Sunday, February 3, 2019

Week-end Wrap - February 2, 2019

Week-end Wrap - February 2, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

A Serious Green New Deal Would Take Up One-Third of the Economy—Are We Ready for That?
Marshall Auerback, February 2, 2019  [Economy for All, (Independent Media Institute), via Naked Capitalism 2-2-19]
There’s no question that deep pockets will be needed, given the scale of the task at hand. Multi-trillion-dollar levels of spending, in fact, will be necessary if we want to follow what the science is telling us needs to be done.... From a practical standpoint, it would make sense to offer parallel incentives to the fossil fuel investor class; rather than have them drag their heels, why not entice them into a profitable line of business?

Absent this alternative use, the source of the demand will be met by the Far East, and the Green New Deal will become a job creation program for Asia, not the United States (as well as creating huge unemployment). We will therefore face a very difficult trade-off between heavy protectionism (at much higher prices) to stimulate investment in productive capacity in the United States or much larger trade deficits.

Ironically, as Jon Rynn, a fellow at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems, notes in his book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The Power to Rebuild the American Middle Class, “suburban sprawl” came about by virtue of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal government spending via Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, and the G.I. Billthat provided loans to millions of returning soldiers to buy homes (and make builders like Fred Trump rich), the build-out of suburban water and road infrastructure. An infrastructure bill therefore cannot simply modernize existing structures, but can and must help to reverse these trends by featuring more public transport and more public housing in densely populated areas. 
Above all else, labor must not simply be treated as a rounding error in this process. As Brian Kohler put it, if environmentalists and politicians aiming for a sustainable economy “fail to understand the jobs issue, you will create a confrontation that you cannot win. You will force us into an alliance with our employers and you, we, society and the environment will all be the losers.”
Will the Green New Deal work? Here's what the researchsays.
Francie Diep, January 24, 2019 [Pacific Standard - psmag.com 1-24-19]
I think these numbers are on the low, low side. They begin at $200 billion. As the above article notes at beginning, it's going to be a couple trillion.
If you're looking for numbers, this report is the closest thing I've seen to quantifying the Green New Deal. It published in 2014, at the behest of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. A team of economists from the University of Massachusetts­–Amherst calculated what would be needed to cut the U.S.'s carbon emissions by 40 percent in 20 years. The study found that the American government and private companies would have to invest a collective $200 billion a year, the government should collect about $200 billion a year in carbon taxes, about 1.5 million jobs would be destroyed, and 4.2 million new jobs would be created. 
"We could extrapolate, based on the work that we've done here, just to get some really rough numbers," says Heidi Peltier, one of the researchers who worked on the report. So: If a 40 percent emissions cut cost $200 billion a year and created a net 2.7 million jobs, then a 100 percent emissions cut might cost $800 billion a year and create a net 6.8 million jobs. "It's not necessarily going to be linear like that, but it might give us a ballpark, at least," Peltier says.

Updated employment multipliers for the U.S. economy
Josh Bivens, January 23, 2019 [Economic Policy Institute, via Rick Summers]
Production in a given economic sector involves linkages with other sectors—that is, production in one industry depends on suppliers in other industries (backward linkages), while wages earned in the production and supplier sectors are spent in other economic sectors (forward linkages). In the case of automobile production, there are backward linkages to industries that produce tires, glass for windshields, and steel for automobile frames (among many others). Forward linkages occur when automobile workers (and suppliers’ employees) spend their income in restaurants and retail stores and at the doctor (to name just a few). 
Industries that are heavy users of materials are vital to their suppliers. If an automobile factory were to close, its suppliers in the glass, steel, and rubber industries would have a big hole to fill in demand for their own output. Industries that pay higher wages are vital to their forward-linked industries. If a steel factory closed, surrounding restaurants and retail malls would also have a big hole to fill in demand for their output.
The power of workers organized

Air Traffic Controllers Defeated Trump. That’s Worker Power
[Portside, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19] 
“Controllers simply stayed home. No federal law prohibits federal employees from getting sick or calling in sick. And who’s to say it was coordinated? Today, the internet can spread information about a voluntary walkout as quickly and efficiently as any centralized coordinator. The larger story is that public workers who lack any formal power to strike – but have the informal power not to work – are becoming a new force in American politics and labor relations. Look what teachers accomplished last year by walking out of their classrooms in the unlikeliest of places – West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina. Most of these are Republican “right-to-work” states that bar strikes by public employees.”
How air traffic controllers helped end the shutdown — and changed history
Joseph A. McCartin, January 26, 2019 [Washington Post, via NC AFL-CIO]

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]
Most of the post-shutdown coverage has focused on horse-race level analysis: Did Trump lose and did Pelosi win? My answer is neither: Workers in the airline industry (air traffic controllers and flight attendants) won. Their collective action happened at the national level, and showed that they can use their position in our complex and fragile supply chain for political purposes. That’s a far bigger story than the teachers strikes, 
The single most important pro-labor speech of the shutdown was not given by AOC
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19] 
“Yet, the Jan. 20 impassioned speech given by Association of Flight Attendants CWA International President Sara Nelson deserves not to be lost in that blur because it grasped the potential power of organizing a national general strike in support of 800,000 Federal workers and their families… ‘We need to follow Dr. King’s lead and think big,’ Nelson said. ‘Think big like the hotel workers who took on the largest hotel chain in the world and won. Think big, like the teachers in Los Angeles who this very minute are taking on powerful hedge funds to save public education for our children…. Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together — To end this shutdown with a general strike.” … When Nelson appeared on MSNBC after that speech she wasn’t asked about her radical, but essential call for a general strike.”
In 13 Years of Education Reporting, So Much Has Changed 
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]  
“I’ve been reporting on education for 13 years, but I am absolutely stunned by the extent to which teachers’ strikes and walkouts are now a day-to-day part of my job. The Los Angeles action was the eighth mass teacher protest I’ve reported on in just 11 months, shutting down schools for one million students across the country…. I was at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, when one of the hottest tickets was to a panel discussion in which rising stars in the party, including Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, spoke harshly of teachers’ unions and their opposition to charter schools… Back then, it was hip for young Democrats to be like Barack Obama, supportive of school choice and somewhat critical of teachers’ unions. But now, the winds have changed pretty drastically.”
Class War

Trump is just riding Obama's economy
@aaronsojourner [via The Big Picture 2-2-19]



Historian blasts billionaires in Davos: Talk about paying your taxes ... 'all the rest is bullsh*t'
Walter Einenkel, January 30, 2019 [Daily Kos]
During a panel called “The Cost of Inequality,” [Danish] historian Rutger Bregman was allowed to speak, in what I am guessing will be known from now on as the last time he was invited to be on a panel at the World Economic Forum. 
Bregman: This is my first time at Davos and I find it quite a bewildering experience, to be honest. I mean 1,500 private jets flown in hear to hear Sir David Attenborough speak about, you know, how about wrecking the planet. And I mean I heard people talk in the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but then I mean almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share. I mean it feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one's allowed to speak about water, right? 
....10 years ago the World Economic Forum asked the question: What must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash? The answer is very simple: just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes.
Taxes. Just two days ago there was a billionaire in here—what's his name, Michael Dell—and he asks a question like name me one country where a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent has actually worked. 
You know I'm a historian. The United States. That's where it has actually worked. In the 1950s, during Republican President Eisenhower, the war veteran, the top marginal tax rate in the US was 91 percent for people like Michael Dell. The top estate tax for people like Michael Dell was more than 70 percent. I mean this is not rocket science. I mean we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes; we can invite Bono once more, come on! We gotta be talking about taxes taxes taxes. That's it! Taxes taxes taxes, all the rest is bullshit in my opinion. 
You can hear the audience get uncomfortable at Bregman’s use of the term “bullshit,”
[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]
Lambert Strether noted there are "Plenty of deliciously horrid details…"

‘We’re all passengers in a billionaire hijacking’ says the critic who has the world’s richest people buzzing 
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 2-2-19]
By 2015, Anand Giridharadas felt that the world he was inhabiting was built on a charade. 
As an Aspen Institute fellow for five years and a former McKinsey analyst, he lived and worked among a collection of elites who believed their exchange of ideas, philanthropy, and so-called conscious capitalism could "save the world." But it began to feel like "MarketWorld," a term he coined for the bubble where it's accepted that the private sector can fix anything with enough money.... 
Giridharadas spoke with Business Insider about Davos, the idea of "better capitalism," why he's so avidly against Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg as presidential candidates, and why he wants Americans to take back their country from billionaires.

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]
“The Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion cut tax package appeared to have no major impact on businesses’ capital investment or hiring plans, according to a survey released a year after the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years. The National Association of Business Economics’ (NABE) quarterly business conditions poll published on Monday found that while some companies reported accelerating investments because of lower corporate taxes, 84 percent of respondents said they had not changed plans. That compares to 81 percent in the previous survey published in October.”
Bill Gates says world poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong 
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19] 
There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s social media. 
What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south. 
Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.
I think the picture is even more complicated. I included this because I detest the claim by policy elites that world poverty has fallen so much. First of all, the country which made the greatest strides out of poverty the past half century has been China. So does that mean communism is the best way out of poverty? Or even "market communism"? Second, claiming half the world's population lived on one dollar a day 20 years ago, but only ten percent do now, does not impress me at all. You could triple such a person's income to three dollars a day, and they would still be in wretched poverty. without clean water, decent housing, good transportation, meaningful opportunities for education and employment.

Third I dislike the Malthusian implications of setting "subsistence economies" with "abundant commons" as a desideratum. Without industrialization, such a world economy could probably support no more than 500 million people. Who is willing to decide which 6.6 billion people should die, and inform them? And who might never have been born, and what would humanity have not gained by their not being born? This does not make colonialism and economic exploitation acceptable. It just makes understanding the history of the past, and understanding what is and is not constructive and progressive for humanity -- how useful economic productive capacity is created -- so as to intelligently and compassionately guide our planning for the future, that much more important.

Economics

[Quartz, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19] 
“The 2018 National Threat Assessment from the US intelligence community notes that the increasing scarcity of fresh water driven by climate change, urbanization, and development will affect human health and fuel economic and social discontent—and possibly upheaval. ‘Water scarcity, compounded by gaps in cooperative management agreements for nearly half of the world’s international river basins, and new unilateral dam development are likely to heighten tension between countries,’ the assessment says.”
A Tiny Screw Shows Why iPhones Won’t Be ‘Assembled in U.S.A.' 
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]  
“But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not. Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple’s manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day. The screw shortage was one of several problems that postponed sales of the computer for months, the people who worked on the project said. By the time the computer was ready for mass production, Apple had ordered screws from China. The challenges in Texas illustrate problems that Apple would face if it tried to move a significant amount of manufacturing out of China. Apple has found that no country — and certainly not the United States — can match China’s combination of scale, skills, infrastructure and cost.”
Lambert Strether notes: "However, if these screws are the special screws that Apple uses on its laptops to prevent users from repairing their own machines because it takes a special screwdriver to open the case… Well. forty years of neoliberal deindustrialization and the ensuing hysteresis aren’t the only problems, are they?"

An increasing number of unsheltered people must weather the polar vortex
[Pacific Standard - psmag.com 1-31-19]

How Houston has virtually ended homelessness among veterans
Rebecca Gale [Pacific Standard - psmag.com 1-31-19]
The coordinated efforts stemmed from a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) training in Florida in 2011, where heads of the Houston and Harris County housing authorities, directors of city and county housing development departments, the regional unit of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and those in Houston who were locally funded to do veterans work, sat together at one table to talk about Houston and Harris County's homelessness problem. The group that came out of that training, Housing Houston's Heroes, started off with a modest goal: to find permanent homes for 100 veterans in 100 days. 
They mapped out how many different steps a veteran would have to take to get into permanent housing and found that the process required over 150 different steps, from securing a photo ID and birth certificate to filling out nearly identical paperwork for the housing authority and the VA—the sort of bureaucratic obstacles that can be daunting for anyone, even the most organized professionals. 
"We got it down to 50-60 steps," says Eva Thibaudeau-Graczyk, vice president of programs for the Houston Coalition for the Homeless. The process of streamlining these steps included changing the documents required by the local housing authority to include alternate forms of ID, and having the VA and housing authority share paperwork.
"We started to learn the power of navigation, and take [homeless veterans] one-on-one through each step of the process," Thibaudeau-Graczyk says. "We'd drive them, wait with them, visit properties with them too." 
....In 2011, Houston had 8,538 people experiencing homelessness on a single night; by 2015, 3,652 of those people—the homeless veterans—had found homes.... But in the years that followed, even with improvements, the same accountability and streamlining efforts haven't worked as well with the non-veteran population. For one thing, homeless veterans benefit from more federal funding and increased public support.... 
The problems that accompany chronic homelessness—broken families, addiction, illness, and poverty—may have overlapping causes and solutions, but each homeless case requires individual attention and work. It's a time-intensive process without easy solutions, and the transient nature of a population with such unpredictable and rapidly changing circumstances means that it's hard to generate concrete metrics, which many federal programs require to show success.

An increasing number of unsheltered people must weather the polar vortex
Pacific Standard


Health Care

Wondering what’s going to be in the 2019 Medicare for All bill being prepared by Rep. Jayapal? [Physicians for a National Health Program, Facebook, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19]
“The most contentious part of the bill might be that it does not ban for-profit entities from participating, removing HR 676’s call for a buyout of for-profit providers. This has been an important piece from a quality and cost perspective. At least from the cost side, I see HR 676’s buying out the for-profits as creating a dramatic increase in short-term transition costs in order to accomplish meaningful long-term cost reduction. From a quality perspective, I’m doubtful but hopeful that the bill will have language that somewhat mitigates this concern. Historically, that’s rarely been effective. So in sum, I have some substantive concerns, but this is a democracy and I’m ready to get behind this bill full throttle.”

Millions of Americans Flood Into Mexico for Health Care — the Human Caravan You Haven’t Heard About
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 1-27-19]

State of emergency declared in US measles outbreak 
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 1-27-19]

Communities across the country are taking radical steps against plastic 
[AlterNet, via Naked Capitalism 1-27-19]

Democratic attacks on AOC expose the party’s fear of taking on moneyed interests
Matt Stoller [Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]

Ban on diesel vehicles drives Germans to the street – to protest
Will Duran, January 28, 2019 [Raleigh News & Observer, via NC AFL-CIO]

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]
“Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, has been revealed as a key funder of the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs – a consistent promoter of climate science scepticism…. According to Forbes, Rinehart was the seventh-richest woman in the world in 2017 and Australia’s richest person, with current wealth estimated to be $17.6bn."
Huge Cavity in Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay 
[NASA, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19]
 Warming Seas May Increase Frequency of Extreme Storms 
[Jet Propulsion Laboratory, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-19]

[Climate Liability News, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]

Extreme weather and geopolitics major drivers of increasing ‘food shocks’ 
[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-19]



Nathan Tankus@NathanTankus

A lot of leftists talking about climate change need to spend a lot of time reflecting whether their "sacrifice" narratives are a product of hard-nosed facing up to "reality" or are an ideological commitment to moralizing austerity.

165
1:46 PM - Jan 27, 2019
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The Natural Materials That Could Replace Environmentally Harmful Plastics 
[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 1-29-19]
How the South Manchuria Railway Shaped Modern China 
[Sixth Tone, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19]

What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free? 
[Fast Company], via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19] 
“[W]hile business owners initially worried about the city creating a ghost town that no one would visit, the opposite seems to be true; as in other cities that have converted some streets to pedestrian-only areas, the areas in Oslo that have been pedestrianized are some of the most popular parts of the city, Marcussen says. Last fall, after hundreds of parking spots had been removed, the city found that it had 10% more pedestrians in the center than the year before. ‘So that is telling me that we are doing something right,’ she says.”
Oscar Sinclair, January 28, 2019 [Railway Age]



Robotic Process Automation Takes Center Stage in 2019
[Machine Design Today 1-31-19]
We examine three developments to expect from robotic process automation in the months ahead.

4D Printing: A Revolution Across Industries
[Machine Design Today 1-31-19]
The market for self-assembling parts is already expected to exceed $64 million.

NIST Opens the Doors to Manufacturing’s Future: A Gallery
[Machine Design Today 1-31-19]
Here’s a look inside the labs of the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States Department of Commerce, and the tools and methods it’s developing to improve manufacturing.
[Huffington Post, via Naked Capitalism 2-119]  
Whatever Warren and Sanders say to establish their political brands, the two senators do in fact represent a very similar way of thinking about politics. That’s why billionaires hate them both.

The trouble for leftish intellectuals is a confusion over the terms “socialism” and “capitalism.” Both words are extremely flexible, and their meanings shift with political currents. In an American context, it has never been easy to distinguish between socialism and reformed capitalism ― and committed capitalists have denounced both with vigor. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was condemned as a socialist by congressional Republicans. In the 1940s, American conservatives viewed the social safety net in Britain and the Stalinist Soviet Union with almost equal alarm. By the 1950s, Herbert Hoover had concluded that the words “liberalism” and “socialism” really just meant the same thing.

So, yes, Bernie Sanders has long been a champion of labor movements, protest marches and democratic socialism, while Elizabeth Warren is an academic wonk who talks about restoring competition to markets and making capitalism more accountable. But when it comes to their most detailed policies to date, both support an array of trust-busting, tougher regulation, wealth redistribution, public options and, where appropriate, nationalization.

It depends on the problem they’re trying to solve. In practice, they end up supporting an awful lot of the same solutions. In addition to Medicare for all, breaking up the banks and taxing the rich, both Warren and Sanders are advocates of a federal job guarantee, postal banking and a bill making it easier for workers to unionize.

All of these proposals transfer money and power from the super-rich to the not-rich.
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19] 
“After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though few really know his positions. Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. ‘It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,’ said the CEO of another giant bank. ‘It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.'”

“Gimme a Brake (Light): a DIY Guide (pdf) 
[New Orleans DSA, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]  From the introduction:


Messaging
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows yesterday’s radicalism can become tomorrow’s common sense [Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]   
“In the 2000s ‘framing’ became an almost ubiquitous preoccupation for liberals, particularly in the wake of Don’t Think of an Elephant! the bestselling book by linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff noted the political significance of certain metaphorical fames. Conservatives adopt the “strict father” metaphor in which politicians act to protect the public from a dangerous world. If liberals inadvertently use terminology associated with that metaphor they undercut their own message. Instead, the argument goes, they must reframe the debate with rhetoric that metaphorically legitimates their own values.* In practice, throughout the 2000s, the obsession with framing reinforced a longstanding reliance on spin doctors, focus groups and soundbites, with many progressives convinced that reaching the public depended, first and foremost, on perfectly crafted zingers…. AOC embodies a quite different strategy. Yes, she’s articulate and charismatic, and she positively rules on social media. But the ‘reframing’ she performs relies on message more than the metaphor, resetting the terms of debate not through spin but by politics.”

Calling Bill That Makes Voting Easier a “Power Grab,” McConnell Exemplifies a GOP Terrified of Democracy 
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 1-31-19]  


Southern communities revitalize their connection to electric co-ops” 
[Southerly, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]  
“It took Cleotra Tanner more than 60 years to learn he was a partial owner of Twin County Electric Power Association in rural Mississippi. Tanner, a longtime local NAACP leader, said that he never heard about meetings, potential changes to energy sources, or board elections, and was not informed about how the relationship between electric cooperatives and members worked. He only knew the bills were exorbitantly high — and figured there was nothing he could do…. In 2016, One Voice started a free annual program that teaches a class of 20 to 25 members from around the state how to decipher bylaws and tax forms so they can understand how cooperatives spend money, and shows them ways to impact co-op decisions. Afterwards, some attendees host monthly meetings in their own communities to share successes and challenges. The next round of leadership training begins in spring 2019. There have been small successes since it began: one group used rebate money to revamp a playground in a community; another got funding for a college radio station.”


The Crisis Facing American Journalism Did Not Start With the Internet 
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19] 
“We have lost about 20 percent of local newspapers in the United States since 2004, and at least 900 communities now are without any local news source in that same time frame…. People want to blame the internet for the news industry’s troubles, but the seeds go back to the 1980s…. Owning a printing press really used to be a license to print money—there’s a reason that became a cliché. Independent and family-owned newspapers began merging into larger companies and conglomerates by the mid-20th century, and those companies were enormously profitable (to the tune of 30 percent margins) in the 1970s and ’80s even though readership declines began at the start of that run. Everyone wanted to own newspapers, and so the publicly traded newspaper chains borrowed money and went on buying sprees because the upside in that economy outweighed the risk. But big profit margins create expectations, and during the 1980s investment strategies were not built around innovation but rather keeping profits high for shareholders.” 
Lambert Strether:  "In other words, capitalists butchered capital allocation (unless you think that the social function of capitalists is looting; many now do, and who can blame them?)"

David Bauder, January 30, 2019, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19] 
In 1992, 37 percent of states with Senate races elected a senator from a different party than the presidential candidate the state supported. In 2016, for the first time in a century, no state did that, the study found. 
“The voting behavior was more polarized, less likely to include split ticket voting, if a newspaper had died in the community,” said Johanna Dunaway, a communications professor at Texas A&M University, who conducted the research with colleagues from Colorado State and Louisiana State universities. 
Researchers reached that conclusion by comparing voting data from 66 communities where newspapers have closed in the past two decades to 77 areas where local newspapers continue to operate, she said. 
“We have this loss of engagement at the local level,” she said. 
The struggling news industry has seen some 1,800 newspapers shut down since 2004, the vast majority of them community weeklies, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a University of North Carolina professor who studies the contraction. Many larger daily newspapers that have remained open have effectively become ghosts, with much smaller staffs that are unable to offer the breadth of coverage they once did. About 7,100 newspapers remain. 
Researchers are only beginning to measure the public impact of such losses. Among the other findings is less voter participation among news-deprived citizens in “off-year” elections where local offices are decided, Abernathy said. Another study suggested a link to increased government spending in communities where “watchdog” journalists have disappeared, she said.


The Illegal CIA Operation That Brought Us 9/11
[Truthdig, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]


Adversarial AI: Cybersecurity battles are coming 
[ZDNet, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]

Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your wifi passwords, stored in the clear 
[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]

Security Things to Consider When Your Apartment Goes ‘Smart' 
[tisiphone.net, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]  
“If I were management companies’ security consultant (and I’m not), I’d issue them some firm advice – connect these hubs to a private and professionally secured network (preferably wired). Ensure they’re monitored for intrusions and administrative logins, and physically locked away from resident access. Finally, ensure the hub product and vendor network meet reasonable modern security standards. Unfortunately, there’s currently a mad dash to get these technologies deployed to rental properties by multiple management firms and smart home vendors, and making those changes costs more and takes more time. What we really see happening across several vendors is a highly competitive push to connect these hubs to residents’ personal routers, so that they they may have a connection to the internet and thusly to the vendor….. So now, we’re in a position where a person with some basic hacking knowledge and YouTube can spend some time gaining access to resident networks, then return days, weeks, or months later, to exploit and tamper with the connected smart hub(s). As an added benefit to a criminal, it’s pretty easy to walk by an apartment and guess based by signal strength which SSID it is broadcasting. This isn’t really high tech stuff – or high barrier.” • This is a terrific article, a must-read if you — or your rental management firm — is considering crapifying your life with the Internet of Things.
Right To Repair Advocates Are Hosting YouTube Town Halls To Show You How To Get Involved In the Movement 
[Vice, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19]  
“Sophisticated hackers have long exploited flaws in SS7, a protocol used by telecom companies to coordinate how they route texts and calls around the world…. This activity was typically only within reach of intelligence agencies or surveillance contractors, but now Motherboard has confirmed that this capability is much more widely available in the hands of financially-driven cybercriminal groups, who are using it to empty bank accounts…. The news highlights the gaping holes in the world’s telecommunications infrastructure that the telco industry has known about for years despite ongoing attacks from criminals. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the defensive arm of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, confirmed that SS7 is being used to intercept codes used for banking…. ‘We are aware of a known telecommunications vulnerability being exploited to target bank accounts by intercepting SMS text messages used as 2-Factor Authentication (2FA),’ the NCSC told Motherboard in a statement.” • This didn’t happen when we had the far more “convenient’ idea of “bank branches.”

[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19] 
“[Facebook] has been paying people ages 13 to 25 as much as $20 month in exchange for installing an app called Facebook Research on iOS or Android, which monitors their phone and web activity and sends it back to Facebook. The Research app requires that users install a custom root certificate, which gives Facebook the ability to see users’ private messages, emails, web searches, and browsing activity. It also asks users to take screenshots of their Amazon order history and send it back to Facebook.”

Chaos has reportedly erupted inside Facebook as employees find themselves unable to open the company’s apps on their iPhones 
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 1-31-19] 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 1-31-19]  
“Google and Facebook combined rake in about 58 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising in 2018, according to an analysis by eMarketer. Amazon and Microsoft were tied for third place, with each getting about 4 percent of the market. Another study by the market research firm Pivotal found that in 2017 Facebook and Google accounted for 73 percent of the online ad market. Digital publishers have been experimenting with ways to bring in enough of what’s left over to survive or to challenge the duopoly’s hold on advertisers.”

Tech: “A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture” 
[Communications of the ACM, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-19]
Lambert Strether noted: "This is a very approachable article, and well worth a cup of coffee if you want to better understand the machines that so dominate our lives. This caught my eye:" 
“In the 1970s, processor architects focused significant attention on enhancing computer security with concepts ranging from protection rings to capabilities. It was well understood by these architects that most bugs would be in software, but they believed architectural support could help. These features were largely unused by operating systems that were deliberately focused on supposedly benign environments (such as personal computers), and the features involved significant overhead then, so were eliminated. In the software community, many thought formal verification and techniques like microkernels would provide effective mechanisms for building highly secure software. Unfortunately, the scale of our collective software systems and the drive for performance meant such techniques could not keep up with processor performance. The result is large software systems continue to have many security flaws, with the effect amplified due to the vast and increasing amount of personal information online and the use of cloud-based computing, which shares physical hardware among potential adversaries.”
Following Missouri’s lead, other states take on cell-cultured meat” 
[New Food Economy, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19 
“The future of meat is almost here, and lawmakers in cattle country aren’t happy about it. Stateline, a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, reports that a handful of states are following in the footsteps of a recent Missouri law that prohibits the makers of plant-based meat, like the Beyond Burger, and cell-cultured meat, which is years away from market but already making waves in Washington, D.C., from labeling their products as though they came from an animal carcass—that is, calling them ‘meat.’ Deciding how to label a new food product, particularly one that acts as a substitute or alternative for a well-established product, results in knock-down, drag-out wars in the food industry. Typically, the fight is about the federal definition of the food, known as a standard of identity.”


The U.S. Army In The Iraq War, Volume 2, Surge And Withdrawal 2007-2011 (PDF)
[Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, via Naked Capitalism 2-1-19]
“The invasion of Iraq showed that even an operation designed as a limited regime decapitation can precipitate state collapse in centralized, authoritarian political systems, after which must follow either martial law imposed by a large military presence or civilian authority prepared to step in and immediately assume responsibility for governance― itself a massive undertaking. If this does not happen, the void will at least partly be filled by malignant actors.”
I do not need any official military post- mortem to pinpoint the exact day and event where the Iraq war was lost, In George Packer’s 2005 book The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, pages 110 to 112, Packer discusses the November 15, 2002 meeting of Condoleezza Rice and Steve Hadley of Bush’s National Security Council, with representatives from various conservative stink tanks to review plans for rebuilding Iraq after the USA invasion. Any useful potential of the meeting was squashed when Chris DeMuth, then president of the American Enterprise Institute, cut off discussion. QUOTE “Wait a minute. What’s all this planning and thinking about postwar Iraq?” He turned to Rice. “This is nation building, and you said you were against that. In the campaign you said it, the president has said it. Does he know you’re doing this? Does Karl Rove know?” END QUOTE

Just stop there and pose one simple question: If you are NOT building a nation, then what the hell ARE you doing? Because of Demuth personally, and the conservative / libertarian fetish against government planning generally, the USA war effort in Iraq was foredoomed from that meeting onward.

If you don’t have a positive vision of forward action to build a nation, then you simply do not belong in government. Period. End of discussion 

The Vice President’s Men 
[Seymour Hersh, London Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 1-30-19]
Amazing details lead to the conclusion that former CIA Director Bush directed and led a "soft coup" against Reagan, who became increasingly enfeebled mentally as his Alzheimer's disease took hold. 
When George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency. Bush was invariably written off as a cautious politician who followed the lead of his glamorous boss – perhaps because he assumed that his reward would be a clear shot at the presidency in 1988. He would be the first former CIA director to make it to the top.
There was another view of Bush: the one held by the military men and civilian professionals who worked for him on national security issues. Unlike the president, he knew what was going on and how to get things done. For them, Reagan was ‘a dimwit’ who didn’t get it, or even try to get it. A former senior official of the Office of Management and Budget described the president to me as ‘lazy, just lazy’. Reagan, the official explained, insisted on being presented with a three-line summary of significant budget decisions, and the OMB concluded that the easiest way to cope was to present him with three figures – one very high, one very low and one in the middle, which Reagan invariably signed off on. I was later told that the process was known inside the White House as the ‘Goldilocks option’. He was also bored by complicated intelligence estimates. Forever courteous and gracious, he would doodle during national security briefings or simply not listen. It would have been natural to turn instead to the director of the CIA, but this was William Casey, a former businessman and Nixon aide who had been controversially appointed by Reagan as the reward for managing his 1980 election campaign. As the intelligence professionals working with the executive saw it, Casey was reckless, uninformed, and said far too much to the press.
Bush was different: he got it. At his direction, a team of military operatives was set up that bypassed the national security establishment – including the CIA – and wasn’t answerable to congressional oversight. It was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau, a brilliant navy officer who would be known to those on the inside as ‘M’. He had most recently been involved, as deputy chief of naval operations, in developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most important, perceived Soviet expansionism in more than twenty countries, including Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Senegal, Chad, Algeria, Tunisia, the Congo, Kenya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and Vietnam.
Posted by Tony Wikrent at 11:16 AM

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