Week-end Wrap - December 29, 2018
by Tony WikrentEconomics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
A Short Crash Course in American Political Economy
Tony Wikrent, November 25, 2016 [Real Economics]
...Economic equality is basic to a republic because, the idea was, no person can be fully independent and be a good citizen if their livelihood depends to some extent or other on another person’s largess, benevolence, or tolerance. This was the basis of the fight between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians. Jefferson believed that only farmers who owned their own land were independent enough to honestly exercise the duties of citizenship. Jefferson wanted to delay the advent of industrialization and subservient factory labor as long as possible. This is why Jefferson acceded to the Louisiana Purchase, which he would otherwise have opposed on the grounds that the federal government has no express power to acquire so vast territory. [2] With the Louisiana Purchase, yeoman squeezed out of the established eastern seaboard would be able to cross the mountains, and buy, steal, or somehow take the land of the native Americans and set themselves up as independent farmers, thus extending in both space and time Jefferson’s ideal agrarian republic.\
Hamilton, by contrast, understood that the economy could not be frozen in time and remain entirely agrarian. Industrialization HAD to not only proceed, but be encouraged [3], for the USA to have any chance of resisting the intrigues and hostility of the European powers – which remained committed to eradicating the American experiment in self-government until the US Civil War. (France and Spain landed troops in Mexico and Caribbean at the beginning of the war; the Mexican republic was eliminated and Maximilian, younger brother of Austrian emperor Francis Joseph I, was installed as puppet emperor. The British government of Lord Palmerston was preparing to land troops in Canada in 1862, but was deterred by the pro-USA street fighting in London and elsewhere which was led by the British allies of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.)
Hamilton’s great insight was that economic development depended entirely on improving the productive powers of labor. This meant the development of science and technology, and the spread of machinery to replace muscle power, both animal and human. The correct view of Hamilton must be precise: it was not that Hamilton sought to encourage and protect wealth, but to encourage and protect the CREATION of wealth. (Read Section II, Subsection 2, “As to an extension of the use of Machinery...” in Hamilton’s December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, if you want something to read today.)
This is where Marxist analysis fails catastrophically. Yes, much of economic history is that of elites accumulating wealth through exploitation, fraud, and violence. BUT: how was that wealth which is stolen created in the first place? Thorstein Veblen, and his discussions of industrial organization versus business organization, are far more useful in understanding the COMPLETE economic story, not just the exploitation side of it....Get Used to It, America: We’re No Longer No. 1
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 12-23-18]
....the economies of China and the U.S. are now fairly evenly matched in size. But with four times the U.S. population, China has more room to grow. And China is already the world’s largest manufacturer and biggest exporter....
The biggest effect will be that China becomes the leading beneficiary of what economists call agglomeration effects. Agglomeration refers to the tendency of businesses to cluster together in the same region, because one company’s workers are another’s customers. As economists Paul Krugman, Masahisa Fujita and Anthony Venables showed two decades ago, agglomeration can bring big benefits to whatever region has the densest concentration of economic activity.
Increasingly, that region is China rather than the U.S. China is where the biggest markets are, so that’s where multinational companies want to build their factories and offices. That in turn leads to whole supply chains migrating to China, as companies try to locate near their upstream suppliers and downstream customers.
Medicare Will Be Good for Everyone — Except CEOs
Interview of Robert Pollin [Jacobin], via Naked Capitalism 12-28-18]
"[The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts] shows we could cover everyone in the United States with no copays and cut overall health spending by almost a fifth.” Pollin: “Officially we have about 9 percent uninsured at present. But if you look at the Commonwealth Fund, which does very good studies, their survey data shows we have about 26 percent of the population underinsured. By our definition of underinsured, these are people that did not get treatment because it was too expensive. It was going to create a hardship in terms of their budget, so they just didn’t get the treatment.” And: “Administration [9% of total costs], pharmaceutical pricing [6%], and Medicare rates for providers [3%] are the biggest [money-savers under #MedicareForAll]. That gets you to 19 percent total savings to operate Medicare for All compared to our existing system.”
As a grocery chain is dismantled, investors recover their money. Worker pensions are short millions.
[Washington Post, via Flipboard 12-29-18]
The 2018 Retail Apocalypse, in 6 Charts and a Map
[CityLab, via Flipboard 12-29-18]
Austerity results in ‘social murder’ according to new research
[Phys.org, via Naked Capitalism 12-8-18]
“The consequence of austerity in the social security system—severe cuts to benefits and the ‘ratcheting up’ of conditions attached to benefits—is ‘social murder’, according to new research by Lancaster University. Dr. Chris Grover, who heads the University’s Sociology Department, says austerity can be understood as a form of structural violence, violence that is built into society and is expressed in unequal power and unequal life chances, as it is deepens inequalities and injustices, and creates even more poverty.”
A drug smuggler built a predatory lending company while free on bail. Now the complaints are piling up.
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-18]
US Corporations Are Micromanaging Curricula to Miseducate Students
Eve Ottenberg, December 26, 2018 [Truthout, via Vicki Boyer]
Open inquiry scarcely figures in corporate-funded curricula, according to Gerald Coles’s recently published book, Miseducating for the Global Economy. Coles points to materials developed by the Bill of Rights Institute (an organization created by the billionaire Koch brothers) as an example of the ideological distortions present in corporate-funded educational materials. For example, the curriculum developed by the institute teaches students that “the Occupy movement violated the rights of others.”
....This book also discusses the Khan Academy’s digital curriculum, observing that, “by 2012 Khan Academy videos had been viewed more than 200 million times by ‘6 million unique students each month.’” By 2017, Khan Academy had nearly 57 million users. Founded by former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan, the Khan Academy offers lessons that promote personal freedom and strong limits on government intervention, as opposed to “collectivist” programs like Social Security....
Miseducating for the Global Economy lists six imperatives that structure corporate-funded curricula:
1) the global economy must be presented as a natural phenomenon;
2) schools must be silent about the global economy’s hierarchical structure;
3) the global economy’s nature is not open to critical inquiry;
4) the curriculum must assume there are winners and losers, and the student’s job is to get an education to become a winner;
5) schooling assumes the legitimacy of businesses paying people as little as possible; and
6) schools must not teach about the global economy’s harm to the Earth and its ecology.
Corporate curricula thus have an agenda – promoting capitalism at the expense of open inquiry – which also spills over into the corporate attack on public education. “Schools are scapegoated for the failures of the economic system,” Coles writes, arguing that corporations, responsible for a growing economic “precariat” (the population whose temporary or part-time work is precarious) in the US, palm off the blame onto schools with a dubious narrative about an abundance of high-skilled jobs, for which schools are not preparing Americans. This narrative is a lie. There is no such abundance, just capitalism’s aim to focus attention elsewhere while it fails to create high-paying jobs, leaving the service sector as the fastest-growing US employer. Coles exposes corporate hypocrisy on this point by detailing how U S corporations contrive to underfund education, primarily through tax evasion....
Overall, Coles argues that schools really do meet corporations’ need for exploitable service sector workers. In fact, “the worst nightmare for corporate leaders and the rich would be universal school success, in which vast numbers of graduates were fully able to do the purported extraordinary number of STEM jobs said to be awaiting them in the grand global economy.”The Global Power Elite: A Transnational Class
[The Real News Network, December 26, 2018]
Peter Phillips, the author of the book, Giants: The Global Power Elite, examines the roles and networks of the world’s richest and most powerful. This class is no longer bound to national concerns, only to the expansion of its own power, says Phillips.
[Dandelion Salad, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-18]
Historically, the core definition of the left has been solidarity with the working class (everyone who depends on wages to live), which includes the majority of people of all races and genders. But a new definition has taken hold among American/Western/college-educated liberals and progressives, as well as socialists and marxists, who are perceived and think of themselves as on the “left”, and it has given rise to a new pattern of solidarity. These leftists have trained themselves to quickly embrace movements defined in terms of race and gender. Critical interrogation will come from within an assumed position of solidarity, and it will usually be in terms of those categories: Does your racial justice movement x have the right attitude and/or demographics in terms of gender?
Much less frequently and urgently, and virtually never as a condition of support, will a race or gender movement be interrogated regarding its position—its attitude and demographics—in terms of class.
There’s a different default setting for working-class movements. They will almost always be looked upon with suspicion, until and unless they prove their attitudinal and demographic race and gender bona fides to the satisfaction of American/Western/college-educated “leftists.” That interrogation has effectively become a prior condition of solidarity for working-class movements. Leftists have adopted a kind of checklist of concerns, and class has moved way down.
So that’s been affecting the slow uptake of left support and coverage of Yellow Vest movement, which is, centrally and unashamedly, a working-class movement. Though the spark was a hike in the diesel gas tax, the flame quickly engulfed a wide range of issues. Far from being an “anti-tax” revolt, as some on the right and the left rushed to characterize it, Yellow Vest has called for the re-imposition of the wealth tax that Macron had so kindly abolished for the French elite. Fundamentally, it’s an eruption of a lot of people who are rightly raging about economic inequality....
When we see a “Center for American Progress (CAP), progressive, feminist,” like Neera Tanden tweeting, from the checklist: “I don’t understand why any progressive is cheering French protesters who are amassing against a carbon tax,” and a correspondent for the “leftist” French publication Libération, calling Yellow Vest a “movement of hicks” or a “band of polluting oafs, addicted to their cars, who need to be dealt with by the police,” we are seeing the sorry, degraded, utterly clueless state of what passes for the left....
A crucial point about the EU and the key role of the Euro is perfectly summarized by Greg Palast (echoing Hudson): “currency union is class war by other means.”
Palast explains: “The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.”
Palast’s “progenitor” is University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell, who “produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.” Mundell hated the fact that, in his words: “It’s very hard to fire workers in Europe,” so he designed a tool that would make it easier. As Palast says, the Euro was designed specifically to “remov[e] a government’s control over currency.. [and be] a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations.” And Mundell, its architect, said it himself: “It [the Euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians, [And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.”The Roots of Venezuela’s Economic Crisis
[The Real News Network, December 28, 2018]
As US sanctions against Venezuela take an ever-greater toll on the country and its people, it is important to understand how the sanctions work and the extent of the damage they have caused, say Steve Ellner and Greg Wilpert, in a joint analysis of the situation
[Washington Center for Equitable Growth, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-18]
Recent empirical investigations into U.S. labor markets no longer allow reasonable economists to bury their heads in the sand about market power and assume that workers’ wages are simply equal to the value of their marginal product or service. There’s now insurmountable evidence that monopsony power is prevalent throughout the U.S. economy, though the degree to which it may contribute to widening income inequality and underemployment remains an open question. These findings imply that employers can siphon off “rents”—economic parlance for excessive profits beyond the cost of production—from workers through the exercise of monopsony power. These findings are the complete opposite of the dynamic formulated in most current labor market models.
In our new Washington Center for Equitable Growth working paper, “Monopsony and Collective Action in an Institutional Context,” we seek to better understand the theoretical implications of this new and growing empirical literature on monopsony power and the resulting lower wages for workers. We construct a monopsony-wage model that integrates the strategic interaction between workers and employers in the wage-setting process into an institutional context where we consider the support, or lack thereof, of institutions such as the government and the courts for workers, as opposed to firms....
One of the main findings of our work is that unions, and collective labor action in general, are rent-reducing and efficiency-enhancing when monopsony power is present. Essentially, collective action neutralizes, to some degree, the wage-setting power of firms by reducing the rent that firms siphon from workers via their wage-setting power. Increases in wages may reduce profits but will decrease rents. This is completely contradictory to how most economists conceive of workers’ collective action, which they see as costly and rent-seeking. But this misplaced view is contingent on the starting point of whether monopsony power exists....
Indeed, the largest employer in the United States today is Walmart Inc., which is famously opposed to any type of collective worker activities. Several studies demonstrate that a Walmart store moving into a community decreases wages.Working-Class Journalism in the Age of Oligarchs
Barbara Ehrenreich [In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-18]
At the beginning of my career, I could earn enough to support my family, at however minimal a level. But starting in the 1990s that began to change. Newspapers and other news outlets were taken over by large corporations that were concerned only about the bottom line. They cut their staffs, including journalists, and closed those magazines and newspapers that weren’t making enough money, at least by the standards of their new owners, with the result that, today, writers aren’t paid well when they’re paid at all.
To make things worse, I often chose to write about poverty—about all the people who are left out of America’s fabulous wealth, who try to get by on about $10 and hour while raising children and paying exorbitant prices for rent and medical care. This seems so unfair to me, so easily fixable. Why not, for example, open up the empty sky-high apartments of the super-rich as squats for the homeless while their super-rich owners are off in London or the Caribbean?
But this, of course, is not the kind of thing that the new super-rich owners of the media business want to hear. I found the demand for my kinds of stories diminishing. Editors urged me to write less about economic inequality and more about “feminine” topics like the first lady’s fashion choices and the secrets of success of female CEOs. I could no longer make a living in journalism, and had to find other ways to support myself.
Lori Wallach [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
“On the upside, NAFTA’s outrageous investor privileges and ISDS tribunals are dramatically reined in under NAFTA 2.0… For Mexico, ISDS is replaced by a new approach: Whereas ISDS allows investors to skirt domestic courts, the new process requires investors to use such courts to resolve disputes with a government until the highest available domestic court rules, or until two and a half years pass with no resolution. In the latter case, an investor can seek compensation—but only for limited claims…. The five other investor protections in NAFTA that have resulted in almost all payouts so far are eliminated in the new agreement….. However, unless the final deal includes strong labor and environmental standards that are subject to swift and certain enforcement—which is not the case with the NAFTA 2.0 text—US firms will continue to outsource jobs, pay Mexican workers poverty wages, and dump toxins in Mexico. Absent a remedy to this fundamental failing, NAFTA 2.0 will face broad opposition.”Foxconn to begin assembling top-end Apple iPhones in India in 2019 – source
[Street Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
“Apple Inc will begin assembling its top-end iPhones in India through the local unit of Foxconn as early as 2019, the first time the Taiwanese contract manufacturer will have made the product in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter. Importantly, Foxconn will be assembling the most expensive models, such as devices in the flagship iPhone X family, the source said, potentially taking Apple’s business in India to a new level. The work will take place at Foxconn’s plant in Sriperumbudur town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, said the source, who is not authorized to speak to the media and so declined to be named.”Hmm, so the new Apple phone will be made by Foxconn in India, not Scott Walker's Wisconsin...
Water is getting scarcer. Is foreign investment making the problem worse?
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
“Researchers have focused on how climate change accelerates the problems caused by water scarcity. My research points to an important additional factor: foreign investment…. Our statistical analyses show that more foreign investment into Indian states in a given year is associated with lower levels of potable water access in subsequent years, with the poorest areas hit the hardest. We find that investment in water-intensive manufacturing and highly polluting industries increases competition for a limited quantity of fresh water, while also affecting water quality. States with larger proportions of marginalized and poor populations see the greatest negative effects of foreign investment on water supplies.”
The Farm Bureau: Big Oil’s Unnoticed Ally Fighting Climate Science and Policy
[Inside Climate News, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
“For more than three decades, the Farm Bureau has aligned agriculture closely with the fossil fuel agenda. Though little noticed next to the influence of the fossil fuel industry, the farm lobby pulled in tandem with the energy lobby in a mutually reinforcing campaign to thwart the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, legislation like the Waxman-Markey economywide cap-and-trade plan, and regulations that would limit fossil fuel emissions…. Linda Prokopy and colleagues at Purdue and Iowa State universities found in surveys in 2011 and 2012 that while 66 percent of corn producers said they believed climate change was occurring, only 8 percent said human activities were the main cause. A quarter thought natural variations were at work, and a full 31 percent said there wasn’t enough information to show that global warming was underway.”10 Costliest Climate-Driven Extreme Weather Events of 2018 Caused at Least $84.8B in Damage: AnalysisJessica Corbett [Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-18]
EPA Proposes Rule Change That Would Let Power Plants Release More Toxic Pollution
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 12-29-18]
The Guy Who Taught Trump to Tweet Owes Us All a Goddamn Apology
[GQ, via The Big Picture 12-23-18]
Yes, the guy has actually been identified and interviewed. Meet Justin McConney, whose father was controller of Trump Organization.
The Guy Who Taught Trump to Tweet Owes Us All a Goddamn Apology
[GQ, via The Big Picture 12-23-18]
Yes, the guy has actually been identified and interviewed. Meet Justin McConney, whose father was controller of Trump Organization.
As Trump grew more enchanted with social media's potential to boost his Q score, though, he began calling at all hours to dictate tweets about whatever was on his mind—Rosie O'Donnell, the latest Anthony Weiner scandal—to McConney, who sounds as if he was slowly realizing that he had taken the worst fucking job in the world.Notes on the Latest Crusade
[Paganarch, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
The assertion that one section of the poor which Capital exploits must be held to account (or as the person said to me in that cafe, “be shot in the face”) before other sections of the poor can find liberation is precisely why no leftist struggle in the United States has come even close to threatening the powerful.
Such failures are directly linked to the refusal of social justice adherents to articulate any coherent criticism of capitalism. Instead, to their view it’s the fault of all white men (whether they be Donald Trump or a homeless guy) that a trans person of color can’t afford her rent or groceries, a ressentiment repeating the form (though not the content) of the conspiracy theorist.
This NBC News story accusing Bernie of waging a “war” on Beto was written by a former staffer for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a former staffer at @NeeraTanden’s Center for American Progress. nbcnews.com/politics/2020-…
With Beto O’Rourke as Lightning Rod, Corporate Democrats Aim to Stifle Criticism
[Counterpunch 12-27-18]
Stacey Abrams has joined the Center for American Progress’ board of directors
Stacey Abrams has joined the Center for American Progress’ board of directors
[Albany Herald, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
Lambert Strether notes: "So much for Stacey Abrams, though in retrospect I suppose Council on Foreign Relations membership would have been a tell."
[Matt Taibbi [Rolling Stone via Naked Capitalism 12-28-18]
“[T]he Sanders platform would massively disenfranchise the traditional financial backers of the modern Democratic Party: Wall Street, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, Silicon Valley, lobbyists and corporate law firms, etc. Whether it’s now or later, whoever takes on those interests is going to take a hell of a beating. That Sanders seems willing to be that person seems reason enough to embrace another run. Someone has to take up those fights eventually. It might be a while before anyone else volunteers for the job.”Is America Really Up Against An Internal Fascist Threat?
[DownWithTyranny, 12-26-18]
....conservatives don't see a way forward for the Republican Party within the confines of democracy. The radical right-- and not just a morons like Trump-- is done playing by a set of rules that they feel are stacked against them. And that means anything goes.\
Conservatives freaked out when people without property were allowed to vote, when ex-slaves and their descendants were allowed to vote, when women were allowed to vote, when young people were allowed to vote. They flip out when their schemes to prevent voting by groups unlikely to embrace conservatism are prohibited and when their endeavors to water down the vote of those people are declared unconstitutional. Ever since the Patriots beat the British and their conservative American allies in the late 1770s, conservatives have felt they've never gotten a break.
Trump's buffoon-like reflexive fascism was easier for conservatives to embrace than it would have been if they thought they could get anywhere without the populists, nationalists and, yes, fascists, who worship him. Over the weekend Jeremy Rosner from the quintessential Democratic establishment polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, wrote an OpEd for The Hill, The Democratic and Anti-democratic parties, explaining a realignment of America’s two major parties that will not be mostly defined by demographics but by ideas about democracy and the rule of law. "To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party."Iowa county elects its first black woman, so GOP decides it should change the whole electoral system
[DailyKos 12-27-18]
On the road in the Karakoram
[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-18]
The snowed-over Khunjerab Pass, at 4,934 meters... is ground zero of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the point where the revamped, upgraded Karakoram Highway – “the eighth wonder of the world” – snakes away from China’s Xinjiang all the way to Pakistan’s Northern Areas and further south to Islamabad and Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea.
Electrical/Electronics Industry Now Even With Auto Makers in Purchasing Manufacturing Robots
International Federation of Robotics
The adoption of industrial robots continues to accelerate, with 30% annual growth in sales in 2017. Over 381,000 robots were sold to production industries in 2017, over twice the number sold in 2013. Over 2 million robots are now at work in industry. That number will almost double by the end of 2021, according to the IFR’s new ‘World Robotics 2018, Industrial Robots’ report.
For many years the automotive sector has been the driver of robot sales to manufacturing. This is changing rapidly. The electrical /electronics (E&E) industry will soon become the dominant sector for robot sales. In 2012, twice the number of robots were sold to automotive manufacturers than to the E&E sector. In 2017, the share of supply to the automotive sector was only 1 percentage point more than the share of sales to E&E firms. By 2021, there will be more robots installed in electronics /electrical firms than in automotive manufacturers (based on 2017 growth rates). It could be sooner, given that technology developments in the automotive industry - such as connected and autonomous vehicles, and electric cars – are driven by electronics. The installed base of robots used to produce electrical/ electronic parts for cars has grown at an average annual rate of 45% since 2012.
Growth in robot sales to the E&E industry is in part linked to the growth of the industry itself. The E&E market was worth €4 trillion in 2016 and is forecast to grow at over 4% per year to 20191. Asia accounted for over 85% of robot sales to the E&E sector in 2017 – not surprising, given the region produces around three quarters of the world’s electronics2. Vietnam – now the second-biggest exporter of smartphones in the world - rose to become the seventh largest robot market globally, spurred by a five-fold increase in robot sales in 2017. An expanding E&E sector is also behind the 52% annual increase in robot sales in Malaysia in 2017.Why Japan leads industrial robot production
International Federation of Robotics
Japan is the world’s leading supplier of industrial robots. Japanese industrial robot manufacturers delivered just over half (almost 55%) of industrial robots supplied in 2017 – 39% more than in 2016.
Japan is not only a leading manufacturer and exporter of robots, it is also a leading robot adopter. With 297,200 industrial robots at work in Japan in 2017, Japan had the second highest installed base of industrial robots in 2017 (after China with 473,400 units)....
Manga comics and animations have had a much stronger cultural influence on interest in robotics. Robots are often depicted as children’s’ friends in mangas, and the post 1950s generation, who grew up with these mangas, learned about friendship, courage, justice and charity through stories that included robots....
Labour shortages continue to be a driver for robot adoption in Japan, not just in the automotive sector. Japan’s working age population has declined by 13 percent from the peak in 1995 to 75.96 million last year, and a further shortfall is forecast. The introduction of robots is regarded as one of the solutions to this problem, which affects many sectors in Japan. Among these are some sectors where demand for robots is especially high – logistics, nursing and elderly care, agriculture, inspecting and maintaining aging public infrastructure, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ work in service and non-manufacturing sectors.Report: Wind speeds are declining in Northern Hemisphere
[Greentech Media, via American Wind Energy Association 12-26-18]
Wind speeds have been declining in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere over the past 40 years due to urban growth and other factors, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Purdue University. "It should be of particular concern to operational wind farms whose financials are based on resource estimates which don't factor in lower future wind speeds," says GCube senior analyst Geoffrey Taunton-Collins.How has electrical generation changed in the US since 2001?
[The New York Times (12/24), via American Wind Energy Association 12-25-18]
The US energy mix has changed a lot since 2001, with natural gas surpassing coal as the nation's leading energy source and renewables like wind and solar seeing rapid growth, according to a New York Times analysis of Energy Information Administration data. Iowa, for example, sourced 1% of its total electricity needs from wind in 2001, compared with nearly 40% in 2017.
With CRRC in Springfield ready to deliver 1st MBTA Orange Line cars, China trade war worries loom
[MassLive, via Naked Capitalism Comments 12-24-18]
For NJ Transit, another rolling stock innovation
[Railway Age, 12-13-18]
After an initial order announced Wednesday, by 2026 New Jersey Transit will have replaced its entire fleet of aging single-level cars with nearly 650 new Bombardier multilevels, many of which will be powered electric vehicles, the first of their type in North America.
Amtrak orders 75 Siemens Chargers
[Railway Age, 12-26-18]
Amtrak will acquire 75 new Siemens Charger diesel locomotives for $850 million to replace aging Genesis power in its National Network locomotive fleet, a sign that, amid withering criticism, it is still investing in the long distance passenger rail market.Regulators warn on Siemens-Alstom merger
[Railway Age, 12-26-18]
Officials from Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain have written to European Union competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, warning that the Siemens-Alstom merger could have detrimental impacts on the rail equipment market.Israel announces three-line Tel Aviv metro network
[Railway Age, 12-20-18]
A metro network consisting of three lines will be built in Tel Aviv, Israel’s minister of transport and intelligence, Mr Yisrael Katz, announced on December 12. The metro network will be built in addition to the three light rail lines currently under construction. The Tel Aviv metro network is estimated to cost between 100–150B shekels ($26.5–39.7B) with more than 130km of underground lines and more than 100 stations. Ridership is estimated at 1.5 million passengers a day and 450 million a year.Rio Tinto hits $1.3b driverless Pilbara trains target
[West Australian, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
A Yale scientist who pioneered a cutting-edge approach to cancer treatment is warning that the field is going off-course — and that drug giants could be making it worse
A Yale scientist who pioneered a cutting-edge approach to cancer treatment is warning that the field is going off-course — and that drug giants could be making it worse
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
Sustainable ‘plastics’ are on the horizon
[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-18]
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-18]
Looking Back at 2018: Spaceflight
[Aviation Week & Space Technology 12-27-18]
[Aviation Week & Space Technology 12-27-18]
It was a year of progress and contrasts in space, from the edge of space to Mars to a probe grazing the Sun to a sample-return rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid.
Looking Back at 2018: Propulsion Technology
Graham Warwick, December 28, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
Graham Warwick, December 28, 2018 [Aviation Week & Space Technology]
New turboprops, big turbofans and the electrification of aircraft propulsion led the news in 2018 as developments in powerplant technology continued to set the pace for advances in aerospace.
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