics 12-13-18]
Belgium has joined the list of countries that are rebelling against their elected leadership. Over the weekend the Belgian government fell over Prime Minister Charles Michel’s trip to Morocco to sign the United Nations Migration Agreement. The agreement made no distinction between legal and illegal migrants and regarded immigration as a positive phenomenon. The Belgian people apparently did not agree. Facebook registered 1,200 Belgians agreeing that the Prime Minister was a traitor. Some users expressed concern for their children’s futures, noting that Belgian democracy is dead. Others said they would get yellow vests and join the protests. 
The unrest witnessed in a number of places is focused on some specific demands but it represents much broader anger. The French yellow vests initially protested against proposed increases in fuel taxes that would have affected working people dependent on transportation disproportionately. But when that demand was met by the government of President Emmanuel Macron, the demonstrations continued and even grew, suggesting that the grievances with the government were far more extensive than the issue of a single new tax....

Call it what you will – neoliberalism, neoconservatism or globalism – the new world order, as recently deceased President George H.W. Bush once labeled it, characteristically embraces a world community in which there is free trade, free movement of workers and democracy. They all sound like good things but they are authoritarian in nature, destructive of existing communities and social systems while at the same time enriching those who promote the changes. They have also been the root cause of most of the wars fought since the Second World War, wars to “liberate” people who never asked to be invaded or bombed as part of the process. 
And there are, of course, major differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives in terms of how one brings about the universal nirvana, with the liberals embracing some kind of process whereby the transformation takes place because it represents what they see, perhaps cynically, as the moral high ground and is recognized as being the right thing to do. The neocons, however, seek to enforce what they define as international standards because the United States has the power to do so in a process that makes it and its allies impossible to challenge. The latter view is promoted under the phony slogan that “Democracies do not fight other democracies.” 
The fact that globalists of every type consider nationalism a threat to their broader ambitions has meant that parochial or domestic interests are often disregarded or even rejected. With that in mind, and focusing on two issues – wholesale unwelcome immigration and corrupt government run by oligarchs – one might reasonably argue that large numbers of ordinary citizens now believe themselves to be both effectively disenfranchised and demonstrably poorer as rewarding work becomes harder to find and communities are destroyed through waves of both legal and illegal immigration.
[Economic Policy Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]
“This report demonstrates that after the Section 232 tariffs were imposed on aluminum (and steel) on March 8, 2018, the domestic producers of both primary aluminum and downstream aluminum products have made commitments to create thousands of jobs, invest billions of dollars in aluminum production, and substantially increase domestic production…. Today, after the imposition of tariffs of only 10 percent, domestic production in both the primary aluminum (including both alumina refining and secondary smelting and alloying of aluminum) and downstream aluminum rolling and extruding industries is up; these producers are hiring and expanding, adding capacity, making large investments, and increasing production, as is shown in this report. These outcomes belie claims by critics, including widely quoted economists from the Trade Partnership firm,8 along with a wide array of pundits, journalists, and representatives of many firms in downstream industries…”
Three decades ago, the Democratic Party abandoned labor unions and positioned itself on the wrong side of the trade issue.  Democratic elites will continue to suffer avoidable political damage if they continue to cling to the neoliberal faith in "free trade" and dismiss populist discontent as nationalist and xenophobic.

Dean Baker — Trade: It’s Still About Class, Not Country
Dean Baker, December 10, 2018 [Truthout, via Mike Norman Economics 12-12-18]
It is truly incredible that most of the advocates of this trade policy do not even seem to understand the class nature of their agenda, equating the interests of a tiny group at the top with the interests of the whole country....
A federal judge just ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional, threatening healthcare chaos 
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-18]

[DailyKos 12-15-18]
...George W. Bush appointee... Judge Reed O’Connor issued a ruling declaringthe ACA as a whole to be unconstitutional one day before the Dec. 15 enrollment deadline.
According to O’Connor, the Supreme Court found the ACA was unconstitutional in 2015, under the Interstate Commerce Clause, which permits the federal government to regulate commerce among and between states. Chief Justice John Roberts & Co. only let it stand because the individual mandate’s penalty could be read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power. Since Republicans struck that penalty in 2017, he reasons, the ACA is no longer constitutional.... 
What’s next? The case heads to the Fifth Circuit, which hears federal appeals from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, or even the Supreme Court, though it’s unlikely that the court will grant pre-appellate certiorari. Although they can take a case directly from a district court, the justices rarely do so, preferring cases in which both the district and appeals courts have both already ruled. 
The ACA’s odds of remaining intact are better at the Supreme Court than in the Fifth Circuit.
It is a dangerous mistake to dismiss jurists like O’Connor as being on the judicial fringe. The billionaire-funded conservative and libertarian movements have been quietly, assiduously, and insidiously working for decades to recruit, train, indoctrinate, and place hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these ideologues on the federal and state benches.

This effort is aimed at displacing the federalism of Washington, Hamilton, Jay, and Marshall, with the anti-federalism of Jefferson and Calhoun. It is important to note that this anti-federalism by Calhoun was deliberately designed to protect and perpetuate the institution of slavery in the South, as detailed by Nancy MacLean in her 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

In an important profile of the grossly misnamed Federalist Society, entitled, "The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics", Michael Kruse writes:
At Yale, Calabresi and a couple of conservative law students formed a student group in the fall of 1981. Eating lunch one day, according to a subsequent telling in the journal at Harvard, they batted about possible names. The Ludwig von Mises Society? The Alexander Bickel Society? The Anti-Federalist Society? The Anti-Federalists, after all, were the ones who sought a more decentralized government at the time of the founding of the country. They landed, though, on the Federalist Society, because it invoked the Federalist Papers and the long-running American debate about the appropriate balance of power between the national and state governments.
"Taxpayers — not Big Pharma — have funded the research behind every new drug since 2010
A sweeping study of drug R&D funding shows the public pays for the crucial foundations of medical breakthroughs. So why not let the public have access to them? Something odd happened when the Trump administration submitted the original version of its latest pro-corporate budget: Big Pharma didn't like it. The problem wasn't a tax hike or new regulations: the problem was that the budget included deep cuts to the budget of the National Institutes of Health. If those cuts had gone through, they would have exposed one of the biggest lies told about Big Pharma: that the current system of patents and price-gouging is just an unfortunate necessity to cover the cost of all their brave and noble R&D work. Trump's original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the NIH, but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities — not Big Pharma — that support the bulk of the country's basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments. That's why the cuts were especially unwelcome in the executive suites of drug and biotech companies. Their business models depend on Washington subsidizing expensive, high-risk basic research, mostly through the vast laboratory network funded by the NIH.
From the article linked to by Avedon:
The CISI study, underwritten by the National Biomedical Research Foundation, mapped the relationship between NIH-funded research and every new drug approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016. The authors found that each of the 210 medicines approved for market came out of research supported by the NIH. Of the $100 billion it spent nationally during this period, more than half of it — $64 billion — ended up helping the development of 84 first-in-class drugs.
Investigation of generic ‘cartel’ expands to 300 drugs 
[Washington Post, , via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18] 
“Executives at more than a dozen generic-drug companies had a form of shorthand to describe how they conducted business, insider lingo worked out over steak dinners, cocktail receptions and rounds of golf… The terminology reflected more than just the clubbiness of a powerful industry, according to authorities and several lawsuits. Officials from multiple states say these practices were central to illegal price-fixing schemes of massive proportion.”
Wall Street’s Corruption Runs Deeper Than You Can Fathom
Robert Scheer, December 7, 2018 [TruthDig, via Naked Capitalism 12-9-18]
Carmen Segarra... [was] an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, she witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand. In her new book, “Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street,” she chronicles the recklessness of institutions like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of the worst crashes in our nation’s history. 
“They didn’t want to hear what I had to say,” she tells Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” “And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used—criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable.” 
Segarra also explains why she decided to blow the whistle on the Fed, and what she ultimately hopes to accomplish by telling her story. “I don’t like to let the bad guys win,” she says. “I’d rather go down swinging. So for me, I saw it as an opportunity to do my civic duty and rebuild my life. … I was very lucky to be blessed by so many people who I shared the story to, especially lawyers who were so concerned about what I was reporting, who thought that the Federal Reserve was above this, who thought that the government would not fail us after the financial crisis, and who were livid.”
[Avedon's Sideshow 12-2-18]
This is from September but kept forgetting to post it, even though I've listened to it several times since then. Matt Taibbi on The Michael Brooks Show, TMBS - 58 - Ten Years Of Not Jailing Bankers. I particularly liked the parts where they tear up Jamie Dimon (welfare queen) and Ben Bernenke.

Wow, a Financial Transactions Tax Is an Amazingly Good Idea
[SplinterNews, 12-15-18]
Congressional Budget Office “Options For Reducing The Deficit: 2019 to 2028" [presents] financial projections from the nonpartisan CBO about a range of things that Congress could do that could conceivably be used to reduce the deficit. Of course, these various ideas could also raise tax revenue that could be used to fund public health care or reduce inequality or bolster Social Security or build infrastructure or a million other things.... peruse this report if you are curious about the dollar impacts of Raising The Age of Eligibility for Medicare to 67 or Eliminating Supplemental Security Income Benefits for Disabled Children.... 
More than a trillion dollars of stocks and bonds are traded each day in the U.S. The CBO runs the numbers for a theoretical 0.1% tax on the value of each financial securities trade—a tax that is low enough to have little impact on the routine conduct of financial transactions, but which would have the side benefit of drastically cutting down on high-frequency trading, which adds very little value to capital markets and itself functions as a tax on everyone that goes into a few rich peoples’ pockets. 
So how much would this tax on Wall Street raise? Even accounting for certain other revenues that would go down as a result, The CBO says that “This option would increase revenues by $777 billion from 2019 through 2028.”
A Closer Look at Recent Tightening in Consumer Credit
Liberty Street Economics, December 3, 2018 [Federal Reserve Bank of New York]
The latest survey shows a decline in application rates for credit over the previous twelve months, and an increase in rejection rates in 2018, compared with 2017. Consistent with a decline in demand due to higher mortgage interest rates, the share of respondents who applied for a mortgage refinance during the past year was lower in 2018 than in 2017. Rejection rates reported during 2018 rose for credit card applications and credit card limit extension requests, and also increased notably for mortgage refinance applications.

Another interesting development revealed by the survey is that, while there was no appreciable change in borrower-initiated account closings between 2017 and 2018, there was a sharp increase in the proportion of respondents who reported that a lender closed one of their accounts (most commonly a credit or store retail card) during the past twelve months. In October, 7.2 percent of those surveyed reported such a lender-initiated event, compared with 5.7 percent in October 2017 and 4.2 percent in October 2016. In fact, the 2018 figure is the highest rate reported since the start of our survey in 2013.

San Jose Unveils Tiny Home Prototype for Homeless Residents 
[KQED, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]
Matt Taibbi [Rolling Stone, via Avedon's Sideshow 12-2-18]
"In its effort to clamp down on fake news, Russian trolls and Nazis, the social media giant has also started banning innocent people, proving again it can't be trusted to regulate itself[...] We could have responded to the fake-news problem in a hundred different ways. We could have used European-style laws to go after Silicon Valley's rapacious data-collection schemes that incentivize clickbait and hyper-partisanship. We could have used anti-trust laws to tackle monopolistic companies that wield too much electoral influence. We could have recognized de facto mega-distributors as public utilities, making algorithms for things like Google searches and Facebook news feeds transparent, allowing legitimate media outlets to know how they're being regulated, and why. Instead, this story may be turning into one of the oldest narratives in politics: the misuse of a public emergency to suspend civil rights and concentrate power. One recurring theme of the fake-news controversy has been a willingness of those in power to use the influence of platforms like Facebook, rather than curtail or correct them. Accused of being an irresponsible steward of information, Facebook is now being asked to exercise potentially vast and opaque new powers."
Uber’s Arbitration Policy Comes Back to Bite It in the Ass 
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18] 
“Over 12,000 Uber drivers found a way to weaponize the ridesharing platform’s restrictive contract in what’s possibly the funniest labor strategy of the year… A group of 12,501 Uber drivers found a new option that hinges on the company’s own terms of service. While arbitrating parties are responsible for paying for their own attorneys, the terms state that ‘in all cases where required by law, the Company [Uber] will pay the Arbitrator’s and arbitration fees.’ As of November 13, 2018, 12,501 demands have been filed with JAMS,” [today’s petition in California’s Northern District Court] states. (JAMS refers to the arbitration service Uber uses for this purpose.) Continuing on: “Of those 12,501 demands, in only 296 has Uber paid the initiating filing fees necessary for an arbitration to commence […] only 47 have appointed arbitrators, and […] in only six instances has Uber paid the retainer fee of the arbitrator to allow the arbitration to move forward.”

US states to meet at deadline on Colorado River drought plan 
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]
...representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and the U.S. government [are] negotiating how to deal with water cutbacks when a shortage is declared, probably in 2020.... After 19 years of drought and increasing demand, federal water managers project a 52 percent chance that the river’s biggest reservoir, Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, will fall low enough to trigger cutbacks under agreements governing the system.... Lake Powell upstream from of the Grand Canyon is currently at 43 percent capacity; Lake Mead, downstream, is at 38 percent.


40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up
[Grist, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-18] 
“Under the current rules, federal water managers project a 52 percent chance that an official water shortage will be declared in fall of 2019, with mandatory cutbacks beginning in 2020. A shortage is more than 99 percent certain the following year. The problem is, due to systematic over-use, even those cutbacks won’t be enough to prevent the river from falling still lower, so the multi-month series of meetings this year have centered around agreeing on deep cuts starting right away. To be clear: There is no remaining scenario that does not include mandatory cutbacks in water usage along the Colorado River within the next few years. The long-awaited judgement day for the Southwest is finally here.”

Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change
[GQ, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]
“Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world’s climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.”
Money talks: Investors with $32 trillion at stake sound the alarm on climate change 
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]

Do Climate Policies ‘Kill jobs’? An Economist on Why They Don’t Cause Massive Unemployment
Garth Heutel [The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]

The Reality Is Everything Must Change
Kenan Malik, December 10, 2018 [The Observer, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-18]
I would suggest there are three things we know.
The first is that climate change is real. The result is that nothing can stay the same.
The second is that neoliberalism has reduced most people to living in states of profound insecurity. Ignore that poverty is supposedly being beaten. This is almost for nought if the result is disabling fear for future well-being. This cannot persist because people will not tolerate it. We are seeing that, very widely.
Third, our economic and social orders do, then, have to change, and profoundly. This is not an option. It is an absolute necessity. And what we know is private capital has ceased to be available for active investment it is now almost solely directed to rent seeking. In that case it is only state created funding that can create this process of change.
To put this another way, what may be the biggest programme of change ever known in human history is required in very short order. We need new energy systems; transformation of our housing stock; new transport infrastructure; radically different approaches to food that might even require rationing if we cannot create change any other way; different ways of working and new ways of using leisure time. As I suggested, everything must change.
But this must be done in a way that increases certainty. Jobs must be created on the ground, everywhere. And I mean, in every constituency. There must be new homes on brown field and some greenfield sites – but the transport and other infrastructure must be provided in that case and that does not simply mean more roads. The social safety net must be recreated. That means a job guarantee. It also means a universal basic income. And business must be transformed. Since that process will be incredibly expensive this requires capital and if that means state investment and co-ownership, so be it. At the same time some things might need to be foregone. Like nuclear submarines and aurcraft carriers. We have no resource to waste on the legacies of our imperialist past.

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-18] 
“Thailand, Brazil and South Africa share similarities that made them ripe for comparison…. [E]ach country’s decision to pursue health-care reforms was unexpected, given a number of factors…. [I]n line with recent work that has shown how major new social programs in developing countries [such as our own] do not always reflect the priorities of citizens, my research highlights that the impetus for reform may actually be less broad-based than we might expect. While traditional activism was important, I found that democratization also empowered well-situated elites from esteemed professions, who in turn drew on their privileged positions in the state, their knowledge and their social networks, to outmaneuver the broader professions of which they are a part and deliver benefits to those who needed them.” Lambert Strteher adds: "The author doesn’t say this, but it’s hard not to conclude that our own elites must, therefore, be more corrupt and/or ineffective than those of Thailand, Brazil, or South Africa."

Pro-Israel Lobby Groups Secretly Admits Boycott Is Effective, Leaked Report Shows
[Real News Network 12-14-18]
Ali Abunimah discusses a leaked report from Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), a front for Israel government-backed lobby group StandWithUs, which admits the cultural boycott is “constantly growing” and “innovative.”

A Mississippi judge accused pro-life legislators of “gaslighting”
[New Statesman, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]
In his decision striking down the latest attempt by the Republican legislators of Mississippi to outlaw all abortions and force a test of Roe v. Wade, Judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi Carlton W. Reeves wrote: 
“This Court concludes that the Mississippi Legislature’s professed interest in “women’s health” is pure gaslighting… Its leaders are proud to challenge Roe but choose not to lift a finger to address the tragedies lurking on the other side of the delivery room: our alarming infant and maternal mortality rates.”
Amy Kapczynski, Columbia Law Review, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]
“Recent Supreme Court decisions have ‘weaponiz[ed]’ the First Amendment, turning it into a powerful tool against a range of ordinary socioeconomic legislation. There is little that can escape its reach, because we are crea­tures of speech, and governance and speech are inescapably intertwined…. Courts, speaking in the name of the First Amendment, are “freeing” us from regulatory approaches that have worked for decades to inform us about the prod­ucts we put in our bodies…. As a commitment to market supremacy advances inside of constitutional doctrine, democratic control over our economy and society will demand new pub­lic infrastructure that displaces or routes around an increasingly ungov­ernable private sector.”

Corporate planning for future climate change is stuck in a business-as-usual past 
[Anthropocene, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]
“A U.S.-U.K. team of researchers analyzed the text of climate change plans prepared in 2016 by 1,630 companies, including many large multinational corporations. The study represents the first comprehensive analysis of climate risk reporting across multiple industries and sectors of the global economy…. [W]hile many companies may prefer to remain hush-hush about climate change in public, the actual bottom-line is that outright climate denialism isn’t very prevalent in the business world… The researchers also identified five ‘blind spots’ of corporate climate change planning. First, corporations have a tendency to underestimate the magnitude and potential cost of climate change risks. Second, they only consider direct impacts to business operations rather than taking into account broader risks, such as projections that climate change will reduce people’s income and thus drive down global demand for goods and services. Third, most companies report only the up-front cost of climate change adaptation measures. Few calculate the return on investment, the relative cost effectiveness of different strategies, or the cost of doing nothing. Relatedly, they mostly ignore the huge win-win potential of ecosystem-based adaptation. This strategy is currently in use by only 3.3% of companies, and is “likely to remain largely untapped until the costs of all strategies are better articulated,” the researchers say. And finally, most corporate adaptation strategies assume that climate change risk is basically linear.” • In other words, we need the State.

East Antarctica is losing ice faster than anyone thought 
[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]
“East Antarctica was supposed to be the stable side of the icy continent, whose western flank is losing ice fast1. But glaciologists are finding that the closer they look at East Antarctica, the more change they see…. Four small glaciers in a region known as Vincennes Bay are thinning at surprisingly fast rates…. The glaciers are responding to warm ocean waters that now reach much closer to East Antarctica’s icy edge than in years past — and might continue to do so.”
Keeping Clothes Out of the Garbage 
[Anthropocene, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-18] 
“The industry, driven by fast fashion, has steadily become one of the most serious polluters in the world. Clothing manufacture was never exactly tidy, what with toxic dyes, copious amounts of water needed for growing fiber and processing fabrics, and waste from factories. But in 2015, carbon emissions from clothes surpassed those emitted from all international flights and all maritime shipping combined. Cotton, for example, uses more pesticides than any other crop—and organic cotton takes up more land and much more water than conventionally grown cotton. At the same time, clothes are worn for less time than they ever have been previously.” • This is a very good summary, and it reinforces what we’ve all discussed: The post-NAFTA crapifcaiton of clothing.
The best and worst cities in America for public transportation, according to an urban planner [interview]
[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-18]
What is Paris, for instance, doing that the US isn’t? 
They converted their commuter rail network into an all-day, seven-day-a-week service rather than lines that are only targeted at 9-to-5 commuters. In doing that, they also dug whole new tunnels under the city and actually transformed commuter rail network into a true regional rail network, which no city in the US has done. 
Even in New York, northern New Jersey is one of the densest places in the US with very poor transit service, very little frequent service. Its buses come every half-hour, maybe. And it has, right in the core of those areas, some very high-quality rail infrastructure with very low-quality service. Like, a train every hour, and there’s enough demand there to fill a train every 10 to 15 minutes all day if it really was integrated as part of the transit network rather that treated solely as an express service to New York City. 
Paris has also taken some major amounts of street space in the city center to install some really high-quality tram rail lines that are carrying a lot of people. And they are building new subway lines through the heart of Paris and connecting to some of the outlying neighborhoods. [It’s] a huge investment on the scale that a US city has not really contemplated. And they’re doing all that at the same time.
Fluor, Walsh win design/build for Chicago subway
[Railway Age 12-14-18]
The Red and Purple Line Modernization Program is the largest capital spending project in the history of the Windy City’s transit system. The project includes designing and building new elevated tracks along a 1.9 mile section in the city.
China Railway orders more CR400AF high-speed trains
[Railway Age 12-14-18]
The order comprises 15 eight-car and three 16-car sets and follows on from an initial contract for 10 trains, which was signed in September. Delivery of trains from the initial batch is due to be completed this month.

Virgin Galactic’s Unity Blazes Trail To Space
Guy Norris, December 14, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
Unity’s Dec. 13 flight marked its fourth rocket-powered test and the first to achieve the goal of exo-atmospheric flight set by Richard Branson 14 years ago.
Branson's Vision of the Future
Richard Branson, December 14, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
"As important and ambitious as SpaceShipTwo and LauncherOne are, they are not an endpoint but rather one step." Read Richard Branson's thoughts on the future of space exploration.
But by harnessing the Earth's natural internal heat to warm a greenhouse, oranges and other tropical treats thrive without the waste and pollution typically found in so much agriculture. Finch’s structure is a take on a walipini – a brilliant design that TreeHugger has written about (and which remains one of our most popular posts: Build a $300 underground greenhouse for year-round gardening).

As Grant Gerlock writes at NPR, the floor is dug 4 feet below the surface, the roof is slanted toward the south to harness as much sun as it can. In the daytime it can warm well into the 80s (F) inside, but at night the temperature drops, which is when the geothermal heat is called in. 
"All we try to do is keep it above 28F degrees in the winter," Finch says. "We have no backup system for heat. The only heat source is the Earth's heat, at 52F degrees at 8-foot deep."
‘You don’t just get to say that you’re progressive’: The left moves to defend its brand
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-18]
So many Democratic presidential prospects are now claiming the progressive mantle in advance of the 2020 primaries that liberal leaders are trying to institute a measure of ideological quality control, designed to ensure the party ends up with a nominee who meets their exacting standards. 
Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are discussing policy platforms that could serve as a litmus test for presidential contenders. Progressive donors, meanwhile, are plotting steps — ranging from closer engagement with campaigns to ultimatums tied to fundraising — to ensure that "Medicare for All," debt-free college and a non-militaristic foreign policy, among other causes, remain at the center of the upcoming campaign. In an effort to winnow the burgeoning field, progressive advocacy groups are beginning to poll supporters in the hopes of elevating candidates who gain the imprimatur of the left.

Why Is The Center For American Progress Betraying The Left?
[Current Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 12-14-18]
“The Center for American Progress does not just accept shady donations. It also gives them. Journalist Andrew Perez reported that according to financial disclosure forms, CAP donated $200,000 last year to the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is a right-wing free-market think tank perhaps best known as the longtime home of racist social scientist Charles Murray.”
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]

Ships Infected With Ransomware, USB Malware, Worms 
[ZDNet, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]

[Motherboard, via Naked Capitalism 12-13-18]

Economics: The Discipline That Refuses to Change. Behavioral economics upended the idea that humans act solely in their rational self-interest. So why do most undergrads barely learn anything about the field?
Posted by Tony Wikrent at 10:43 AM

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